Hey. Do you know who I am? Probably not. Nobody knows who I am. Nobody understands my pain. Nobody.

My name is Tom, but names no longer mean anything to me. Not since I realized how much my life sucks. My parents both make steady livings and all my material desires are being met, and do you know how much that empties my soul? Yesterday my mother told me to take out the trash and I had a rant about how she was oppressing me, shortly before I returned to eating the dinner that she had cooked for me and purchased the ingredients with the money she made at her job.

Don’t even get me started on my father. The man works as a slave for some faceless corporate entity so he can provide food and shelter and comfort for my mother and sister, and he doesn’t understand me at all. Never mind the fact he went through fairly similar if not identical circumstances in high school with women and work or all the other things that are giving me such incredibly-atypical-nothing-at-all-like-what-millions-of-other-teens-suffer-through grief, none of his attempts to talk to me can help me or help him understand my indescribably profound pain.

It’s terrible, it truly is. I hate my life that is completely unlike anything any other teen has experienced.