I know that, but the problem is that the alternative to being clingy and depressed, emotionally, is depressed and just pissed off at everything, or flat and apathetic. I don't like being pissed off; and I hate being emotionally flat. Clinginess is, in a bizarre, masochistic way, emotionally satisfying; the others aren't. The real problem here is that I've been infatuated with her for about two and a half years; the summer before this all started with her I had a girlfriend (camp relationship), but it was a camp relationship, which are like dynamite, and she was my polar opposite: she's a self-described slut and nymphonamiac; I'm a monogamous ball of cuddles. Mostly it was that I wasn't depressed (it was camp, after all), and we're both extremely smart people (even by the standards of that institution of hyper-nerds).
Then that winter, things...started going down the tubes. One, her boss is my father (he's history department chair). And it was winter, and I have seasonal affective disorder, and, well, long story short, I switched out of her class right before Christmas, then things got worse over that winter (getting better once spring came), culminating as written in me slitting my wrists over her. Combine infatuation with depression, and the end result is that I'm TERRIFIED of the woman. I shouldn't be, because she's extremely nice and completely harmless. It's completely irrational.
Shrink's advice (and just about everyone else's): get a girlfriend. I seem to suffer from an excess of affection that I need to be able to dump on someone.
The problem NOW is that I'm going on a gap year to Finland, where I'll have less than 6 hours of sunlight on Christmas, and also where the exchange rules specifically outlaw dating. But this past winter (the bad one was the one before this past), I was mostly fine. So I don't know how I'll be this winter.
What worries me most, I suppose, is that this I'm clingy and depressed but will be even more so if I do find someone to attach to; I keep having this...fantasy? No...more of a mental image of me and the aforementioned history teacher (usually) cuddled up in a broken little ball. God, that sounds pathetic...but that's as it is; I don't know how else to describe it. It'd be a completely dysfunctional relationship...and one that could only lead to bad things.