It’s been a ‘good week’.

If you look at this from the outside, it has. Yes, I spent most of Wednesday in bed, but apart from that…I got everything done. I went to everything. I volunteered answers and ideas in seminars. I even managed to give a presentation. I even managed to do – badly – the work to make up for the presentation I missed the other week.

I did everything.

And most days I’ve eaten proper meals.

And I’ve been in touch with my family and my friends.

And I’ve been making plans for the next couple of weeks.

This should mean that I am okay. I should be feeling good.

But I just keep crying. I just keep thinking of all the things that are still left to do. I’m so tired, but I’m not sleeping, still. I feel nervous when I’m around people, and lonely when I’m not. I’m moving too slowly. I’m forgetting the simplest of things. And nearly all the time I have to myself, I’m curled up on my bed with the lights off, crying or trying not to cry or staring at the walls or imagining killing myself.

But I’ve been getting stuff done. So I can’t complain, really.

I worry, a little, that I’m just getting better at pretending. That I’ll be going to things and volunteering answers right up until the day I kill myself.

Maybe that’s better. Stops people worrying, I suppose.

I’m not suicidal. I mean, I keep thinking about it, but I’m not making any plans. It’s an obsession but not a reality. Just something that my mind keeps returning to.

Every measurable sign says that I’m fine. I’m doing well.

And if I don’t feel it then that’s just me being stupid.

I’m finding words difficult. And everything else, really.

On the bright side, I’m calmer. I’m no longer cluttered with too many thoughts and too much movement.

But I feel like I’m made out of lead.

Stupid, isn’t it? I spend all my time complaining about one thing or another, when I should just accept that there is no middle ground.

I’m so slow. I couldn’t think properly before because all the thoughts were jostling for position…now I can’t think properly because there just aren’t enough thoughts. I think, then I pause, stuck, no words at all in my head, and I just have to wait for something else to come along.

I have to do a presentation tomorrow. I have to do so many things.

I can’t think, I can’t move.

I’m trying to be okay. I’ve been going to things. I went to a meeting with my presentation group earlier, and I managed. I felt ridiculously fake, my face stretched into a grimace, my voice too quiet, then too loud – everything was just off, but of course, people don’t notice. That’s not how it works.

I am trying. And I have to be okay. I have to be able to do things.

But I feel so slow and heavy and tired. My insomnia is still stupidly bad. It’s just me and my thoughts at night, and at the moment I don’t even have the energy to try to distract myself – and if I did I don’t think it’d work. You have to be interested in things in order to be distracted.

The other day I was talking to a girl who was really passionate about her future. She was talking about how she was nervous that it wouldn’t work out and excited that it would, and about how this is the start of her life, really – about how she could do anything.

And I didn’t understand. I would have done…years ago, I’d have understood. I’d have got it, I’d have felt the same.

I miss it.

I miss feeling like there was some future for me. I miss feeling like no problem was insurmountable. I miss that unshakeable feeling of invincibility.

I know there’s no way back. I’m not stupid.

I just don’t know how to go about moving forward, carrying on, with what I’ve got left. What I am now.

I’m just tired, I suppose, and talking crap.

Yesterday I was so incredibly on the move and twitchy and fidgety and jittery, and then I got back to my room and, for no reason I could work out, burst into tears. Just horrible, sniffling, unable to breathe properly. Just curled up in a corner muttering, “I can’t do it, I give up, it’s too much,” to myself. For…well, a couple of hours, which is embarrassing. I’d been fine all day…well, perhaps not fine but at least not unhappy.

Then I got up early this morning and went to do my volunteering and I think it went alright but I kept feeling like everyone hated me because who am I to tell them what to do?

And now, I am so. Fucking. Tired. I have so much work to do but I’m too tired, I just want to sleep but I can’t.

Things are getting very strange, very quickly.

My thoughts and my life are like a rope, slipping through my fingers and I can’t grip it, I can’t stop it slipping away, I can’t hold it still.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

My pulse is…very fast. I can feel it everywhere and, like everything else, my heartbeat feels like it’s running away from me, like I can’t catch up. I feel…tingly, like halfway between an itch and a shiver, and I can’t keep still.

I’ve been walking empty streets at night. I’m not scared of the dark, I’m not scared of the occasional people I see. I’m not scared that nobody knows where I am. I’m scared of being in my room, trapped, caged.

I can’t shut my brain up but I can’t think properly either. Everything is too fast, too jumbled. I start a thought and immediately another one cuts in, and it’s connected but not really, and I can’t keep up, I don’t even understand my own thoughts anymore. Half way through a thought, I will get stuck on a word. And that word will just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, countless times until I manage to break free of it, only then I can’t remember what the rest of the thought was and I get stuck and confused and then more thoughts come and they start repeating too, and there’s still the faint repetition of previous thoughts echoing around my head and it doesn’t make sense and if I could just think for a moment then perhaps I could work out what is wrong or find a way to cope with it, but of course, the problem is that I can’t just think for a moment.

And I don’t know what my mood is because I don’t really feel anything apart from this confusion and panic and compulsion to move, to walk, to be somewhere else. And when, occasionally, briefly, I slow down for a moment I suppose I feel alright, quite good, making plans for the future and oh, God, I think I sent emails to about 5 universities earlier asking about their PGCE courses and I don’t know why because I don’t even know if I’m going to apply, I don’t even know if I’ll pass my degree or finish university or if I will even be alive by next year because a person can’t live so completely on edge as I am now; something will have to give, I can’t keep this up, can I? Surely this can’t carry on?

I try to distract myself. But I can’t read. I read a sentence or two and then I’m so completely distracted that I give up, I open a new book but the same thing happens again, and my room is just scattered with books that I haven’t been able to get past the first page of. And I’m in a computer lab now, but I can’t concentrate on listening to music or watching things because it’s the exact same problem, and I can’t concentrate on anything and when something does get through to me, it gets stuck in my head, repeating over and over until it loses whatever meaning it had.

Last night there were flies in my room. All over the walls and the ceiling above my bed. I was frightened, which is stupid, because who’s scared of flies? But I didn’t know how they’d got in and obviously I couldn’t go to bed when they were there, and I spent so long swatting at them on my walls, but when I hit them it was like they’d disappeared, I couldn’t see them anymore, and then I’d look back to where they were and they were there again, or they weren’t there but there was a mark on my wall, and I kept wondering if that was what it was all along…there are little marks on the walls and ceiling, just wear and tear and not-so-stellar paintwork, but why would I mistake them for flies? I just sat there and watched them for a while, and it was like they were dancing, like their movements formed a code, like bees do, and I didn’t want to kill them but I couldn’t have them there and I kept hitting every bit of wall I could reach and then I got tired and I slept for a while and when I woke up they were gone and I completely panicked and couldn’t stop thinking what if they flew into my mouth while I was asleep? and I nearly threw up and I had to get out, and I walked around and around, all over campus and I can’t get rid of this nervous, agitated energy and I am scared of flies but not of strangers or darkness or deserted alleyways.

It’s just because I’m tired, I think. Small things become huge. Everything becomes confusing.

I know that this is strange. I know that I am making little sense. I know I should have spent today doing work for my course rather than walking around randomly, so quick I was almost running, trying to tire myself out or stop this continuous need to move.

I don’t really know what’s happening. It’s difficult to think about it, difficult to think about anything.

I’m trying to be calm, but I’m fighting a losing battle.

I have to go now. I’m in a computer lab and the only other person here is a boy who keeps breathing out really loudly though his nose and if I have to listen to it much longer I’ll probably say something bitchy or punch him in the face or something. Also, it’s kind of almost midnight so I should probably be going anyway. I have to get up in the morning.

I am holding things together. Just about.

I feel, very much, like I’m one of those people who walks on tightropes for a living. Or for fun (weirdos). You know, all I’m doing is walking in a straight line, it should be easy, but one misstep and everything is irretrievably lost. And every time I actually think about what I’m doing, I panic and start screaming (only in my head, you’ll be pleased to know), “DEATH! DEATH! DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!”

My laptop’s fucked. Completely, unfixably fucked. I’m writing this in a little corner of the library. I’ll hopefully be getting a new one over the next couple of weeks. I’m nervous about that because I hate asking my parents for money, especially large sums, but I really need a computer and even with the (fingers crossed) new job, I don’t have the money.

I am, somehow, surviving through the not sleeping thing. I hate just lying around in the dark, I’d rather be reading or something…I’m trying to combine avoiding being bored out of my mind and the fact that, even – especially – if I’m not sleeping, I really do need to rest. It’s easier to get through a day on an hour of sleep and three hours of quiet, calm, peacefulness than it is to get through a day on an hour of sleep alone.

It’s difficult, though, resting. My room can be perfectly peaceful but my mind is not. I can’t stop thinking. They’re mostly pretty neutral thoughts at the moment, hardly any horrific, life-destroying pessimism, but living with my brain at the moment is a bit like living with someone who just does not know how to shut up. Actually, it’s probably a bit like living with me when I’m in a certain kind of mood, only at least when I’m being annoying, other people can go elsewhere, other people can escape it. Whereas I just have to hang around, being harrassed by the mental equivalent of an inquisitive toddler tugging on my sleeve and delivering hours of inane monologue.

I’m so tired that I’m in a daze. It’s like slowly going blind…blurs and flashes and the strange experience of seeing things but not understanding them, as well as the now more-or-less constant nerve-twitching. I’m pretty much running on empty at the moment, my only fuel being a constant, low-level anxiety…a jittery kind of feeling which runs through everything, like a constant, “Oh God, oh God, shitting hell, I’m on a tightrope” kind of thought. But it’s an energy, even if it’s an uncomfortable kind of energy, and I think it’s actually been quite useful over the past few days.

I’ve been getting out of bed, because I’ve been finding it difficult to lie still, I’ve been making walking and running motions even when I’ve been lying down, and it gets to the point where it’s more annoying to be in bed. So I’ve been getting up. And I’ve been going to things, too. I didn’t go to one of my lectures, but it wasn’t compulsory and is perhaps not a huge problem that I missed it.

And I went to my other lectures and seminars. For my Thursday morning discussion/meeting/thing, I was in such a sleepless daze that I inadvertently did the wrong week’s reading (and didn’t even do that very thoroughly), which made the discussion difficult…I mostly just wittered on, trying to think of ideas that might make sense. I think I did alright, the tutor is very pleasant and friendly and she said my ideas were good. So I think that if I can actually do the right reading for other weeks (and, in a mythical, ideal world, get some sleep beforehand) then I could cope quite well, maybe be almost good at the subject.

Thursday afternoon was a bit more difficult – it’s a two-hour lecture/seminar that is stupidly difficult, and I’d missed the previous one, and the lecturer has this way of asking questions, then staying very quiet until someone volunteers an answer, so you answer just to stop the silence, and then if you’re right he looks at you like it’s obvious and why on Earth did you wait so long to give an answer? and don’t get all pleased with yourself, scumbag, a three-year-old could do this. And if you’re wrong, he looks a combination of offended and puzzled, like you’re offering him a hat made out of dog shit. But, you know, I coped. I need to practice the exercises and stuff for next week, and it should be okay; I’m not so far behind that it’s incomprehensible.

Then today I managed to get up for my 9am lecture/seminar,  and I went, even though I’d missed two weeks, in one of which I was supposed to be giving a presentation. And it was alright. It’s one of those topics where there are lots of little easy bits and lots of huge, confusing, soul-destroyingly difficult bits. But again, it was okay. I need to keep going to it, I need to do the reading, and maybe I will cope. My group is supposed to be doing a presentation next week, and obviously I have to do it, I have to go, I have to manage – not just for my grades but because I don’t want to let my group down (I still have to do the exercise that the tutor set for me to replace the last presentation. I have another week to do it, I’m going to try to dedicate a whole day…I know one day isn’t much out of two weeks but I’m so busy, it’s all I can spare).

This afternoon’s seminar was actually fun, even though I had to do a presentation. And after that I went to another training session for my volunteering…it’s actually really exciting, we’re going on an ‘adventure’ next Tuesday…I’ll have to get up at 7am, which is a test of my new-found skills of getting out of bed, but we’re going somewhere I’ve never been (not a particuarly exciting place, but a new place all the same) and doing a whole day with sixth-form students.

And on Monday I’m doing the training for the new job.

Which means that I have this weekend and Wednesday (plus perhaps a bit of time in the evenings) to:

• Do the presentation-replacing exercise
• Do reading and preparation for next week’s presentation, including meeting up with my group
• Do lots of reading for all of my modules – next week I have to hand in a diary of all the reading I’ve done so far for one of them (and given that this is the module that the only reading I’ve really done for it was the wrong reading, I need to catch up!)
• Go food shopping (I’ve been surviving more or less on rations this week, partly because I didn’t want to spend all my money, but also partly because I just haven’t had the time to go to town)

Then next Saturday I have a whole day of further training for volunteering (it’s heavy on the training, but all of the training is pretty fun…even when I haven’t enjoyed it, I’ve been able to tell that I’d be enjoying it if I wasn’t feeling like complete shit. It just takes up time, although this one will be the last training session).

Then the week after I’ve got a piece of coursework due; not particularly long but it’ll take time to do, but as you can probably tell I just don’t have the time to start it next week. I’m hoping that once I’ve handed in the coursework, I can go home for the weekend; I don’t know how relaxing it would be, but I could really do with a change of scenery. But then after that, it’s back here: more lectures and seminars, more reading, more volunteering, and hopefully some days I’ll be working, too (the people I’m working with do sort of events…they have stuff going on most weeks and you opt in when you’re available). And as the end of term approaches, there’ll be more coursework due in, and I think I have a test at the end of term too.

I am hideously, hideously busy. And hideously, hideously tired.

And everything feels like perhaps there’s a chance of being okay, of coping, but all that needs to happen is I miss something, or I don’t do enough work, or I pause – even for a moment, it feels like – and everything will collapse.

I can do it, for a day. For a few days. Maybe a week, or a couple of weeks. But I can’t do it indefinitely.

It’s like sprinting a short distance, as fast as you possibly can, and then being told, “yeah, that’s the kind of speed you’re going to need for the marathon. Maybe a bit quicker, if you can”.

I mean, I’m okay. Mostly I’m being…well, if not positive, then at least okay. I’m trying to focus on the fact that I have coped this week, I have done, just about, what I’ve needed to do. But it’d be stupid of me to think that I can keep this up.

Quelle surprise.

Today: stayed awake all night. Napped for an hour or so this morning. Spent most of the day in a bit of a daze, doing nothing. Then went to training for volunteering – not too bad, although I felt like a spare part all the time because I can’t make anything I say relevant, or useful or even decipherable. Feel like I’ve forgotten how to speak, I just keep stuttering and saying errrrrrm. Came home and cried for no discernable reason. Now it’s gone eleven at night and I should go to bed, I feel like a ghost, I really need to fucking sleep but as ever it doesn’t work. Eyes closed just means eyes closed, it doesn’t logically lead to sleep anymore. My eye is almost constantly twitching from tiredness, and I keep seeing strange, unexplained flashes of bright light, which make me jump like a moron.

Tomorrow, provided I don’t fuck it up: Wake up, breakfast, lots of reading, meeting,  lunch, lecture, reading, meeting, dinner, reading, sleep.

Can’t do it. Can’t.

Even when I actually get motivated to read, I can’t concentrate properly, I don’t take anything in, my mind wanders.

I know from experience that if I go to my department, or email them, and explain, they’ll be sympathetic. But I don’t want their fucking sympathy. I want…a time machine, or a new brain, or a new life…none of which the average university department’s going to be able to provide. I don’t want to contact them and say, “I’m sorry, I’ve been depressed, I’m trying, I promise,” because it feels like a lie, and even if it’s not, it feels like whining and begging and pathetic excuses. I don’t want them to say “Sorry to hear that, shouldn’t you get some help?” (like they did last year, and I deliberately ignored them), I want them to say “That’s not acceptable” and shoot me in the head.

I feel like most of my brain has stopped working. I cannot concentrate, I cannot think, I can hardly even motivate myself to try. I’m alternating between feeling a) spaced out and distant, and b) horrifically miserable and weepy.

I’m not going to make it.

I can’t cope, I can’t live. I don’t deserve to get my degree; I haven’t put in enough work. I don’t deserve to get a job; I’m mind-bogglingly unreliable and terrible with people. I don’t deserve any good thing because I’m incapable of doing anything with them. Short burst of productivity serve only to inconvenience more people when I inevitably fall apart.

I’m stuck, completely trapped inside my head. Like I said above, I can’t speak properly. Not even about stupid, trivial things. The words won’t come out. I can’t communicate anymore. Probably connected to the fact I can’t think, either.

I have to be better than this, but I’m not.

Edit: I just spent five hours lying in my bed. No light, no noise, nothing. Nice temperature, comfortable bed. I didn’t sleep. Not a fucking wink. And my alarm goes off in three hours and I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep, and it’s driving me mad.

Just imagine it; me, running along. Flailing. Screaming. Forever, and ever, and ever.

Coming soon to a street near you.

Somehow, inexplicably, my dull, empty life has become unforgivably hectic.

Simply because it’s as easy a place to start as any, let’s start with uni.

Module 1 – Well, I have a lecture for it in an hour or so, and a seminar on Friday. But I’m part of a group that has to teach something for part of Friday’s seminar, so that means we’ve had to meet up today, and we’re meeting up again on Thursday evening, too. Added to that, I’ve missed  two weeks of it, so I have a ton of reading to do to catch up in order to actually do what I’m supposed to be doing with my group.

Module 2 – I have to do four weeks worth of reading before Thursday morning, where I will then spend 2 hours in a very small meeting, having an intelligent discussion about said reading.

Module 3 – Initially, not as bad – I’ve only missed one week of it, so I don’t have to do loads of work to catch up. But a quick glance in my diary tells me that I have a piece of coursework due for this in two weeks.

Module 4 – A heartbreakingly difficult module, which involves waking up on Friday morning and walking half way across campus for a two-hour lecture/seminar that’s so confusing it makes my brain hurt. And I have to write an essay for this because I missed the presentation.

And as for other things in my life – well, tomorrow evening I’ll be spending 4 hours doing training for volunteering (and I’ll be doing more training all day next Saturday), in an attempt to make myself perhaps slightly more employable, because, you know, this whole ‘getting a degree’ thing isn’t really working out. And next Monday I’ll be spending all day training for my possibly-hopefully new job, for which I really hope my references are good enough, because I desperately need the money.

Added to that, my laptop charger broke once again, so I bought a new one (spending almost all of my money for this week, despite the fact that, should I actually remember to eat, I have enough food in for…a day. Perhaps two). I think there’s something wrong with the laptop, though, as the new charger works only intermittently, and as it’s about the fourth charger I’ve had in a year or two, it’s starting to become not exactly financially sound to keep replacing them. I could really do with a new laptop, but obviously I can’t afford one, and I’m wary of asking my parents if they could get me one, even as a Christmas present, because, quite apart from The Current Economic Climate (*frightening music*), my mum’s retiring because of her health, and may or may not get DLA, so my dad’s working more hours and obviously that’s not fun and obviously he can’t work two people’s amount of hours, and really, everybody thought I’d be employed by now.

Oh, and I only slept for two hours last night, and I’m so tired I could scream – a state of mind which, for me and presumably not many other people, is actually less tired than ’so tired I could sleep all night’ – a magical level of tiredness that I have yet to reach.

Life isn’t supposed to be this difficult, is it? I mean…surely there are people who are busier than this, who actually manage to do things without feeling like their head will explode? I think I was one of them, once.

Perhaps I have turned a corner.

A tiny, tentative, temporary step in the right direction.

I got a good four or five hours’ sleep this morning, which feels like a luxury. And then I spent quite some time lying around, doing nothing, being nothing.

And then a little thought skipped into my brain – and it feels so long since thoughts have skipped - and it said: Why not get out of bed today?

Well, I thought. Why not, indeed?

And I got up. And I got dressed. And I even left my room, the flat, the building. I went to my department and I bought some reading that I really should have bought a couple of weeks ago, but at least I have it now. And then, on a whim, I got on a bus and went to town.

It was, perhaps, a bit too much, a bit too soon. I felt very sick. Things were a bit blurry, and I was having a bit of trouble walking in a straight line. Actually, I came over a bit faint, a bit dizzy, in Waterstone’s (a bit more extreme than the usual Waterstone’s dizziness, the panic of I want these two books and they have ‘3 for the price of 2′ stickers on them so I need to find a third but I don’t want any of them but oh my god I HAVE to find one…etc etc etc). It was around about then that it occurred to me that it was over a day since I’d blankly, dully forced myself to eat anything, and almost as long since I’d remembered to drink. Which was, if I’m honest, a bit strange.

Well, then there was food, and drink, and since then I have felt considerably more solid, although still a little woozy occasionally, which I think is probably just the effect of so consistently not really sleeping.

Also, I got an email from my tutor, saying that because I missed a presentation I was supposed to give, I can make up for it by writing a short essay…not sure I’ll actually be able to do it, let alone do it well, but it’s nice of him to give me the chance, although at the back of my mind is a horrible, reproachful voice telling me that I don’t deserve to have a second chance, because I lied, because I wasn’t really ill, just tired, just lazy, just sad.

God, I am so fucking tired. The extra sleep of this morning didn’t do me much good. To be honest, I feel like I’d need to sleep for a good four or five weeks in order to feel like I’d had enough sleep.

But I feel a bit more human. A bit more capable. And I suppose that’s what I need to hang on to.

I haven’t felt this bad for a long time. Possibly ever.

I mean, I’ve felt hideous, on and off, for months. Years. I’ve wanted to die more times than I can remember.

But it’s been a long time since I’ve cried so much. And I am thinking, a bit obsessively…there is a bridge. Nobody is ever there. I could jump, and drown. Even if anybody did see, from the road in one direction or the buildings in the other, it would be too late. I would be dead. I could die.

It hurts. I feel all twisted up inside, like I am made of knotted ropes, twisted and gnarled and frayed.

And I would ask for help. I would. It’s what takes up most of my inner monologue. Silent, desperate, please help me, please take it away, I can’t do this. But I know from experience that if you put me in a room with anyone and ask me to talk about it then I go very quiet, very calm, very controlled, and understate everything, and probably throw in a couple of jokes and a wry smile and I leave them thinking that I’m just a bit stressed, and wondering why I asked for help anyway.

And even if I could do it, even if I could explain, it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t help, and for the millions of reasons that run around in my head, it would just make things worse.

And I can’t let anyone know. It’s why my absence forms are filled with vague comments about having a cold, or a headache. I’m hanging on to the shredded remains of my pride because at least pride doesn’t hurt, and I can’t face people knowing – how long it is since I raised the energy to shower. How little I’m eating, partly due to the fact I don’t have the energy to cook or shop, partly because these crying fits are so violent that sooner or later I’m dry-heaving over the toilet, lights flashing in my eyes. How I can’t stop crying long enough for my face to stop being red and swollen. How every time there’s a knock on the door of the flat, I pretty much stop breathing until I’m sure it’s not someone for me, parents or friends or anyone paying a surprise visit, because I can’t face them and they would see it straight away. They’d see it in the untidy room, unlit, closed curtains all day. They’d see it in the way that I don’t know any of my flatmates, can hardly remember their names. And they’d see it in me: the big red face, the all-day pyjamas, the frightened, crying, hopeless demeanour.

And really, I don’t want help. Partly because it goes against my nature and once again I wouldn’t be able to do it properly, partly because of the shame I feel for needing help with anything. Partly because I’m scared of the consequences with my family. Partly because I’m not convinced it would help – and because I’m almost certain it would make things worse. But really, underneath it all…I don’t think I want to be helped. Because what being helped really means is getting a little bit of encouragement and then being expected to sort the rest out for myself. Getting help means, over and over again, putting myself through the ritual humiliation of listing the horrifying details of how little I can cope, and it means probably not being believed, and it means always being forgotten, and it means feeling like a burden all of the time, and worst of all, it means carrying on. Staying alive. Trying to live, trying to cope.

I do not have the strength to do that. I can’t do it. I wish that I could, but I think that if I could then I wouldn’t need help. Because that’s really what the problem is, isn’t it? That I can’t live properly. And getting help just means trying harder to live properly, with added embarrassment.

I have so much to do. I keep getting emails, being told things I have to do. I have to start going to things again, I have to do work, do reading, understand. They want me to give presentations. And I know I should be able to do it, but I can’t, and I’m so ashamed. I am supposed to be happy. Being here is supposed to make me happy, and the fact that it doesn’t is my fault, and I hate it so much.

I can’t sleep. What little rest I get is snatched in brief moments of peace and only leaves me feeling more exhausted. I lie down and close my eyes and try to breathe deeply and suddenly I’m struck by some horrible thought or regretful memory or horrific imagining and then I’m crouched in a corner, wide awake and crying again.

I don’t know what to do. I’m supposed to be the good one. I’m supposed to be the happy, smiley one who never has any problems and never causes any trouble, but I feel like I am dying and I don’t want dying, I want dead, because dying hurts too much, there is too much feeling in it.

I can’t live. I can’t.  I can’t keep putting myself through this.

I can’t stop thinking about the person I used to be.

I know it’s stupid, and not particularly helpful. Maybe if I could forget what it was like to be happy then I could learn to accept that this is all there is now. But I hold on, so desperately, to these memories, because they are all I have left of my life.

If you’d met me when I was 17, you would still remember me now. Oh, there’s probably a decent chance that you’d hate me, but nonetheless, you’d remember.

I was so alive.

And yes, occasionally, I would perhaps be a little quieter for a few weeks, and be more likely to spend my time reading in corners, and would find it more difficult to get out of bed, and would sometimes fake illness so that I wouldn’t have to go to college. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t depression.

And the times when I was happy really did make up for it. I was loud, confident, funny. I had so many friends, acquaintances, friends of friends, and I would cheerfully chatter away to any or all of them. Everything was just a massive game, it was all a big joke. I could be cheeky, verging on obnoxious, to people I didn’t like – could be downright rude on occasions. I lived, for the most part, in a shiny, happy version of the real world. Once, whilst waiting for some friends, I started to wonder what it would be like if that bit of flooring there was actually water…when my friends arrived, they found me sitting on a stool in the middle of the social area, giggling to myself and pretending to row. And the great thing was that they joined in, they started rowing too, and it became a funny story, and it wasn’t me being weird, it was me being funny.

And the walk to college, and the walk home, would be an adventure. It was running and skipping down paths, singing at the tops of our voices. It was competing to see who could receive the most waves from people in the vehicles on the road. It was pretending that road crossings were mountains – crossing one as if climbing, and the next as if abseiling. It was talking to strangers, it was talking to lamp-posts, it was running ahead of everyone so that I could act out some weird, ad-libbed sketch with a stranger or a tree or a particularly interesting piece of concrete. It was in-jokes and personal catchphrases and silly walks and stupid dances and not giving a solitary shit what anybody else thought, and if occasionally I was a bit tired, a bit subdued, and those walks, for a few days or weeks, were just walks, then it didn’t really matter, because there’s nothing wrong with walking, and so much of the time everything was brilliant anyway.

And really, I don’t mean to seem arrogant, but I was so fucking clever. There is, contrary to all appearances, a very good reason why I’m at this university, doing this course. The reason is that, before I came here, there was every reason to believe that I’d do really well. I was that annoying kid in class, you know…the one who asks questions that the teachers don’t know the answers to. The one whose essays get quoted, in lessons and on handouts, as examples of good ways of doing things. I remember, once, we had to do a piece of creative writing, and the teacher said that she set that task every year and always found that it said something about the students – then she gave me a strange look and said she’d never read anything like what I’d written. And I had to read it to the class, and it took so long, because everybody kept bursting out laughing, and then the teacher kept interrupting to explain why it was funny, why it was clever, and I was a little embarrassed, but mostly proud and so very alive.

I felt like I could do anything. I was loud and annoying, but I was smart and funny and capable of anything.

And I miss it, so badly. When people I knew at school or college get in touch with me, I often don’t reply, because I know that if we talk or meet up, they’ll see the change, they’ll notice the difference. And it sounds so stupid, but I feel like I lived all of my life, used up all of my happiness, back then. As if we’re given a finite amount and I frittered it away, consuming it all at once, not realising that it would run out. I turned 18, and there were a few months of happiness, although even then I was starting to unravel, starting to get out of control. And since then…nothing. Most of my happiness has been uncontrolled, a bit wild, a bit frantic, and quickly forgotten in the vast, crushing depression that follows. And all of a sudden, I’m 21, and I haven’t learned, I haven’t grown. I’ve withered and diminished and I’m hardly recognisable as that person.

And I wonder…if this hadn’t happened, if I’d carried on as I was, where would I be now? And the answer, and this is what really hurts, is wherever I’d be, I’d be happy. And I’d be making other people happy. And I would have a purpose, and I’d be determined, hard-working, successful. And most of the time I’d be laughing, and people would be proud of me, and I’d have no reason to be ashamed.

I know it’s stupid. I know that I’m just torturing myself with what-ifs. I can sit here and cry and wish to be able to go back in time as much as I want, but it’s never going to happen. But I am so scared of the future. I look into the future and all I see is year after year of this, of crying, hiding, running away, lying, struggling, hating myself, disappointing everyone and wanting to die. So I look back, and try to remember what it was like to be looking forward to the future. What it as like to feel like anything could happen, like I could achieve anything. And it makes me miserable, because every time I look back at the person I was, I feel like I’m mourning her. Because she’s gone, forever, and that hurts so much.  And I know that the friends I’m still in touch with from back then only spend time with me because they’re hoping I’ll be like that again (which probably explains why they haven’t spent much time with me lately…they’re giving up hope. Like me, they know that this is who I am now – and who would want to spend time with this?).

I need to shut up. Get over it, move on. There is no going back. But moving on feels like giving up. The truth is that I don’t want a future when I’m not clever, funny, imaginative, outspoken. I don’t want to be my future self, or my present self, when I know that everyone from my past prefers my past self, and so would everyone from my present or future, if they’d known me then. It’s just this awful feeling of being second best to myself. I will never live up to everybody’s expectations of me, because I’m not the person I was when they formed those expectations. They all thought I was going to achieve something with my life, but these days, a day counts as good if I manage to get out of bed, and a real achievement is managing a conversation.

I hate being this person. I hate feeling like I’m half-dead, I hate being incapable of completing even the tiniest of mundane tasks. I hate the lethargy and the stupidity and my slow, dull brain. I hate the loneliness, the shyness, the all-conquering fear. I hate crawling along, avoiding everything, being the mousiest of mice. I hate my weakness, my slowness, my unending ineptitude. I hate, more than anything, that there is no way out. That this is who I am now. I hate having to lie and make up excuses for being like this, because I am too ashamed of being depressed, and too frightened of being asked to talk about it.

I hate that, even in the brief respites from depression, most of the time these days I just end up being frightened and confused - a different kind of horrible, but horrible nonetheless; a strange, cartoon version of the person I used to be, with the energy and the strangeness amplified, and the sense of being an actual human being almost completely omitted.

I’m not me anymore. This isn’t the change that comes from getting older, growing up and experiencing new things. This is the change that comes from ripping out my brain and replacing it with half a melon. 

I’ve destroyed myself, and there’s no way back. And I don’t want to live like this. I wish that I could shrug off depression like a cardigan, throw it away and never have to deal with it again. I wish that I had died at the age of 18, before I ever had to experience this. I wish that I’d died, not living long enough to know how it feels to be nothing, not living long enough to become a disappointment. Or that I’d never been born, because if this is a part of life then I don’t want anything to do with any of it. It’s not worth it.

I hate it so much. I hate being this hideous monster, I hate that I’ve let everyone down, I hate that nothing is easy anymore, and I hate that every day, I feel so intensely all the things that I have lost. And I’ve gained nothing in return. I’m just an empty shell now, drained of all the things that ever made me me.

And I can’t do it. I’ve tried, but I can’t.

There’s nothing left.  I’ve let it destroy me and I am a wreck, a ruin. It’s too late to salvage anything – there’s nothing worth salvaging.

I can’t do this anymore, but I can’t stop doing it either. I’m stuck. And I know that I should make myself live properly, drag myself out of bed and make myself do things, whether I’m happy or not. But I’m just so tired, and so scared, and so weak, and I feel like already, after three weeks of term, it’s too late to get a decent degree, too late to work really hard (even if I had the energy to do so). It’s too late to change anything, too late to change myself, to be a better person, to sort out my life. And I don’t want to be this, but I can’t change, but I should be able to.

I should be stronger than this, I should be able to cope, and I hate the knowledge that I’m not.

P.S. The title of this post is a quote from the Harry Potter books, in memory of the fact that my friend and I aimed to quote or refer to those books in as many of our A level exams as possible.