then you tell yourself what you want to hear 'cause you have to believe "this will be my year"

I am lost, here. I numbly, blindly manipulate. I pull the threads of the web I've woven to keep me safe, push the levers in a variable ration, negotiate the rat-maze I find myself in.

But I am not happy. I am not satisfied with this Skinner box, I am slowly dying and decaying. I can feel it. My intelligence, my skills in analysis, my writing ability, my creativity -- the slow degradation is killing me.

I know what I'm missing, I know what I'm losing, trapped and slowly going insane here, and that just speeds up the process.

I find myself creating challenges for myself, something I've done since I was 5 or 6 and realized I was ten times as smart as my goddamn teacher. Only this time, the challenges aren't simple and easy and fun, like reading 30,000 pages in a trimester or spelling everything perfectly for an entire week. Now I challenge myself by sabotaging myself and then seeing if I can recover; now I challenge myself by convincing myself everyone hates me; now I challenge myself by slowly cutting away anything I might possibly use to support myself and seeing if I survive.

I have to get out of this house, out of this life. There needs to be a change, and it has to happen soon, or I think I may lose everything that matters to me completely.

This is why I pin my hopes on going to college. This is why I get panic attacks when I think about them not accepting me, when I think about not having the money to go. This is why I tell my closest friends that if I don't leave this town, I don't think I'll live another year.

I'm scared that if I stay here, I will finish the work that a decade of depression started. And I know that in the end, I won't even care about everything I've thrown away.