depression_now!

So this is probably quite the specific question that might be pretty unusual but I guess it's probably still relatable to get rejected from people (even if I don't get answers I think it's just good for me to write this off my chest).

I 22/male am very lost in life due to my depression and anxiety.

I was searching for a place I belong for pretty much my whole life. Early on I started becoming very fascinated with America, their people and the culture. Some might argue it's just because American media is so influencial but I admired the country so much that I wanted to know and learn everything about the country and become as American as possible.

By doing that I thought Reddit is a good place to ask questions about America and learn from people who are directly from there. After very good initial experiences I sadly encountered strong hate towards me about two years ago (probably because I was asking too deep questions and haven't thought through them enough so they might've sounded ignorant/judgemental which was not my intention and I think it was a misunderstanding. [If u want further context an example would be: I asked many questions about positive topics that I admired, but during my research I also stumbled upon things people said about America that might be more negative/critical/controversial but important/valuable to know in my opinion and since I wanted to learn everything about America, both the positives and negatives, I just wanted to learn whether they were true or not because I didn't wanna be judgemental like others who rush to conclusions. So maybe they misinterpreted it as bate since the detail of human interactions gets lost in text based social media and my wording might've not been good enough]).

I tried to explain to the sub that this really hurted me and that I had no bad intentions but I only received rejection.

They said very hurtful things such as that they wish I would end my life, that I'm a loser and that I should never come to the country and it broke my soul.

Since then (about 2 years ago) I really started to lose the last fundamental passion and hope I had in life. It's like my fundamental passion got destroyed by this. It feels like the people who I deeply admired hate me and reject me and might be mean/bad people. To me it's the worst feeling I could feel, especially as a person who's already deeply lost and insecure. Maybe it's just because I'm not good enough for America anyways and I'm just fundamentally not on the same level.

I know my thinking is probably not reasonable/very foolish and doesn't make much sense but it is how my depressive/anxious OCD brain works and I can't get rid of it. I get very strong mistrust of people and this was probably the worst experience to trigger that in me.

This was literally everything to me as I deeply resonated with American culture. It gave me joy, a purpose and hope but it all crashed and I don't know what to do. I feel like my life depends on this. I'm fighting with these thoughts for probably 2 years now and asked for advice many times but just can't get over this. It's like this experience got burned into my brain and now I can't forget it anymore. When I watched Americans online it filled me with lots of joy, now every time I see an American online I get sad and depressed. And now it's like every time I see an American I have this mistrust and thought what if they might be evil, which is very unhealthy for me since I'm almost projecting it that way and obviously if you look for something bad in someone you will find something bad in someone and they will sense that and get off putted, further worsening the cycle. Reasonably this has nothing to do with America but I still can't get rid of this construct cause it might be due to my life history and my OCD/overthinking which is the worst when it applies to my idols.

I know that Reddit probably is a negative/hate filled place anyways and isn't a good representation of American people and people on there might be like that anyways because it's Reddit and it might be the same with people from any other country cause people are people and I'm way too sensitive. The problem is just that because of my interest in America and disinterest in everything else I almost exclusively only interacted with Americans in American subs. And even if I would experience something similar with a different country it just wouldn't affect me as much as the one I deeply admired and looked up to.

I wish I could be more mature in this regard but it's affecting me so deeply subconsciously. America is everything for me.

I hope someone here has some understanding for my odd situation and has some advice. I wanted to post this on the Reddit sub r/depression but even before it got published a moderator immediately banned me and argued with me that I'm not depressed and am not allowed to talk about the reason why I'm depressed even though everyone else there is talking about it. It really is a struggle living with this burden and people being so destructive and cruel.

It's probably too late anyways, knowing me I assume I will never recover from this.😞