Hello, everyone.  My name is Lucas Willand, and I am currently an ungraduated 23 year old.

I joined this forum because I feel stuck in life.  I know that it is not the most original or perhaps exotic problem to talk about, but there is a deep problem that I feel I have that I cannot address. No matter what I do, I feel like that it doesn’t matter. Let me explain.

Last year was one of the worst and best years of my life simultaneously.  I seriously thought about suicide over twice and almost went through with it. To be honest, I would be lying if I said that I have not struggled with melancholy for most of my adult life: I was just very good at hiding it.

When I was younger, I was often bullied and even beaten by my peers. Having grown up with cerebral palsy, I had a very difficult time learning to do things that other people were excelling at. I won’t lie and say that thinking about what happened in the past doesn’t cause me pain, it does, but I figured that the only way to get through it was to be strong, no matter how difficult it was. I didn’t realize just how hard that could be.

As a result of my pain, I figured that the only way that I could be stronger was to be better, so I tried to improve myself over and over again, and failed every time. Eventually, I just gave up, looking at the pursuit of self-development as a fruitless course. Throughout all of this, however, I always did my best to try to improve people. I tried to help a convicted felon find work because I felt I needed to. I decided to continue being friends with people that would abuse and abandon me because I felt that they didn’t really mean any of it, and that people are always capable of making mistakes.  In essence, I tried to minimize my existence as much as I could, and made them bigger than me (as odd as that may sound).

It didn’t take long before years of repressed emotions began to catch up to me. I remember I was alone in an apartment that I had just rented out when I was going to take a knife to my wrists, but I stopped. I couldn’t go through with it, even if I wanted to. I was in so much pain and wanted to die, but something was preventing me from delivering the final cut that would have rendered my hopeless and fruitless existence void.

I was angry, even upset at the time. “Why couldn’t I just kill myself? Am I so pathetic that I can’t even stop myself from living?”  I remember I sobbed heavily, the knife leaving my hand with a nervous thud. I can’t say exactly what prompted it, but I knew then and there that something had to be done.  I decided the next morning with some encouragement from my parents that I would join a partial hospitalization program. I was afraid, terrified that I would be laughed at, mocked, or even forgotten by my family members. But I decided to do it anyway because I didn’t see any other options.

To my surprise, I got along well with everyone in the program. Almost everyone greeted me with a warm reception, and said that they were glad I didn’t follow through with it. Regardless of what they said, however, I felt it wasn’t enough.  While I was there, I learned a valuable lesson on deep pain: that it can touch anyone anywhere.  I heard stories that made my soul break in grief and sorrow, stories that I wouldn’t even want to repeat. It saddened me to think of how trife my concerns felt in relation to theirs. No matter what, there was no way I could ever feel the pain that they were feeling.

I decided after that I was going to do things I had been too frightened to do before.  I decided to join a political cause, help adults finish their GED to work towards a better life, build homes for Habitat for Humanity, and help immigrants and refugees learn how to speak the English language as well as  how to use modern computer programs, as well as work serving food in homeless shelters. I figured that if I couldn’t finish my education, I would at least find value in helping people finish theirs.

Now I have a problem. It seems like nothing I do matters. That no matter what, even if someone tells me different, I have a hard time accepting that anything I do can or will make a difference. My parents are constantly questioning what I am doing with my life, and to be honest, I really don’t know anymore. If anyone has any advice, I would love to hear it.