Pardon me's Things

I know I sound fucking stupid and there are millions of websites on which I can look up advice, but I feel super comfortable in this community. I recently started high school and Im worried and uncertain about a lot of things. I want to know if high school is as horrible as people say it is. I'm just finding myself obsessing over everything, how I look, how my grades are, how people see me. I feel like it's not very healthy and all. I am genuinely curious about how much my grades really matter and how important is my image. I also want to know about everyone's experience.

*Warning long story ahead. If you don't want to read all of this, just skip to bottom paragraph*

Depression is something very serious and can completely ruin your life. At one point in life, I felt everything breaking apart. What hurt me most was the fact that I couldn't even understand why I was sad. At the time, I was having issues at home. I was someone who strived for the best grades and seeing my grades drop, made it worse. I remember coming home and just crying for hours and hours. My "friends" made it worse by making fun of my eye bags. I told someone that I trusted about my situation and they flat out said to me: "You don't have any right to feel depressed, you are just being too sensitive". That answer broke me.

Long story short, I am feeling better than ever, however there is something that seriously pisses me off. That is, people who fake depression for attention. Now I know this sounds horrible to say, however I have met someone who fake being depressed just to gain sympathy from others. There was a girl that I knew. Let's call her Ella. She was my friend at first. The thing was, she LOVED attention. She would do anything for it. Whether that meant hurting others, disrespecting teachers. She would often humiliate my other friend, who was having severe issues at home. Ella would comment on how my friend looked gloomy and sad. It just hurt me seeing my friend laugh off Ella's horrible comments as a joke.

I knew Ella very well. She had no problems at home. Had a huge number of friends, and she was very pretty and her grades very pretty ok. She would come to school saying how she was ugly and how she wanted to cut herself. Ofcourse, everybody (including myself) assured her that she was anything but ugly. Ella realized that using this tactic would get her a huge amount of attention. So she would randomly go on public chats and say things like cuts herself and how she felt that she was ugly. Now I suffered from the time someone literally said to me that I was making my problems seem way to big. I didn't want to be like that person and assume that Ella was doing it for attention, so I tried my best to assure her that she should stop.

One day, Ella comes to school and flat out humiliates a shy guy. He was known to have feelings for her. She tells him that he is ugly and commented on his weight. I remember him breaking into tears. It felt so horrible. All I could do was tell her to cut her comments out. A couple of weeks later, Ella, me and some other girls were paired for a project. Our assignment was on mental heath. We found an article of this boy sharing his story of his depression and I can still remember Ella's comment: "This guy was triggered that he didn't get pussy and tried to hang himself", I remember when I had depression. Never would I ever shoot someone's experience with depression down like that. Her comment was so ugly.

It made me angry. There are people like my friend who was called "gloomy" by Ella. Never did she get the same amount of support Ella did by faking her so-called depression. I tried my best to stay open-minded regarding Ella but I just couldn't. I thought to myself about how much I hate people like that. People who used made-up depression as a way to get attention when there are so many people who could use all that support to turn their lives around.

I'm sorry this was so long, I commend you for reading all of this. I would just like you to know that Ella WAS indeed faking it. Prior to this, she would find just about everything to get her attention. Anyways, I am wondering if any of you have encountered people who fake being depressed to get attention.