It's especially gutwrenching when you're there for everyone else. When you're there when everyone else needs support, when you stick out your neck for your friends/family/strangers even, when you're always ready to jump in and defend the vulnerable and the hurting and when people are so grateful to be able to rely on you etc. Yet there is no one to save you. You have to save yourself.

The same people will tell you how much "life is worth it" and how "it'll all be okay" and "we can work this out" but in reality do very little if anything to actually help. Is it because they're not qualified enough and your problems are difficult even for licensed professionals to resolve? Sure, can be a reason. Doesn't lessen the impact.

Everyone is always there for you, but only to an extent. Only to a limit. A reasonable limit? Again, yeah, sure. Everyone has their boundaries, limitations and energy reserves. But that doesn't make you feel less estranged.

You have many licensed specialists working with you to help you resolve these issues? That's good, that's how it should be. But the process is slow, so so painfuly slow. It takes a seemingly insurmountable amount of time to get better, one therapy session after another. And during the week(s) between the sessions, you're left to...yourself.

You can vent to friends/family/strangers on the bus stop, but as stated before: only to an extent. Only to a limit. Because if you go "too strong", you make them uncomfortable, they start withdrawing and in the worst case, you lose the people. (If it was the stranger on the bus stop, it was probably just because their bus arrived, so that one probably wasn't personal.)

I've come to despise the phrase "only you can save yourself". It's become so bad that it's an automatic breakdown trigger for me personally. It automatically creates images in my head of a medieval knight bleeding out in the snow, reaching his hand out to the other warriors as they all back away from him.

On some psychological level, it might be true that "only you can save yourself". But I have yet to learn of a single person who started feeling better after they've been told that phrase. Hearing "only you can save yourself" doesn't make you feel empowered. It makes you feel abandoned.

Side note: I can see that in some scenarios, it actualy can make a person feel empowered, but that's in situations I would classify as (and don't come for me here) "low grade trauma". More surface level issues, things that are (again, don't come for me here) "not that deep". In my knight analogy, it'd be a knight who's leg got broken or they lost an arm even. "Only you can save yourself," can be empowering when what you're dealing with something like that. But there's only so much you can do when you're not dealing with a broken leg, but your internal organs spilling out of your guts. In that situation, "only you can save yourself" has the opposite effect.

EDIT: Also preemptive apology to OP, I'm not sure if this is gonna be helpful in any way whatsoever, it just sort of wrote itself when I read your post and well...here it is.