I’m a 20 year-old college student. I’m majoring in screenwriting. This summer a producer looked at one of my scripts and liked it a lot. Haven’t heard from him in a while, but the encouragement alone makes me feel like I’m on the right path. I’m leaving to study abroad in London in 3 weeks with my best friend. I’m making more money than I ever have from a new job that’s ridiculously easy and sometimes even fun/creative.

But I’m hella depressed. And I feel like an ass for being so damn depressed.

I almost feel like it’s coming from fear but I’m not sure if that even makes sense.

A bit of backstory (here’s where things get really complicated): I came out as gay to my family during my freshman year of college. I thought it was as simple as that but then I started learning about gender and realizing why I felt so unhappy with myself/body. It’s because I’m not the gender I was assigned at birth. I guess I always knew this but I didn’t have the language/confidence to address it until very recently.

I’ve started dressing the way I want to and using different pronouns but I’m not 100% sure about where I stand. I think I’m non-binary but every time I do something new to dress and act more like a man (for example, I just started wearing boxers instead of girl underwear) I feel so happy. It usually only lasts a few hours (sometimes a day or two) and then the excitement wears off. Still, I feel so much closer to understanding who I am than I ever have in my life. And yet I feel like shit.

And the thing is, my family is so accepting. I know that even if I decided to transition, they would be on board.

But I also haven’t told my best friend — who lives states away — or anyone else about what I’m going through. I think this is one of the biggest contributors to my depression — the fear that I’ll go back to school and people won’t accept me. I go to a pretty catholic college (HELLA SMALL) with a great diversity program, but a very white very upper-class student body that I already have a hard time fitting into. Especially because I have social anxiety and am an introvert, and it’s a very Greek campus.

How could my fear be causing this many problems for me?

I have zero motivation. I cry almost every other day. Sometimes I’ll just lay on the floor and stare at the ceiling or sit at my computer and stare at a wall for no reason. I avoid my family (though it’s hard because most of them work from home) and I’m not very kind to them which makes me hate myself even more.

I just feel like everything else that’s positive in my life should be overriding my fear, but it’s not.

I’ve started seeing a therapist. Only one session so far and it helped a lot but I started to spiral again after just a day or two. We’re not speaking again until the 31st.

I just want to snap out of this. I feel like I’m wasting so much time.