I'll make it short and to the point. I had been tripping acid basically on a bi-weekly basis for about 3 to 4 months, and I would take microdoses (very small amounts) to work often just for the extra energy it provides at those doses. It got to a point where I was feeling kinda obligated to trip because of all the people around me that wanted to trip with me. I introduced the drug to my circle after all. One time I ate FIFTEEN hits and had an extremely mild trip. I decided to take a three week break to restore my tolerance. At the three week mark, I decided to trip on SEVEN hits with my friend who took five (he hadn't done acid in a while by then). I was completely off on that dose. I did not expect to trip nearly as hard as I did. I freaked out and had a hellish trip. I didn't get HPPD from that one though. I waited another three weeks and tripped again, this time on one and a half hits. This one showed me a whole new layer of acid hell. The next morning I woke up and realized I felt fundamentally very different and was still seeing stuff. Eye floaters, visual static, white stuff flying around in the sky, and I couldn't process fully white objects properly. I knew they were white, but my eyes just felt confused looking at stuff like that. For example, a snow-covered bush looked like it had fixed purple spots, but when I looked at them they turned white and the purple spots re-arranged around my peripheral vision. "Yup, I done did deep fried it."
That was a year ago. My visual symptoms have slowly but steadily gone down in strength. The emotional scars, the fear and the paranoia have just about healed and I ended up learning a lot from that trip because it ended up forcing me to reflect on and fix certain things about my life that were keeping me down
I tried a bunch of different supplements to self-medicate and ended up settling on Aniracetam. It makes a huge difference and I recommend it to everyone with HPPD. It has next to no tolerance buildup and zero addiction potential. The worst that can happen is you feel a little dumber than usual for a few days when you stop taking it, but it's not too bad.
Overall I'd say I don't regret my experience anymore. It's a big part of who I am today and I like myself. I don't remember that much about how I was different before the trip (I never did, I just knew my brain/soul was tweaked at the core), but I do remember not having that much self-esteem before the incident.