Thats ok sweetie...
Ever since I was a little kid I knew there was something wrong...
But I didn't know what it was.
I used to ask 'what is wrong with me? what is wrong with me?' fairly compulsively.
Then, after my first contact with the mental health service I figured the answer would come in the form of a diagnosis.
I was always pushing my clinician's to tell me what diagnosis they thought I had. They were reluctant to tell me. They kept trying to divert me back to my symptoms. But I wanted to know and they had to put it on my file in order for me to obtain treatment, you see.
Once I found out I read everything I could get my hands on and... I had trouble with how to view myself. I started viewing myself through the lens of what had been written about my diagnosis. Only... I disagreed with some of it. I battled for a long time in the position where if I were to internalise all of it I really thought I was obligated to kill myself to save others from my harming them. So I'd swing to denial but lived in fear that I was in denial because I couldn't face the truth.
But it wasn't the truth. Wasn't even. What clinician's write about people with x diagnosis reveals just as much (if not more) about them and their issues.
The whole process was really very harmful to me.

And now... Looking back... I can see why. I really wish that someone had sat me down and said this to be before and saved me a lot of grief. Still... I usually do have to learn the hard way...

For me... Part of it is about how to view myself. A diagnostic category gives me a conception to run from. A conception that I'm going to... Spend my life trying to counter and avoid and not be true to.

What I started to do was to write down the kind of person I'd like to be. The qualities I'd like to nurture. That is a self conception to work towards rather than a self conception to spend ones life running away from. Your symptoms are the things that are holding you back from achieving your self conception.

Looking at it that way helps me be a whole lot hopeful...

Also...

It is controversial but the DSM is looking at moving to a dimensional rather than categorical approach of mental disorder, particular kinds of mental disorder, and symptoms. While the categorical approach seems to suggest that there are real divisions in nature between disordered and not disordered, between diagnosis x and diagnosis y the dimensional approach suggests that there aren't real divisions instead it is all a matter of degree.

I have friends who have never been in contact with the services (and they probably don't need to) but they have traits that (if magnified just a little) would see them meet criteria for something or other. Everyone has elements of obsession and dissociation and mania etc etc. It is just the degree to which the symptom is present that can lead to problems with respect to your being the person you want to be and living the life you want to live.