2022 has been a slow start of a year for me. I've been plagued by depression and lacking in energy and motivation to the degree where most days I could barely get out of bed. After a pretty severe depressive episode last night, my parents insisted in taking me to a crisis center. I'm quite happy they did, in hindsight. I just, broke down. I let it all out, incoherently rambled and cried about my insecurities and issues to a patient listener. I'm finally going to be getting some counseling and therapy. Despite my past traumatic experiences, I am nervously considering some medication for my depression and ADHD as well.

It's all such a tangled mess of compounding issues that make me feel guilty or down, hopeless or powerless, inadequate and a failure. I feel so alone, so touch-starved and deprived. Yet I struggle to reach out to people, to make myself go out and spend time with people. I moved a little over a year ago, and the few friends I had now live over an hour away. Its scary and nerve-wracking trying to make new friends. And it was traumatic leaving behind the home I had lived in my entire life and the friends I had made there. The few times I have managed to get together with my friends have been absolutely lovely, but even then I feel intense guilt for taking up their time and not spending my own time on "something more productive". All my issues feed into themselves in other ways, weighing me down in different aspects of my suffering.

Having recently graduated college, my job search has not been going well. No one has replied to my applications, which only compounds feelings of guilt, low self confidence, and self-hate. This is heightened by issues of feeling I don't deserve my degree, as i've had issues with depression throughout college and had lots of days where I barely got out of bed there as well. I feel like I didn't learn everything I needed to, and people just turned a blind eye and gave me an A+ to look good on their performance reviews. In my recent internship, I struggled immensely with things my boss assumed I would already have mastered, and consequently got removed from working with them. Yet somehow, perhaps entirely based on the written paper and journal requirements from the college's side of things... I was still given an A+. I just... don't feel like I deserve it. It brings everything up to this point into question. Was I on the deans list because I was actually excelling, or just because of grades inflation? I'm soon turning 25, which means I need to get my own health insurance, as my parents' plan will no longer cover me. This is another financial weight on me that makes not having a job even more painful for me. I need to renew my drivers' license soon as well, which means a lovely eternity of waiting in the RMV.

Things will get better though, for the first time in a long while I have a glimmer of hope on things. I'm going to start using the journal feature here to vent about things and keep curious friends updated on my progress and mental health. It... does feel good venting about this here.