She’s crying right now, harder than she’s cried in a while, and she can’t seem to place her finger on why exactly she’s crying. It seems as if the myriad of elements of her life are constantly swirling, swirling, swirling around her and she’s just standing at the center, not a part of it but instead surrounded by it. Occasionally she will reach out a hand and touch what passes, just for a second: engage in hanging out with friends, try out for a sport, find someone and fall in love, find interest in a class—but eventually she seems to retract back into the center of the whirlwind that surrounds her.

She finds fleeting moments of happiness and joy, but there is always an impermanence to what she does. What’s the point, her brain seems to constantly remind her. What is her purpose? This is not a depressing question but one filled with frustration to the point where she wants to scream and scream and scream into an empty void, so that void can capture all her screams and envelop them, and churn out an answer that will satisfy her. She can’t seem to find it. She don’t know if this is just “being an adolescent”, “being in college”, “being in your early 20s”, but it seems like she has no deep friendships and no foreseeable future. She feels as if she has been balancing on knifepoint.

She doesn’t think she’s necessarily at a point in her life where she can be in a relationship with someone, or even know for sure how to love, and how to be loved. She does not have structure to her life without him, this summer. At school, it was easy to distract herself with (shallow) friendships, school, going out.

But she thinks perhaps the answer is to develop deeper, more meaningful friendships, because currently she has none. She thinks this lack of solid relationships in her life makes it difficult for her to function socially. She thinks she has too much time on her hands to talk, and when she finds no one, she cannot cope. Her mind ruminates. She has her figure her life out. She needs to figure out what it means to have deeper, more meaningful friendships and how to be a better person.

But her question is, why is it so difficult for her to develop deep friendships? A million thoughts sprout at this question, they grow and their branches become tangled and confused, angry and depressed. She doesn’t know if it’s because I’m too picky with friends, because I’m too weird, too singular, too shitty of a person to have friends. She feel isolated and this confuses her because it seems to her as if it’s so easy for everyone else to get along. Why is it so difficult for me?

Is it because she put up those barriers for herself subconsciously? Is her lack of confidence and low self-esteem so crippling that she fills herself with doubt when talking to new people and subconsciously pushes them away, claiming that they are too this, too that, etc. Then she doubts herself and says that she is too picky. Then she doubts herself again and says that friendships are important and meaningful—you cannot be too picky. She doubts herself and thinks that who she is as a person will be rejected. She feels too complex and too spread out over the spectrum of personality to necessarily develop a friendship with someone as deep and as meaningful as she would like it to be. What is wrong with her, she wonders? She thinks she expects too much.

She doesn’t know what to do about all her problems. She doesn’t. She definitely has these extremely depressive episodes that make her question her sanity as a human being. But she thinks if she thinks long enough she always come to the conclusion that there are things that she can do to become a better person. There is nothing she can change about the world, about other human beings, but she can change herself and her attitude. And that is honestly the only thing that she can do.

She thinks the best advice but the hardest to stay true to is to be who you are and be proud of who you are.