...I got better?

Trigger warning: mention of self harm.

I want answers.

I want to be able to say, definitively, this is why I do this unhealthy thing, and this is how I can stop myself from doing it.

How can I possibly understand myself, and consequently help myself heal, if I'm constantly editing myself based on who I'm interacting with at a given point in time? There are things that I know about myself that, while subject to a certain amount of change, I accept as fact; but a lot of who I am feels like a costume that I put on so that people will like me, so much so that I don't know where to start to figure out what is actually me.

I'm in school; it's impossible to know fully who I am within that environment. It's impossible to know fully who I am within any single environment, though; it's less about my specific surroundings and more about waiting and living and experiencing many surroundings so that I have things to compare. But I need to know! I'm impatient! I want to be fixed and done and have no more work to do!

But what then? What if the goal is not the end, but the process of healing? What if that's what life is, living through and learning and growing continuously until its end?

That's terrifying.

I'm currently in the midst of a psychological assessment which will end with me being given a diagnosis of what the person who I've been talking to thinks is going on in my brain. That will be useful to shove under other people's noses, like, here's a partial explanation for my inability to do x y z p d q. But it's not the end.

First, no one knows my brain and my emotions better than I do. Granted, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist by any stretch of the imagination, but there are nuances in the way I experience things that I don't remember, or that I can't articulate.

Second, a diagnosis is not an excuse. I can't let myself use it to justify causing intentional harm to others or to myself. It's just a tool that will hopefully help others better understand where I'm coming from, and will possibly help me understand myself better.

Maybe I need help working through everything in my head, maybe I don't; I'm leaning towards "this is too much for me to do alone right now, and if I don't at least start it now, I'm more likely to continue harming myself emotionally." Having said that, I'm not happy with the idea of therapy, because I don't know if it will really help me get through my day-to-day life, especially given that I forget most of what happens within half an hour, even if it hurts me -- possibly, especially if it hurts me, because part of my nature is the urge to suppress pain or at least alleviate it.

What happens when I can't do anything to stop the pain? (I'm talking about emotional pain.)

In the past, I have inflicted physical pain on myself as a way of distracting myself from my emotional pain. That's unhealthy, and for the most part I've convinced myself that it doesn't work. Right now I don't have a replacement, which means that I tend to wallow in the emotional pain when it rears its head. Therapy could help with that; but I have gigantic trust issues, and I don't trust a therapist to know what will work for me until I've been talking to them for months, and I need help now.