21 y.o. male student in the US, for context.

Like the title says, I don't really know where to start. I was researching a friend's condition to better support them, and went down a click hole when a few things caught my eye that I myself related to. I came across an article on quiet borderline and it hit me like a truck. Every word, every detail of every symptom and experience was like someone had been writing a biography about me. 

All the things I thought were normal for the past four years of my life suddenly aren't. The constant, neverending self criticism, inability to recognize things that would be considered personal needs (even just saying that makes me want to isolate and throw up), the splitting and emotionally ripping myself apart when faced with sometimes trivial setbacks, inability to maintain close relationships of any kind. Everyday questioning why I am still such a genuine, despicable piece of shit when I'm putting a truly immense amount of energy out to support friends around me and do reasonably well in college. At my lowest point last year, the days and days I would go without sleep to help others complete schoolwork, but instead of doing my own work or eating or sleeping, crying in my car because I just felt awful to exist and like I wasn't doing enough and I needed to push harder. I thought all of this was totally normal, albeit a little sad.

But how could this happen? It's a trauma disorder, I didn't have the best childhood but it certainly wasn't painful... And then I realized I don't remember 90% of it. And the parts I do remember are usually being alone while so desperately not wanting to be, fights between parents, fights with parents, and being absolutely tortured by the truly vile elementary and middle school system in my town (I went to a tech high school out of town).

Then stepping through my own life, I arrived at my now ex-girlfriend. Things were not good between us but I always chalked it up to me being a shitty person, not to mention inexperienced. Yet I stayed because it was the first time I didn't feel alone. I stayed on and off from sophomore year of HS to the first semester of college. And I never realized until now that she completely ripped away so many parts of me I will never be able to get back. I was miserable and I didn't even realize it. The gaslighting, the cheating, the passive aggressiveness, the insults and the fights that were always blamed on me, the firmly planted and often refreshed idea that I am simply not attractive enough to receive sexual pleasure and should consider chemically correcting myself, the invalidation of so fucking many of my needs and wants that I now have an extremely hard time recognizing. I thought I was just bad at relationships, I never realized the full extent of what she did until now, three years after we cut ties.

I want a support system so fucking bad. It takes so much effort to craft together a one sentence text to a friend that even hints at me even having a bad day, and usually some part of me will end up throwing the phone down and send me into isolation before I can hit send. It's maybe once every six months or so I can bring myself to ask for help, and it's never been fruitful. Months of effort just left on read or brushed off, or frequently just telling me they don't want to help me deal with it, however small 'it' is. And all that does is completely reaffirm to me that my needs (I can't stand calling them that) are NOT valid and I cannot have them and I need to shut up and get back to work. I think the effort of calling a counselor would actually give me an aneurysm, not that I could pay anyways.

It's been about two weeks since my realization. Finals are over and I don't have a job because corona fucked off over 100 of my job applications in a month, so my entire life has been bed to computer and back, except for going out to take care of a friend who is going through something undeniably harder than anything I am. If I'm not taking care of them I'm purposeless and keep getting sucked down into a cycle of self loathing I am now acutely aware of. 

I don't know what to do. I'll most likely end up deleting this post 30 seconds after putting it up because asking for help is so fucking foreign and uncomfortable no matter how bad I want it