I have isolated completely. I might as well not exist.

I’ve spoken to my flatmates a couple of times in the past day or two. Brief, superficial chats. Once, a card game in the kitchen. That’s all.

Even my parents haven’t contacted me for a week (I’m having terrible anxiety about that. Every knock on the door of the flat is them, come to see me, come to confront me, to see me, to see and hate and regret what I’ve become. I’m really, really panicking. Even footsteps in the middle of the night are them. I’m so terrified of seeing them, of them seeing me, of them knowing, and asking, and trying to be helpful). I am disposable.

I can’t do this anymore. I’ve wanted to die for so long. There is no wonderful answer, no magical solution. I am changed, irrevocably.

I miss who I used to be. I miss her so badly it hurts. She was going to be okay, she was going to achieve something. But she’s gone and she’s never coming back, and here I am in her place, such a fucking disappointment.

I emailed someone and asked if he’d be my dissertation tutor. He said he could, and asked what I wanted to write about, and asked me to go and visit him. I didn’t reply, I didn’t go. The vague idea I’d had seemed unbelievably stupid, and the prospect of speaking to somebody - looking them in the eye and explaining something, especially something about my thoughts – made me panic and cry.

How pathetic am I? All of my friends will tell you that I am loud and talkative and fearless to the point of irritation. But I can’t do it anymore. I haven’t been able to do it for ages, but nobody’s noticed.

I hate feeling so fragile, feeling like if I have to speak to someone I will just burst into tears, or run away.

Where do I go from here? Is there really any choice? Do I just keep still and keep breathing, hoping for a break, a change, a miracle? Or do I give up? I’ve been doing the breathing and hoping thing for so long and it hasn’t worked, it hasn’t happened, nothing has got better or gone away or become bearable.

I do not have the strength for this.

I wish there was another way. I wish I could stop existing without inconveniencing anybody. I wish I’d never existed. I wish I’d died when I was younger, died of an illness or an accident, so that my family wouldn’t have to know that leaving them is my choice. I wish I’d committed suicide when I first got depressed, so I could die with the memory of life still fresh in my mind. I wish I was strong enough to keep living like this, so nobody would have to realise what this really is.

But wishing doesn’t make things true. All that can happen is the best that I can do now, how I am, with what I have.

There isn’t any other option. I am an empty shell. I don’t want to live like this, with so much of myself missing. I just can’t do it. Sooner or later I have to just end it.

It will be okay. Nobody will mind. Nobody will notice.

I’m sorry for complaining all the time. Please don’t worry about me – the guilt is unbearable as it is. I probably won’t do it. I’ll probably be too cowardly to try, or if I’m not I’ll be too stupid to make it work. But I want it so badly. I so desperately want to be dead. I’m sick of wanting it. I’m sick of crying so hard my head hurts, sick of panicking so much I feel like I’m going to throw up. I’m sick of being reminded, every single day, of how much I’ve fucked everything up, what a failure I am, how little a future I have.

I just want it to be over.