I’m new on here and I have so much to talk about. This is gonna be a long one. I’m german, that’s my excuse for any grammatical or spelling mistakes.
I go into very much detail here, because I like doing that (idk why, I have always been someone who included pretty much every detail when talking about anything) and on here, I don’t need to worry about annoying anyone, because I don’t know anyone and if someone does not want to read this insanely long text, that’s fine and I won’t know.
I don’t even know where to start. I feel like I need to include “a bit” of backstory here.
I’ve struggled with bad thoughts, self-hatred and no self-confidence, for a couple years (I think it started when I was 13 or 14 y/o, I’m turning 19 in a week.), but it has never been that bad. I still enjoyed my life and those thoughts only came to me in very sad moments, which were pretty rare. It got worse over the years and I started cutting, which got worse as well, but that and most of the bad thoughts stopped about 1,5 years ago, after I finished school and started studying at university. I finally felt like I’d get something done in my life, I was proud of and had fun with what I did, I even had a girlfriend.
In August, I broke up with her after 21 months, because it just didn’t work out anymore. That’s fine, it happens and I don’t regret anything of that, neither the relationship nor ending it.
Shortly after that I became really good friends (best friends by now) with a girl I met online.
At the moment, she’s the only real friend that I have and the only one I can talk to about what bothers me. Now that’s where the probably biggest of my problems comes in: She has gone through the same stuff as I did (self-hatred, self-harm etc, that stuff). Due to that and people hurting her, she’s not getting as attached to others anymore and develops barely any feelings or empathy.
None of that is her fault and despite that, she is a truly wonderful person and probably the best I have ever met.
Nontheless it hurts me so much to notice over and over again, every single day, how one-sided this friendship is and how much more I care about her, than she does about me.
But that does not mean that she does not care at all. She does and it makes her sad when I am.
Which leads to my next problem: Even though she told me she’d always listen to me when I wanna talk, which she does, I do not tell her everything, not even close, because I notice how it hurts her. It’s hard for her to handle, when my depression kicks and I tell her about how I want to die or hurt myself, which is unterstandable and I think it’d be hard for everyone to have close friends telling you that kind of stuff.
That means I don’t talk to anyone about my problems, which are these:
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Self-harm. As I mentioned, I started cutting a couple years ago. I was never able to really get rid of it, until I had that relationship. I promised her to not cut again and I did not break that promise, until I broke up with her. After breaking up, because I did not talk to her anymore afterwards, I no longer had the struggle, that if I cut, I’d either have to tell her I broke my promise or I’d have to lie to her.
So I started again and it got worse than it’s ever been before. I had only some scars on my right shoulder before that, not even that many. Now my left shoulder kinda looks like my right one did before. I started doing it on the left one, because if I did anymore on the right, they’d be visible when wearing short sleeves, there’s just no space left. At the moment, I do it almost every day. I think my cuts are relatively big, the ones I did right after the break-up are not fully healed yet. -
I want to die. If it wasn’t for my best friend, I probably wouldn’t be here anymore. She’s the only one I have and even though I have a wonderful family, that’s not enough for keeping me alive. She is. I am afraid of the day our friendship ends, I hope it never does. The thought of losing her, in any kind of way, terrifies me the most right now. I’m pretty sure, if I ever lose her, without anything else changing, I couldn’t do this for much longer.
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Self-hatred. One of the reasons for the 2 previous problems is this. I hate myself so fucking much. The way I look, behave, talk, just everything I am. I truly wish I was someone else. Whenever I talk and hear my voice, look into a mirror, laugh (even though everything is pretty shitty, I am a rather humorous person and laugh about a lot of stuff), see any part of my body, say something just slightly unkind, stupid or something that I think is funny, but then it’s not funny, I am disgusted.
Additionally, I have a terrible way of handling things. I run away from my problems. Sometimes by avoiding them, sometimes by ignoring them even though I shouldn’t, but, which is the worst part, most of the times by lying to others. I lied to my ex about so many things, which I truly regret, and I lie to my best friend, mostly so I don’t have to tell her about my problems, when she asks me about how I am, if I cut again etc. -
I can’t control myself. I have pretty big problems controlling myself.
That’s mostly about food: I can’t hold back when it comes to food. When I do grocery shopping I always come home with more than I planned to, I get food delivered to me way too often and when I plan ahead what I want to eat which day of the week, I usually eat two thirds of that on the day I bought it. But I am not overweight, because eating too much makes me hate myself so much and feel so bad about myself, that I restrain myself from eating anything for days, which I know is not the right way, but I can’t help it. I always feel like I need to make up for the days I eat too much.
Another thing I can’t control is cutting. It’s become like a drug for me and I need it so much and I know I shouldn’t, but just as it is with food, I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t hold back. -
I am a disappointment. I finished school when I was 17 and I started studying maths at a german university in the same year. I love maths. In school, I hated most classes, except maths and biology. I was really good at those. The stuff just feels like it was made for me. Both subjects are so interesting that I didn’t need to do any studying, because I just learned about it in my free time, for fun. It’s been like that since my first years in school and for 8 years, I was sure maths was the thing I would want to earn money with when I grew up.
Then I got to universtiy and it was so much fun. It was all so interesting and I loved it. But then it became very much harder pretty fast and soon I was still interested in it, but I didn’t understand it anymore. I failed all my exams in the first 2 semesters. I started over again this year, but I will probably fail again.
This hurts me in two ways.
a) The realization, that maths might not be what I’m made for, after it felt like that for about 14 years (I started getting interested in maths when I was 4, my Mom once told me), hurts me so much. Not being able to do what I love, simply because I don’t understand it, is terrible for me.
b) I don’t want to disappoint my parents. Failing the first year is fine I think, but if I fail again this time…
They are great parents and I honestly think they would never lose faith in me, but I feel like deep down they’d be disappointed that I wasted 2 years of my time and their money. But what might be even worse is that I disappointed myself. Maths was always the only thing I considered myself to be really good at. Now that’s gone. I’m not intelligent enough to do what I love so much. -
I overthink everything. Whenever I see someone has read my messages, but has not answered, I aways instantly assume they are mad at me/hate me, without considering they might not have the time or the motivation to reply right now. Even though I am aware, that sometimes others don’t want to talk or need some time to reply, I always overthink when they don’t.
And here, by “they” I actually only mean my best friend tbh. I don’t take it as serious when others don’t reply, because it’s not as important to me what they think about me as it is what she thinks. I could handle someone else being a bit annoyed by or mad at me, but I could not handle her being that.
So when she does not reply to my messages, which happens quite often, be it because she is at work, playing video games she can’t pause, meaning reading a message is possible, but typing an answer is not, or because she just does not want to talk, I always feel like I did something wrong. Instead of then waiting for an answer or accepting that she does not want to talk right now, I make it even worse by telling her about it. I tell her that I feel like I’m annoying or that she’s mad at me and ask her if she is.
Then she either replies and it turns out she just not had the time to do that before, which makes me feel stupid, or she doesn’t, because she doesn’t want to talk or still doesn’t have the time. If she doesn’t, it starts all over again, getting worse and worse, because I worry more and more that she might hate me (which is fucking stupid btw, she’s the best friend I’ve ever had, she’s not gonna hate me because I annoy her once).
Something else that I overthink: We both play a lot of videogames. As I mentioned, I met her online and she lives kinda far away, it takes me 4,5 hours to get to her when going by train. That means because we can’t meet very often, we talk via discord very much and usually play videogames together while doing so.
Now when I see she’s online and playing a game, alone, I also think too much about why she didn’t ask me to join her. It’s hard for me to accept that she sometimes just wants to be alone, because I am someone who never wants that. I also never not want to talk to her, which kinda explains the overthinking, when she’s not replying to my messages.
I think all of this is a result of what I mentioned earlier, that she doesn’t get as attached to other as I do.
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Aggression problems. I get very angry very quick, but only at myself. I almost never get angry at others and try to see the positive things in what they do and hope they have good ambitions, even though it seems to be otherwise. On the other hand, I get angry at myself for every little thing. For example making a bad play in a videogame that I know I could have done better, forgetting stuff (dentist appointment, calling my grandma to thank her for the postcard she sent me, watering my plant etc., nothing too crazy important), expressing myself in the wrong way thus hurting someone else (which happens way too much), saying something stupid because my brain just stopped working for a moment.
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I’m terrible at socializing. After finishing school I moved into a new town. I now live alone and after 13 months of studying at this university I haven’t made any friends or even one acquaintance. I don’t talk to anyone when I don’t have to, because I feel so uncomfortable when I do. I wrote earlier that I met my best friend online. Well she’s not the only one, there are some other people, that I wouldn’t really call friends, but I’m cool with them and we play something together every now and then. It’s so much easier for me to talk to others I don’t know yet when it’s on discord, then it’s not a problem at all. That’s why everyone I talk to is either someone I met online or someone from school. I don’t see any of my friends from school anymore, because we all chose different paths and are living our lives far away from the others, none of us stayed in our old hometown. That means I talk to literally no one in real life, except for when I have to.
Now after reading through all of this again, I realized that the parts 4-7 could also be part of “self-hatred”.
It got even longer than I expected and there’s so much more to it, that’s bothering me, that I won’t put here yet, because it’s all just results of the above.
If you read it all until here, thank you very very much. Just typing this here and getting it all out of my head helps a lot. I am not sure what I want to achieve by posting this, what kind of replies I expect or want to see. I just want to talk about it, all of it.