Hi everyone. I stumbled upon this site by accident today, and the articles I’ve read so far have been making me feel lighter than I have in months. I’m feeling a bit lost lately and am looking for some advice, or really just someone to talk to. I want to start bettering myself and put my life on a new track. I have a bit of a long story, so if anyone could bear with me, it would be much appreciated.

I came out of high school a few years back with a very jaded attitude. I did everything I was supposed to do in high school, or rather, everything I was told would get me into a good college. I took the SAT’s and ACT’s multiple times, did tons of community service, played a few varsity sports, and became an active participant and leader in the Air Force JROTC program offered at my school. I come from a military family, so that was more or less a natural progression. My parents always had high expectations of me growing up. I am the oldest of 3 siblings, and expected to be a role model, as well as a helping hand to my mother when my father deployed. Over the years I developed a “caregiver” role in most of my relationships, to the point where when I finally graduated, I wasn’t weightless or happy beyond belief, I was emotionally exhausted. Being involved in JROTC, most of my close friends were also in the program. The hierarchy and unnecessary drama of the happenings of our daily activities was comparable to the OC. My “best friend” was also in this program, and she was someone that I didn’t exactly care for as a person. She was a bully, she always needed to be right. She would talk behind her friend’s backs, including mine, constantly. She was immature, and more often than not just plain annoying. But we were partners on a Color Guard team and worked very closely with each other in leadership roles, so I tried as hard as I could to maintain the peace as often as possible. And eventually, I became her best friend. Only later did I find out that she had an awful home life. She had neglecting parents with a father who repeatedly cheated on his wife. My friend also had quite the medical history: spinal problems, knee issues, and a condition that would cause her to have seizures and lose the ability to breathe that would usually arise in hot, moist environments, or periods of stress. Her parents would get angry with her for being sick, or being transported to the hospital after having what we would call “attacks.” However, they did nothing to help their daughter, nor did they show any interest in pursuing answers to the cause of her condition. So, I became her caregiver. I would take care of her during these attacks and talk her through them. When they occurred in public, I’d be the 16 year old telling the adults what to do. Our high school nurse eventually stopped calling her parents and would call me down to her office if this happened during school. I genuinely cared about her, but she was sucking the energy out of me at a very young age. At the end of our junior year of high school we were on a bus ride home from our annual National Drill Team Competition with the rest of my unit, and she experienced the worst attack she had ever had at the time. Whenever she had an attack, she would always beg not to go to a hospital through her wheezing, and not speak to you for weeks if you supported and helped carry out that action. Usually, it didn’t come to that, and I was a big reason for that. However, I had a very odd/uneasy feeling at that day which I’d never experienced before, and directed two other kids on the bus to help guide the bus driver to the nearest hospital. It took about 45 minutes to get there, in which time I kept order in a bus full of kids from ages 14-17, and watched a girl I had an incredible, unhealthy bond with, go into cardiac arrest. We arrived at the hospital as I had frantically laid her on the floor and began performing CPR. I learned minutes later that she had been recessutated and was going to be fine, but from that moment on I was haunted but what I had seen, what I had experienced, and I never felt the same.

Around that same time, another one of my close friends was dealing with intense depression, and had already tried to commit suicide 3 times. My dad was deployed in Pakistan, and I developed an insomnia. I never went to a doctor, nor did I try to talk about my problems with anyone even though I felt like I was on the verge of exploding. It was never who I was; people came to me for advice, and I saw me going to someone else for help as me being weak and whiny, because the problems of others were much more important and significant than my own. So, I bottled everything up. And one day, I eventually evened out. I started sleeping again and feeling a bit more like myself. The one thing that had changed though was that people exhausted me. I stopped caring about people, I stopped caring about offering help. I became cold and numb, and finally cut myself off from any sort of contact with my best friend and most others. I quit JROTC and started taking art classes (something I’d always wanted to do but never had the time), and I thought I’d fill more fulfilled that way. But I seemed to have a total lack of feeling whatsoever. Graduation was fast approaching, and I figured cutting ties would be an easier, cleaner way to handle things. I would be attending Boston University in the fall, on an AFROTC scholarship. It was what I had always strived for, but I found myself being totally unenthused and even dreading it slightly. I moved away to Boston, and my freshman year was quite the adjustment. Everything was new and exciting, and just plain different. I was locked into a degree of study that I had no desire to pursue, but the Air Force was paying for it. I dealt with bouts of depression as I’m sure all new college students away from home deal with at some point, but I made quite a few fantastic friends through the ROTC program. Being in ROTC made up for the fact that I hated my classes, and I was content enough to keep going on the path I had chosen.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year that things really started heading downhill. 3 people I was very close to passed away: one was my high school best friend I cared for, one a relative to suicide, the other my childhood mentor to natural causes. I found myself dealing with an unmanageable amount of depression about a month after everything transpired. I lost the motivation to do much of anything. I couldn’t get myself to class, or even out of bed to eat. I developed unhealthy habits and the insomnia I had experienced in high school made its way back into my life. I started taking sleeping pills and drinking alcohol just to go to sleep at night, but would just wake up nauseous and even more tired than the night before. I wandered in and out of frat parties every weekend in hopes of meeting a guy and feeling some sort of…feeling, but I only felt worse afterwards. I began experiencing anxiety attacks if I was in one place for too long or surrounded by too many people, and would need to smoke multiple cigarettes a day to feel somewhat relaxed. I felt tight and on edge constantly, but couldn’t really feel happy, sad, or angry. It was if I just had a total lack of feeling. The semester passed by in a total haze, and most of it I don’t even remember. I received incomplete grades in most of my classes, and thankfully had professors who were very understanding and willing to work with me. My relationship with my family also deteriorated during this time. We barely talked, and when we did, we were having arguments. I tried to explain that I wasn’t feeling well but I didn’t know why, and they would get angry and start yelling about how I take everything that was given to me for granted and that I was ruining my life. They said I was failing, and if I didn’t get over myself and keep going on the path I had decided I’d be a dead beat, and I shouldn’t expect them to help pick up the pieces.

Over Christmas break I tried to find a way to fix myself before returning to school. I tried seeing a couple of different counselors, which didn’t help. I tried turning to different pastors and priests so I could obtain some sort of faith in a higher power but I only felt frustrated. I tried mending my relationship with my parents, which fortunately got better, but I personally felt now better. I spent my days trying not to worry about the amount of school work that had piled up but whenever I tried to work on some of it I would exhibit symptoms of a panic attack, as would focusing on any one thing for too long. I convinced myself that I needed a break from life in general, so I spent Christmas cutting myself away from my school life. I didn’t talk to any of my friends and just tried to forget everything. Obviously I had to go back at some point, and surprisingly, I felt a lot better when I did. That feeling didn’t last though. I gradually started to feel horrible again, and I just filled up with negativity and self loathing. On my 20th birthday I wanted to forget and not feel anything. I wanted everything to be over, so in a typical college fashion I tried to drink my sorrows away. I ended up in the hospital a few hours later, covered in vomit, with a concussion and an aching body. My hospital trip due to intoxication was grounds for disenrollment from the ROTC program. I spent the entire semester not focusing on any of my classes and working with my instructors to try and get a waiver to stay. I was informed in early May that my attempts were futile, and I was no longer allowed in AFROTC. I had lost everything. Since then I have been overcome with guilt and self hatred. My parents call me a liability and a failure, my brother is ashamed of me, and my sister feels like she should be getting a job so she can help me pay for Boston University. She’s 14. I’ve never felt so low, and I don’t know how to get out.

One good thing that did come out of this year was a relationship. While I was attempting to handle all this I became very close with a friend in ROTC. He was a year older, we were involved in many of the same things, and he always made me laugh. He was the first person I felt able to go to for advice. Somewhere down the line he became my light at the end of the tunnel when I was dealing with all of this depression. He’d pick me up and force me to eat, and just listen to me talk, cry, and whatever else I wanted to do. He was my confidant, and he was the only person that ever made me feel a smidge better, even more alive. Around the time of me being taken to the hospital, we became even closer, and started a relationship after some initial resistance on my part. We became pretty serious pretty fast, and while it was scary, it felt good. We compliment each other so well, and being together intimately was effortless. He’s been an incredible amount of support for me, and has helped me in more than I thought possible. I trust him more than anything, but lately I feel as though my negativity has been damaging our relationship. He’s a very black and white type of guy, and usually turns to logical thinking and rationalizations to get me out of a slump. We’ve just been getting under each other’s skin lately. I’m afraid I’ve become too dependent, and that I’ve started to weigh on him. We’ve been acting differently around each other, and now I’m even reluctant to say if something’s bothering me in fear of hurting him. He cares about me; I just want to learn how to be less of a burden. I love him and I don’t want to put him through anything unnecessary.

I hate myself; it has been a persistent thought in my head all summer. I want to get the negative thoughts to start going away, but nothing has been effective. I have a steady job to fund the remainder of my education at a state school, but even with moving forward and getting on a different but still good track I can’t bring myself to feel good about myself. I want to heal from my experiences and learn to help others overcome similar things. Any thoughts/tips? Thank you! 🙂