I honestly don't even know where to start, but here we go. I've been depressed off and on since roughly my junior year of high school. It's been especially apparent recently and I've been feeling myself start to spiral again, so I guess I just felt compelled to formally get down my thoughts somewhere to know what I need to do to get back into one of those elusive positive swings again.
I've always been a really quiet kid and a lot of it has been due to accumulated social anxiety. Growing up, I always had my tight knit group of friends through elementary school and middle school, at least on a social level. We'd hang out and do whatever, mostly just fucking around and having a good time. The thing is though that while they all evolved into the people they eventually did, I just grew further and further away from all of them as we moved into a huge ass high school. Despite being 'well-liked' a lot of those early years, I always had this deep-rooted fear of getting bullied. I mean, it makes sense given all the horror stories and shit, and I'm not trying to belittle anyone who's been through those kinds of awful situations, and that's exactly the kind of stuff I was hoping to avoid. From age 15ish on, I just had this natural fear of not being accepted in whatever capacity, so therefore I would never feel good enough for those around me. I'd be on the same 'level' or whatever as whoever I'd talk to in that time frame, but I progressively just got worse and worse when it came to social anxiety and simply being comfortable in my own skin. Now, I always had my group of friends and all that, but it was really just people I'd play sports with or talk to in the halls or whatever. I was all but closed off emotionally, due in large part to just wanting to be universally accepted and liked, which of course isn't 100% realistic.
I could make this part like 500 paragraphs and have to a decent amount of people on this site, but I ended up going away to a college where I didn't know anyone beforehand. It was a smallish private school (which naturally was not cheap by any means), and in my head, it was the perfect setting to 're-invent' myself, and be that kind of person I always hoped to be in high school. Very very very long-story short, it didn't happen. In fact, it would've been really flipping hard for it to have gone any worse. As many dingus 18-year-olds do, I was wayyyy off when it came to picking my initial major, and jesus christ I nuked almost all those classes out the gate. Luckily, I did have a solid cushion from gen ed dual credit classes from high school, but between my shitty grades and eventually switching majors down the line anyway, it essentially boiled down to a lost year academically. So, based on that, you could objectively say I threw money on a fire for a year, but it was college, at least I had fun right?
Simply put, no. That aforementioned social anxiety just kept compounding on itself, especially with the constant feeling of the academic failures looming over my head. Like I said, I could go on and on about this whole year, but I'll try to keep it shortish. My first roommate was international, and he naturally got pretty close to the other international kids, and I was kind of the odd man out in those circles despite my initial efforts. He ended up moving out, and after living on my own for a bit in the dorm, I was assigned a new roommate. We actually hit it off pretty well and I consider him to be a pretty good friend to this day. The thing was though, that despite our common interests and social chemistry, I always had that looming feeling that I'd be stepping over some kind of boundary or whatever whenever he asked me if I wanted to do something with him and his close circle of friends. The thing was that I actually got along well with all of them, but that feeling just wouldn't leave me. Blah blah, I kept turning down offers to hang out and he eventually stopped asking me because he just expected 'no's after a certain point. It remains one of my biggest regrets to this day, because by the time I knew I wouldn't be coming back to that school 100%, I really just started to give less of a shit and ended up having some good times with all of them.
The thing was, it took a lot to get to that point. I had never ever ever felt more alone, and this is coming from someone who'd never had a 'close' friend and never really realized it. Like I said, I had been all but closed off emotionally, and didn't see anything all too off about it. It took a lot of miscellaneous crying random nights to come to the conclusion that I wasn't right mentally. I sought out therapy through the school, which was ultimately kind of fruitless to be completely honest, but exploring my own mental issues at the time was a positive in of itself. Speaking of, a big part of this recognition was ironically my roommate's girlfriend. She was legitimately the first person I opened up to and grew an attachment towards, a feeling I had unknowingly desired after all this time. Naturally, feelings started to develop, but out of respect for my roommate and her, who were by far my best friends on that campus, I kept my feelings in check and simply tried to enjoy the academically-meaningless time I still had left that second semester. On top of that, there was always this feeling that she had developed some sort of attachment to me, which I tried to ignore, but many of my friends that I talked to about it were pretty keen on her showing some signals. Again, I tried to ignore them and moved on.
I've talked about this a lot more in depth with some people on here, but I don't want to include all too many details. Long-story short again, I was pretty drunk one night late in that following summer, and she snapped me. She essentially led me on, purely to find out if I had feelings for her, and it really really hurt me emotionally considering she was the first person I had ever really confided with on that kind of level. I blocked her and tried to forget about what I considered to be a 'rock-bottom' of a year for me. I transferred to the college in my home town, moving in with my parents again, and basically went through the motions, still reeling from that interaction over the summer. I legitimately hated my life.
Fast forward to the following fall, where I was still not 100% alright emotionally because of what had happened, and I had a very forgettable year which happened to be fine academically. After a super tough summer of working roughly 65 hours a week between landscaping and dishwashing, it my freshman year of college started to weigh heavily on me again. I made the decision to reach out to my old roommate's girlfriend. I just wanted to get everything off my chest, about why and how what she did hurt me. The thing was though that she was the only person there for me when I needed it more than ever, and I told her because of that, she could always talk to me if she needed anything. I'm not going to go into detail of what she said, but she had long been through depressive stages herself and that year hiatus of not talking to her saw her in some deep depths of it. Ultimately, it felt like a huge huge huge weight off my shoulders, and that I could finally accept all that happened my freshman year, whether it was the 90% bad or the 10% good. All that suffering brought about an important lesson. The hard times are shitty of course, but you can't just put your tail between your legs and try to forget about it. It's especially crucial to take whatever negative experience and try to make something positive of it.
Here we get to the last year or so, which up until coronavirus happened, was one of the better times of my life. For what seemed like the first time, I was happy with who I was, and at my new job, which constantly forced me to interact with new people on a daily basis, I ended up meeting some really good friends. As one could expect, coronavirus did kind of derail all my progress to that point and I found myself in that same type of isolation as I'd grown accustomed to for years. A big thing though was that I really wasn't expecting to stay with this grocery job for so long, hoping to get an internship or something over the summer, but those hopes were completely thrown to the wayside.
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Alright so here we are today. It seems like there's always some kind of tipping point for this stuff, and for me, it was Sunday the 4th, when I found out that one of my old high school friends, as well as another really good family friend, had both passed away over the weekend. This high school friend wasn't someone I was particularly close with, but he was another one of my friends that I was constantly talking and laughing with. The key connection here was that he was one of the first people I ever worked out with around age 15 or so. If you know me in any capacity, you're probably familiar with just how important fitness and lifting has become for me over the years. It was especially apparent that god-awful freshman year, where it was my only outlet to do something productive and get away from the day-to-day pressures for some period of time. I spent what was basically late Sunday to Wednesday just crying and crying. Every time I would go to work out, it would be impossible not to think of the amazing times we had together. Back then, as a very skinny kid, it was one of my life goals to bench 135 lbs, as limited a goal as it may sound. I must've failed it 10 different times with him spotting me, a smile on his face every time. Needless to say, I've come a long long way since then, but those are the types of memories that really stick out given my passion for the activity. He was just such a positive influence on everyone around him and it was completely devastating to find out that he had overdosed.
Like I mentioned, it served as some kind of tipping point for me. For months and months, I had felt that something resembling that same gradual downward spiral which crept up that hell-spawned freshman year of college, and it all came to a head as of late. I'm not afraid to say that over the last couple weeks or so I had been drinking out of nothing but pure angst or sadness. I don't believe I'm anywhere near the level of depression I felt back then, but it's honestly my worst fear to fall into that same feeling of uselessness and eternal depression. I don't want to fall into that same cycle where my only fulfillment is hitting x arbitrary number in whatever lifting exercise. Where all this ties in with those 19 context paragraphs is that the worse my depression/anxieties start to creep, is the worse my social anxiety is. This is especially apparent given that I'm supposed to graduate college roughly a year from now, and I don't have any experience in the field. Also, moving out hasn't been made any easier with the current climate of things.
Idk who the fuck would read all this, but it was important for me to get it down somewhere to reference in the future. The thing is, it's so so so so much easier to get down on yourself and be sad than it is to go the other direction. I don't know what it is, but it's just something I've noticed over the years. Like I've said to this point, there are people I've told all of this shit to some extent, and shockingly, most of them are friends from this website. I'm not scared or embarrassed or whatever else to say that my closest friends on an emotional level come from here. I can't thank them enough for their time and willingness to give me guidance or simply an ear to bitch into, but at the same time, I'm tired of doing so. I hope this marks a point where I can legitimately pivot and shift things back into the right direction, and for Logan's sake, I swear I will.
If anyone on here needs someone to talk to, I know what this type of worthlessness feels like, at least to some extent, and I can't stress enough how helpful it is to practice introspection and simply talk about all your bullshit from time to time. For those purposes, my discord is pak#1187, don't hesitate to reach out if need be.
), and it wasn't until my third therapist that I found someone who matched that description (and she has been an absolute angel, and more understanding of me and what I had experienced and continue to experience than I thought anyone ever could be).
Feel free to DM me if you would like to chat about OCD at all.
