I feel like everyone is in pain, but the people who express their pain are resented by the people who don’t express their pain—and vice versa—which causes more pain. 

For years I genuinely thought that there were people who never felt bad because they never expressed feeling bad, and I hated them, but also felt superior to them, like I was experiencing life in a more “real” way or something, even though I was just defining “real” as “depressed.”

Now I think that everyone feels sad and hurt and worried all the time, but some people cope by expressing it while most people cope by suppressing it, and any sense of superiority I got from being an expresser is canceled out because more people want to be around the suppressors. 

Sometimes people have told me that they relate to my writing or wish they could articulate their emotions the way I can, and that feels nice; but never shutting up about my feelings makes me, most of the time, pretty hard to be around in real life.

And so it’s not that I’m isolated because I have a clearer view of the world than everyone else, it’s that everyone else is like, “yeah, life sucks, we get it—can we talk about something fun now instead?”

I’m not sure I’m even making sense. Probably this whole thread is an example of what I do wrong that drives everyone away. People check Reddit on a Tuesday morning looking for a nice little distraction from their lives, not a wall of my whiny text. 

But is it even possible for a chronic feelings-expresser like me to become a feelings-suppressor (“feelings-handler” is probably a better term)? 

It doesn’t seem possible but maybe I haven’t tried hard enough? 

But then you factor in mental illness and that complicates things more…

Is my relentless emotional expression a symptom of my illness, or a contributor to it? 

Do most people handle their feelings better because they’re healthy, or are they healthy because they handle their feelings better?

What is the value of having written (in my actual writing and in my millions of texts) 100,000 words about feeling bad that maybe 100 people relate to when not 1 of them wants to actually be around me in real life? 

The few IRL friends I have, it’s not because of my emotional expression—it’s despite my emotional expression. 

I’m not sure that I actually even said anything here, or ever. 

I guess we are all just trying to get by. 

And I hope everyone has a decent enough day.