I first tried to take my life when I was 10 years old, then again when I was 16 and 21. I never told my parents about my depression, I think mainly because I didn’t realize I had it myself. It wasn’t often enough that I took it seriously.

Last year, when I was 25, I wrote a suicide note on Facebook and a girl found it and called my parents back home in Georgia. I wouldn’t answer the phone so they called the cops and I ended up in a mental hospital. When I got out of that hospital three days later, I started seeing a counselor for the first time in my life. I went to her for eight months before I decided it was a waste of time. Now I’m 26, and in this year alone I have had four attempts and countless nights of suicidal ideation.

I think it all started because when I was 8 I was taken out of homeschool and put into private school and desperately tried to fit in. I was super geeky – buck teeth, super skinny legs, big frizzy hair, huge glasses – and all of the kids made it a point to tell me to my face how ugly I was and exclude me from their little cliques.

I think I developed social anxiety all the way back then, never realizing until maybe last year that it’s not normal to develop a sweat or shake just because you’re talking to someone.

After that year in private school, my parents pulled me back out and put me back into homeschooling, but the damage had already been done, and since I didn’t realize it at the time, I never sought help. But I definitely see how that time period shaped how I view myself today.

Despite what you might think, and despite all the typical stereotypes surrounding homeschoolers, I’m actually pretty glad for that. I think I’d only be more insecure if I’d stayed in school. I’m sure I wouldn’t be alive, because I never grew out of my ugly duckling stage until I was 17 years old.

Today, I’m not quite so insecure about my looks, though there are still things I don’t like, but it’s more about my personality (or the lack of it) and the feeling that I can’t carry on a conversation to save my life, and thereby spending much of my life without deep friendships and only having acquaintances.

Somehow despite all of this I still cling to the faint, dying hope that one day I will be free from all of this. Maybe that’s my faith in Jesus Christ. I don’t know. I can’t help but cry out to God, asking why He’s allowed this to continue for so long in my life when I have been praying about it. I know He is real, and even that He hears my cry. There is no question about that. He has protected me from taking my life, He has provided a place for me to live just in the nick of time when my roommates were kicking me out of their place, He has given me a family that loves me even if they are all the way in Georgia, He has sent messengers many times to tell me that He hears me and hasn’t forgotten me. Complete strangers have walked up to me and told me that.

Still, I don’t understand why I spend so many days, nights, weeks, and months, feeling so utterly alone. I just want to connect and feel accepted – somewhere.

I have so little human contact, and while this is just an online community, it’s still better than nothing. Day in and day out, the only people I see are the people I work with. But when you’re in a cubicle all day and there’s a wall between you and the next person, it’s not even that much contact other than “hi, how are you?” I’ve tried to get out and change that by getting myself super involved tons of activities, but just when I start to think I’ve finally made some friends, I’ve finally found a group that accepts me the way I am, I make some kind of stupid social blunder and again find myself rejected, kicked out, and abandoned.

I don’t know what the answer is, the escape from all this pain. I just know that I can’t live like this anymore, something has to change. And I guess I’m here just to get these thoughts out to someone who can actually understand and not judge me.