I’m a 15 year old student. My mind is a mess. It’s constantly thinking about negative things and making me go crazy. Sorry if anything I write below offends anyone. I didn't intend to.

I think it started with me realising that I’m an attention seeker and I love self-pity. I love attention, pity and sympathy from other people(and myself). I love being dramatic. I fantasize about opening up to people about having a mental illness or something. Just imagining how people would look at me with sympathy and concern and listen to me intently, pat me on the back, comforting me and saying “it’s ok” makes me quiver with excitement. I would look up symptoms of mental illnesses and try to convince myself that I have one, that I need pity and attention. I’m able to restrain from over-dramatizing in front of other people, but I think that’s only because I know how doing so will only embarrass myself and others, and I won’t be able to get what I want in the end. So instead, I went for a subtler approach. I would emulate symptoms of mental disorders such as depression. When people asked me how I was doing, I sometimes would pretend to be spacing out and realise they are talking to me after a few seconds, and I would say, “Oh, sorry. I’m okay. Of course I am.” I would secretly hope that someone would notice that “something was off” and would ask me persistently to tell them what was wrong. Then, I would pretend to reluctantly tell them I have depression, and I would be able to get all the things that I mentioned at the start of this paragraph. I mean, that’s how it happens in movies and TV shows, right? I simply followed suit.

But the other side of me hated the attention-seeking, self-pitying side of myself. I hated how selfish, ignorant and immature I was. In fact, I hated it so much that I made a habit of banishing anything that had to do with attention seeking or pitying myself. Whenever I did or thought something that I consider attention seeking or pitying myself, my automatic reaction would be: “Dude did you seriously just think that? I can’t believe it. You’re disgusting. You’re just an attention seeking piece of trash. Just stop it. Stop lying to yourself. You are in perfect condition, so stop trying to convince yourself that you have problems. Don’t try to trick yourself into pitying yourself. You don’t have the right to pity yourself, nor are you worthy of other people’s pity.”

However, saying that to myself only made me start hating myself more and more. Feelings of “I hate myself” was classified as attempts of tricking myself into believing that I am mentally ill (in other words, self-pitying in nature), which led to the “automatic reaction” mentioned above, which led to me hating myself more. It became a vicious cycle.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t escape. Everything I tried to do to fix it just made me feel worse. My mind became full of these thoughts:

“Aren’t you satisfied? Now you finally have a problem that you can complain to others about. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“You don’t really hate yourself, do you? It’s all just an excuse. An excuse for you to feel sorry for yourself. Do you even have any shame? Are you even human?”

“It’s all in your mind. Stop acting so childish. You’re 15 year old – can’t you think more rationally? I can’t believe you’re so immature for your age. Snap out of it this instant. This "vicious cycle" you think you're going through is just your imagination. Man up and face reality.”

I got to the point where every time I have a thought, it gets bombarded with questions and doubts. Then the doubts themselves get bombarded with doubts. It never ends. I can’t believe any of my thoughts anymore. I can’t trust that I’m honest to myself – I won’t be able to tell even if I’m not. I can’t tell if I really think or feel that way or I’m just being dramatic. This whole thing completely screwed up my mind.

I’m tired of feeling this way. I’m falling behind at school and I stopped caring as much about my physical health. I’m starting to hate social interactions. I’ve been shutting myself in my room more and more often cuz it’s the most comfortable place for me. I feel zero motivation to do school work – I just want to watch tv shows and let them distract me from thinking.

Here’s what comes into my mind when I think about things mentioned above: “You’re responsible for this, aren’t you? Who created these problems? It was you. Who chose to be like this? It was you. So, whose fault is it? It’s yours. Are you sure you don’t like to be like this? Deep down, this is what you wanted. You wanted to be a pitiable, miserable failure, just so people would pity you. You’re really rotten to the core, aren’t you?”

All this probably sounds crazy and I won’t be surprised if it’s incomprehensible.

I feel like I’m offending people just by living, just by having these thoughts. I mean like so many people out there are struggling with problems like depression and anxiety, poverty, autism, death of family members and friends, break-ups, schizophrenia…… and here I’m sitting comfortably in front of a computer, struggling with these stupid “problems”. It just makes me feel like the most stupid, self-absorbed and incompetent weirdo to ever exist, which, of course, only succeeds in taking me back to square one.

I’ve never talked to anyone about this cuz it’s too embarrassing. I don’t think anyone will understand, not even my parents.

I’m certain my mind just came up with 100 arguments how “thinking other people won’t understand” is BS, nonsense and exaggerating what I’m going through.

I don't know man. My brain is a conflicted mess and I can't think straight anymore. Why am I like this? What is wrong with me? Does anyone understand my situation, even just slightly?