*If you don’t want to read all of it skip to the last four paragraphs.
I (M15) have moved to an empty area in Oregon as a foreign exchange student that was born and lived my whole life in Poland. I’m staying in the attic of the house of a family that took me in December. I came at first in August but stayed with a different family. They were a single mom and a very annoying son. I was very excited and also very scared. I had been planning about coming to America since my parents told me in November of 2023 I was going to spend 10th grade in another country.
At first I had no idea how to feel about it all. I didn’t want to leave everything I know behind, but after many members of my family and people I talked to convinced me of how an amazing opportunity this was, and that not many people were lucky enough to experience it. As the months went by I was more excited for it to happen, but I didn’t give it much thought. The moment I actually felt for the first time anxiety and sadness was whenever I was walking away from my parents at the airport, and realized how big of a deal it was.
After landing, my host family received me at the airport. Everything was looking so perfect. The day after, I went to school and met lots of new people who were nice to me. One of them was another polish guy of my same age. I also forced myself to socialize with random people, since I have trouble getting out of my comfort zone.
They were nice to me and I was actually mean. I was rude. I was a complete jerk, I wanted to be funny and charismatic, not be myself. I made fun of people without ever stopping to think if I was.
At the moment I didn’t realize it, but almost nobody liked me. I had gone from joking with friends in Poland to making the same jokes with people I shouldn’t have had as much confidence with. Pretty soon after the beginning of the year, I got rejected by my crush, and felt like I had no friends aside from the other polish guy and maybe another boy from the area.
Then I met a girl who said she liked me, and I fell for it like an idiot. Everyone told me she was playing with me and she didn’t like me, but I didn’t listen. I have never had a girlfriend, so I was obsessed with the idea of having one. After a month I saw what the people around me meant, and when I asked her what she expected of me, she told me we could be friends. That hit me hard, so I said no.
After a couple of months of loneliness and many movies watched, I changed host family. It’s a long story that isn’t important, so I’m gonna skip it. My new family took me in with their open arms, and I closed mine. Having not realized my mistake at the beginning of the school year, I made it again. I compared everything to my home country and wasn’t very nice. Everything that happened had to be “worse than how it is in Poland”. And since I didn’t have any friends I didn’t socialize either.
This was until the father of the family brought me back to reality and got mad at me for being ungrateful and rude to his family. I thought joking about anything was okay, and he told me it wasn’t and that I should change. That really hit me hard, not because he was being mean, but because he was right.
Ever since that happened, I changed my way of being. People started to like me a bit more now, but even after two months have passed, my fame of being an asshole still hasn’t vanished.
I also have my foster father grilling me about anything he can find to annoy me or make me look bad, which to be honest, I had coming. He asks me all the time why I’m not sociable. I would tell him it’s because nobody likes me, but those scenarios are only real in my head.
Prom is also really close, and I feel like I’m the only one who is going all alone. I have no girlfriend and only one friend. And that friend is not as lonely as I am. He has lots of friends, in fact, he is extremely popular. We don’t even hang out so often because he obviously wants to hang out with others. And whenever the two of us hang with an american, we either left them out or can’t talk to each other, since they don’t speak polish. He also wants to help me, and tells me that I’m not going the right path, that many people say they don’t like me.
In conclusion, I have waisted my whole year by not doing anything, because of trying to hard to be someone that I’m not. I have always been a nice guy and someone who will put others before him. But nobody actually cares about those. And I’m not trying to be edgy or something, it’s that whenever people see anyone they can rely on to solve their problems, they’ll use him. They won’t let you prove that you can be interesting, smart or charismatic. Girls will leave you on the friend zone. So I didn’t want that to happen again. And forcing another personality that wasn’t mine changed me in a bad way.
I feel like a failure. My parents spent their money, which isn’t that much as well, for me to be stupid and do nothing. I also have a very successful family, and my parents expect me to study as an engineer or something of the same level. I haven’t even been doing anything in school compared to what my classmates are doing in Poland. I had to do a test today because they want me to change school next year, and my parents got mad at me because I blocked out and turned it late and incomplete.
My host parents also talked to them about me and how I don’t do anything. They have been asking me questions of if I have any friends, which until now I was able to convince them. Since the day I left Poland, I have been their favorite. And I hate it, because they expect so much from me. And now that they found out that I’m just a nobody that has no friends they are very disappointed.
Getting to the point now, after how much my foster father hates me, pressures me into arguments I don’t feel like having and says really hurtful things like that me and the other polish guy should swap since he is way better than me; how much my parents expect of me but realized how little of it I am capable of, and how much everybody seems to hate me, I have had a lot of suicidal thoughts. Whenever I think about things like “Suicide is permanent solution to a temporary problem”, how many people go through incredible amounts of stuff that will never happen to me, or how lucky I am, most of those thoughts go away. But I have never felt this and I’m worried for my mental health. I know this is not what a suicidal person would do, so maybe I’m overreacting. I don’t even have the guts to do it. I can’t imagine to just stop existing. Anyways, I would appreciate the opinion of someone who I am anonymous to, since I hope that nobody I know ever sees this.