I'm 17, and I genuinely feel like the last 3 to 4 years of my life have just blurred together. I can barely tell the years apart. Nothing has really changed; nothing has really grown. I feel like I'm existing, not living. And yesterday at a party, surrounded by friends, I felt the most alone I've felt in a while. That was the thing that made me want to write this out.
I don't really have a close friend I can talk to on this level. I help other people not to sink, but when I'm struggling, there's genuinely no one pulling me up, partly because I hide it really well. I celebrate other people's wins, but there's nothing of mine to celebrate, and not many people around me actually would either. I also haven't had a girlfriend since second year of secondary school, which is almost 4 years ago. I haven't even kissed anyone. I'm almost 18 and I'm struggling to get noticed, especially by girls, and to even have a casual conversation with a girl I'm attracted to. If I'm honest, I'm probably not really putting myself out there a lot either, and I might be letting the few times I half-heartedly try and it goes nowhere have too much influence on me. Meanwhile people around me are in relationships, hooking up, moving forward. It's really been eating at me more and more. Sometimes I feel invisible, like I have zero authority and really low social status, around friends and especially around girls, and I don't know how to get out of my own way.
I'm too comfortable. I tend to let my emotions and whatever feels easiest or best in the moment dictate everything. I'm becoming more and more aware of this, and I'm trying to change it, but not hard enough. It's more passive than active, because I still mostly haven't changed it. My main escapes are gaming, porn, and scrolling, not in an "I enjoy these" way anymore, more because they've become a routine that fills up empty moments and feelings or cravings, even though I know I could do something better with that time. There are nights where everything hits at once: the loneliness, the feeling of wasted time, the fact that I can't tell my years apart. And it genuinely hurts. Then the next day the comfort creeps back in. The cycle repeats.
I practice a martial art, but even in that area I feel like I'm slowly stalling instead of moving forward, probably because continuing to grow would require putting in more effort outside of sessions, which I'm not doing for the reasons I described above. My body looks alright for my age, but I'm pretty small and skinny, which doesn't help either.
I know I was handed a pretty good life. Decent family, okay grades, healthy body, no serious trauma. And I feel like I've been quietly wasting it since I was about 10, because I haven't been the main character in my own life and more recently through screen addiction, procrastination, avoidance, and just general comfort. I'm not looking for reassurance. I want someone to tell me what's actually going on and what I can actually do about it that I know will help me move forward, because I'm tired of the blur.