i'm everything i hate

Hey everyone, I hope u guys are doing okay. This is the first time that I write a post here and just write about my feelings in general in many months. There are so many things that are weighing on me, and they've left me so empty. These days, I can barely hold onto the weight of my own body. I feel like I'm literally hanging on by the thinnest thread.

I thought I entered the worst of my depression a year ago, and a year ago I thought the same about the year before that. But once again, I was proven wrong. Today, I come back feeling different, like this time I seriously mean it when I say I'm going to heal and stop abandoning myself. But at the same time, I still don't have any trust left for myself. I'm not sure at what point exactly it happened, maybe it was much longer ago than I've ever thought, but I've completely let go of myself. I still have a sense of who I am, but because of the way I've lived versus the way I've always wanted to live, because they are two completely different persons, I barely have a grasp left of what I was really made for. I thought this would be a short episode of depression that I would've climbed out of easily, but I learned the hard way that there was no way out. The only way out was through. It was through dealing with it, through failing, time and time again. It didn't matter how many times people told me to not do something or to do something. This awful voice in my head had the most power and it won. Despite all that I've been through, over my entire life, at least I've never stopped fighting. I fight like *** every day. But it's a silent, invisible fight and nobody has the slightest clue of what it's like in my mind. It hurts me most when people think I'm just stupidly unaware of how I've made bad decisions. But I can't get any control.

I've been struggling in silence for the past few months, and numbing the pain any way I could even if it meant procrastinating more on healing the "inner child." I've let people hurt me, I've put myself in situations and around people who I knew would hurt me, who would steal time from me, and I let them. I still can't understand why I would do that to myself. I think I was able to somewhat manage with this up until the end of last year. I thought I was finally getting better. But the toxic cycle kept going. I was still isolating myself, avoiding literally all social interaction. And if I did hang out with people, it never felt real. My expressions of happiness and smiles and laughs have never felt more forced. I don't remember the last time that I genuinely laughed without feeling this deeply buried misery in me.

The last few months, things have been pretty horrible. Aside from completely avoiding socializing and making real, authentic connections outside from online ones, which have really not been many, I've also been unable to make any money at all. I can't bring myself to look for work. I'm a college student and several years ago, I thought I would've graduated by now. But I'm not close to graduating at all, and the worse part is ever since I started, I haven't been productive the way I wanted to be. I try to be organized but as soon as I start organizing I stop and never get back to it and then everything becomes a mess again. I've barely passed my classes, I have no idea how I made it up to this point. But this year, it's like everything became so boring and just unbearable to do. I missed so many important deadlines, and I think I even failed a couple of classes. I still don't know for sure because I can't bring myself to look at my grades. I'm terrified of seeing a grade that I deeply know I could've avoided and gotten something much better. At one point in my life, I was a role model. I was able to get perfect scores, straight A's, I was always awful at socializing and making real friends (fake friends were always there, sadly). And I just can't believe I could reach a point where I fail classes, even easy ones. I feel so embarrassed and ashamed. But beneath it all I know that there is a lot of grief and sadness and I think I need to feel it so that I can function normally again. I'm supposed to keep studying now in the fall but I really don't want to cause I'm terrified of going back to school and I'm too scared to say that out loud, especially to my parents.

I also realized some weeks ago that I went through something very traumatic a couple of years ago. It was when I had graduated from high school. I can barely talk about this without feeling really horrible. I can't even barely cope with the realization of how much time I lost that I will never get back. I was taken advantage of, psychologically and sexually, by a much older, predatorial man. I literally thought I had almost fallen in love. I had rose colored glasses on. He abused me and I thought it was love. I'm not so much surprised as I am mad at myself, because I can't believe how much of myself I lost during that time. But the reason I'm not surprised is cause I have loved several abusers (including family members, my parents) throughout my whole life, and I can't explain to myself why. It makes no sense. I'm just so tired of being surrounded by the wrong people. I just want to not be hurt by someone else, for once. I just want to be able to experience one wholesome love story, just one. I'm so tired of being used again and again. My needs have so rarely been met. I've been alive for about two decades, and I can barely remember moments where I was experiencing genuine joy without also knowing I was letting someone hurt me. I used to be pushed away by people a lot, and made fun of, and I think that all grew little by little into a strange side to my brain, that I don't know how to get rid of, that makes me unable to choose myself, to put my needs first.

I have never felt more lonely in my life. I thought at this age, I'd have the most happy years of my life but I'm actually at my worst. I keep making choices that are horrible for me but I don't know how to stop and I'm conscious of how it's not good for me, anything that I do. The people who i've hung out with make me feel more lonely, what I study doesn't make me happy, my family makes me sad because they remind me of everything that I needed as a child but never received, they remind me of a conflict that just never ends, my own reflection makes me unhappy. And no one in my family will ever admit or want to hear my truth of how they hurt me. They will always find a way to make themselves the victim, like there's no way in *** that i could've ever experienced pain like they have. I have literally nobody to talk to. Everyone who I once felt safe and comfortable around is gone. Whenever I would confide in someone and really open up, they just suddenly disappear. I'm not mad at them, I've accepted that these connections just weren't meant to be as deep as I thought they could be. Some people just like surface level, friendly neighbor small talk and thats okay. But when it's your own family, like a cousin or a sibling who you once thought they had your back, just to then not recognize who they are anymore, it's a really hard thing to deal with. I realize that many times, when I was younger and went on family trips, or to reunions, they were merely just these things that we did to overlook or cover up the abuse, the neglect, all of the bad. And now I just don't want to be near my family. They don't really know anything about me. Even though I would have fun at reunions and at trips, I never realized just how much I would cling to those singular events when really I hated spending the rest of the time with my family, as bad as that might sound. I've never even been able to open up to "friends" i've had throughout life. The people I thought I was close to, I'm starting to think we were never really close at all. I lied to myself to be able to feel some kind of peace with myself. But I was never really close with anyone. None of the connections I've had have ever been completely authentic. I know that my life is going to continue and I still have chances but why can't I let myself make a good choice for myself? When will I stop neglecting myself? I'm so frustrated that I could bear a lifetime of neglect, that that is all I've known, and when I've had the chance to meet my own needs, I don't.

Every day before I fall asleep, I feel disgusted at myself. When I wake up, I have the same feeling of disgust and disappointment. I still feel gross even after I shower. I can't be clean enough because nothing feels right inside. I really don't know how to move forward from here. I eat and drink too much sugar when I'm really stressed and extra lonely. I feel like I've never felt as close to people in real life as I have to people who don't even know I exist. And that is so sad. Maybe I just need to move, aside from looking for therapy, maybe a change of scenery would be better for my mental health. I've never moved. I was born in the same city I'm still living in now. This is all I know, and I've been so lonely all my life, even though there are a lot of people around me. But I just don't know how to make a real connection with anyone. I have kept so much of myself hidden. It's just all I've known how to do.

So, especially since the beginning of this year, I've felt a big urge to just n0t exist. I want to keep living, but it feels like so much of my childhood and my teen years were robbed from me, so basically almost my whole life. And now, all I feel is grief and sympathy for my younger self. And I'm so exhausted. I want to meet my needs and work on feeling good but I also want to be asleep for years and years. I've been indulging in this urge, by sleeping all day and staying in bed. This has been how I've been living for the last few months. Just staying in bed until very late hours in the day. Sometimes I have gotten up as late as 6 pm, sometimes 3 pm. And I feel disgusting every day. I haven't slept comfortably and normally, probably not ever since I was a very small child. As a teen, I could attend school normally but I missed out a lot, and I never slept at night. I'd been chronically sleep deprived for years. Maybe as an adult that's also weighing on me. So, how exactly do I move on now? How do I make up for decades of abuse and let go of the past, and still live my life to the fullest, all while being present? Now as someone in their early 20s, I've become everything I never wanted to be, I can't make a decision without getting stuck in a cycle of overthinking, I'm a huge burden on my parents even though they were the cause of the suffering I experienced as a child. But I know I was always a pain for them. They fell out of love, long before they even had me. I think I was mostly brought here by them to see if I would fix their relationship. But obviously that didn't work. And I don't know. I just wish I could exist as a non-human, like as a plant. I just want to be invisible, to not be perceived at all, because this shame i feel is already as painful as it can get, but I do want to live. I do want to know what it's like to feel happy and present and not dread the present. I want to experience the beauty of life and remember how much potential I have and all that I'm capable of. Lately, I've really wanted to start over. Like deleting all my social media, changing my environment, etc. I mean, I have no one in my life, what's the point of having any social media if there's no one. And my profiles remind me of how inauthentic and superficial all of my past connections were. I can barely bring myself to open the *** app, because I know I'll see people from my past having a nice life, and I feel like it will traumatize me again. But I just don't know how to move forward right now. Like if this were a video game, I feel like I can't move on to the next level, and I've been on the same level for years now and I'm too embarrassed to ask for help because how is it that it has taken me this long to complete this level.

I know this is an extremely long post so I TRULY am very thankful if anyone reads this at all. I feel like I could still write about this experience for hours, I could write pages and pages about the way I feel and everything that I've subtly repressed. But I'll stop here. It felt nice to get some things off of my chest.