Three days James has been laying in bed. Never getting up to eat. Never getting up to shower. Never getting up to live a normal life.
Three days of nothing but his thoughts.
Three days of trying to drown the thoughts in TikToks or YouTube videos. Three days of having comfort shows in the background while he tried to drown out the thoughts with his phone.
You don’t have actual friends.
They’re just pretending to like you to be civil.
No one cares what happens to you.
His stomach hurts. All he fed himself these last few days were snacks he got from the convenience store the one time he managed to get out of bed. And it took all day to convince himself to go out and get something to eat. Hours of telling himself he’d starve. Hours of arguing with the voices that at least one person might care if he died of starvation. Hours of trying to get out of bed but an invisible force pulling him right back down.
But that food only lasted so long. He can never help himself. When there’s food there, he eats it all, he feels bad, he doesn’t eat for a few days and the cycle continues. It goes on forever and it’s so exhausting. Moving away from his parents may have sounded like a good idea, but not in times like this. In times like this he needed them. Needed them to make him food, to force him to eat, to force him out of his room. Roommates don’t do that. Roommates don’t care. Roommates don’t need to care. James isn’t their responsibility, nor is he his parents’, he is his own.
And he’s doing a shitty job of it.
He can’t even feed himself properly, how is he supposed to go out into the real world? How will he ever be a functioning adult? Is there even a point? Why should he even be part of society when he was so bad at it? Why should he continue like this? Why do the thoughts eat at him like this?
Maybe a part of him knows the voices are right. No one cares for him. Why should they? He’s mean, he snaps easily, he rarely is the one to reach out, he can’t communicate his feelings properly. He doesn’t deserve friends. Everyone should leave him alone. It’s what he deserves for being such a shitty person.
He should just lie there for all eternity. Wait for the sweet release of death to get him all on its own. No one would notice, no one would care.
And why should they notice? He acts as if everything is fine when he talks to them. If they text him, if they call, he’ll reply instantly, he’ll act the same he always does. He’ll push all the feelings down so he’s not a burden to people that already hate him.
These people aren’t his friends.
These people know who he is, but they don’t know anything proper. They don’t know what goes through his head, they don’t know him. They know the projection of himself that he shows to others and nothing else. And that’s not their fault, but it still doesn’t make them friends.
And that’s his fault. He never opens up, he sees relationships as transactional. If he starts venting, that means the people he talks to can start venting to him. And it’s not like he minds, but he can’t take it. He can’t have people venting to him, he’s not useful. He doesn’t give good advice. And he can’t just be there to ‘listen’ either, he wants to be useful, no he has to be useful. If he’s not useful he’s nothing. So he can’t vent because he can’t have people venting to him.
All he has is himself. All he’ll ever have is himself.
So he just needs to suck it up and keep pretending. Pretending to fit in with society, pretending he’s fine living away from home, pretending he’s happy.
He just has to fake it until the day he dies. How hard can that be?
