/dep/ - Depression

"You have to interview someone from another culture and write an essay on their responses"

What exactly am I supposed to do? Where exactly do I begin to look for an interviewee? It's not like I know ANYONE. My entire extended family hates me. My friends have all vanished. And the entire system as a whole has done nothing except set me up for failure. I'm 22, and I've worked 17 jobs in the past 4 years and nothing stuck. I spent 99% of my time in Elementary, Middle School, and Highschool in semi-permanent I.S.S. (In School Suspension) because of my Asperger's diagnosis. Which inevitably forced me to drop out and get my GED.

I've been voluntarily homeless before to escape a broken household with a psychotic & narcissistic mother. I've driven from the South, to the Southeast to the Midwest multiple times looking for something to hold onto. Either to reconnect with some friends I had in high-school in the hopes to establish some kind of camaraderie/fellowship. Or when someone I met on CS:GO offered to let me be their roommate. Nothing ever seemed to work. There was always SOMETHING that happened to set me back. It was always one step forwards and two steps back. Either I lost my job, had a manic episode, or crashed my car and got saddled with a $400 quacked-up ticket from a cop who wasn't on the scene until a whole hour after the accident even occurred.

I figured after all the trouble, that maybe I should attend community college. Unfortunately, now I have to navigate this academic labyrinth which is filled with countless obstacles that are designed to single people like me out so we can be removed from society. What am I supposed to do? If I withdraw I'm stuck with debt (albeit only the first semesters worth), even then I can't even land a job that lasts for more than 3 months at a time, so paying it off would be hopeless. If I choose to keep going at it, I'll likely fail and end up with a horrible GPA that'll ruin my chances at climbing any corporate ladder.

It feels like every opportunity taken has lead to nothing but failure. There hasn't been anything in my life I've ever been successful at. It feels as though the writing is on the wall. Only this time the consequences to be faced by choosing either fork in my path will end up being nothing short of insurmountable.

I look at people like Adam Shephard (Scratch Beginnings) and Chris McCandless (maybe even Ted Kaczynski) and see that either they are able to make something of themselves from nothing or they're able to bring satisfaction into their lives from very little. Then I'm forced to contemplate and question why exactly I'm always stuck with the short of end of the stick, trapped in the mud, with hardly any wiggle room, momentum or any number of proverbial tools at my disposal that'll grant me any chance at escape from these chains.

Is my anomie the consequence of a life brimming with exclusion and alienation., garnished by poor financial security and systematic failure. Or is it all in my head? Have I just created an elaborate schema of a prison in my mind? And maybe I'm just stuck in a constant loop of self-damnation and destruction, because that's the only thing I've ever known.