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Why does school make me hate myself?

I wake up every morning already tired of being me. Not the good kind of tired, like after staying up too late reading something that actually matters. The bad kind. The kind where my body knows before my brain does that in approximately forty-seven minutes I’m going to be sitting in a plastic chair that smells faintly of old sweat and regret, pretending I care about the quadratic formula while someone in a polo shirt tells me for the eight hundredth time that this is “preparing me for the real world.”

And I just sit there thinking: if the real world is anything like this, I’d rather not go.

I look around the room and everyone’s doing the same thing I am—trying to look busy, trying to look like they’re not slowly disappearing. Some kids are better at the performance. They raise their hands, they smile at the teacher, they write the notes in those perfect color-coded notebooks that make me want to set something on fire. I’m not one of them. I’m the one with the hoodie pulled up even though it’s against dress code, the one doodling broken things in the margins because if I don’t draw something ugly, I’m afraid the ugly will just stay inside me.

School makes me hate myself in the quietest, meanest ways. It’s not the big dramatic moments—those I could handle. It’s the slow drip. The way my stomach twists when the teacher calls on someone else and I realize I knew the answer but my mouth wouldn’t open. The way I feel stupid for not being excited about the same things everyone else pretends to be excited about. The way I get a 92 on a test and still feel like a failure because it wasn’t a 100, and apparently 92 means I’m lazy, not that I’m a person who sometimes forgets things or gets anxious or just doesn’t care about mitochondria as much as I’m supposed to.

I keep waiting for someone to notice I’m drowning. Not in a loud, splashing, obvious way. Just… sinking. Slowly. While everyone else is busy treading water and smiling for the yearbook photo.

And the worst part? The part that really gets me? I think I’m supposed to be grateful for this. Grateful that adults decided to lock me in a building for seven hours a day with people I didn’t choose, to grade my entire worth on how well I can memorize things I’ll forget the second summer starts, to tell me over and over that the version of me that shows up here—quiet, sarcastic, tired, daydreamy—is the wrong version.

They want me to be shiny. Polished. On time. Eager. I’m not shiny. I’m chipped. I’m late because I spent ten extra minutes staring at the ceiling trying to remember what it felt like to like myself. I’m not eager because nothing they’re offering feels like it’s for me. It feels like it’s for some imaginary future adult who’s going to be thrilled about spreadsheets and networking events and 401(k)s. That guy sounds exhausting. I don’t want to be him. I just want to be the girl who likes drawing broken things and listening to music too loud and wondering what the world would look like if we stopped measuring people by how well they sit still.

Sometimes I think about running away. Not in a dramatic packing-a-bag-and-hopping-a-train way. Just… emotionally. I want to run away from the version of me that school keeps inventing. The one who’s never good enough, never fast enough, never loud enough in the right ways. I want to go back to the me I was before all this started. The one who used to ask a million questions because the world was interesting, not because there was going to be a quiz on it Friday.

I don’t know if that girl is still in here. I hope she is. I hope she’s just hiding under all the shame and the sarcasm and the exhaustion. I hope one day I’ll figure out how to dig her out without having to wait for someone else to give me permission.

Until then, I guess I’ll keep scratching ugly things in the margins. Trying not to disappear completely.

And if you’re reading this and you feel the same way—same sinking, same chipped, same quiet screaming inside your chest—I see you. I’m right here with you. We’re not broken for hating this. We’re just human. And humans weren’t built to live like this.

We’re allowed to want something different.

We’re allowed to want ourselves back.

-G

Posted in: Blog, Commentary, Knowledgebase on January 19, 2026 @ 10:35 PM

Tags: depression

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