i have no idea what im supposed to put here…. if youre reading this you already know whats going on.

might as well share my story… this is gonna be rambling and probably not very cohesive, fyi. ive commented on a lot of other posts on this site. i go on here multiple times a day, to check and see whats new here. my goal in life is to help people. specifically, keep depressed people from killing themselves and hopefully get rid of their depression. i have dedicated my life to that goal. so far i have been very successful at keeping people from killing themselves, but not so good at ending any kind of depression… as far as i can tell i just drag people down and keep them stuck where they are. by people i mostly mean my girlfriend emma and my best friend lily. they have both been so amazing to me, but of course we all suffer from depression, so none of us can see clearly the good we do. i really do love them, but they cant always see it… which gets really stressful sometimes. my depression started about four years ago… so i would have been 12 or so… mostly i think it started because of all the bullying. ive always been small for my age, and thats how the teasing started. it then of course continued to change, i was always behind on slang, didnt listen to the right music, couldnt watch the right movies or tv shows… my best friends at the time (this was 5-6th grade) were Zach and Katherine. it wasnt really a big secret that Katherine had a big crush on me… i just didnt feel that way back. of course, those two never got along… Zach was (and is) a jock and Katherine was a nerd. thats just how school works. at the junior high, i started making my mask so people would think i was happy. i used to make it a game to see how outrageous a facial expression people would buy. humongous smiles, that i thought people HAD to see were bogus. of course i was wrong, nobody noticed, and the game got boring. my math teacher always seemed to notice when i let my mask slip… every time i did she was right there saying “nathan, are you ok?”. my mask wasnt enough, so i came up with the excuse i use to this day. “im just tired”. they bought it every time. i didnt get made fun of so much at this point, but Zach realized he is a lot bigger and stronger than me and a lot of the other kids, and he used it. i only lost it a few times, i remember one time watching my hand swing a huge textbook down and smash the corner on his head… of course nobody believed that little innocent nathan even COULD do something violent…

8th grade everything just went to hell. Katherine and Zach fought more…. another friend, Luke, started having hearing problems. he got really distant, argumentative, etc. because he couldnt hear what people were saying and it messed with his head. so at this point in my life i couldnt really talk to anyone without them getting paranoid or turning it against one another…. summer after 8th grade everything changed. not better or worse, just different. i met conor, who was for a long time my very best friend. not mean like Zach, not paranoid like Luke… and the other big thing that happened was i started going out with Katherine.

Em, if youre reading this you can skip this part… i know you dont like hearing about her. Katherine came up to me at my jazz band practice which i invited her along to sometimes. mascara running down her face, she just stood there sobbing because i didnt want to go out with her. it was just too painful to look at… i convinced myself that i loved her and told her of course i would go out with her. the next time i was hanging out at her house… we kissed and got to third base in the same day. we took it from there… we took each others virginity at 14. worst mistake of my life. that tore apart our relationship, soon after that first time i got the idea things were falling apart. we stayed together for another year and a half or so… she cut once. three long lines down her arm. i almost attempted once, knife to the throat was (is) my plan. i chickened out with the knife ready at my throat… 9th grade of course i got made fun of for dating Katherine… plus her best friend Cailin could tell somehow things werent going to work out. that Katherine was just going to get hurt. she was right.

i started biting myself sometime in november or december 2008… nobody noticed… towards the end of the summer before 9th grade i met emma online… her boyfriend had just broken up with her and i helped talk her out of suicide. a couple times. she started going out with the moderator of the chat room… i was a little jealous but convinced myself i wasnt. i was still going out with katherine at the time. i kind of stopped feeling for a long time at this point… just wasnt worth the pain… the only things i enjoyed at that point were chatting with emma when she was doing well, messing around with katherine, and biting. january 09, me and emma admitted to each other that we love each other, so i broke up with katherine and she broke up with vallin. about this time i started talking to lily a lot on facebook, we had met at a summer camp the summer before. me and em were great for a long time, i didnt bite for two months… she stopped cutting… good times

lily was another story, her psychotic ex boyfriend (and when i say psychotic i mean APD psychopathic sadist freak with lots of knives) would do things like call her and whisper in her ear to cut, he sent her a razor for christmas. i started talking to him and he went to get treatment, god knows why… he came back and didnt hurt anyone for a while. he seemed better. then he started cutting lily himself. the last straw came when he broke into her house, started groping her, then when she resisted he carved up her back with a switchblade. she told her health teacher and he got alan sent to juvie.

after that not much got better… lily was safer but she is still dealing with PTSD from all the abuse. emma was also abused by a previous boyfriend… as a result she has androphobia and ended up shaking really hard the first time we met… all three of us are suicidal every once in a while… we all have self esteem issues… we all cant get out. its a vicious cycle. we try to help each other, and it keeps us from sinking lower, but we cant pull ourselves out. i just want to take all their pain away… and i dont know if i can really be happy while they arent. maybe im just selfish? stupid? i dont know… all i know is if i dont find a way out of this soon im not going to be able to stay clean… and maybe not alive. i really dont know.

not sure what i hoped to gain by posting on here… just thought since its a really cool site id put my story on here… hope it helps someone. if anyone needs to talk to someone my email is murtuagh3@gmail.com im here to help…