I'm 21, Male, and I'm currently a student attending community college trying to get my life together. If you don't want to read further, I will give the tl,dr: I was bullied heavily throughout highschool, to the point that human interaction petrified me. I have gotten better at talking to people, but I've found that after isolating myself for so long, I can't stand social interactions, the mere thought of having social obligations drains my mental energy significantly. I can't even talk to people/friends online, I'd rather just text - not necessarily because I'm afraid to talk to them, but because I just don't like talking to people for some odd reason. I don't want to be this way and it is eating my insides - I feel trapped.

With the tldr out of the way, I just want to take the rest of this time to vent - as I said earlier, I was bullied for most of my teenage years, and I became socially stunted because of it. For context, I haven't had a friend since I was 13. I became petrified of social interaction to the point I couldn't even order food at a drive through, or go check items out at a cashier - these seemingly uneventful interactions gave me extreme anxiety. Fast forward to community college, I was having an extreme depressive episode and decided to drop out my first semester, and work full-time - this was around March 2020 (I would later decide to return to school late 2020, though). I decided to immerse myself into crypto as an escape shortly after I dropped out, and I gambled my life savings in the market. Come late 2020/early 2021, I started to feel truly happy (I hadn't seen this much money before in my life), but subsequently let all of my gains evaporate over the next 8-9 months. So now I'm nearly 22, struggling through college, don't have any friends, and lost money that could've changed my life. I don't know what to do at this point. I feel numb. I usually try to view things through a positive light, but I have to admit, it is getting hard. The unmistakable gut wrenching feeling of depression is starting to set in again. My family is not very emotionally supportive, they all have their own problems they have to deal with, and so I feel I have no one to turn to or a shoulder to lean on. This post doesn't really have a point, I just want to vent - and if you took the time to read until this point, thank you, it means the world to me.


And for anyone wondering, yes, I am still holding. Not holding my breath though.