I like to hurt myself using other people. When I’m depressed, I have no emotions, and am emotionally overwhelmed at the same time. I’m a lockbox of emotion: I can’t feel anything on the surface, but there’s too much inside, and it tears me apart.

When I can’t feel anything and feel too much, I go looking for opportunities to hurt myself. There are people who care, who say they worry about me, but I wish they wouldn’t, because it ends up hurting me more. It’s exhausting—all I can focus on is myself, and having someone say that they’re concerned about me and then show me how concerned they are in their words makes me feel worse about how I feel because not only am I self-destructing, I’m affecting other people.

I don’t want other people to worry about me, but I want them to care. I want them to care about me so much, they’ll do something to show me exactly how much, but nobody ever does.

I know when I’m like this that I’m frank, stunted, hard to respond to, but for once, I want someone to not care that I’m prickly, and assert their presence in my life, to remind me how important they are to me, and maybe more to the point, how important I am to them, because I’m sitting here all alone, with my brain doing its level best to alienate me from everything.

I want someone to smash through every barrier I don’t even want to have, and say, “No, I’m not going to go away, because I care about you”.

I cry when people say something even remotely decent to me when I’m like this. I got an email from someone saying about something going on in my life saying they were sorry I was in that position, and I burst into tears, because it’s the first person I’ve spoken to in what feels like years that’s really bothered to say that to me, or make me feel like I’m not just a part of an institution to be kept at an arm’s length. I cried because I’m so sorry I’m like this, too, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and nobody else seems to care enough to want to be there with me.

We all struggle with feeling alone and doubting ourselves, but I pour so much of myself into reminding people of their worth, their importance, their values and traits that make them unique and worth appreciating. I have completely depleted myself trying to make other people feel even remotely happy, or marginally better. I want someone to care about me enough to want to do the same for me.

And this is how I punish myself: I give people opportunities to do just that. And they don’t. And I feel awful, because why would they? Better yet, why should they?

I’m proof enough of what doing that for others will do to you, but it really numbs me that nobody seems to care enough about me to want to do the same.

It really fucking hurts.

There’s no one there, and even my brain wants to get away from the me that’s left, too.