It's probably no consolation, but I was about 25 and never had a date, a girlfriend, or even an indication that anyone eligible or attractive would ever have any interest in me. Then one day a girl called my roommate. He wasn't there and I was and we got to talking. Less than a year later we got married.
The problem with this sort of fairy-tale happy ending is that there's no guarantee when - or if - it can happen to you. You can do some things to help improve matters, although there's no quick, easy, or guaranteed cure.
One of the most important is to try and determine how much of your rotten feeling is because you have a good reason to feel rotten and how much is actually your brain chemistry screwing you over. It was many years before I discovered, for example, that tea gives me anxiety. Not caffeine, but specifically, tea - even decaffeinated tea. I mostly switched to
coffee after that, but I'd grown up a tea-drinker.
Professional help is worth checking out. My experience is that psychologists are often very supportive. Around here, the psychiatrists are all crazier than I am, but local medical service structure requires a psychatrist or medicial doctor to prescribe anti-depressents, and unlike medical doctors, a psychiatrist is specifically familiar with the appropriate drugs as well as psychological treatment.
Going around depressed is like having an angry God's thumb pressed into your shoulders wherever you go. It's seeing the world through shit-colored glasses. Even the thought of doing things is exhausting. That's what things like anti-depressants are good for. They don't make you happy, but they take God's thumb off your back so that you can at least feel like trying. Being depressed is a lot like treading
water with bricks tied to your shoes. You can do it, but it's tiring and the minute you stop trying, you start sinking. A good anti-depressant is like removing the bricks. You may still be in the water, but it's easier to float.
It's generally considered that Behavioral Therapy is one of the most effective treatments, but until I had the right drugs, I had too much internal resistance to be able to respond to suggestions. Once you get the weight off, then it's easier to take advice, and in fact, you're likely to
want advice, since you've probably grown up feeling oppressed and depressed and actually have no idea how to behave normally.
One thing I've never seen said, but I'll state from my own experience is that there can be an obsessive side to depression. When you're depressed and you try something risky (like approaching a girl) and fail (and, unfortunately, girls are repelled by desperation), you end up replaying that failure over and over in your mind until it's very deeply embedded and just makes it worse to try again. One of the earlier, cruder medications I took actually broke that cycle by messing with my short-term memory. Essentially, you try, you fail, but you forget about how bad it felt, so it's easier to go on and eventually to try again (as opposed to go home and crawl under the bed and cry).
At the moment the science of the Mind is still very, very primitive. Only within about the last 30 years have we graduated from brute-force treatment to medications that can actually target specific brain chemistry problems, and we're a long way yet from being able to do a simple
test and determine which drugs might be best for a specific person. You may have to go through several and unfortunately, some may have unpleasant side-effects.
I don't take anti-depressants any more, because since I got put on blood pressure medication, one of the side effects of that drug is as a mild anti-depressant itself (it also reduces baldness). I rarely drink tea. I'm never going to be Mr. Sociable, but at least I don't feel totally hopeless.
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