I'm currently sitting by myself to write this article. I would say that I'm happy to finally have peace after a long day, but to be honest, I woke up in silence, ate breakfast alone, walked to my classes with not a single person acknowledging me, ate lunch alone, went to more classes by myself, attended my extracurricular where nobody spoke to me, ate dinner alone, studied in a private area, and here I am writing this.

Now, I don't believe I'm an entitled person, but I am confused about how I live my life every single day and nobody seems to validate that I live in this world too. I don't think I deserve to spend the majority of my waking moments feeling friendless and invisible. I'm perfectly agreeable in most situations, I listen, I have strong opinions, I have a diverse set of interests, but no one seems to know that. But in all honesty, I'm not innately superior to anyone else--I don't think anybody deserves to feel this way.

But what makes this situation so difficult and inescapable is that I'm stuck with an enemy.

If I could, I would cut ties with that enemy. I would block her number and cut off any way she could contact me. I would distance myself as far away from her as possible and just ignore her for that matter. But there is one issue. None of those solutions are possible— Because that enemy is me.

When I'm my worst enemy, making friends becomes so difficult and every issue becomes an awful catch-22. I convince myself that everything I do is bothering somebody and nobody actually wants to talk to me (because if they did, they would've approached me first, right?), so every time I try to interact with someone, it warrants an apology. But once I apologize as often as I breathe, to the point where it is as instinctual as a reflex, I do become annoying. So I apologize for apologizing and the cycle continues.

I also become super submissive to this "enemy." Therefore, I live my whole life coming over as somebody who is so complacent that it seems perfectly fine to leave me out. If there are too many people in a group for anything--a night out, an apartment, the number of chairs at a table, I'm usually the first one out. Because while I try to seem agreeable to make everyone's life easy, I'm also just as easily the one that nobody cares to stick up for or the "easiest" person to leave out (because I'm so agreeable that I won't care at all, right?). The problem is that I do very much care.

Even worse, I am so afraid of rejection and loneliness that I naturally distance myself from everybody. Because if I try to meet other people and they end up leaving me lonely, that's worse than just being alone in the first place, right? In my efforts to protect myself from loneliness, I end up as lonely as ever before because I run away from everybody who might possibly leave me. Then, I really become invisible.

So in the meantime, I am left out of most conversations. If it's a conversation for six, I could never be the seventh person (because that seventh person would really make a huge difference). At every social event, I'm always the photographer and never the photographed (because I'm invisible and let's face it, nobody wants a picture with empty space). If there's an empty chair with people in the dining hall, it's reserved for the air particles and never for me.

I've come to realize that I am definitely not the only one to be feeling this way, but I didn't discover it as much from talking to other people as I did from reading articles very similar to this one. I hope to add this article to the pool of other articles from other people who feel super alone right now. I want to reinforce that if you're feeling this way, you're NOT alone in this feeling--I can guarantee you that. Sometimes we need to get out of our own heads (which I'm struggling to do right now), but here's to hoping we can realize that we are visible, even if it doesn't always seem that way.