For the past couple of months, I've noticed that I have gotten extremely irritable towards everyone and everything. I'm lashing out at the people closest to me and not even bothering to talk to my other friends. Most of the time, I prefer to be alone in my room. I've completely lost any motivation to go to classes or study, and am failing almost every class. I started sleeping a lot, but I'm constantly exhausted and need to take naps during the day. I've lost any interest in things that used to excite me, like cooking or working out with my boyfriend. I just feel so lost in life right now. I don't understand why I'm losing motivation to do well in school. I see everyone around me trying and studying, and I just can't work up the drive to do so as well.

Its not like I've always been like this. I graduated high school with a 3.9, one of the top 5% of my class. I was always ambitious, striving to be the best at everything. I was president of numerous clubs, did community service every week, and worked a part-time job, all while taking honors and AP classes (and acing in them, for the most part), being the section leader in orchestra, and excelling as a three sport athlete. But by mid-semester of my freshman year of college, I slowly started to stop caring. I started skipping more and more classes and drank constantly. I finished my freshman year with a GPA of 2.4. And while my grades have slightly improved since then, I have completely lost my motivation and drive.

My boyfriend was the first to notice something was wrong. He started tentatively asking about my study habits and why I never wanted to study anymore. I shrugged it off for the most part, getting irritated at him when he brought it up. When I started to not care about more things, he started getting on my case more, which only irritated me further. He constantly asked why I didn't want to go jogging with him or cook together anymore, or why I never wanted to hang out with my closest friends anymore. I didn't realize how much I was starting to scare him. Last night, I mentioned again that I just didn't think I was smart enough for school anymore while talking to him on the phone. After arguing about it for a while, he confessed that he had been worried about me for a while and thought that I was slowly but surely becoming depressed for the past year. He told me that in this past month or two, my actions and attitude really started to scare him and he begged me to see a therapist.

There's a part of me that just can't imagine being depressed. I've never been that type of person to allow myself to think in a defeated way, or let anything upset me for very long. I keep thinking that the root of my problems is not being able to find motivation to try hard in school, so for the past year and a half, I've been looking for ways to fix that. I've tried changing my major, exploring different classes to see what I'm passionate about. I've joined clubs and have gotten involved on campus. I stopped drinking and smoking. But I feel like I've exhausted my options and now feel really hopeless. Maybe I'm just realizing the type of person I really am...useless, unintelligent, undriven. Is it really depression if I'm just finding who I am?