I just haven't felt "happy" since I was a kid. I guess I don't particularly want to kill myself any more, but at the same time I feel kind of empty. And to be honest, I don't think I have any reason to feel the way I do. I'm in a good university, I've been getting excellent grades, I'm reasonably healthy, I don't have any financial issues, my family situation's more or less alright, and I have friends. Nothing's honestly going wrong with my life, but I just feel shit. I don't think there's been a time in the last ten years or so that I could sit down and think "I feel good with how my life is." I see my friends laughing and smiling at things, and they do seem happy. Are they faking it? Because I know I am. I can laugh, I can smile, but I never mean it. I can say the right things, I can play the social game, and nobody seems to know. But I feel fake.

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Maybe that's why I can't keep close friends, to be honest. Maybe I'm not hiding it as well as I think I am. Maybe people see it. In school, I feel like a lot of my friends saw me as a charity case, of sorts. As the weird, sad little boy that they can have a crack at fixing. Maybe in the real world, nobody has time for that. I have friends, to be sure. But for most of them, I'm a side project, rather than being in their "friendship circle." I don't have a "group" that I can hang out with, that I used to have in school. I can contact individual people for coffee, certainly, but I always have to be the first. Most of my friendships end at the university gates, and sometimes I'm little more than a glorified tutor. But nobody seems to be willing to spend as much time with me as I am with them.

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This probably sounds stupid. It certainly seems that way to me. How can I complain about problems I don't have, to people who legitimately struggle with life? There's half the problem. I have friends who grew up in poverty, from broken households, who are failing out of university. I know I can never speak about my feelings to them. They often tell me how lucky I am. They're not wrong, I know that. And I know my family would never brook this kind of talk from me. They know I had problems, years ago, but have convinced themselves it was a phase. I don't feel like I have it in me to put it to paper, and risk it being discovered, so I guess I'm just looking to scream into the void that is the internet.

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TL;DR: Don't read it, this is a cathartic excercise in self-pity.