Dissatisfied with my life. I'm a 29 y.o. male heterosexual virgin, though that isn't what really bothers me so much as my inability to form a relationship with women. The entirety of my experience was three dates with the same chick I met off Okcupid last year; she flinched whenever I so much as brushed up against her and wouldnât shut up about Dr. Who and steampunk conventions. I wanted to bludgeon her.
I've had a late start with dating because, generally speaking, my life is awful. Since I was 4 or 5, Iâve been legitimately mentally ill. It didnât start all at once; obsessive compulsive disorder was the original problem. My first real memories are of imagining myself cutting off my own face with a knife. This continued nonstop and I really felt like I needed to do it. I invented rituals of repetition to distract from the compulsions, which landed me in therapy throughout elementary school. Needless to say, I never made any little friends; even the teachers thought I was nuts. Each year, it was the same idea about shipping me off to a 'special school'.
In junior high, the migraines started in. Those could drop me for days at a time with the blindness and nausea alone but far worse was the bipolar disorder which surfaced. The depressions caused me to miss months of school and were accompanied by suicidal ideations. The manic phases feel good but I can never tell when Iâm in one;their downside is that I become self-destructive. Iâve cursed out teachers and professors, smashed up the cars of people who pissed me off, shoplifted, the works.
High school, I developed Crohnâs disease and the attendant arthritis in my knees and shoulders, plus rashes and ulcers on my face and back. I missed a couple years because I was in the hospital and I went permanently bald from the Prednisone I was given, which really was the last straw for my sense of humor.
By college, I think something in my brain must have melted, because I started getting panic attacks constantly, 24/7. To this day, ten years later, if I donât take a Klonopin every 6-8 hours, I start to feel as if I canât control my body and I (hopefully) pass out from hyperventilation soon after. The best part is that they are entirely random and unconnected to any outside stimuli. I managed to get a Master's online, though by the time I was done I had suffered three nervous breakdowns.
Oh, I have severe asthma and Iâm sterile too.
So, as you might imagine, all of that hampered my social skills a bit. Iâve been in therapy for 20 odd years; pills have stabilized me a bit but they have their nasty side effects. I have absolutely no energy (Iâve fallen asleep at stoplights and in the middle of conversations), frequently dizzy, very low metabolism, and lower than normal libido. I've tried acupuncture, chiropracture, all sorts of vitamins and herbs but the only result they have ever had is to make me very slightly sicker. The docs have tried tapering off the pills as well but it caused the depression to come back full force and resistant to the chemicals so that only a year of electroshock plus increased doses of much worse meds got me stable again. So, I've learned to live with it.
I feel trapped. I work two jobs, seven days a week, for a pittance (despite my graduate degree, in this field, I will barely break 20K this year). Iâve been looking for a full-time position for several years now but haha, no. The energy drain from sixteen pills makes job hunting virtually impossible on top of real work. I have no âfree timeâ, no âsocial lifeâ, certainly no friends. If you were to track my movements, it would be a straight line from work to bed for four years, maybe the dog park (I love my dogs). Hell, I havenât even left the city in more than a decade. I get sick so often that vacation time is always used up recovering.
What prompted me to sign up here was this winter break. Now I didnât actually get much time off, just a three day weekend but it was enough to allow me to think about myself and plunge back into a quasi-depressive state. I realized that I am profoundly miserable and terrified of myself. I donât want to lose any more of my mind, I need to stay in control but every time Iâm alone I can feel myself slipping. I need someone to anchor me, to distract me from myself. I need to be normal or as normal as possible but I donât know how. I seriously donât know what I have to offer a girl besides a tremendous amount of pain if she got close to me. I don't want to bother my family, they have bigger problems (my younger brother is at least as nuts as I am and twice as violent and my little sister has multiple sclerosis) and I don't have friends. So I go to message boards to complain to strangers...
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