Wondering if it’s creepy/ stalkery to go to the store my ex-aunt works at? She was a big part of my childhood but divorced my nasty uncle when I was like 11. She works like 2 streets away from my grandmothers house and I want to check out the place she works out and of course I’d like to see here. But is this weird to like go to her place of work just to potentially see her?

Ok, so when I was in high school I became very obsessive with love. I didn’t love myself and I found this boy who I wanted to love me. I had myself convinced we would get married. He didn’t even know who I was and I’ll admit, I completely invaded his privacy. I memorized his schedule, I put myself in places I knew he’d be or if I knew he was somewhere I’d go. I truly never meant harm, I just wanted him to love me and I thought that me stalking his life would get me into it and get him to love me. It got to the point where I even stalked other girls I thought he liked and told them that we were a “thing” so that they would stop talking to him even though we were definitely not a thing. I struggle to release the guilt of that overall because I feel so so so awful about it, but I know I never meant harm. Anyways, now that we are no longer together, I have this fear that if he never would’ve given me the attention I desired that I would’ve kept going. I would’ve started to get harmful and that I would’ve gone as far as harming people around him in order to get myself into his life. It makes me feel so awful but I truly do feel like I would’ve kept going and kept myself in his life even if he would’ve gotten a different girlfriend. Idk, I just really struggle because I don’t feel as though this was ocd and that maybe I truthfully am a horrible person who does need serious help because I stalked him so much and obsessed over him and crossed his privacy boundary. I’m so afraid to the extent that I would’ve gone had it not become us dating.

I try my best not to ask for reassurance, I really do. One thing has been bothering me a lot for a few hours now: A (former?) good friend of mine and I are meeting up next Thursday to talk about the situation our friendship is currently in (since I write a lot anyway and like to digress, I'll spare you the details for now). But to cut a long story short: it’s tense. Now, I've been "stalking" her on social media relatively often since the whole thing started, actually almost daily and on all socials. What really bothers me is the thought of whether I'm really stalking her at this point or not. I know that the term now has a pretty distorted meaning, especially on social media, but at its core, stalking is not only punishable by law, it's also morally wrong and indicates disturbed behavior. I noticed earlier that she somehow blocked me on Twitter/X. I have a very random user name there that she doesn’t know and I was also firmly convinced that you can't see when people visit your profile. It's stressing me out in two ways right now. On the one hand, I'm actually afraid that my behavior can now really be described as "stalking", and on the other hand, I'm confused and unsure about how she could even notice me on Twitter. Apart from social media activity, there were 2 "real" situations about 2 months ago in which I felt, in retrospect, that I had crossed a line. I "tracked" or checked (actually legally) the online activity on Whatsapp (EU) of her and a second person to see if they were online at the same time and therefore possibly writing together and she was lying to me. She knows about this since I told her. The second time was in person, when I went for a walk with another friend in the park behind my school and then saw said friend sitting there after she said (at school) that she was going home. I immediately panicked because I thought she was lying to me again, which is why I went up to her and pretended that I had just happened to pass her with the other friend. I didn't actively follow or spy on her on purpose in any way, however, up until a few weeks ago I did actually have the urge to do so. I'm quite aware of the legal boundaries and would never cross a line there, but I'm more concerned about the morality. I know that it probably sounds a lot like reassurance-seeking up to this point, but I don't really want to hear from others whether what I'm doing is directly considered stalking or not, because I'm going to have this heavy feeling either way. Instead, I would like to know what advice you would give me in this situation, either because you have actually been stalked yourself or simply because you have advice from a more distanced perspective than mine. I want to add that although I was officially diagnosed with OCD that I am sadly not in professional treatment yet and that I have been wondering for years now if I may fit the diagnostic criteria for BPD as I believe to have a lot of common “quiet BPD” symptoms, the friend mentioned being my FP.

So there's this lady that I'm thinking about all the time and I would love for us to hang out more than anything. I think she's cute and we get along pretty much flawlessly. We have a lot of things in common and it always feels like my day is so much better whenever I get to see her and talk with her. I want to ask her if she wants to hang out with just the two of us someday, but I just seem so nervous and unready for dating. My mind is always thinking of cop out responses like "she's too good for you" or "You're not ready for this" or worse, "You're gonna mess this up and hurt her" which is the one I'm really scared about because that's the last thing I want to do. I would not want to hurt her. I'm not even sure I want to date but I do want to just hang out with her. I haven't gone on a date before, so it gives me a lot of this anxiety, but I don't know when it will ever go away. I don't know what to do about this.