When I was younger I was an athlete, good with girls, popular, etc. I was living life at exactly the same pace as my peers and I was doing it well. My first semester of college, I crashed and burned hard. I didn't make a single friend and attempted suicide midway through the semester. My parents pulled me out of school after that. I had just turned eighteen.

All of my friends had gone to a different school than I, including my best friend Bailey, whom I had fallen in love with. After nearly a year of waiting tables, living with mom and dad and having no friends or romantic options, I returned to school having followed Bailey to her school. I confessed my feelings for her and she turned me down. The friendship never recovered from that awkwardness. She told me I was like a brother to her. I was too ashamed to face her and we quickly lost contact.

I've always had esteem issues. Nobody has ever told me that I'm ugly, but the way my face looks has been a source of self hatred for me for my entire life. Thinking I'm ugly led to thinking I'm unlovable, which led to thinking I'm worthless. Bailey was the only person I could really feel comfortable unabashedly being myself around. When who I was wasn't good enough for her, I decided I must not be good enough for anyone. I became a recluse with a crippling pornography addiction. I became an incel. I frequented those online spaces, fueling my self loathing and sparking a deep loathing for other people. I've been ashamed of myself my whole life. The feedback loop of feeling anxiety and seeking out content to validate that anxiety, which also fed the anxiety, crippled me socially. It began with hating women for caring about looks, then hating men for looking good, then hating everyone for having what I couldn't. I'll touch more on this later.

Something changed when I was twenty. I was still in school and had finally, thanks to one of my few friends having forced me into it, joined a student organization. Briefly, I was living a normal life again. I made friends, had a girlfriend, established myself socially again, and was finally happy. I was able to escape the self-destructive and hateful mindsets I'd fallen into. Craving social validation turned me into a social butterfly which turned me into a party animal. Being a party animal ruined me academically. I dropped out of college a second time. Then my girlfriend graduated and moved away, COVID struck, and I lost contact with all of my friends. Having associated the feeling of social acceptance with intoxication, I began drinking heavily.

Because it worked well for me before, I got a job that would force me to get social interaction. Previously, I'd only really socialized with the "gifted"-type people I grew up taking classes with (my school district growing up offered separate coursework for high level students). At this job, I was finally meeting regular people. At this point, my sexual history included two women. My self-loathing had prohibited me from feeling confidant enough to even try with women from the ages of 18-22. The people at my job seemed to have at least ten previous partners on average and were on average two years younger than me. For people younger than me to have accomplished so much more in less time was humiliating. My whole life, I've been ashamed of myself, and now, having had the courage to re-enter society, it is being thrown in my face how little I've managed to do in my life.

It seems so easy for other people. It always has. People have always told me that I'm an interesting and unique person, but I have never felt unique. I have only ever felt different. Different is the most awful feeling in the world. I have always been looked at as inferior. For as long as I can remember, everybody has treated me like I am different. To feign normalcy, I began lying. I lied about my sexual history, I lied about the circumstances of my youth, etc. I lied about everything and established a false persona as a lady-killing smooth talker. Eventually, I made friends at my new job. I came to be well-liked. I felt like I was finally socially succeeding again. I grew to be popular with the girls at my job and was steadily flirting with many of them, with things occasionally going a bit further here and there but nothing serious. Then, I got involved in an informal relationship with a woman from my work. I would eventually come to recognize this relationship to be very toxic. She frequently boasted about her sexual prowess and extensive sexual history. This was a great source of anxiety for me. I might as well have been a virgin. Having sex with her for the first time was the first time I had had sex since high school. I was 22. The sex was terrible in every regard and the relationship ended immediately.

While I had been involved with that woman, I was involved with another woman. My involvement with this second woman, Cheryl, was different. The courtship moved slowly and was romantic and respectful. When I made my move and asked her out on a date, Cheryl was very enthusiastic. It was a Friday night. The date was scheduled for Sunday night. Come Sunday evening, she cancelled on me. Every woman I have tried to be with since Bailey, including Bailey, have all told me the same thing, "you're like a brother to me," as if I don't know that means "you're ugly." I don't hold it against them. I can't blame anyone for caring about looks. I care too.

I quit my job. I thought the friendships I made at work would last. At first, they did. But the culture of a social group is constantly developing, and without being present every day, I quickly came to feel left behind. "Left behind," I suppose, is how I've always felt.

I stopped talking to everyone I know. My lease is up this summer and I have no idea what comes next.

I feel like every waking moment of my life is nothing but humiliation. I'm a failure and a burnout. I want to kill myself. The way my failed attempt hangs over my family haunts me. I never got to feel happy when I was young and I never wanted to grow old. What else am I to do? I've lost too much time now. I can never go back and do things right.

It's funny how, just when I thought I was starting to heal, life came along and told me I'd been right about myself the whole time.