Okay, so this is going to be quite a wall of text about me, my real life, my current situation, and my future. It's also going to be kind of whiny and not especially happy. I can't blame you if you don't feel like reading all of this, but I can't really give a good tl;dr either. Feel free to just skip this thread if you don't particularly care about what I have to say.



Since I don't know how else to begin, let's just start with the core issue. I have been suffering from severe depression for almost all my life. And by depression I don't mean 'feeling kind of sad' or 'having a lot of bad days', but actual, clinical depression. It's been gradually getting worse and by now has fully devoured me. I have completely lost control of my life and am incapable of regaining any of it. It is hard to really give normal, healthy people an idea of how severe of an illness depression really is, but I'll try to at least describe what it's like for me. Some of the following points probably sound exaggerated, but I assure you that they are actually true.

For years, I have essentially never left my apartment. I have no social life at all; no friends, no acquaintances, nobody to talk to. The number of face-to-face conversations I've had over the last six years with people other than my family or therapist is in the single digits. Literally. A normal person has more social contact on an average day than I have had in multiple years. I lack the energy to do much of anything; even the most basic tasks become insurmountable hurdles for me. Even getting out of bed is near impossible. Every day, after waking up, I just lay in bed for several hours, wide awake but unable to get up. Lately it has been a serious achievement for me if I manage to get out of bed before 7pm. There are days where I only manage to force myself out of bed when it's already almost midnight.

I rarely manage to muster up the energy to take a shower. Such a trivial task, yet it takes a lot out of me. I often smell awful and am disgusted by myself, but somehow not even that manages to motivate me. In a similar vein, I didn't get myself to brush my teeth at all for several years. It is a miracle that I only needed to get two root canals after that. By now I have managed to force myself to at least brush once a day, but anything beyond that is completely hopeless. Seeing the trash pile up in huge mounds around my apartment is awful as well, but I lack the sense of self-worth that might bring me to actually take it out. All I want is to be able to live a normal life, but at the same time I don't feel like I am worth enough to even deserve something as basic as bodily hygiene or a clean room. The longer I live like that, the more I start to feel that this dirty, disgusting environment is actually a part of me, or an expression of who I really am inside. It no longer really feels like an illness, I basically just feel like a worthless, lazy bum who doesn't care about himself, and blame myself for everything that is wrong in my life – which is a ridiculous number of things.

You know how people talk about 'crying oneself to sleep'? Well, for me that's not how it works. Quite the opposite in fact. Whenever I cry at night (which happens way too often), I end up being completely unable to fall asleep at all. I just end up laying awake the entire night, feeling like shit. But even on normal nights, it takes me several hours to fall asleep. I don't know how people manage to fall asleep in less than 15 minutes, it just seems totally inhuman to me. Oh well, the point of all this is that I fail at basically everything in my life, no matter how basic it may be. I have tried every single method I could come up with or find online on how to overcome this subconscious blockade, on how to get motivated/disciplined and actually pull through when attempting to do stuff. Nothing worked. Or, as it feels to me, I failed to make anything work. By this point I don't know how I can be optimistic about anything anymore; after failing time and time again for years, you just start feeling completely hopeless and powerless. Life just kind of happens and you're left out with no way back in. It's an awful feeling. Even more so because I technically should be able to achieve so much more – I used to be a straight A student and finished school with excellent grades all around. People around me expected me to become successful and live a fulfilling life, yet here I am, leading an existence more miserable than I'd ever have been able to imagine.

I have never been very good at making friends. I'm just way too shy to approach anyone myself and my depression-induced lack of interests doesn't exactly make me an interesting person to be around. That, coupled with a bunch of other factors, led to me being a huge loner, outsider, and the school's number one subject of bullying. I basically never felt accepted or appreciated by anyone, be it classmates or my family. No matter how well I did at anything, it was always just expected (by my parents) or a source of envy and antipathy (for many of my classmates). It is difficult to develop any sense of self-worth when you're never told that you're doing well and that people are proud of you.

I also never really felt affection from anybody, which makes me feel even more undesirable and worthless. I've never been in a relationship – heck, I've never even so much as held hands with a girl. For a 25-year-old, that's kind of pathetic. In addition to that, I lost pretty much all contact with the few friends I used to have almost immediately after finishing school. All due to inaction; doing nothing. And for some reason, 'nothing' was all I could do. It still is. Whenever I try to do 'anything', I fail, so 'nothing', or a state of complete inaction, pretty much defines my entire existence right now. You probably can't even begin to imagine how lonely I feel most days, how much I long for someone to be close to me, someone to talk to and just spend free time with. But that is impossible. Even if I were to magically gain the strength/motivation to actually leave the house and approach people, I would still not be able to find friends, because I am the most boring person imaginable. I have nothing to talk about at all. Normal people can talk about their daily lives; their jobs, circle of friends, activities they did, interests,... I cannot do that. I don't have a job or anything to talk about, no friends/colleagues/acquaintances to talk about. Nothing new ever happens in my life – for the past years, pretty much every single day has been the exact same. I get up past noon, sit down at the computer because I lack the energy to do anything else, mostly just passively watch something because everything else is too draining, and eventually drag myself back to bed. For a long time, osu!/taiko used to be the only thing in my life that was actually fun, that I could get myself to do actively. But by now, with the illness getting ever worse, even that has stopped being fun. I used to have no 0 playcount months in all of my osu! 'career', but now I basically haven't even opened the game in over four months. Somehow, I have lost the last thing in my life that was fun, the last thing I could get excited about. Now I just feel completely dead inside. The longer my life drags on, the more I wish that I would just die – that I won't have to wake up tomorrow and force myself through yet another day of the same 'nothing'. How can I ever expect anyone else to like me when I can't even begin to like myself? It's awful, but I just see nothing about me that's worth liking. Even when comparing myself to other depressed people, I feel like a failure. When I read posts on exchange sites for people with depression, I can't help but notice that almost all of them mention having a job, friends, or even a relationship. Why is it that all these people manage to deal with the same illness so much better than I do? Why do I completely fall apart and lose every last bit of autonomy, when everyone else still manages to carry on and fulfill their duties? Am I that much weaker than all the others? Do I just not try hard enough? Maybe my illness is just worse than theirs? But then, thinking like that marginalizes the struggles those people face, so I feel like an asshole for even considering something like that.

Anyway, let's change the topic to a slightly less pessimistic one. I want to say thank you to everyone on osu! who put up with me and spent time talking to me. It really means a lot to me, since I have absolute zero social contact in real life. You may not have known the real me, but at least I felt somewhat accepted because people actually cared about this online persona I created. I tried so hard to hide the real me and be a positive, likable person. Luckily, it's easy to fake being happy and optimistic on the internet, where nobody can see your face. In fact, I had a conversation with a fellow team member before the last taiko world cup, where I mentioned having lag issues and a few other things going badly as well. When he told me to not get depressed before the world cup, I half-jokingly said 'Don't worry, I already am.', to which he replied 'You're the last person I'd believe if they told me they're depressed.' In a way that made me happy, because it means that I successfully managed to play a positive character, that at least online I don't emanate an aura of negativity. On the other hand, it made me realize how hard it would be to really talk about my real situation if I ever felt the need to. On occasion I probably tried too hard to hide my real personality and ended up being a bit annoying or even obnoxious due to overcompensation. I apologize to the people who had to put up with that, and want to express how thankful I am that you still wanted to talk to me. I am also sorry to everyone for not being honest about myself and essentially living a lie, but I was just way too afraid that nobody would like me if I didn't do that.

Now that my psychotherapy and antidepressants have not had any visible effects whatsoever after many months, my therapist and me have decided that it would be best if I were to live in a psychiatric hospital for a while. While the exact duration depends on the results of the treatment, my therapist told me to expect at least a stay of six months at the hospital. Tomorrow is going to be my first day there. I don't know when the next time I have internet access will be, so I wanted to take this last chance to post this thread and tell the people who may have cared about me the truth. I am sorry for just kind of disappearing without any comment during the last few months, and I am especially sorry to the German taiko community because I most likely won't be able to participate in the next world cup. At least we have a few promising newcomers, so I'm going to cheer you guys on and I'm sure you'll do just fine.

To be honest, I'm really afraid about the future right now. Mostly because I feel like this hospital stay is basically my last chance. What if that doesn't work either? I don't really have any other options after that, so if it fails, am I stuck with this depression for the rest of my life? That thought terrifies me, there is absolutely no way I am able to survive 50 more years of this hell. I wish I could be optimistic about this, but truth be told, after repeatedly failing at the most trivial of tasks for years on end, you stop believing. Fake optimism is the only thing that keeps me sane, but it is really hard to keep it up on an emotional level.

Technically there are still lots of things I could write about. I have only barely scratched the surface of my whole situation, but I need to go to sleep soon so I can force myself out of bed in time tomorrow. I also don't want to bore you with even more ramblings about me and my life; I think I already said more than I ever thought I would. Thanks once again to everyone who made my time here at osu! one of the very few bright spots in a dark and dull life. I don't know when I'll be able to return, or if I'm ever even going to be in a condition that allows me to return, so I guess I will say goodbye to everyone now. Please don't forget me, and please don't hate me for who I am or am not.

Farewell