This troper used to be a WideEyedIdealist until a couple years, some trust issues, twenty-two occasions of public crying, a MSN chat log full of insults and two church sermons later pretty much destroyed my faith and happiness in almost anything and now I'm pretty much this trope. I want to get better so badly, but there's no one important in my life that would even care.

God, I wish I could help. Do you accept hugs from strangers?

This troper's best friend (whom he considers an older sister even though she's two years younger than him) is defined by this trope.

I would think I fit this trope myself as a lot of the points are true of me, even though little by little, I'm starting to become more like a DefrostingIceQueen with some help...

I'm sad all the time, completely alone, and even on the internet i feel like I have no friends and still have issues. I'm terrified to make a mistake because I don't want to get yelled at anymore or be made fun of, so I spend all my time alone surfing the internet and being generally miserable. I can be happy sometimes but it feels like a facade and tears are pretty much never far away. Do I qualify?

Yes, you do. *sniff* You sound so much like a female version of me!

That sounds like me in 7th grade.

Original Troper here: that was kinda just the worst point in my life ever. I'm doing better but not by much. At the time that I wrote that I wasn't really thinking clearly and was pretty much sobbing. I still manage to keep a WideEyedIdealist outlook in spite of the above, so I guess in hindsight I don't really qualify except as a weird hybrid hah.

Just remember TVTropes and its random Tropers will always be here for you :)

OT: You have no idea how much that means to me. Knowing that there are people out there who are willing to hug a perfect stranger how just is upset and needs someone in their life? It's really been a wonderful experience for me to discover that people care. Thank you, over the past few months that this entry has been edited I think I've made steps to getting back in control of my life. I'm openly crying right now in joy. Life is amazing.

For those of you who romanticise the thought of dating a girl like this, let me tell you a tale of my girlfriend, who is a full on broken bird, as this troper discovered bit by bit while dating her. It's a bittersweet thing really, she is prone to depression, and a great deal of bitterness at being a poor girl in a relatively wealthy small town, and has a great deal of trouble with her family. The bad nights are pretty awful, for both of us, with the both of us feeling helpless to change anything, one of the worst feelings in the world is seeing someone you love suffer, and not being able to help, when she's so withdrawn she won't even let you hug her. But... there are rewards, because when things ARE going well.. and you get to see her open up to you, something you're sure no one else in the world sees, it's very gratifying. So, be warned, ye seekers of broken women... be prepared for hardship, be prepared to suffer some pain yourself, but if you can make it though, and things start to improve... then it starts paying off. Because, despite all of the problems, i love her, and more importantly, she loves me back.

Love you too :3 (I cried when I read this.. happy tears..) (Also fix your grammar! So many commas.. XD)

This other troper just wants to say...D'awwww. C:

This tale brought a little tear to the eye of this troper, who has (had) a broken bird girlfriend of his own. She had very rough childhood, which has tainted her young adulthood through depression and bouts of self-injury (which once crossed over into self-mutilation on one occasion, leading to her current whereabouts). Right now, we're not together, but I very much want to be with her again. More than one person has told me I don't know what I'm getting into, but I do, and I'm willing to deal with it because I LOVE HER. When I look in her eyes, I can see a world of pain, but I can also see the love she's locked away in her heart...her foster mom has said of all her children, she sees in her the most potential to love. Gotta stop now, otherwise I'll start rambling, so I'll just say thanks, you've given me hope (in a weird way).

This tropette is generally this. Grade school shaped a lot of bad memories for her mostly due to her above average height. She got abused emotionally, and sometimes physically; she avoided confrontation to not get a bad reputation (or worse reputation that comes with being the tallest) her parents did nothing to help her deal with her problems except tell her "Get over it". She didn't make a lot of friends in school either, being the brainiac didn't help much either, the friends she did make didn't really do much to help her either except be the occasional shoulder-to-cry-on. She was called lots of nasty names, and even a teacher had her on their bad side. Middle school didn't get much better, as she developed an inferiority complex, kept hearing the unavoidable, "Do you play basketball?" even before anyone asked her name. Later she developed a {{Kuudere}} persona around her friends, and her Amazon qualities did do her justice to the opposite sex . Nowadays, she remains optimistic as she did all these years to mask her caged depression and anxiety, more of {{Dandere}} type, a little cynical but lately finds emotional comfort and refuge in art, Anime/Manga, and the internet.

You sound kinda like me - only I'm short - can we be friends?

This troper has this badly. It was helped along by meanness from my peers from the middle of elementary school through the beginning of high school, a less than stellar relationship with my dad (which I'm honestly just starting not to even care about anymore), and other issues. With me, it manifests itself as mental illness (major depression with bits of bipolar disorder thrown in). My anal-retentive and earnest personality don't help matters either. But nonetheless, I'm getting better with help.

This troper's mother, having been broken a fair bit in her childhood and teenage years, definitely qualifies, albeit without the {{Jerkass}} aspect. She's more of an IronWoobie if anything. I'm well on the way to becoming one myself, although my mum has been through far worse.

This troper, probably? Funnily it have evolved (or rather, favored) into a complete NietzscheWannabe. Not that it is a bad thing or anything at all.

Oh boy where do I begin? My childhood where I was made to feel worthless by my sister and my alchoholic mother's boyfriends? Never fitting in at school causing me to be socially awkward? Family issues? Everything that happened last year? I am quite certain I qualify for this. I don't think I could even go into details without crying.

God, I want to help so bad. I have that problem too - can't talk about my elementary school years or a lot of my home life without crying. People like us can stick together.

I think I can elaborate better now. Last year my emotionally abusive father crossed the line. He was looking after my cat(who I saw as my child and loved more than anything) but he lost her. She got out his window. I put up posters for months afterwards and was always looking for her but she was never found. This destroyed my life. I was unable to do anything at all for 9 months and I still just manage to get by. It helped me realise that this wasn't the only terrible thing he had done to me and that I really was being abused even if he never lay a hand on me. It didn't help when my uncle called up and called me "Childish" and said "It was my fault he was harassing the family". How can I be responsible for what that schizophrenic childish man does? How could I have trusted him? I still have nightmares about him and I fear whenever I pass the suburb his mother lives in on the train. I have cut off all contact with him thankfully but it doesn't bring my cat, no my baby back.

As a kid, this was me. Well, after dealing with some horrible experiences, starting with being sadistically tortured in many horrible ways for months on end by my best friend at the time (4th grade), having the entire school bully me for one reason or another and/or threaten to take my life (5th grade), and then having any good deeds end up bringing me more bullying and creepy stalkers (6th grade). I was driven to suicidal depression twice before high school, and I never told anyone until half a decade after everything happened! Still, after middle school, I kind of did a 180. I went from being withdrawn and moody, cynical to a fault without trusting a single person around me, to a bubbly goofball who went out of his way to find other broken birds and help them fly. So far, I have had great success. ^_^ It also helps that I learned most of the people who did torture me were also broken birds to some extent, which made me pity them...except for the friend in 4th grade, who I am sure will not live past the age of 22 if he keeps doing what he's doing.

I love you. You. Rock.

I think I am: while barely studying and still having excellent grades, being a responsible big sister for my two siblings and an obedient daughter, I have been slowly breaking down, because no matter how many times I try, my mother doesn't seem to realize that I am really smart, and the fact that my father doesn't live with us despite not being divorced from my mother have made me search for a paternal figure that I don't seem to find. Also, I've slowly become cynical, cold and a little unstable. It gets worse when you find out that I have no social skills, for what my mother sometimes scolds me and that I prefer arts to sports and science. Add some self-esteem problems and the discovering that your parents were going to get divorced years ago and that the arrival of your beloved little brother was not planned to the mix, too. Oh and I almost forgot that I'm also an ill girl with Rheumatic Fever and a weak immune system who began realizing the true meaning of everything at age fourteen, and that even when my mother is a dedicated Christian, doesn't seem to care for any of my problems... I think I got you tired of all this, didn't I? And there's still more...

Things started going downhill in 6th grade when I lost my friends and spent my time looking at movie reviews. But ItGotWorse. The school had toxins in it, so I moved-''twice.'' Then Melanie came...

One of my male friends is this. He didn't have any friends until myself and my best friend took pity on him and after that he became part of our friendship group. We thought he was just another shy one, but turns out he absolutely hates himself. He was apparently bullied or ignored all through school and it sounds like his parents had a messy divorce when he was a kid. His behaviour really bugs us- he will suddenly walk off for no reason which makes the whole group worried. He also has awful black moods, which get the whole group down. Being friends with him is really hard, because most of the time I'm either really worried or really irritated with him. None of us have a clue what to do to help him.

I used to hold out a lot of hope for a lot of things, including the Internet and the sanctity of KeepCirculatingTheTapes. ...not so much anymore.