I’m actually becoming terrified of staying alive…

This is probably going to be long. I just needed somewhere to write out what has happened these last few years so I can get my thoughts in order. I’m sorry.

I first noticed that  I was apathetic with my emotions when I was 10. I didn’t think much of it then – only wondered for a little while as to why I was different to the rest of my classmates. It never really bothered me much, that is, until I got to high school. I suppose that I should mention that I’m an introvert. I don’t have very many close friends, and none that I really like to talk to outside of school.

My life really started to fall to pieces when I was 13. I had made a new friend over the course of year 8 and moving into year 9 we were still strong friends, or at least I had thought we were. It was around October that I started receiving messages that were overly sexual in nature from an acclaimed 40 year old man. It only lasted for a few days but one of my friends was still worried for me. She advised me to call the police and get them involved. I didn’t really know what to do so I talked to my best friend about it (my new friend I had made in year 8). That was when she informed me that it had been her sending the messages all along. She was scared and upset and kept telling me how she had not meant for it to go so far. I was shocked and ended up crying for half an hour. During this time one of the student counselors had taken us to a private room. At the time I wasn’t able to say much about the situation and was basically told to forgive and forget.

Needless to say it was swept under the rug.

I ended up trying not to think about it too much over the next year. She was still my best friend and so I allowed myself to think that it was sorted out at the time.

A few months after this happened I broke off from my main group of friends. My mum had been pushing me too much about how they treated me and I snapped cutting it off with them. The above mentioned friend chose to stay with them rather then come with me (basically just another knife in the back from her). During the month I was alone (she chose to come with me after ‘sorting herself out’) I discovered that I’m a really paranoid person. I kept thinking everyone was talking about me when I sat by myself. I felt so uncomfortable and just wanted to cry whenever I went to bed. After another couple of weeks the backstabber finally convinced me to go back to the group, leaving me feeling pathetic and weak.

It was during this year that I started to lose all motivation in school and in my hobbies. I stopped doing homework, leaving it all until the day it was due in and I started to draw away from my clubs, both in and out of school. I stopped enjoying things that I had loved to do originally. I could see what was happening to me and started to hate myself for it. I felt ashamed of myself for my lack of motivation and outright disgust when I found that I couldn’t even find any pleasure in reading anymore. My emotions became even more apathetic when related to anything that needed my opinion. I found myself following other peoples opinions because I wasn’t ever sure what I was thinking or feeling. I couldn’t tell what I did actually enjoy but I could tell you plenty of things that I hated.

It got worse through the transition into year 10. I started to realize that I was terrified of disappointing people. I had always been  a bit of a pushover but I had never realized that it connected to my fear. I’m afraid of disappointing my family, my friends and my teachers. I got even more paranoid, convinced that everybody would hate me as soon as I so much as made one mistake. My motivation to do homework went from bad to worse. It got so bad that throughout all of year 10 I never once handed in any complete work for one of my lessons. My anxiety over disappointing people skyrocketed and I found that I couldn’t face that teacher at all, I was so scared he would hate me as much as I hated myself.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I had a breakdown during January of year 10. I told my parents about the messages and it was brought properly to the schools attention. I had a chat with my form tutor who told me that the police couldn’t get involved now because it had been too long since it had happened. She told me that she could get my friend put in to see the school counselor and asked if I wanted to be put on that list. My parents had already found me a counselor outside of school so we said no and that was basically it. Once again, the situation was just swept under the rug.

My friend was put into the counselling system and it was then I noticed that 2 members of my group (it consists of 5 of us including me and the backstabber) had become very frosty with me. Those two had always been closer to my supposed best friend than they ever had been with me (despite me being the one who had to make them like her in the first place). Things became awkward and I chose to leave again, only talking occasionally with the one member who still liked me (by this point I had cut ties with the other girl completely, but for some reason she didn’t hate me). I hung out with them for a little while at the beginning of her counselling but the situation just became too emotionally draining for me to stay.

I did try to commit suicide at this point. My counselling wasn’t really working for me despite me trying to make it work (I eventually gave it up, pretending that it had worked for me just so that I didn’t have to go anymore). My suicide attempt wasn’t really successful and I ended up going into school the next day without anyone even knowing that I had tried.

She got out of her counselling on a complete fluke. She had refused to actually talk about the situation that had put her into the system in the first place and the counselor just let her go, claiming that there was nothing wrong with her at all. It was at this point in time that one of the members of the group that preferred her started making my life more difficult. She was always talking about me behind my back and her attitude towards me made me hate myself even more for disappointing her to the point that she was prepared to truly make me feel like an outcast.

The backstabber then did something completely idiotic again. This time she hurt the friend in the group that still liked me. I flipped out at this point and completely dragged myself away from them, feeling more and more ostracized and hated as the time went by. I broke down again one day and told the member that didn’t hate me as much as the other everything that had happened with the messages. She apologized for how she had acted telling me that the backstabber hadn’t ever told her what the messages had really been about. She told the one that really hated me about what had really happened and she completely flipped her attitude towards me and the backstabber. I was now the one liked whereas she was the one who was hated and ostracized.

You would think I would’ve been happy about that y’know. She finally got the punishment that she had deserved. No, of course it would never be that simple. I felt disgusted at myself that I had ever shown those two the messages and I felt ashamed that I had let the same thing that happened to me happen to her. I hated myself even more, never really knowing how to act around her, you have to remember, at one point she was the greatest friend I had ever had. My emotions were in turmoil. It was no surprise that I did badly on my GCSEs that had to be done that year. I was honestly surprised my report card came out as good as it did.

This summer leading to year 11 has been horrible though. I’m terrified of the thought of having to go back to that school in a week. My feelings haven’t changed much at all. If anything, I feel even worse as my self-hatred has built up and my anxiety has worsened. I’m afraid of the teachers, I’m afraid of the scores I’m going to get in my GCSEs if I go back to that school this year. I’m scared of having to deal with my friends and I’m terrified of disappointing everyone around me because I can’t handle it. I’m debating just dropping out of school altogether. I’ll be 16 four days after we start school again, and two of those days are the weekend. I can’t see any future for myself right now and it scares me. Or at least, not any future where I’ll be happy. I would try to commit suicide again, except I’m too scared to do it.

My life is in shambles right now and I’m don’t even know where to begin trying to pick up the pieces. I don’t even know if I want to try…