I am writing this as a soon-to-be 30-year old man, who has never even held hands with a girl. I will not use the more well-known labels, because they are dangerous, and if this thread stays up, I would appreciate you not using those either. My sole purpose in writing this is to beg anyone reading this to help out young guys they see becoming socially isolated. I would write something similar for girls, if I could actually offer any insight into their world. I'm not competent enough for that, so I won't.

The list of reasons for my own situation is long and they all tie into each other, but here are a few: relentless bullying, shortest and weakest in class, poor and somewhat narcissistic/abusive parents, way too nerdy, very late puberty, weird way of walking, poor hygiene, crooked teeth, and so on. At least I didn't have glasses and was thin because of not enough food and lots of physical work on the grandparents' farm.

THE FIX: I have been going to therapy for a year and will most likely for years to come. Nothing before that helped. I could keep up a training or diet regimen for a week until I missed one day, thought that I was worthless anyway, no woman could ever like me, why was I even born, and on and on and dropped the regimen until a few months later, when the same loop started all over again. Why did I even stumble into therapy? Well, after a particularly long death march on a project I was working on, I was so exhausted that I couldn't even think about suicide for a few weeks. And so the thought was that 'OK, might as well try therapy, nothing else has worked so far'.

Reaching out and them accepting it will be hard, but please do it. I would not even know where to begin, though, and how to get through that wall. A teacher offering help through e-mail after a very serious bullying incident that caused me to be hospitalized for a week? Ignored, she was just covering her tracks and pitying me. College roommate telling me that I was the only person in our dorm just staying up until 3 am playing video games and to not waste my life? Met with disbelief, because I thought I was too ugly and poor to hang out with other people. After all, everybody in university had at least middle-class parents, was beautiful and smart and talented and well-dressed, and there was no way a poor country bumpkin like me could fit in. And so on and on...

Why am I even asking for this? Because a few months ago I was cleaning out my stuff after moving, saw one of the few photos I had allowed to take of myself in high shcool and thought, 'Hey! What the fuck? I wasn't that bad looking at all, actually. So where did it all go so wrong?' So, if you can, find a way to help a 15-year old guy find himself, so that he could live a much better life than I have so far. If you can't, and probably won't, because it's probably on the level of 'inventing cold fusion'-hard, then it's OK, too.

In conclusion, I wouldn't call my life bad: I eventually graduated university after dropping out 2 times, I met many awesome people through the Internet, I saw things you people wouldn't believe when playing MMOs. But still, it could have been so much better if somebody knowledgeable had gotten through to me years earlier. But at the moment, I don't even see how that could have happened: with low enough self-esteem, you yourself become unwilling to seek out any kind of help and any help offered seems like a joke at your expense.