Hey there, stranger. This might be a long one, so buckle up for a ride. (Or scroll down for the tl;dr. That's fine, too.)

So. The name's Jorge. I'm a ripe old 17 right now, senior-to-be in high school after all this virus panic settles down. I'm not diagnosed with anything but depression. I'm pretty confident I have that one, what with the constant plunging in and out of depressive episodes. Serotonin? I haven't heard that name in years. Unofficially, I have anxiety. I'd be a fool to deny it when I got to my current high school as a freshman with anxiety so bad I could only stare across campus at the winding lunch line, fearing I'd "get it wrong" and that lightning would strike me down or something. 

More recently, I've been doing some internal detective work putting names to feelings and sorting them out and have figured out ADHD (predominantly inattentive, what ADD used to represent... I think?) sounds like me to a T. I'm not one for self-diagnosis, so I've erred on the side of I Just Present Uncannily Similar Symptomatology. Something for the psychiatrist's office.

But my laundry list of mental issues aren't what I'm here to talk about. My obsessive tendencies are.

In the past, I've worried myself sick over whether I might have x illness or y disorder that might explain whatever the hell behavior I'm hung up on next. You can imagine the WebMDing and the Mayo Clinic-ing and the self-administered tests trying to conclude *something* real. 

Let's jump back to this past summer. I'm a sophomore, incoming junior, and my only friend is my best friend. So I spend some time on here making my rounds on the "new friends here!" type subs before I see my inbox pinged. I open it and there's a message from an LGBT Discord server, something like the Pink Triangle. It's not important. What is is that I hit it off in there, make a name for myself. Before long, a cat profile picture slides into my DMs saying hello in Spanish. Curious, I respond in turn. 

Groups and I have never mixed much. I leave the server in two days, but cat profile picture and I keep talking. Fernando's the name, flirting's the game. I'm gay, I should say, and it doesn't take much before we're in a friends-with-benefits scenario, and perhaps less for my platonic "I love you" to carry a little more weight. Only problem is, he's in Honduras and I'm in sunny ol' California. So long-distance it is. My first relationship.

There are a thousand more details I could spend the rest of the night explaining, but what I'm here to talk about are the specific situations that qualify as "obsessive". Or more like just plain odd, is the way it's always felt to me. 

There's this game I play, a get-to-know-people game. Truth or Truth. Exactly what it sounds like: Truth or Dare without the dare, so it's just back-and-forth questions. Fernando and I'd play and come up with funky questions to really get familiar with each other. One question in particular, I still remember.

I was at a family friend's. Just waking up, I think, or lounging around for the day. One of us asked, "what's your favorite movie?" Howl's Moving Castle, of course. I said as much. We exchanged banter. And then he said his was Call Me By Your Name.

Gay film. Never seen it. No attachment to the characters. No previous exposure to anything about the movie besides an article about the peach scene. (If you know, you know.) No *precedent*.

What do I mean by that? There was no *precedent* for the mention of a movie I'd barely thought about beforehand making me so crushingly depressed I could barely move for the rest of the afternoon. I can't really remember what I did then. Play it cool? Cough up my emotions? Laugh at the futility of it? Definitely note how pathetic it felt. 

A couple more things struck me after that, so it didn't end up being a one-time thing like I'd hoped. I'd have loved to chalk it up to the nature of a turbulent long-distance relationship (if it isn't obvious, we're no longer together—or talking, for that matter), but the random sadness has been an issue since way before.

I remember being at school in Tijuana for 8th grade. A younger, more pompous me at 13, "mature" in all the wrong ways. I was a Steven Universe geek and a sucker for PC games, which made me a perfect target for my then-friends' interest in Undertale. I downloaded the game, played it through Pacifist, Normal, and Genocide. Since we didn't have wifi at home, I'd have one of those friends take a USB and load it up with videos I'd request: Steven Universe Possible Fusions, Game Theory stuff, lots of creepypasta. One Game Theory video, the one on W.D. Gaster and his relation to Papyrus and Sans? Every time I thought or talked about it with any of them, it'd make me so *sad.* For no reason I could explain, nor any that made any sense. 

When Fernando would mention Tumblr, those feelings bubbled back up to the surface. For no reason! Tumblr! It feels so pathetic to say, but he just had to say the word and my day would be practically ruined. I'm sure there were other things, smaller ones, but I can't remember them now.

Cue the start of junior year. For these reasons and others, Fernando and I "break up", quotes because it's debatable we were ever really dating in the first place. 

It's here I should note that, despite the Undertale thing not having to do with romance, every other incidence of this random sadness has. It doesn't typically happen with close friends, much less acquaintances. 

Rebounding off the breakup, I meet a guy in Algebra 2. Charming, if a little boyish for my tastes. He makes a quick friend of me. We overshare, but let's not talk about that. Long story short, we confess our feelings for each other in short order. Skip a whole bunch of heartache between my best friend during this whole era, the romantic portion of which only began maybe three or four months ago, and you have the past two or three weeks. 

I do a lot of mental comparing. It's one of those pesky symptoms I can't categorize or even really make sense of. I'm a walking goldmine for a therapist near me, but. Point is. Since the start, I've been doing a lot of comparing between Fernando and this guy, Jason. Trying to make sure this isn't a repeat, that I *do* feel for him this time, this and that and all this noise to do things whatever "right" is. 

I mentioned I'm a Steven Universe geek? Consider him a Steven Universe encyclopedia. And now, for whatever reason, the same sorts of feelings that used to taint my interactions with Fernando are creeping into Steven Universe. Animal Crossing, too, with the release of the new game, and the crummy part about both of those is I *enjoy* them both, but it's almost like I can't think of either of them without getting either overwhelmingly sad or unreasonably irritated. 

Over a kids' show and a kids' game, is why this feels so pathetic. 

I'm not looking for answers about *why* this or *why* that by posting here. It'd be irresponsible for anyone to hand me my own feelings, not knowing the full extent of them, and foolish for me to take them. What I want is to figure out if anyone else here's experienced something remotely similar, and, well. What *you* do to cope, or to make sense of it, if there's any making sense of it outside a cushy office for $120+ an hour. 

If anyone has any kind of thoughts on this, go ahead. I'm all ears. Thank you for listening to me rant for the equivalent of twenty minutes. 

tl;dr: Random things are making me sad, like when my first boyfriend last summer mentioned Call Me By Your Name, a movie I'd had no previous experience with, and it made me crushingly depressed without rhyme or reason. It happened with any mention of Tumblr, too, and it extends back into my past when I felt the same way about an Undertale video during middle school. Now it's affecting my current relationship with Steven Universe and Animal Crossing and I don't know what to do. I'm not seeking answers, just insight. Any and all thoughts are welcome.