People keep telling me it will get better and it just gets worse. I can't do anything. I can't take care of myself. How will it get better. Most of what I'm depressed about won't change.

I'm still suffering. Why can't it stop. Why can't I just be happy. Why is this how I work.

I feel completely consumed by it. I can't stop, I can't escape. Why am I trapped like this. Why do I have to be this way.

Why is everyone else so different from me.

"forcing their way of life onto us".

If someone says "I am a X" and a dweller responds with "no, you are not a X, and here's why I am so certain about that as a third party", that is an act of forcing their worldview/lifestyle onto other people.

I am so tired of my friend. She is in a codependent friendship with me that i am trying to get out of while she dives deeper into the hatred that comes with the slow withdrawl of ones therapist (me). Istg if i spoke to her the way she speaks to me she would freak tf out.

Shes homeless and we are housing her, and i want to stay dedicated to that, but it has been months of her making my life more and more painful, because she is upset that i spend intimiate time with my roomie and not with her. I didnt even reduce the amount of quality time with her, i just started spending intimate time with my roomie.

Me and my difficult friend spend most days together, i am her (perhaps only) source of codependent emotional validation, and she is pissed at me (like, staring daggers at me for daring to leave my room, being snippy petty and shitty, trying to control me, etc.) for not wanting to do that anymore and trying to establish a boundary around my time and emotional energy. I poured so much energy into her because i genuinely like her friendship when she is in a good space, and i wanted to help her get back on her feet again.

I struggle so much with codependency and she knows this, and ive been upfront with her about the ways ive contributed to the codependent friendship between us. I am trying to tell her again and again that she needs friends beyond just me and my roomie, but she doesnt try to make friends. So then i have to choose between emotionally abandoning this person or upholding my own boundaries and preserving my emotional sanity and safety.

I need an emotionally safe space for myself and she is taking that away by doing things like banging on my door to ask if it is ok to throw away a piece of trash that isnt even mine. It was clearly a ploy to try and let me know how pissed she is with me; its only recently ive stopped modifying my behavior and agreeing to unhealthy things (like texting her whenever me and roomie go to one of our rooms together) to make her less pissed off, make her not be angry with me. I think she recognized this and thats why she only talks to me about her issues and not my roomie, cause my roomie established boundaries early on. Im so exhausted of having her hate me for not spending all waking moments with her.

Were all supposed to move together, try to find a house, but im legitimately terrified to sign a lease with her. I refuse to bring this dynamic with me into a new home. Plus where we are now has fantastic sound isolation and wherever we move will be far worse: her main complaint is hearing us fuck, which we have taken steps to reduce and eliminate where possible. However we havent fucked in like a month, and she has complained about us every time we go to one of our rooms. She complained today that she could hear us talking last night and it kept her up which 1 no it fucking did not, we were not talking loud, she heard murmurs and hyperfixated on them i know because i have heard her shouting in her room and it is not fucking loud at all and 2 if thats happening come knock on the fucking door instead of sulking all night. Talk to us and ask us to be quieter when its quiet hours in the apt block. If its outside quiet hours put on some ocean waves or other ambient music. And also like I cant read your fucking mind and shouldnt have to deal with your hatred and vitriol for failing to! Its like she expects me to solve her problems for her without telling me about them, and the only solution acceptable to her is such an extreme contortion for me that its completely unacceptable! I have no fucking sexual autonomy in my own fucking home anymore!

I need out of this dynamic, i need her to have housing, i want her to be happy, and i want her and i to be ok in our friendship. But right now, i think i have to choose between the needs and the wants, because i cant get out of this dynamic and ensure shes housed while also making sure shes happy and were ok. I think I have to stop caring about her feelings and that scares me so much and really activates my own self hatred.

So about five years ago I was an extremely depressed teenager. I remember crying for hours on hours one night, and then after that, I kind of turned off my intense emotions as a defense mechanism. I could still laugh or be annoyed, but I couldn't cry or see beauty or be angry at the world.

This winter was the most difficult of my life. I've messed up, I've lost friendships, I've failed in college, I've been addicted to weed, I've not been the person I want to be. But I was also able to cry for the first time in five years. Not just sniffles and a tear, proper bawling my head off ugly crying. And since then, I have been able to cry at bad things and good things. I got rejected by someone I liked and I cried - last time that happened, and the time before, I felt nothing. I watched the final episode of Mob Psycho and I cried a lot. I didn't cry when it first came out, and I already knew what was going to happen. I'd seen it before, but I cried this time. I also sat on a bench with my friends and looked at the Irish coast and saw the light and the colours and movement and it was beautiful.

Growing is hard and painful. Its one thing to know this intellectually, and another entirely to experience it. You also don't get to choose when you grow. It just happens out of necessity. I'm about to turn 22 and I've only just realized how much time I could have ahead of me, and I need to decide how I'm going to live.

I like analyzing media and looking at characters. I criticize bad character arcs and appreciate strong characterisation. But I've just begun trying in earnest to write a novel, and I've realized how little I actually understand about the human experience. How can I write about things I've never gone through? I don't know, but I'll try.

I'm becoming an adult, for real, actually this time. When I started college I was only an adult in technicality. Now I'm soon leaving college and I've been forced to change. It makes me want to change myself on purpose, and control who I am. When I started college I felt sad, because I felt like I was closing the chapter of my life that was childhood, which I never wanted to end. Now I'm leaving college and I feel like the training wheels have come off, and I can be so much faster and freer. Living is a strange thing, and I'd like to find out more about it.

Sometimes I separate the art from the artist like I have a cheap copy of the road and Cormac Mccarthy is dead, so him being a nonce as we found out last year feels different.

But Neil Gaiman is alive and his crimes are pretty bad. I don't really feel I could ever read these again and enjoy them. Or recommend them.

Also the specific details of his abuse are very similar to a case I dealt with years ago in my old work and it's brought up some bad memories there.

I probably should donate them but I'm tempted to toss them. The 0.5 is good omens but I'm sure Terry Pratchett would be fine with my fisbee-ing it into a skip if he was alive.