Hello. It's been a long time since I last posted on these forums.

I hope everyone's doing alright.

As for me, I just finished crying my eyes out. Today definitely wasn't a good day for me. A lot of very troublesome things happened, which eventually led me down a path of self-introspection.

Even so. I always suspected that maybe my friends were changing. Maybe something was wrong. I wanted to help them. Yet I couldn't gather enough energy to even ask them if they were okay. My conversations with them started to grow more and more stilted and strained, far shorter and awkward. I thought maybe I just wasn't compatible with my friends anymore. Maybe they were changing and I just needed to accept that things change and people grow to be different over time.

But I think I slowly started to realize things about myself, as well. I went from the person who "tries too hard" to the person who "doesn't try at all."

Nowadays, it's difficult to even pull myself out of bed in the morning. I can't bring myself to do work and it's making me more and more stressed the further my work begins to pile up. Plus, I need to look after my brother and make sure he's healthy, eating, and getting everything he needs; because I know he'll forget and slack off with taking care of himself if I don't step in and remind him.

There's the ever-growing fear of my friends eventually leaving me. They're all I have. I used to have around seven friends, but now I have two. One of them hardly even looks my way anymore. The other one, I feel like I'm more of a burden to them than anything else. I constantly rely on them, because apparently I can't handle and fix my problems on my own.

It's just an endless cycle. I lose sleep at night, worrying about tomorrow, about how I'll feel and how I'll think. I try to stay up, drinking coffee, drinking Monster, doing anything that'll keep me awake throughout the night just to delay the inevitable arrival of daytime. Then when it finally arrives, I promise myself to do all these things, to finally step up and become a better and more productive person. But just breathing drains me, just talking drains me, any basic human action and activity only furthers my exhaustion. So I end up resting and moping around, not doing anything. Which results in my work piling up, my self-esteem crashing even further, and me worrying myself sick to the point where I'm afraid of tomorrow coming. Which has me beginning the nights with losing sleep, yet again.

I'm in this huge trench of depression and I don't even know how I wandered into it. Of course, I've had strong episodes of depression before. But at least I saw them coming. I knew why they were there. I knew how it was happening and maybe even how I could stop it. But this came out of nowhere, it hit me, and now I'm stumbling back in an empty daze. I caught me off guard and I'm making no attempt to try and combat it.

Because I've already tried. I've been trying for years. I'm sure this depression episode will simmer down soon. But even then, guilt weighs on my shoulders as I type that. Because it really does feel like a lie. It feels like I won't ever feel better, I won't ever get out of this hole that I dug myself into. At this current moment in time, I feel nothing but emptiness and hopelessness. Exhaustion and despair. Not a single bone in my body wants to try anymore. Even my fingers ache from typing this post, they just want to rest.

It wasn't my friends, my family, my environment, or anything that were changing. There were all the same people, locations, and feelings I've known throughout my life. I'm the one who's changing. I see this and it terrifies me. Yet I can't make an effort to fix or mend any of it. It feels impossible.

I finally understand.

I'm really sorry if I bummed anyone out. I just really wanted to vent. I just have no one else to turn to or talk to at this point. My friends won't listen anymore, my family are too busy to listen, I can't get a Therapist and I'm just cooped up in my house until I'm finally old enough to move out.

You don't have to feel obliged to give me advice or respond, if you don't want to.

Thank you so much for reading.