I guess I should describe myself first? I have been struggling with mental illness since I was like 13/14 years old. It started with my body image. I absolutely hated my nose, thought I look like a mean retard on pictures and just looked too big. Due to that I had huge problems with eating and started to count how many days i could go without eating or only ate the glucose drops for a period of time.

Thinking about it, I guess I was never normal. Even when I was very young I had fantasies of people serving me and me being on top of the world (I won't go into detail).

In high school I was always very ambitious and studying was basically my whole life. When I first started high school, I did have a few friends, however, the amount of friends that I had gradually decreased with time until I only had a few acquaintances in my last years of school. I'd talk to about 3 people in school, but never met them after school or hung out with anyone else. All that time was dedicated to studying. Also, when I say that I'd talk to 3 people, I mean 3 people exclusively. I only spoke to others when it was really necessary.

Surprisingly, I met my boyfriend during this time. I guess the reason why it worked out was because we met online and I could warm up to him "from a distance".

I'm 19 years old now and graduated from high school in a European country with the best score possible. I'm now taking off a gap year which I wanted to use to get my mental health back on track (to no avail as it seems right now) and to earn money. I'm currently interning at a software company (it's a longer internship) and also going to therapy, but I feel like therapy doesn't do much.

Anyway, that's my "story", if that's what you want to call it, onto my current situation. I have been a wreck since graduating. People keep telling me that I'm special and smart but I don't feel the same way and feel that people don't understand that for high school, you don't need to be intelligent. Even for maths all you need to learn are the different patterns and then just use them on the different questions. It's just a matter of how much effort you are willing to put into it. I applied for different universities in the UK to study computer science. I like what I do at my internship right now (I basically have my own project that I get to develop and that they actually want to implement into their own software (yes I know I'm getting exploited, I earn basically nothing)), but I'm so afraid I will fail the course, especially the maths part. I'm already 19, 20 once I start university. If I fail the first year I will be 22 by the time I could start any other course. No university will take me after spending a gap year working at a software company and other places after this internship, then doing a year of computer science and suddenly quitting. Of course they will know I quit because I was too stupid.

University is different than high school, in mathematical departments at least, you actually have to be smart.

In addition to that, I'm very anxious about a lot of things, like when I pull out of a parking spot I'm paranoid about having hit a car or I'm afraid of getting a speeding ticket all the time. When I leave work, I have to check my computer like 10 times to make sure it's turned off and even though I do not have access to anything like that, I'm always afraid I'd leak some private company information nobody is supposed to know. Or when I resell my old clothing online I have to check the addresses a million times and even after that I'm afraid I sent it to the wrong address. It was really bad during my finals in high school. After my math exam, I couldn't eat for days and during the exam I actually tried to memorize the question so I could check them at home.

My looks aren't as much of a problem now, even though I still hate them but I just do not have the strength to deal with that now.

I'm so afraid of ending up poor. I already save up all of the money I have but I just don't know where my life is supposed to go because I can not live like this. I cry on a daily basis and I feel like a burden to my boyfriend.