Morning, same here. 
I couldn’t change the variable type because I’ve already compiled it with it in the blueprint, but I made another one as the purple class type. However… when I try to drag out the component from it as I did in the pic I posted with the blue object type, that component getter isn’t listed! So that takes me back to my first problem - I can make an event for the actor/object, but not the component!
And I don’t exactly know what you mean about blueprints detecting themselves but I should say all this is done inside a different blueprint than the one the variable is referencing, otherwise I would have just made the overlap event straight from the component itself!