You'll never be able to form relationships as close as they were in college. Having not had a single friend since Freshman year and currently almost 25, I'm starting to accept the fact that I'll never be of a high social caliber and will probably end up like J.D. Salinger.

Well, to give you an idea of my situation:

  • When I took time off from school after being hospitalized, not one single person from college reached out to me to find out where I was or if I was all right. When I came back, I said "Hello" to the people in my freshman year group (they never branched out) and they said "Let's stab him in the kidney and fuck that hole".

  • A year later, a boy reached out to me and tried getting me involved in clubs and activities. His friend lived across the hall from me. I came back from class one day holding my iPad and him and his friend walked up to me, saying "that's a nice looking iPad". The next day, it was stolen out of my room and both of them avoided me from then on. It turned up two months later at the campus center, where one of them worked.

  • I became depressed (again) and started failing my classes, so the administration sent an undergraduate to knock on my door in front of my suitemates to see if I was OK, and made no secret about the fact he was sent to check on me. As the semester progressed, it turned out there were two other people in my suite who were mentally ill, and there was a piece of paper on my door with a picture of Lucien Freud on it (a painter who was Sigmund's grandson). A student killed himself in my building three weeks in, and then it was an endless odyssey of mandatory meetings with therapists, student counselors, the housing department, and professors. A counselor called me randomly at 9PM to make sure I was "ok" because my academic adviser (a.k.a. her "friend") asked her to. I walked by the undergrad's group of friends one day and they all snickered, and one of them said "I'm going to need a security guard in front of my suite" (they all lived across the hall from me).

  • A professor I had would openly coddle this kid with severe Aspergers' Syndrome whose mother was a major donor to the school. I reached out to him myself because people were picking on him and I knew what it was like. Turned out he could just tell people his mommy was rich and he automatically became the most popular guy in the school, lack of conversational skills notwithstanding. He nagged me into helping him with an essay he was writing (I'm very good with research and shit) and he got an A in it. When he presented the essay in class my cell phone accidentally went off, and he said "We all know how popular acrowley666 is", to a chorus of snickers. My essay was never finished because I broke down, and I told this same professor I needed an extension because I was dealing with clinical depression. I ended up with a D- for the class.

  • I brought in a really, really big name in politics to speak at the school. I was kicked out of my house the day before the event for fighting against my parents and for being homo, and I slept in a hotel paid for by my enabling father that night, and I didn't get any sleep. I stood there saying nothing the whole time and everyone including the speaker got offended. Let's just say I wouldn't be working in a convenience store right now if I was actually a normal person.

/r/depression Thread Parent