as im writing this im beginning my freshman year of college. honestly surprising i even made it in, because just like i said in the title, i barely really did any schoolwork. i can barely ever write an essay, words come to me and immediately sink back down in my brain drowned by the feeling that i have nothing worth saying and even if i say something itll be the wrong thing or itll be interpreted the wrong way or sometimes i really just sit in front of a blank word doc with no thoughts at all.

its about more than just schoolwork though. i have only hung out with friends like a handful of times in the past year. even though many of these people ive known for most my life i just never felt like i could ever really talk to them, like i didnt want to come off as weird or something so beyond brief text conversations maybe once a month or a little more with a couple people i really just never talked much. and now pretty much all my friends are over an hour away from me at some other college. my only friends are online now. i know nobody at my school beyond like acquaintances and people i sorta know who i went to high school with.

pretty much everyone around me seems like more of a "real person" than me. like idk if id call it maturity or what, i dont really think im immature but i guess id say i just have way fewer experiences in my life than most people i know. like for one ive never been in a relationship, like that doesnt really bother me too much because that ones sorta on me (been on both ends of that whole "unrequited love" deal). but its just like the totality of things. high school was really hyped up to me by basically everyone, its sort of a weird obsession in our culture that those years are meant to be some golden time in your life and it just absolutely wasnt that. like i absolutely would say that i wasted my high school years. but like not even in a drugs sorta way or whatever (maybe to a certain extent but not really) more in like the sense that i basically just spent most days in my room listening to music and playing video games. like its sort of a covid thing but not 100%, like even before i was a complete fucking loser and i just did not talk to people or anything. but it also sort of is a covid thing. like when it hit and we switched to online classes i just could not motivate myself to get any work done at all, everything seemed completely pointless and once lockdown ended all my social abilities had basically atrophied and i was already an extremely socially anxious person but that just turned it up to 11 like id go into a room and be constantly thinking "everybody here hates me everyone here wishes i wasnt here" and it is sorta still like that

tl;dr: ive wasted my entire life so far and odds are ill be wasting the rest of it too