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2004 1 February :: 8.48 pm
:: Mood: depressed
Painful Delusions
Autobiographical piece inspired by articles on RuinYourLife.com
It's hard to pinpoint the exact beginning of my unhappiness, or the point where the things that would help cause it began. At first school, I was a happy, if slightly oversensitive, kid with a sizeable group of good friends. All my memories of then just wash over me as 'the good times' that I can barely remember. The lazy summer afternoons and the snowy winters when I enjoyed life.
So I suppose I should really start with my experiences at middle school, when it all might have started, when I stopped being quite as happy as I used to be.
I had a bit of a rough start at middle school. I had recently moved to a different area of my town, and I couldn't go to the same school as my friends. My best friend had moved away, and suddenly she was forty-five minutes drive away instead of five, which was a big difference back then. And then I was thrown into a completely new school with no friends, and the only people I knew were two boys who went to the same first school as me, but hadn't been in my class, so I hardly knew them.
As the weeks went by, and I slowly got to know the people in my class, I still didn't make any friends, but I didn't really notice because almost everyone was always nice to me. I was clever, and everyone always wanted me to give them the answers in class. Even the people who were just as smart as me, and those who were smarter.
I passed through the whole of middle school with people using me to get good grades, and never actually making a single real friend. I came close a few times, but a particularly jealous, attention-seeking classmate decided it would be a good idea to force anyone who looked set to be a friend away from me.
Of course, it never really hit me that I had no friends and that all the people I knew saw me only as a living answer sheet. I used to be so naïve, maybe because my parents are far too overprotective and I never really saw much of reality.
All that changed when I reached high school, though. I was forced to go to a school I knew I would hate, and no amount of argument would make my parents see otherwise. I basically had no choice in the matter, which I still resent now. I did try to make the best of it, and at the time I decided that I would make a great effort to fit in properly, and become semi-popular, like I was in first school. If only I had known how I would end up.
Three-quarters of the way through my first year I was lost. In my teaching group I had no friends, which I believe had a lot to do with the fact that the most unpopular girl in the class latched herself onto me immediately, mistaking my shyness for unpopularity and misfit status. Of course, I know now that I’m never ever going to be popular, and I no longer care, but in year eight it did mean a lot to me. In my form group, I sat with my cousin and her friends, trying to fit in, but not quite managing because they were all louder and more confident that me, and my parents wouldn’t let me take part in their social gatherings outside of school. I grew very depressed throughout year eight, and began to self-harm for the first time. It was nothing serious, just shallow scratches mostly caused with compasses and by digging my locker key into my arm and dragging it through the skin. They were never enough to scar me, and after a while I eased off and stopped.
When I started my second year of high school, I was quite a bit better. I wasn’t as depressed, and I wasn’t self-harming any more. Unfortunately, my lack of social life over the summer holidays had distanced me even further from my cousin and her friends. I got on ok with them for a while, because they all got into witchcraft, something that had always interested me. But then, for no apparent reason, they stopped liking it, and to my horror, got involved with Christianity instead! Now, I’ve never been a religious type, and I didn’t really want anything to do with Christianity, which made things very awkward. All they did at school was go on and on about what they were doing outside school, and what their church was doing. My cousin did see that I wasn’t happy, and tried to got me involved with her church, thinking it would make me less of an outsider or something, but it never worked out.
It all came to a head pretty quickly, and so I had a big argument and ended up not speaking to my cousin or any of her friends, and coming very close to moving forms. By that time, I had got used to the girl in my teaching group, and we actually got on quite well. She had been through a period of depression at around the same time as my year eight self-harming, and so I took to hanging out with her friends.
I got better after that, still depressed, but not nearly as badly as before, and for a while, I though things were going to be alright. Of course, I was very wrong, as always.
By the end of year nine things were falling apart again. My newfound ‘friends’ were arguing amongst themselves a lot, so I tried to keep out of it, and I hoped that everything would just blow over during the summer holidays. Wrong again. The beginning of year ten wasn’t so bad, but by October I had entered my worst period of depression yet, which was not at all helped my a school residential to France. I thought it would be an escape, but it was just another cage, and it didn’t get any better when I got back.
A week after I returned, I was extremely depressed and I was just so frustrated I picked up the nearest sharp object and laid into my arm, scratching at it until it was red, and just becoming sticky with blood. I stayed like that for another few weeks, regularly cutting and scratching myself with semi-sharp objects, pleased when I drew blood. It was never painful, just numb, and it gave me a release for my anger and depression.
Just before Christmas, I became extremely suicidal, to the point where I’ve now decided how I’m going to die, and have a rough idea of when. I haven’t got any better really, although I’ve been a little calmer since I started to sort out my suicide plans. And I’m still self-harming, with the injuries slowly getting worse.
I don’t tell anyone the full extent of my unhappiness, maybe because I’m scared they’ll ask why, and if I tell them, then they’ll say it’s stupid, and nothing to hurt myself over. Part of my mind is always telling me I don’t have the right to be depressed, that there are so many worse-off people who aren’t suicidal. I don’t come from a dysfunctional family, I’ve never been severely bullied, and I really don’t know why I’m so depressed. It’s just the way I am.
1 Whisper |
Endlessly, she said... |
