It is something that people already use this thread for, pretty regularly. I will say that if you wanted some insight, or advice for your issues, then asking specific questions definitely helps with that. As trying to reply to a long rant, without any real direction can be hard to tackle, and to know what to say exactly. But some do post just to get it off their chest, and nothing else. Which is perfectly fine as well.
Yeah, I noticed this when lurking this thread. I would like advice if possible but if not then that's okay.
Anyways, to begin, I feel like I should start by saying a bit of information about what conditions and issues I've had for a long time now. I've had general anxiety for a very long time, especially in an academic setting. I can remember panicking and acting insane over exams for as long as all the way back to the second grade. I also have some problems with my muscles that make them weaker and harder to develop that I don't know much about but I guess that's not really related to mental health. I think I have other conditions but I don't exactly know what they are. I have not looked at any of the official paperwork relating to my mental health and I'm not sure that any other conditions have been diagnosed. My dad said that when I was young I got tested for high functioning autism and he found out that I didn't have it, but regardless some of my behaviors are rather similar to someone with high functioning autism to this day. For example, I have trouble making eye contact and socializing in general, and I do tend to maintain interests in very specific things. I also get easily frustrated and have trouble adjusting to new schedules. In addition to these things, I also feel like I learn things differently than most people, though I'm not quite sure how.
But anyways, throughout my schooling I've received accommodations for mental health; I usually get more time on assignments and exams and am allowed to take exams in a room separate from other students. But what really made me want to post in this topic is that I feel as though for the past year or so I may have been experiencing depression.
Now, I'm not actually sure if I am depressed, because I haven't seen a therapist about it or even told anyone about it before. And I'm not 100% sure because I'm not quite sure what depression is like; I mean, I'm not always sad, all the time, so maybe I'm not. If I'm with my family or playing video games I'm usually happy, though I have found it hard to actually motivate myself to play games at times. But there's always looming feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred. Usually these fluctuate; sometimes I can hardly feel them at all, sometimes they're so damning and present that I can't think about anything but what an awful awful person I think I am.
I guess you can sort of skim this part (everything up through detailing my college experience) if you feel like it, since it's not really all that important but I felt the need to get it off my chest
The real problem stems from my self esteem, which is incredible low. I'm going to be more personal right here and speak a bit more about myself and why I think it's so low. Anyways, I'm a white, upper-middle class guy from suburban California, which means that I come from a successful family with loving and encouraging parents. I'm currently ending my Sophomore Year in college. Throughout life I haven't really had many interests aside from games, the internet, and school. In elementary, middle, and high school I was generally a good student, didn't really have many friends and the ones I did have I didn't really spend much time with outside of school. I was generally I pretty good student, though in high school I didn't have an extremely challenging schedule because I was afraid of the possibility of failure and because my councilors. I generally excelled in math and English the most. I spent a lot more time on homework than most students, I'd usually come home and play games or watch TV or go on the computer and post online or watch anime for an hour or so and then spend five hours working on homework. This didn't really bug me, I just figured I was a slow worker and that's how I was. I had some difficulties, but in general I was successful and I ended up getting into a fairly decently ranked expensive, small, private university.
I went into Computer Engineering here. Just so anyone can keep track, I'm keep in mind I'm in Sophomore Year, third quarter right now. So, first quarter, I was generally pretty successful and got good grades, around B-rangeish, and I studied pretty hard. I wasn't sure if I liked Computer Engineering Second quarter I had a bit more difficulty, especially in my Physics class, but I ended up doing alright and passing all my classes which is what I figured I can hope for in an Engineering major, more or less.
Third quarter is when I began to have difficulties. This quarter I took a class in Physics (2), Programming, Calculus (3), and a logic programming class. I found all four to be difficult and the only one I didn't really struggle in was logic programming. The most frustrating for me was my main programming class; I began to realize that I didn't like programming at all. I realized I don't think it's something I can do for the rest of my life; I don't find it enjoyable or rewarding or even tolerable in the least. Programming just feels so tedious to me, and 99% of the time I feel completely lost. In retrospect I don't know if I've ever coded something that isn't very simplistic without having someone help me figure out what I'm supposed to do fairly directly. Moreover the way that class was taught made it difficult to study for. At my university, most of the programming classes don't actually have a lot of programming assignments; it's usually just the labs. The exams are really what count for most of your points, and on the exams you usually have to write short lines of code and identify and understand concepts. So when I told my professor I didn't feel confident enough with my skills, he was basically like "welp go look at the labs and do them again". I ended up bombing the first two exams. The first one I admittedly didn't really study much for, but for the second one I looked at the first exam and the labs and the textbook many many times and spent a lot of time, and still ended up feeling lost. I ended up dropping the class after the second exam when the professor basically told me I had to. At this time I was having difficulties in my Calculus and Physics classes, not because of one particular concept, but just because I felt like the classes were moving way too fast. I would go to class and they would pile on several concepts and I just lost track. I would spend several hours a day studying for these classes and I still ended up feeling lost. After I dropped my programming class, that's when the feelings of depression began setting in. I just sort of lost motivation to try in Physics or Calculus. I still put fourth the effort in my Programming Logic class and ended up doing alright there. I also ended up doing alright in my Physics class because the professor was super nice to the students and gave the class an extreme curve. But I ended up failing Calculus. I probably would have dropped Calculus and Physics but I live on campus and need to be enrolled in at least three classes to maintain housing.
So, fast forward a bit, school starts back up in the Fall. I talk to my mom some, I don't tell her about my feelings of depression that began to start, but I told her about everything else. I end up taking a bit of an easier quarter to hopefully prevent a situation like that from happening again; I retake the Calculus and Programming classes that I failed, and also take a Spanish class and an Anthropology course. Additionally I hired a tutor for programming and Calculus. I do well in Spanish, though the course was easy. I do alright in the Programming class, it was pretty hard but I put fourth the effort. However, I get a D in both Calculus and Anthropology. I had difficulties keeping up with Calculus AGAIN. It wasn't as hard this time because I was more familiar with the concepts, but there were some that I just couldn't for the life of my understand. The tutor I hired was extremely flaky and towards the end of the quarter I couldn't contact him at all. I ended up lacking the motivation to just figure some of it out, especially in the time frame the class took place in. Anthropology was just difficult, and I had trouble remembering all of the facts I read for exams. They just wouldn't "stick" in my head, if that makes any sense, though I guess I'll get to more of that later.
But, next quarter comes, I end up taking the classes I signed up for. "Ds" technically count as passing at my school so I was able to take the next courses in the Calculus and Anthropology sequences. I also took another programming class and an electoral engineering class. I end up dropping the electrical engineering class near the beginning of the quarter, since I just found it to be overwhelming at the start and there was a recommended prerequisite class that I didn't take. Calculus is disastrous. That class was probably the most ridiculous class I had ever taken. There were like five homework assignments a week with three of them being due online. The individual online assignments could take me upwards of five hours or so, with half of that time being spent trying to figure out my small mistakes and give the website the exact answer it wanted since if I didn't do that I wouldn't receive any points for the problem. They ended up taking me more than five hours because I would just rage at the computer and have to take a break to calm myself down after I couldn't figure out the exact answer that the site wanted me to give. And, since I had lost contact with math tutors at that point, I tried to find another personal Calculus tutor but I was unsuccessful. So I ended up struggling in the class outside of the assignments because I couldn't keep up with the concepts. As a result of this I would do poorly on the assignments and exams because I didn't comprehend all of the concepts. So I would be spending ridiculous amounts of time a week, trying to keep up with all of my assignments that I would only be getting half credit for anyways because a significant portion of my answers were wrong because I didn't really understand what I was doing. I had to stay enrolled in this class because I couldn't drop it (since I had to maintain housing), but halfway through I think I just sort of gave up, though I still attended class and tried to follow along. Much like how earlier dropping my programming class sort of made me unmotivated in my other classes, this class made me unmotivated in my other classes. For example, I was actually keeping up with and understanding the concepts in my programming class, but I just lost motivation to keep up with the actual assignments (that the professor actually assigned this time) because I was just so burnt out by my Calculus class and they were just so intimidating. My second anthropology class was more or less the same as the first one. I ended up doing okay in programming, getting another D in Anthropology, and obviously failing Calculus.
At this point my mom and my councilor noticed the difficulty I was having, so in between that quarter and the one I'm in right now I sat down to talk to them. After talking to both of them I decided on taking an easier quarter with mostly non-STEM classes to help boost my GPA. This quarter I'm taking an Astrobiology Course, an Introductory religion and Political Science courses, and another programming course (so I actually have something within my major). I'm doing alright in all of them, and I'm probably going to pass all of them, but the only one I'm really excelling in is my Introductory Religion course, which is generally a pretty easy course for everyone.
As for outside of my classes, I live on college campus, but I hardly do anything here. I spend most of my time in my dorm or in the library. On a typical weekday, I wake up, go to classes, then go on the computer, then go to bed. Weekends are the same except without classes. On the computer I'm either studying or browsing the internet. I'll admit that I get distracted by the internet a lot, but because I'm on the computer pretty much the entire day I usually spend quite a few hours a day studying and working for my classes. I don't really play video games much during the school year, though usually a couple times a week I'll set aside a few hours to play a game. Like in elementary/middle/high school, I don't really have many friends. The only friends I do have are my roommates. Now, I like talking to my roommates and hanging out with them sometimes. However, they're jerks. They'll make fun of me for liking anime a lot. One of them has an ongoing narrative that he tells me about how he's having sex with my mom. Now, they do this sort of thing to each other too, but I don't really take jabs and mess with them in response because that's not really my thing. Occasionally I think it's funny, but usually I just tell them that I would appreciate it if they stopped, and they don't. They're still usually cool with me, and they seem to enjoy my company, but I'm sort of tired of hanging out with most of them. Next year I'm getting paired up with random people instead, so maybe I'll make friends with them.
So, throughout this entire experience, I've just became less and less confident in myself. Admittedly I didn't have much self confidence before college, but now it's just extremely low. I feel like a terrible, terrible, terrible human being. Like absolute bottom-of-the-barrel. If I were to walk around the area I live in and look at other people I would view myself as inferior to each and every one of them. I feel like I'm doing nothing but being a leech on society. The real, major heart of the problem, I think, is that I feel like I'm not good or even really average at everything. This is sort of a cliche I think, for someone to think that they're bad at literally everything, but it's honestly how I feel. I'm not intelligent, I'm not a good student, I'm not athletic, I'm not sociable, I'm not funny, I'm not good looking, I'm not anything. I'm just garbage. I'm not even good at video games, even though they're my main hobby and the thing I have the most fun with. I didn't used to feel this way, since I was a decent at worst student prior to college and didn't really care about anything else, but now these feelings have been settling in hardcore.
The only thing I feel like I might be any good at is tracking information on games and users. This is something I'm famous for on a couple other sites, and it's something I do a lot of in my free time. Just memorizing information about random people and games. But it's a skill so useless that I wish I didn't have it at all. Just having it makes me feel even more garbage. I cannot for the life of me remember any information for college classes that center around memorizing important information even if I spend hours memorizing it, but I can remember details about some mediocre video game I read about online that I have no intention of ever playing. I can remember that some person posted that he forgot to brush his teeth in the morning two years ago. I just feel awful that I can remember such pointless information, because I feel like it means that my brain prioritizes it over actually important thing.
But otherwise, I just constantly feel inferior to others. Like everyone around me is successful, and has done something, and I haven't. People around me are able to maintain a social life, work a job, have hobbies, and go out to parties and other places and still be successful students. I don't do any of these things and I'm still not able to be a successful student. Sometimes I feel like everyone around me spends a lot less time studying than I do but are still able to do better than me (my roommates certainly do). I just feel absolutely dreadful, and this contributes to my feelings of human indecency.
I'm also just extremely worried. I have no idea where to go. Since I don't really excel in anything I have no idea what I would change my major to if I changed majors. Additionally my GPA is pretty much unsalvageable at this point, I'm right on the cusp of probation in terms of both GPA and units taken. I don't know much about graduate school but I know that you have to have a certain GPA to get in, so I'm scared to switch to a major that's heavily competitive with graduate school. I know I'm going to graduate in five years at the least (I go to a university where most students are heavily encouraged and pressured to graduate in four years, which added to the stress early on though I've basically gotten over that since my mom said she'd pay for however many years it would take to get me through college).
Earlier, I said that I come from a successful upper-middle class family in California, so it might seem strange to some people that I might be depressed. My parents are extremely loving and supportive of pretty much anything I do. I don't think I've met many parents as caring as mine. They're ultimate goal is for their children to be happy, and they'd give up pretty much anything for that. But, oddly enough, this actually contributes to my feelings of self-hatred. Because I always feel like I SHOULDN'T be experiencing these feelings of hatred, if that makes any sense. Internally I'm always thinking to myself "Why am I so awful? Why am I not successful? I should be successful because I have all of the advantages in the world, and yet I can't accomplish the most basic of things!". I'm terrified to tell my parents how I feel, because like I said, they just want their children to be happy. They would give up all the things in the world so their children would be happy. I'm scared that if I tell my mom how I feel about myself it would break her poor little heart. I think I'm probably ready to do it anyways, since I know it's necessary, but I've been avoiding it for the longest time. When I was talking to my mom about my difficulties in classes, there were a couple times where I think she even asked "You're not depressed, are you?" and I just sort of froze up and denied it.
Also, it's not as a big of a factor that contributes to my feelings of worthlessness, but since it's a factor I guess I'll mention it. Even though I'm a Sophomore in College I still feel like a child. As you can probably tell from reading this I still rely on my parents for a lot of things. Sometimes I feel like I never fully developed as a person in my teenage years. I have trouble motivating myself just to do typical adult responsibilities like cleaning my dorm room and maintaining proper hygiene. I've never worked a job in my life. I typically spend Summers in my room playing video games all day, which I enjoy for the most part and I wish I could basically just do for the rest of my life. There's no need for me to take a job during the school year since my parents are paying for all of my college and then some (which, again, contributes to feelings of worthlessness because I feel like I should be successful because of this). I get lost easily, and probably wouldn't be able to find my way back home if someone dropped me off in the middle of the city. I feel like these are skills I should have developed by the time I was 15 years old but I haven't yet. I also get frustrated easily and sometimes behave like a child. I even sort of sound and look childish, though I don't really care much about that.
So yeah, that's how I really feel about myself. This was probably way way longer than it needed to be and I doubt anyone will end up reading everything I wrote and now I'm sort of afraid that someone I know from another site will find this, but I really needed to get all of this off my chest because in the past few weeks these feelings have been increasing. I probably overdramatized how I feel about myself and my situation, but whatever. Hopefully I'll improve.
EDIT: If anyone does read this, for a personal response, what do you guys suggest I should actually do? I'm not sure if I actually want to start seeing a therapist or taking medication, even though that seems like the most obvious route. I've seen therapists a couple times before, earlier in my life, and the honestly didn't help me that much. And I'm afraid of getting addicted to medications. I read the information in the OP about medication, and it makes sense, but I guess my fear of taking medication is mostly just irrational but it's still something.
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