High School ruined my life and took my sanity
I've been venting a lot lately, so bear with me.
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I'm 21, a sophomore, and I just got into a four-year school I'm transferring to after spending the better part of three years in community college. (I took a gap year first because I had a really bad car crash right after I graduated high school.) This is supposed to be exciting. I've had root canals I was more excited for.
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I've hated school my whole life. Not the work, not the boredom, but the people. In elementary and middle school I got bullied badly enough that I'd make myself throw up in the mornings, because legally my parents couldn't send me in if I was sick. If they tried anyway, I'd do it in the homeroom bathroom so I'd get sent home before first bell. I begged my dad to put me in online school, homeschooling, anything. He always brushed it off, or told me it was my own fault for not being able to get along with people, and sent me right back in. And it would be one thing if we didn't have the resources. We did, and I had a stay at home mom until he chased her away.
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That went on until middle school, when I attempted for the first time. I ended up in inpatient, then a PHP. My therapists told my dad outright that I was being badly bullied and isolated and that he needed to listen to me. Instead I got pulled from that program and dropped into another one.
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Those programs are also where I found drugs. I started smoking weed in 8th grade just to get through the school day. After I got caught the first time, my parents started randomly drug testing me, so I switched to harder things that cleared my system faster. That cycle ran until I went to rehab partway through freshman year of high school — where, again, someone recommended online school, and again my dad said no. So I went right back to using, because there was no physical way out of that building, and numbing out was the best I could do.
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From there I fell into some genuinely bad relationships. One of them blew up into false accusations during COVID, and my name got dragged so hard that I spent the rest of high school eating lunch alone under a stairwell, high out of my mind. I finally got sober on my own senior year, when I scared myself badly enough. But the damage was already done.
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What I'm left with is barely any social skills, no real sense of who I am, and anxiety that never fully shuts off. I have a vague memory of things I used to love and was good at. Things like drawing, writing, riding horses, or acting, but now I either feel nothing when I do them, or I've lost whatever skill I had.
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And I hate people. Like genuinely can't stand them. I didn't used to. I used to actually try to give humanity the benefit of the doubt. Now every kindness reads as a setup for some ulterior motive, everyone's talking shit, and the second you tell one person something it's all over the place. I know I need human contact. I can't logic my way out of the guardedness. Years of isolation and Abuse made it too clear to me how people operate.
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So now I'm about to start a four-year school, and I've been in a low-grade panic for months because I won't just be in a building full of preppy assholes, I'll be living with them for most of a year. I don't think I'll fit in. I feel underdeveloped, not that interesting, like there's no real reason for anyone to want me around.
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The best plan I've got is to buy a motorcycle and keep day trading hard, so that when I get down there I'll at least show up with a bike and some money — something that might make people want to talk to me.
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I don't really know what I'm looking for here. Maybe just to put it somewhere and not be told it's my fault for not being able to make it work socially.