I wish I could write here about my ‘normal life’. You know, the day-to-day stuff that isn’t just about my mood and my own private inner life. But they’re inseperable. My mood is the coloured filter that I see the world through. I can’t talk about something I’ve done or something that happened to me without mentioning my mood because chances are that without my mood, either a) the thing wouldn’t have happened, or b) I wouldn’t care about it.

I went to stay with a couple of friends a few nights ago. I just stayed for one night. It was nice to see them, but in some ways it was difficult to deal with. They’ve finished their degrees and are renting a house. They were talking about how they’re looking for jobs, about life away from home, about their happy relationships. And I just felt so…young. Lonely, too. Everybody has grown up, but I linger. I feel completely useless, when everyone I know seems to have some purpose in their lives.

Home is still the barrel of laughs it’s always been. My mum’s in the early stages of applying for retirement because of her illness, so she’s off work and at home all the time. She’s drinking a lot and hardly eating, and spends almost all day and all night sitting on the sofa, alternating between sleep and shouting. She’s shouting at all of us. We’ve all done something wrong in her eyes.

I’m not very good at dealing with it, to be honest. She makes me feel like I’m all wrong. Making jibes about my weight and repeatedly asking what size all my clothes are. Asking if I have a boyfriend, and when I say no, wanting to know why. Acting offended every time I swear, even though she swears too. Pulling her face every time I put on something I want to watch on tv. Asking, every night, why I’m not out with my friends, and then when I do go out, acting overly worried and concerned that something terrible’s going to happen to me. Asking when I’m going to get a job. Asking about my plans for the future, wanting to know what even I don’t know yet. When she found out my exam results, she was too pleased. Smiling and congratulating and saying, “any grade is good”. Casually mentioning depression any time she can. Telling me not to be stupid every time I laugh or joke. Making everything into a massive deal, an accusation, a life or death matter. I don’t know what would be worse: if she’s acting like this deliberately to hurt me, or if she’s so insensitive and knows me so little that she hasn’t even noticed.

I find it so difficult. She’s not very well, so I’m not supposed to respond or retaliate. I’m not supposed to say the little quips that jump to my mind whenever she does or says something completely hypocritical, like loudly and angrily declaring her hatred for people who are manipulative or over-the-top. I’m biting my tongue a lot, trying not to upset her. I’ve upset her too many times in my life.

I hate how selfish I am. She really is ill, but I’m making it about me, I’m going on and on about how it makes me feel, how the way she acts adds so much to my feelings of worthlessness, of wrongness. But it shouldn’t be about me. I shouldn’t be complaining. I should be helping her, making her happy.

But I’m no saint. Not even close. And all I can think about is how angry she makes me and how much she crushes my self-esteem.

I’m such a fucking disappointment. No wonder she doesn’t like me. You have a child, you don’t expect that 20 years later they’ll be like this, do you? I’m a waste of space. Nobody can achieve everything, but I seem to be unique in that I’ve achieved nothing at all.

I’m finding it difficult to imagine staying alive. If I do, all I’m going to do is keep letting people down, keep being a disappointment. I’m not saying that I’m planning to kill myself, but it feels inevitable.

I’m scared of meeting people I went to college with because I know they will be surprised. In three years I’ve gone from loud, bolshy, unashamed, devil-may-care know-it-all, to stupid, quiet, awkward, uncomfortable freak. I’m scared of going back to university because I won’t know anyone anymore and I can’t face trying to make friends again. I can hardly face the friends I’ve got because they only want to see me when I’m loud and happy and funny, and when the lost, terrified mouse part of me is prominent then I might as well not exist.

How can I do it? How can I live? My family’s falling apart and my friends are moving on and I’m stuck in the desolate remains of my life being constantly reminded of the fact that it wasn’t always like this.

I’m so tired and such a failure. Everything in my life is a reminder that I’m not the person I want to be, that this isn’t the life I want to lead, and that there’s no way of changing either me or my life.

So, what do you do when you’ve destroyed your life? When there’s nothing left worth living for? Do you do as I’ve been doing for two and a half years – living in the shadows and thinking staying alive is the key, like life is about length, not quality? Or do you give up – accept that it’s not going to get better and get out of it while you still have the strength and the presence of mind to know that this isn’t how you want to live?

It’s pure speculation. I rant, I cry, I obsessively imagine, and sooner or later it goes away. Only to return, to go away, to return, to go away, to return…

Sometimes, it feels like it’s weaker to stay alive. Sometimes, I feel that killing myself is weak, but that I don’t really care about strength or weakness, only about finding a way to remove the lead weight that seems to be strapped to my heart.

There isn’t any hope for me. Staying alive for staying alive’s sake feels like an insult to life itself. It shouldn’t be a chore. It shouldn’t feel so much like it goes against my natural instinct, like a conscious effort that sooner or later I’m going to be too exhausted to keep up.

I want to time-travel: go back and change my childhood, or go forward to some mythical time when my moods don’t feel like the tides. Or I want to swap with someone else, live someone’s content, balanced, ‘normal’ life. But it’s not possible, is it? And it’s childish to sit around hoping and daydreaming of a day when I have the power to change how I feel.

If this is living, why does it feel like dying? Why does it feel like I’m betraying my nature? Why does life, like everything within it, feel so fucking wrong?