Hi, I'm a 17 years old guy. I was hoping someone could offer some input into my situation.
Truthfully, I don't even know if I'm really depressed. I've just recently taken several online tests, and they all said that I might be suffering from moderate depression. I don't know. I've never really talked to anyone about it, and I've put forth good effort to make people think that I'm ok. The fact is that I have been relatively unhappy about my life and who I am for at least two years now, maybe longer. I think that my life may have always been unhappy, but I just didn't realize it. I can remember some times in my life that I was happy or felt proud of myself. But I can't really say that I feel proud, happy, or satisfied with anything I've done in the past. I think that I've always assumed that I was different from everyone else ever since I started kindergarten.
I believe that the source of my problems is how I was treated and how I reacted when I was very young. I had five older brothers that never respected me, would always insult me, call me fat and ugly several times a day, treat me like I was worthless, like no one cared about me, and would criticize everything I did. This was all when I was between the ages 4-10. My mom would always try to make me feel better; I don't think it ever really helped. And I never talked to my dad. I don't know why (he wasn't a mean person in any way), but I was afraid of him until I was about 9 years old; after that I simply detested him.
I believe that things like this that happened to me when I was younger have caused me to have my problems today. I have a hard time having a conversation with my friends, let alone strangers. And don’t even think my friends would be willing to talk to my about my issue. I avoid saying anything that isn't literal because I have a very hard time expressing my emotions, so people usually think I'm being serious when I'm not. I feel inferior to others all the time, even though I know that I'm not. I take just about any criticism hard, and I often don’t believe compliments about me. I have a hard time trusting people. And it seems to me that no one thinks the way I do and that no one really, truly likes me.
And these things, among others, have lead me to act in ways that I have thought would allow people to accept me. But in recent years I've felt that even though people have accepted "me", it's never really been me. So now it feels like no one really knows who I am, and I've spent so much of my life trying to behave like everyone else that I can’t tell when I’m being myself and when I just acting or which thoughts are mine and which are those of my friends. So, heading towards my senior year in high school, my sense of my own identity has become obscure.
I don’t really care if I ever live a life as happy as everyone else’s seems to be, and I could live with this problem without ever telling anyone, except now it seems that I spend a third of my time awake(and a lot of my time asleep) obsessing on my issues. I can’t focus on something for more than 5 minutes without drifting off into a daydream about my problems. These daydreams often involve me and another person talking (mostly me) about my problem and what I would say if I actually had to tell them. I could stand having this problem, but with it always in my head, I’m wasting so much of my time and I know that I could do so much more with my life if I could just get these thoughts to stop. I can’t afford to waste all this time doing nothing. I’ve tried not thinking about these things, but that hasn’t been very successful. After a while of avoiding these thoughts, I think a part of me starts to actually want to feel depressed, and I’ll sometimes loose hours out of my day to thoughts of depression.
And the worst part is that because I’ve never talked to anyone about this in my life, I’m not even sure if I have a problem, or if I’m normal and am just making a mountain out of a molehill. Since I don’t feel like there’s anyone I can really talk to, I welcome any input someone out there could give me, even if it’s that I’m not depressed and I have some other issue.