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I will start by acknowledging that while the only people who should give advice are therapists, I would appreciate it if anyone who is able to relate to my experiences or concerns could share anything which you think could be helpful.
I am a college student at a fairly competitive college, and I have been struggling with depression and anxiety.
As far as I can remember everything has gone fine for me socially up until 6th grade. However, I suffered from a speech impediment, which resulted in teasing from my classmated and it diminished my confidence in communicating with people. For whatever reason, I started to become extremely introverted starting in 7th grade and started to experience social anxiety/withdrawal. I wasn't doing much with friends outside of school, but at the time I didn't care too much. I enjoyed being alone, so I thought why should I be worried about keeping up with friends.
Going into high school started to realize how big of a mistake I made, as I started to experience loneliness. I tried to reconnect with the people I used to hang out with, but they had already formed a close-knit group and I could understand very little of the conversations they had with each other - games they played or places they went to together outside of school. Every once in a while I would be invited to join them for a birthday party or something, and I felt both excitement and panic that it could be my only chance to finally enter back into a social group. But I only succeeded in coming off as shy and timid - I had little experience talking to people, and my frustration at myself started to grow.
There were then two traumatic events that happened in my life. The first was with my sister. I once considered her my best friend as she was the only person I felt I always had by my side, but when I was 16, she ran away from home to be with a boyfriend she had met online. They have since broken up and relations have improved between us two, but at the time I was heartbroken. I couldn't help but interpret it as my sister choosing a life with someone online over the current life she had with me and our parents. I also found out she was using our relationship to her advantage to avoid our parents finding out about what she had been up to. I felt both disowned and abandoned. But in the months leading up to when she left, my home slowly transitioned into a very unhappy place. This boyfriend has a firm and negative influence on my sister's actions, and my parents were well aware. With every day came a couple hours worth of intense arguing between my sister and our parents, while I stayed tucked away in my bedroom, unable to do anything or leave the house to hang out with anyone. Every day I dreaded walking from school back home because I knew it only meant I would have to endure more arguing with my family members and I would have a hard time focusing on schoolwork.
Then the pandemic happened. It feels like one year of my life had been entirely torn from my memory, as I remember very little that happened during 2020. I know I hardly spoke with anyone, and I also felt I lacked general emotion. I knew I was lonely but I didn't feel frustrated by it. The frustration didn't come until school was back in session for my senior year. That was when I saw all my classmates again, and that they managed to stay in touch with each other. To me it felt that everyone had aged so much - I recognized my classmates by I no longer knew the type of people they had turned into. At this time I felt a strange disconnect with my physical self. I hated the fact that I was born as the person I was, and that I was brought into existence without my consent. I also felt indifferent to whether I continued living or died. The one thing that kept me going was the hope that things would improve for me once college started and I had a fresh beginning in a new environment.
My first year of college went well. I became part of a good friend group that felt stable, and although I still felt socially awkward at times and exploring who I was, I felt my personality was improving.
It feels like things have started to deteriorate during my second year. Whereas I felt each semester would see my social circle steadily grow, it suddenly felt that it had started to shrink. I suppose classwork has started to consume our lives as we haven't been spending as much time together. I also feel many of my friends have gained a better idea of what they want to do with their lives whereas, whereas I'm a good student but I am still trying to find myself career-wise and personality-wise. I'm also enrolled in a co-op curriculum, which means I am expected to work in an internship next semester and not go to campus to take classes. I will not be able to see my friends for quite a while, and I worry I will not be capable of maintaining my relationships with them. I am terrified to experience abandonment again.
I've also been experiencing social anxiety again. Group outings usually start out fine, but if I feel myself start to slip-up, I feel like I start suffocating. I can try saying whatever I want, but in a group nothing will make an impact, everyone else is always smarter, funnier, and more experienced than I am. It feels like I am both burning up inside and drowning. It may seem I am being metaphorical - but what I feel is physical as well. I feel my entire body whimper up and compress, and I know I am unable to redeem myself.
This was what led me to self harm. Whenever I felt my emotions such as self-frustration were becoming too bottled up and I needed to diminish them, I was able to calm myself and reaffirm that I had a sense of control. And whenever I felt myself slip-up socially, I was able to punish myself, and leave marks that would remind myself to not let it happen again. I felt my problems during high school were the result of emotional indifference, so if I allowed everything to negatively affect me, it would force me to confront my problems and not be a push-over. While this worked as a short-term coping mechanism, it didn't solve the fact that I still felt alone a lot of the time, so I knew I had to focus on the quality of my interactions with others if I wanted to get better.
One of my friends in college is also a self-proclaimed introvert who used to suffer from self harm many years ago, and since they improved they started to provide mental health support online to other people experiencing similar hardships. Unfortunately, I've also had a tendency to experience feeling of jealousy towards people who I feel are more fortunate than me, and I started feeling this way toward my friend. I felt betrayed that someone who claimed to once experience the same things I have been going through manages to act so extroverted and likeable in social situations, and as my mentality continued to decline, they felt they slowed down their communication with me. My jealousy for them turned to irrational hatred. When I started trying to give up self harm one month ago, I reached out to them to ask for resources, indicating to them for the first time that I haven't been in a great place emotionally. This wasn’t intended to strengthen our bond, but rather to get them off of my mind. I thought that if I got from them what I wanted, my jealousy toward them would go away. Since I reached out we have managed to communicate with each other more often, not about mental health but general conversation.
I now find myself wondering if talking to them again and sharing the details of my experiences would help? On the one hand, they might be able to share something about their past experiences that could help me. On the other hand, I worry they do not care about me the same way I care about them, and talking to them about what I have written here could end our friendship.
Thank you if you’ve read this far. Even if you aren't able to respond, just being able to write all my thoughts down like this and express myself is helpful.
