Yatzi wrote:When I was very young, in elementary school, I never had friends. In third grade, I started becoming friends with this kid. He then started bullying me, for no apparent reason I can see. Nobody would do anything about it, I having gone to the school and my parents on multiple occasions. When I tried to fight him, he brought in some older kids to the fray. I had to switch schools. After that, I got really depressed and stopped doing my school work. I delved myself into video games to forget what a piece of shit I thought I was. Never have made friends since. Still spend most of my time in video games. Still haven't dealt with my depression. I'm going into my senior year of high school now. Life's a beach, ain't it?
That kind of depression can take a while to work through. And a whole lot of people come out of high school with a lot of damage, so at the very least, you're not alone in that.
As much as I hope things turn around for you in your senior year - and they certainly can - bear in mind that life does get better after high school. It gets harder in some areas, but for the vast majority of people I've known or talked to online, it gets better. You'll still be you when you get out, and you'll feel more and more freedom to be who you really are, and to become the person you want to be. It's more likely - especially if you're going to college - that you'll find more people like yourself. And, believe it or not, a lot of the people who were jerks in school come to realize what jerks they were, and actively try to change for the better. I've reconnected with a couple of them in my own life, and invariably they feel pretty foolish about how they behaved back then.
Having said these things, I hope you don't let the people who hurt you keep you from opening up to others, or from achieving things for yourself. One of my biggest regrets was that I never did any homework in high school (out of pure laziness more than anything else), and because of that I missed out on things like scholarships which would have allowed me to avoid the heavy school loan debts I'm struggling to pay off now. But even more importantly, while you know well how easily you make yourself vulnerable to being hurt, is the alternative worth it? You might miss out on what could become an enduring friendship with someone out there, or something more.
I'm not trying to paint sunshine and rainbows, but one of the things KS reminded me of was that shutting your emotions down and isolating yourself - something I was doing - is no way to live. It would seem to me that cutting yourself off from other people and letting your grades sink would be to allow that kid who betrayed you to control your life...even though he isn't even
there any more.
