"It's a self preservation thing... you see"

I like to torture myself mentally & emotionally. I like to think that most of my friends have abandoned me, that they don't contact me, not because they are busy, but they genuinely don't care. I can prove this by saying that only one person from my original year (MBBS04) ever contacts me. None of the others do. Nobody contact me from MBBS05 but at least a few contact me from MBBS06 - about four actually. I don't receive any contact from people I went to secondary school with, apart from one or two. They contact other people but they never get in touch with me. I like to think they have lives to live but in my mind they are just frightened of having a friend with depression or that we were never close, that our friendship was a farce.

I don't just torture myself with friendship. I inflict pain with other aspects of my life but mostly with love. Whenever I meet a girl I like, I automatically think that she will not like me. I give myself excuses - she already has a boyfriend, she hates me for no apparent reason, she's a lesbian, etc. I do that with the current girl I'm infatuated with. Throughout this morning's lecture when I sat next to her, this was going through my mind - she won't like me because I'm overweight, stupid, acne-ridden, ugly and geeky.

So why do I do this to myself? Why do I self-mutilate my ego? Perhaps misery loves company, that I love being miserable. My depression has a tendency to perpetuate itself at times, especially when the rock has gathered momentum down the hill. Or perhaps I'm preparing for the worst, that if something like this actually happens it won't damage as much as it should have?

Yet I genuinely want to stop torturing myself but don't know how. The only way I can see it happening is for someone to tell me that I am wrong and to prove it in front of me, that my friends actually care or that a girl will like me for who I am.

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Genuinely been miserable for the past few days. Infatuated with a girl who probably hates my guts, doing Paediatrics which I hate the most and now Thierry Henry has left Arsenal to join Barcelona.