i don’t know what i’m doing here. nothing traumatic has ever happened to me. no abuse, no drugs, no alcohol. and yet i have been having suicidal thoughts for nearly seven years now, i think. the earliest time i can remember being this way is sophomore year of high school, i was sitting in english class and instead of listening to lecture was very clearly picturing the medicine cabinet at home. i remember planning exactly when i would do it – had to be when my parents weren’t at home, when it was just me. i didn’t do it because life got in the way. i would start thinking of how the people in my life needed me. and i would love them and hate them for it. few years later, same deal, with a knife, but a friend talked me out of it. and then college came and i thought i left that darkness behind, but it was only lurking. i had my first relationship freshman year and came out to my parents. my partner used me for experimentation while she was simultaneously having a relationship with her old boyfriend behind my back, and sometimes in my face. i had a mental break a few months in after things fell apart and she told me to get a shrink and dumped me when i needed her most. instead she threatened that she would tell the administration that i was suicidal which would have gotten me expelled. so what could i do? i went to the campus counselor. i thought i finally had someone who i could rely on to help me but she gave me ten sessions and then told me to find help elsewhere. nobody seemed to think my problems were drastic enough to bother with – freud probably would have called it hysteria. so i started to be convinced that i was dreaming all of the bad feelings and started shutting down the part of me that could feel. i let go of all my friends, or drove them away, and buried myself in work. i pretended that doing what my parents wanted me to do, having somebody’s approval, would justify existence. the only thing i was doing was prolonging the inevitable. i’ve graduated now, with decent grades, a respectable resume, all the appearance of being perfectly normal. and now the depression comes back and i find that i have no one i can go to, the few friends i still keep in contact with don’t understand what is affecting me or deny that it exists or think that i am just making up stories. part of it is because i told one of them that i was strong enough to keep it at bay just through willpower but it’s not true, i can’t do it anymore. right now i’m exactly where i never wanted to be and all of the people that i once talked to about this, the friends that understood me, have long forgotten me or have buried the memories that we had together because i hurt them too much when i pushed them away. i just feel so useless all the time now and i don’t have any plans for the future and living at home with parents trying to make me find a job and enter a strenuous profession that i’m not even sure i want to do or can do, especially not when i’m like this. i can’t even bear going outside because i feel like people are watching and judging me. i don’t know why i should go on, because no one would even miss me.