I cut myself sometimes. I started doing it last summer. A few months ago I posted in /r/selfharm about how worried I was that it was part of who I was now and I'd never be able to shake it. One user brought up an interesting point--one I'm still not sure if I agree with--which is that our actions are what create our identity, and because of this, identity is not set in stone but malleable and in fact destructible. I had and continue to have confusing feelings of self-hatred and guilt and I decided to act on these feelings by cutting my arms and legs. Therefore, I am a cutter. But if someone comes along and chops my hands off with an axe, I won't be able to cut anymore, so I won't be a cutter. Those initial negative emotions will still be there, and the means to act on them may still be available, but the point is that ultimately who you are is determined by what you do. A ballerina who's been practicing her entire life could suddenly break both her legs and then she wouldn't be a ballerina anymore because she'd be in a wheelchair. A murderer could stop killing people and then he wouldn't be a murderer anymore, even though he used to be. A writer who doesn't write anything because he has "writer's block" isn't a writer, even if he has ideas in his head for novels, even if he has the potential to be a bestselling author, he's still not a writer. A person can be lonely because of how they feel, but a person is only alone if they aren't physically in the company of other people, and that can change. Basically, the "you," the "essence" at the core of your existence, doesn't actually exist, because it's something that can constantly be changing. You could literally drop everything right now and buy a plane ticket to Nepal or something and become a farmer and just live off the land until you die and never come back here again or contact anyone from your old life again. Then you won't be a Redditor who browses /r/foreveralone, you'll be a farmer. Your entire identity can be broken down and rebuilt into something new, just like that. Whether or not you have the willpower to do this or not is a different story, but the main idea here is that WHO and WHAT you actually are is 100% determined by what you actually do. Right now you're a person, but 24 hours from now you might not be. Maybe tomorrow you'll be sitting at a traffic light and suddenly a cement mixer will drive by and flip over and flatten your car, and crush you into an unrecognizable mush of shattered bones and blood and blood-soaked clothing and intestines mixed in with sharp metal parts and gasoline and broken glass and the material from the seats. Then you won't be a person anymore. You'll just be inanimate matter, which is what we all started out as anyway in the core of some star before it sacrificed itself in a supernova explosion and sent its guts hurtling through the cosmos where they formed planets and life and conscious matter.

Make a list of everything about what, not who, you are at the present moment. Don't put down adjectives describing how you feel about your life or yourself, only objective nouns. Put down alone but not lonely, put down virgin but not unwanted, put down your physical characteristics but not unattractive. Take a look at the list and understand that this is what you are at the age of 21 but 22 in a few months. 23 years ago you were something else entirely; all the atoms that make up your body existed somewhere in some form, and before that they were somewhere else, and in the course of less than 25 years, you've changed so much and finally ended up whatever you are now. Think about that for a second--in less than 25 years, you went from not being a person to being a person, your entire soul went from nonexistence in the void to existence, here, in this world, on this planet. That's fucking crazy. Do you seriously think it's not possible change again by the time you're 47? If you can transform from being a fetus in your mother's womb to being an entire person in that same amount of time, I'd say it's completely possible to transform from whoever you are now into whoever you want to be. At the end of the day we're all victims of the laws of physics, and shit happens out of the time that's out of our control (like being born with the genes you have), but there are plenty of things you, as a self-aware collection of atoms that's part of an equally self-aware universe, can control. It all comes down to your actions. You can keep writing depressing rants on /r/foreveralone about how you hate who you are for the rest of your life, and for the rest of your life that'll be all that you are, and every single word of what you wrote will come true, or you can make every conceivable effort within your control to change, to self destruct and reconstruct your identity and do it over and over again every few years. When you're 72 you might be sitting at the kitchen table in a nice little house in a pleasant little neighborhood in a foreign country you've haven't been to yet, sipping a cup of coffee and holding hands across the table with a woman you haven't met yet, wishing your grandkids would come visit more often. That's 50 years in the future dude, twice the time it took you to transition from nonexistence into existence. You can't honestly tell me you don't believe it's possible to change again.