Ashley, I love white noise too! I was disappointed when we moved house about a year and a half ago because I couldn't hear the traffic as much.
Hugs, I've been doing the same thing too. When I first started going downhill a couple of years ago, I was quite unstable and my friends weren't sure how to take it. I had a breakdown towards the end of year 11, when one of my best friends got a school leadership position and I didn't. She went to hug me because I was crying and I pushed her away, then I said to her, "Everything I do, you do better." It was never a competition, but we did the exact same subjects, had similar interests, same group of friends. She was more popular than me, she got the top grades of our classes and got roles in the school play when I didn't. She never saw herself as better than me, but since I was depressed I thought I was a failure. Around that time, we had to write a reflective speech about our life so far, and as a part of that we were expected to write about difficult times we'd been through. I was chatting to another friend on Facebook about what we were going to write in that part. I mentioned I might talk about what had happened with our friends, like how I felt like a failure and that was a hard time for me, and he said, "Don't mention that or everyone's respect for you will go down the drain." He also told me "You can't expect to have a go at one of the most popular girls in school without there being consequences." For the 2 weeks since what had happened with her, apparently everyone had been talking about me behind my back and they were annoyed with me for what I'd done. Yet no one had asked me about it to my face. I felt hurt that no one realised that was my cry for help, that there was something else going on.
At the start of grade 12, another one of my close friends who I thought would always be there started drifting away from me. She said she couldn't stand being around me anymore because I was too negative and down on myself. I was still going downhill then. It's been almost 2 years since I yelled at the girl who was school captain for our senior year, and it's been playing on my mind a bit. I was sorting out my old school books, and in the margins of my biology notebook are random scribbles and drawings from the 3 people I've mentioned. In that class, it was just the four of us from our group. It was hard remembering what it was like before all that happened, to what things are like now. I've lost a lot of friends because of my anxiety.
This is the first time I've ever written what happened out like this, so sorry if it's a bit long winded. I was kind of processing it myself at the same time.
See Hugs, we need to stop torturing ourselves with the past. The problem with comparing ourselves to others is that we compare their best qualities to our worst, which isn't fair. It's strange how we would never do that other people, but when it comes to ourselves it's a whole different set of rules and expectations.
Kaitie.
P.S. Sorry to be a bit of a downer there!