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Severe depression...

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
...or at least I think it may be.

Hi, everyone. I'm typing this because I Googled something like "I'm so upset all the time" and found a link to someone's thread on here and thought it would be a good idea to make one too. As I type this I have been on a major, major, major low for a good couple of weeks and the past week I have cried every day around the same time and I really can't see myself here this time next year. Let me explain my circumstances. This may be lengthy but if you could give time to read it I would be incredibly grateful as I am really struggling to pass even the hours, never mind the days.

I'm 21 and trans male. I'm not sure if being trans has anything to do with it but I thought I would throw that out there. At the moment I am in a long-distance relationship (I am in England, he is in the States) with a guy named Sunny and we've been together for just under a year but have known each other for a little more. My relationship has always been fraught with issues mainly due to my own faults and errors. I'm unsure if this is because it's more difficult to make it work when it's internationally so I have always naturally been less... gracious? serious?

I have a history of being unfaithful. There are no excuses for it, and there never will be. I guess a lot of the reason why I keep doing this is because of deep-seated issues of self-hatred and extremely low self-esteem, so I cling onto whatever attention I get whenever I get it. This is often to the detriment of my relationship because I have cheated physically when a friend from Australia came to see me for two weeks and I slept with him.

I have also flirted with other people online who I know through this group community activity known as online roleplay. It sounds bizarre but ever since a young age I've always been a writer so since my early teens I've always gravitated towards this roleplay thing because it's allowed me to be so creative and expressive. There are so many individuals within this community and naturally people do become friends beyond the creative aspect and chat via instant messenger, Facebook, Skype, etc. I have an extremely difficult time with interpersonal relationships (friendships, casual talking) and have never been able to really make friends unless I see them face-to-face all the time as I do with my flatmates who are some of my closest friends---so often this 'flirtation' I enact in, which doesn't happen all that much, is purely superficial. I guess I can psychoanalyse myself pretty well but I'm still stuck within my own boundaries, if you know what I mean?

Anyway, my boyfriend has always been so gracious towards me. Earlier on in our relationship he did something that really bruised my trust in him and hurt my feelings a lot but I worked over it and it doesn't much bother me all that more. I, however, have been really horrible to him... as detailed above. I don't know why I do it. I guess that I've never 100% thought this relationship would go anywhere because I know the pattern all too well. I thought we would get to know each other, maybe last a few months, and break up. And now it's gone past that 'few months' and we've endured some really tough things together, it's really starting to hit me that this could very honestly be something real. Now I know I'm young but trust me when I say I've been through my fair share of issues.

I've always been emotionally stunted because my mother who gave birth to me at 17 was really dismissive of me. I was brought up by my grandparents (who I refer to as my parents) and held a lot of resentment towards my mother up until a few years ago because there was always this pattern where she would put her man before me and my sister. She used to scream and shout at us a lot, would never cook us dinner when we were young (9/10 years of age) but would always have something for him on the table, would always tell us to go and play outside or something because she wanted alone time with her man/didn't want to spend time with us, always took her boyfriend's side on things. Though my grandparents went above and beyond for me I have always felt limitations with them as well because my grandmother is very emotionally distant and inexpressive (she never said I love you/never hugged, etc.) though I know without a doubt she loves me a lot. My grandfather is one of those people who everyone kind of tiptoes around. He raises his voice a lot and dislikes it when his children have opinions that differ from him. He can act like he wants world peace and he's super relaxed but he has a really awful temper on him a lot of the time so I've always shied away from him a lot and not been vocal with him and it doesn't help that whenever I've expressed some kind of emotional trouble he just fobs it off as being a phase I'll get over.

So I've always been emotionally distant from everyone around me. Coupled with a really messed-up family (I am talking mental health issues, substance abuse, altercations... though not in a I-can't-function-as-a-person kind of way) I think it has really taken a toll on me. When I was 13 I had my first real boyfriend who I lost my virginity to. The relationship at that time was only very short (3 months or so) but over night he just changed. For the next 2.5 years he made my life hell because I would see him every day at school and he pretty much turned the entire student body against me (once he beat me up at school and when I came in the next day with a black eye he went to lengths to tell people it was either makeup or I had done it to myself) and bullied me... all while taking advantage of my vulnerability and feelings for him so he could use me for sexual favours. He was very emotionally manipulative and abusive. This lead to me self-harming very badly (I still have very visible scars to this day) and I went off the rails with running away from home, skipping school, getting made homeless, etc.

I went through a flurry of meaningless relationships after that, some of them at distance, some very close, some in other cities within the UK. Always I would give myself up easily because I guess that I felt all my worth was in how much people wanted me/how attractive I was to people. When I was about 14 or so, I got into a relationship with an ex-soldier from Blackpool who was 18 at the time. He had withdrawn from the Army due to a knee injury and so he was kind of working menial jobs. He was very quiet so we got along well, eventually we met up and it became a regular thing where he would stay at my house for the weekend. My parents and mother really liked him but you know, things changed, we drifted apart. He was important to me because he had always been there for me whenever my first boyfriend was abusing me, and he helped me through it a lot. And when we started drifting apart we started talking less and less but I guess it was for the best because we both had our issues. In April of 2009 he was deployed to Afghanistan and he would email me sometimes telling me how scared he was but how he was enjoying it. And I remember we had some kind of argument and in June he sent me this email saying how sorry he was and would I like to meet up in September to go to the cinema and just talk things through? And I was so agitated with him that I deleted his email and didn't reply. Two weeks later he was killed.

It really messed me up very badly. I was dealing with things at college such as bullying and started skipping classes and whole days so I didn't have to deal with it but his death really rocked me to my core. It was very painful for me. For about three years I was a mess and I kept crying and couldn't sleep or function and it's only until recently that I feel like I've healed from it and moved on. I quietened down a lot throughout that period and became much more reserved but it all had this knock-on effect on me where I was filling my emotional void with food and kept piling on weight (still am). In August of 2010 I started dating an Australian guy named J (the one who I met up with) and that was a good relationship for about 2 years but I broke it off in 2012 because I felt like we were both too comfortable where we were and we weren't getting anywhere in life. So I wanted time out to evaluate that and it did help a lot in the sense that we remained super close friends (VERY close) and he ended up getting a job and it all helped to finance his trip to England in July 2013.

In about Feb of 2013 I met Sunny online and to be honest we hit it off with casual phone sex at first. We would spend hours just on the phone talking and eventually we admitted we liked each other so we moved into relationship territory about 3 months later but I mean, I don't know. Both of us have our extreme personal issues with ourselves and we're both really low on self-esteem and second-guessing ourselves and we both get really jealous and it's just... it's not good. I'm super territorial over him and he is the same way over me but we never really find a way to resolve our issues because we both are so insecure that we just want the instant validation and to tell each other it's okay instead of really working out the problems with our relationship and with ourselves. In real life we are both very quiet, reserved people and online we can be very much ourselves. It's free reign. Maybe a little too much.

So the point of this thread is my current position... As you can guess, I've always been depressed even in a mild sense but over the years as I've isolated myself and found it difficult to make friends and whatnot my depression has become heavier and heavier to the point where I feel like I am truly at the point of destroying myself. I used to get so excited about going to the movies or reading a book or going to theme parks or playing video games and just small things like that, you know? Now I find joy in nothing, not even my writing which has always been a constant in my life.

About a week ago, Sunny made me a really difficult ultimatum and since then I've felt hopelessness in everything. I was still talking to J who was pretty much my best friend but Sunny was hurt because he felt like we were flirting? And I can see where he derives that from because of my history with J but my feelings for him were at that point where I knew I wouldn't pick him over Sunny at all. And he said that it was either him or J. And it just hit me like a tonne of bricks. I couldn't live without Sunny. I literally can't. So I told J all of this and I said my goodbyes and since then it's just so bizarre for him to not be in my life when he has always been this constant rock. I've been so lonely ever since then.

I'm clinging onto Sunny in ways that I've never done before. He says he doesn't mind, that he likes how much I love him and whatnot but I don't think he understands the magnitude of what I feel. I get so jealous when he says like he'll come to bed with me over Skype but he keeps talking to his friends whereas if I did that he would get super annoyed and hurt. And it's just really silly because he's just talking to his friends. It's no big deal yet my heart does this funny thing where it hurts and then my throat gets tight and then I just cry and cry and cry and it's the worst feeling in the world. When he doesn't respond to my messages instantly I get so hurt and I think he's off talking to other people who he would prefer to be around when he insists this is not the case at all. And I know it's not but that's how my brain is processing it and it's creating all these really intense, draining emotions that are making me want to curl up and die.

Let me say that I am not the submissive party in this relationship. I don't know, people say I'm super cold and distant so whenever I open up it's in the knowledge that I am extremely vulnerable within but it's my way of expressing that I want to be closer to that person. I'm the dominant person in my relationship and always have been but I feel I am honestly losing my will to even be a person at this point. I have tickets to visit Sunny in June (insha'Allah) and each day is a test. It gets harder. But I want to keep going, I want more than anything in this world to get on that plane and yet I'm so terrified he won't show up to meet me because we argue every night now because I am so insecure.

Because I'm seeing things that aren't there and blowing things 100% out of proportion and it's causing rifts and I just feel so worthless like he's going to leave me. Last night was a big problem. His friend Bael had started sending him these very inappropriate sexual images and he insists that they're just friends. I believe him, I do, but the flirting from Bael's side of things made me so very uncomfortable. After I made it known to Sunny that I was upset, Sunny kind of told him to stop but it was in a very soft kind of way when I feel it should have been blunt and to the point. Bael obviously wasn't taking it seriously because he kept sending these images and I was getting really p***ed off and I started crying really badly and getting that feeling in my chest again. Thinking about it now hurts.

But Sunny just kept making excuses like "he's never like this" and "he's probably drunk" whereas whenever anybody has flirted with me on a MUCH lower level he's made me stop talking to them. And when I mentioned that I wanted him to perhaps cease contact with that friend (just as he made me do with J), he got upset and super defensive. And I keep thinking, why? Why do I have to lose everything and everyone but you get to keep everyone? Why am I not allowed to be upset at the same things you get upset about? And I try to talk about it to him calmly but he gets so defensive and just says "I can't do anything right, this isn't working out, I'm just going to go" and he refuses to talk about it and I truly don't know what to do anymore. But my feelings of hurt are still there and yet I'm never ever ever allowed to have them. It's almost as if he'd rather have his friend stepping beyond those boundaries of acceptability than take my sincere feelings of hurt seriously and that hurts so much. It feels like he doesn't have my back in this or he's so hesitant to have my back.

I don't know. I'm really sorry for rambling. I just don't know what to do. I re-registered with my GP so when I get back into my hometown in a few days I am going to see if I can set up an appointment yet. I really am just very lonely and my feelings are so, so, so, so, so super extreme and I just want it to stop because it's causing arguments every day and I'm getting so stressed out. I've had suicidal thoughts. Very sincere suicidal thoughts.

Thank you for reading.

Comments

  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Hi ,I am sorry that life has been so hard on you, it really isnt fair.
    I can't really give you any advice ,as I have no idea what I should say to you?
    I would suggest to try meditation? I hated it at first but when I'm really really down ,it helps me calm down? Relax even if it only last 5mins it helps.
    And you could try exercise? A 10 minute walk a day is meant to be good if you have depression ( I have depression and anxiety and I find it helps)
    keep hanging in there , it will get better, :)
    Could you tell me a happy memory you have? Or something you used to love doing?
    your not alone , I know it feels like that but try remember your not :)
    I hope this helped? Sorry if It didnt ...
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