I'm writing this thread here because basically in my life I have no one who can support me, at least not the people I typically rely on for support. My mother had 3 deaths in her family (people I did not know so it didn't effect me) about a year ago and so she is in a perpetual state of grief. My father is in an abusive relationship with a drug addicted woman and he is constantly in financial strife and borrowing money from my sister and I, and he is basically hostile unless he is borrowing money from us (I refuse to give him any). So I cannot get support from my parents.
I don't know what triggered it, but about last week there was just a switch that flipped in my brain of panic. Like complete and total panic. I cannot turn it off, sometimes I can during the day but at night time when it is dark and it gets near bed time I start to have all of these racing panicking thoughts that end up making me unable to sleep. I feel miserable, and totally on the brink of crying all of the time. In fact today I did break down crying.
My dad, whose wife has strangled him in front of me and I had to pull her off of him- and she is an on and off drug addict- came to the house today. I live with my grandparents while I go to school, rent free. He used to live there too but he got married in may 2014 and it was a spur-of-the-moment wedding type deal, he was specifically married to her so he could see her at the drug rehab program she got sent to after being charged with filing false police reports (which was, the day she strangled him and I WAS THERE, she tried to claim to the police he assaulted her, which she didn't, and so the state charged her with filing false police reports and my dad who is an attorney represented her in court, even though in the past she's alleged things like he had child porn on his computer, which he did not.) anyway she is banned from our house for obvious reasons and he brought her here anyway while my grandparents are out of town.
I have been talking to his sponsor, my dad is an alcoholic, recovered and never relapsing for my whole life, but nonetheless he has addictive tendencies and I got into contact with his sponsor when all of this happened. I had initially gone to my mother for support but she is in such a state of grief she actually defended by father's marriage and blah blah blah. So she told me to go to his sponsor, which I did, and I am going to meet with him tomorrow about all of this but basically the whole point is everyone agrees he is in a toxic relationship since his wife has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, has distracted him from doing his work which has resulted in him being financially unstable and his business collpasing in front of him to the point that he cannot pay our cell phone bills and my sister is constantly having to fork over money in order to pay for these things. She works a part time job at a thrift store so she can't exactly afford it.
Anyway I'm derailing I'm just giving context of the situation...This, all of this stress, I called the police and the police said that because his address is our house he can bring whomever he wants there and legally they can't kick out this wife. My dad literally charged in my face and was aggressive towards me when I asked them to leave, even though yesterday I had assisted him in getting money and all of that. This brought me to tears, this stress, and I get it is a really stressful situation to begin with but it made me feel totally overwhelmed.
What I have realized over the past few days- I've been feeling the weird feelings since oh, Sunday, but the past few days I have been THINKING about shit. There is a constant internal dialog going on in my head about things that I cannot turn off, it's like I'm psychoanalyzing myself. What usually happens is I start thinking about how I have been financially dependent on my grandparents since I was 18 and I am soon to be 22 and how I have never worked a real job, and that it has taken me 4 years to get my associates degree which should have only taken 2 years. I am thinking about how if things continue I will have my Bachelor's at 24, still never having had a real job and still having no idea what I want to do and then at that point I will have to get a job and make a decision. I am feeling bad because I am realizing that at some point I will have to be living alone in some apartment, having to go to some job every day and work the same routine over and over. I realize there are certain areas which I could be happier in- nonprofit work or maybe somehow becoming involved in writing for television or movies or something, but basically these things are pipe dreams and it's kind of like...they are "so far away" and "impossible" that my dreams of these things are more of an escape from reality?
Here is the deal. I have withdrawn from my life over the years. Like In 2011, I was part of this nonprofit organization that I formed when I was 15 years old, I was meeting important people like the mayor, I was going to school, I had a semi-active social life and I felt fairly good about myself. But an incident happened- basically this girl ran away to be with her girlfriend who she had a restraining order against and because I did not have all of the info, my sister and I offered to pick her up if she was ever in danger and we basically encouraged this girl. The rest of the people in the organization found our emails by looking through her facebook, printed them out to everyone, publicly humiliated us in the group and so I no longer felt comfortable going there. This is the BEGINNING of my withdrawal, because for a while in 2011 and part of 2012 I tried to find a support network to replace that, by helping to start up the first asexuality organization in Utah, by getting involved in LGBT activism groups for teenagers, I went to the pride center and stuff. Basically what happened there is I was a racist turd and got sort of 'kicked out' of that group because of it. I have since educated myself about racism but back then I was ignorant. So I stopped going to that group and 2012-2013 is a period where I tried to make a "conversation" group with a close group of friends to talk about current ideas and stuff, and that fell apart, so I ended up never leaving the house for various reasons and getting really into the internet and roleplaying (not sexual, just fictional stories like collaborative writing). In 2012 I was dieting and exercising and dropped a lot of weight, but then problems in my famiy like 3 deaths on my mothers side happened and I kind of stopped exercising and dieting and gained a bunch of weight and as a result of that I think I ended up staying home more, I had car problems, I didn't have money to go out anyway so a lot of the time it was easier just to be at home. I stopped talking to my friends to the point that I only see them now like once every 3 months-- the last time I saw my BEST friend was Halloween. In 2012 I had this weird nervous breakdown thing where I decided I was taking too long to get my degree and that I needed to work and get an apartment and moved out I got a job at discover card for a week and what happened was I did *badly* and they were going to play the call of me on the phone in front of everyone to say what I had done wrong (they were doing it for everyone though) and the thought of that was so traumatic for me that I quit the job before that could happen and then I went back to school and that was that.
Skip to 2014 of october when the girl who had been the reason basically I was kicked out of koppir is murdered by her girlfriend, and I got back involved in KOPPIR but it was like A LOT. I would be gone for 9 hrs straight and the whole time I remember all I wanted to do was get home and roleplay. At this point writing online has become the center of my life to the degree that thinking about not being able to do it brought me into a panic so at this point I know I am addicted. I am also feeling bad about not being able to maintain the exercise and diet I had started- I had felt so good when I was lost all that weight but it also made me feel like I had ADHD because I had SO MUCH ENERGY and could not focus on anything to the degree that I failed my classes when I was really into exercise and diet, at that time all I wanted to do was excerise and diet so maybe I had become addicted to that too.
Anyway, skip to last Sunday when suddenly I realized I need to make major decisions in my life, like what university to transfer to, what degree to get, and my thoughts are panicking about how I have not been doing enough, how I have been "Wasting" all of this time. It got to the degree the other night that I realized roleplay had become a way for me to live life without really having to live it. My friends were online and especially in december, my roleplay habit had become SO BAD that with my mother and sister and most people I knew, all I had to talk about was what was going on in my roleplay. I used to read books and be able to tell people about politics or thoughts I had or conversations with my friends but it got to a degree where even I knew consciously that no one was interested in hearing about my stories but it was literally all I had to offer. So a couple of nights when I realized this suddenly I felt no interest in roleplaying. this is BAD because roleplaying is arguably my only interest and so now I have lost interest in the only thing I seemed to care about. I also feel like it's a good thing but it just makes me panic. I am in a constant state of panic trying to figure out what I am going to do with my life and like even little things like for examples I need to renew my driver's license by june- that gives me so many like fears and it seems like such a "big" task to accomplish. At the same time this fear caused me to apply to the universities I need to get into and also register to take the SAT this march, which I normally have to be prodded to do things but I just did it because I realized these things needed to get done. I guess a lot of what I realize lately is that whenever I would have an emotional problem I would go to my mother and call her for comfort, but since she has been in grief when I call her typically she will reject me or want me to comfort her, so it has gotten to a point where I realize perhaps I have an unhealthy tendency to not be able to regulate my own emotions, that I need other people to help me solve problems of affirm/validate my feelings which is true, like to day my sister was annoyed with me because I called the police and she thought it was "Dramatic" and I could not stick to my guns and feel justified, I began to self-doubt and feel bad and wanted her just to tell me she wasn't upset with my decision because her rejecting my decision made me feel bad.
I'm thinking a lot of this might root in low self esteem? The thing is I have been in denial about it for a long long long time because I am not the type of person who is suspetible to peer pressure. I have never felt the need to fit in with my peers but basically I do feel the need to be approved by the people I care about- like my family. I have bad social anxiety I think which is a result of being bullied as a child severely, so badly to the point that I literally don't remember most of my childhood. I am being completely honest, I don't think it's normal, I think I have blocked out most of my child. I think this has created trust issues within me, including the fact that I had two parents who were recovering alcoholics so they were not the most emotionally healthy people. My mother for example was neurotic and nervous all of the time- she had been abused as a child sexually and otherwise- so she has PTSD and I remember if we made a mistake she could yell hysterically at us for hours. We also as children would get dragged around the house by our hair. I know these are mild things but basically how it resulted in me growing up is I was constantly afraid of doing the "Wrong" Thing and I would turn to video games or the computer to escape my reality since at home and at my school I was not feeling very safe. Couple that with the fact that my dad has always been absent in my life even though I've SEEN him usually every weekend and since I was 16 I've been living in the same house with him, he possibly suffers from Bipolar disorder and prioritzes women and friends before his family, his life is a mess. My mom also possibly has bipolar, at least one therapist has said this but she later denies it was ever said. Plus on both sides of my family there is major depressive disorder.
I mean when I think about it the very fact that I dropped out of school at 15 then went to online school then dropped out of that school at 16, having moved into my grandparents house, and then at almost 17 moviing in with my other gradparents and starting to attend college that probably says a lot about my upbringing, because I feel like that's not usually normal? I'm pretty sure when I was 16 I was suffering from some form of depression and I had 2 panic attacks in that year, so I have been suffering from mental health stuff for a long time but it never seemed "serious"? I even contemplated hurting other people (never had been suicidal) and was glad that I had been taken out of school because there was the chance I might have acted on my impulses. A lot of things changed when I moved out, namely being separate from my mom and sister helped me but I still struggle with anxiety and it effect stupid areas of my life, like my #1 fear of getting a job is having to drive to work in the snow because a couple years ago I slid out of my lane while driving in snow because it was really bad and i literally cried about it for hours I was nearly in a carwreck it was very very scary.
So I don't know if I have bipolar or depression or just anxiety or what is wrong with me, but I'm pretty sure something is wrong with me and I don't know what to do or what to make of the situation. I've been to therapy before, in fact a few years ago when my sister had attempted suicide I went to therapy because I was struggling with fears of her hurting herself and stuff and then I went to therapy when I had dropped out of school to work and more recently I went to therapy for aneixty and when I was 15/16 I went to therapy but none of these times seemed to help or do anything. I don't think I was able to express what's going on in my head and even when I did like my last therapist said "well just break down your goals one step at a time" and like I get that but he let me go saying I seemed to understand myself and could think through my own problems and I didn't need therapy and it was like now here I am with all these issues again and I just don't know how to get help or what to do. I know this post is long and disorganized and blah but really I know how to EXPLAIN what is wrong with me, I don't know how to EXPLAIN this feeling of like...almost....it's gotten to the point where, no, I would not hurt myself, but the dread of thinking of my future makes me wonder why I am alive at all, like what purpose is there in me being alive? My big fear is that I will have to work a boring, miserable job and be "Stuck" in it the rest of my life to pay the bills and I realize this is a reality for a lot of people and it just makes me think like what is the big deal why is this so devestating for me there are some people out there who live in on the streets like so many people have it worse, I have so much to be grateful for and so I don't understand why it seems like i don't want to do anything or rather, I want to be successful but at the same time it seems so hopeless and I feel stuck where I am. Like I have NO worries, my grandparents are helping me financially go through school, and all I can think about is how I am "using" them and what is going to happen when I get my degree and am forced to do something, like I'll be 24 and that's assuming I don't flunk any classes and everything goes smoothly, like I'm just not sure if I am cut out for this world because it all seems to be going nowhere, like what is the purpose of anything anymore???
I don't know what triggered it, but about last week there was just a switch that flipped in my brain of panic. Like complete and total panic. I cannot turn it off, sometimes I can during the day but at night time when it is dark and it gets near bed time I start to have all of these racing panicking thoughts that end up making me unable to sleep. I feel miserable, and totally on the brink of crying all of the time. In fact today I did break down crying.
My dad, whose wife has strangled him in front of me and I had to pull her off of him- and she is an on and off drug addict- came to the house today. I live with my grandparents while I go to school, rent free. He used to live there too but he got married in may 2014 and it was a spur-of-the-moment wedding type deal, he was specifically married to her so he could see her at the drug rehab program she got sent to after being charged with filing false police reports (which was, the day she strangled him and I WAS THERE, she tried to claim to the police he assaulted her, which she didn't, and so the state charged her with filing false police reports and my dad who is an attorney represented her in court, even though in the past she's alleged things like he had child porn on his computer, which he did not.) anyway she is banned from our house for obvious reasons and he brought her here anyway while my grandparents are out of town.
I have been talking to his sponsor, my dad is an alcoholic, recovered and never relapsing for my whole life, but nonetheless he has addictive tendencies and I got into contact with his sponsor when all of this happened. I had initially gone to my mother for support but she is in such a state of grief she actually defended by father's marriage and blah blah blah. So she told me to go to his sponsor, which I did, and I am going to meet with him tomorrow about all of this but basically the whole point is everyone agrees he is in a toxic relationship since his wife has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, has distracted him from doing his work which has resulted in him being financially unstable and his business collpasing in front of him to the point that he cannot pay our cell phone bills and my sister is constantly having to fork over money in order to pay for these things. She works a part time job at a thrift store so she can't exactly afford it.
Anyway I'm derailing I'm just giving context of the situation...This, all of this stress, I called the police and the police said that because his address is our house he can bring whomever he wants there and legally they can't kick out this wife. My dad literally charged in my face and was aggressive towards me when I asked them to leave, even though yesterday I had assisted him in getting money and all of that. This brought me to tears, this stress, and I get it is a really stressful situation to begin with but it made me feel totally overwhelmed.
What I have realized over the past few days- I've been feeling the weird feelings since oh, Sunday, but the past few days I have been THINKING about shit. There is a constant internal dialog going on in my head about things that I cannot turn off, it's like I'm psychoanalyzing myself. What usually happens is I start thinking about how I have been financially dependent on my grandparents since I was 18 and I am soon to be 22 and how I have never worked a real job, and that it has taken me 4 years to get my associates degree which should have only taken 2 years. I am thinking about how if things continue I will have my Bachelor's at 24, still never having had a real job and still having no idea what I want to do and then at that point I will have to get a job and make a decision. I am feeling bad because I am realizing that at some point I will have to be living alone in some apartment, having to go to some job every day and work the same routine over and over. I realize there are certain areas which I could be happier in- nonprofit work or maybe somehow becoming involved in writing for television or movies or something, but basically these things are pipe dreams and it's kind of like...they are "so far away" and "impossible" that my dreams of these things are more of an escape from reality?
Here is the deal. I have withdrawn from my life over the years. Like In 2011, I was part of this nonprofit organization that I formed when I was 15 years old, I was meeting important people like the mayor, I was going to school, I had a semi-active social life and I felt fairly good about myself. But an incident happened- basically this girl ran away to be with her girlfriend who she had a restraining order against and because I did not have all of the info, my sister and I offered to pick her up if she was ever in danger and we basically encouraged this girl. The rest of the people in the organization found our emails by looking through her facebook, printed them out to everyone, publicly humiliated us in the group and so I no longer felt comfortable going there. This is the BEGINNING of my withdrawal, because for a while in 2011 and part of 2012 I tried to find a support network to replace that, by helping to start up the first asexuality organization in Utah, by getting involved in LGBT activism groups for teenagers, I went to the pride center and stuff. Basically what happened there is I was a racist turd and got sort of 'kicked out' of that group because of it. I have since educated myself about racism but back then I was ignorant. So I stopped going to that group and 2012-2013 is a period where I tried to make a "conversation" group with a close group of friends to talk about current ideas and stuff, and that fell apart, so I ended up never leaving the house for various reasons and getting really into the internet and roleplaying (not sexual, just fictional stories like collaborative writing). In 2012 I was dieting and exercising and dropped a lot of weight, but then problems in my famiy like 3 deaths on my mothers side happened and I kind of stopped exercising and dieting and gained a bunch of weight and as a result of that I think I ended up staying home more, I had car problems, I didn't have money to go out anyway so a lot of the time it was easier just to be at home. I stopped talking to my friends to the point that I only see them now like once every 3 months-- the last time I saw my BEST friend was Halloween. In 2012 I had this weird nervous breakdown thing where I decided I was taking too long to get my degree and that I needed to work and get an apartment and moved out I got a job at discover card for a week and what happened was I did *badly* and they were going to play the call of me on the phone in front of everyone to say what I had done wrong (they were doing it for everyone though) and the thought of that was so traumatic for me that I quit the job before that could happen and then I went back to school and that was that.
Skip to 2014 of october when the girl who had been the reason basically I was kicked out of koppir is murdered by her girlfriend, and I got back involved in KOPPIR but it was like A LOT. I would be gone for 9 hrs straight and the whole time I remember all I wanted to do was get home and roleplay. At this point writing online has become the center of my life to the degree that thinking about not being able to do it brought me into a panic so at this point I know I am addicted. I am also feeling bad about not being able to maintain the exercise and diet I had started- I had felt so good when I was lost all that weight but it also made me feel like I had ADHD because I had SO MUCH ENERGY and could not focus on anything to the degree that I failed my classes when I was really into exercise and diet, at that time all I wanted to do was excerise and diet so maybe I had become addicted to that too.
Anyway, skip to last Sunday when suddenly I realized I need to make major decisions in my life, like what university to transfer to, what degree to get, and my thoughts are panicking about how I have not been doing enough, how I have been "Wasting" all of this time. It got to the degree the other night that I realized roleplay had become a way for me to live life without really having to live it. My friends were online and especially in december, my roleplay habit had become SO BAD that with my mother and sister and most people I knew, all I had to talk about was what was going on in my roleplay. I used to read books and be able to tell people about politics or thoughts I had or conversations with my friends but it got to a degree where even I knew consciously that no one was interested in hearing about my stories but it was literally all I had to offer. So a couple of nights when I realized this suddenly I felt no interest in roleplaying. this is BAD because roleplaying is arguably my only interest and so now I have lost interest in the only thing I seemed to care about. I also feel like it's a good thing but it just makes me panic. I am in a constant state of panic trying to figure out what I am going to do with my life and like even little things like for examples I need to renew my driver's license by june- that gives me so many like fears and it seems like such a "big" task to accomplish. At the same time this fear caused me to apply to the universities I need to get into and also register to take the SAT this march, which I normally have to be prodded to do things but I just did it because I realized these things needed to get done. I guess a lot of what I realize lately is that whenever I would have an emotional problem I would go to my mother and call her for comfort, but since she has been in grief when I call her typically she will reject me or want me to comfort her, so it has gotten to a point where I realize perhaps I have an unhealthy tendency to not be able to regulate my own emotions, that I need other people to help me solve problems of affirm/validate my feelings which is true, like to day my sister was annoyed with me because I called the police and she thought it was "Dramatic" and I could not stick to my guns and feel justified, I began to self-doubt and feel bad and wanted her just to tell me she wasn't upset with my decision because her rejecting my decision made me feel bad.
I'm thinking a lot of this might root in low self esteem? The thing is I have been in denial about it for a long long long time because I am not the type of person who is suspetible to peer pressure. I have never felt the need to fit in with my peers but basically I do feel the need to be approved by the people I care about- like my family. I have bad social anxiety I think which is a result of being bullied as a child severely, so badly to the point that I literally don't remember most of my childhood. I am being completely honest, I don't think it's normal, I think I have blocked out most of my child. I think this has created trust issues within me, including the fact that I had two parents who were recovering alcoholics so they were not the most emotionally healthy people. My mother for example was neurotic and nervous all of the time- she had been abused as a child sexually and otherwise- so she has PTSD and I remember if we made a mistake she could yell hysterically at us for hours. We also as children would get dragged around the house by our hair. I know these are mild things but basically how it resulted in me growing up is I was constantly afraid of doing the "Wrong" Thing and I would turn to video games or the computer to escape my reality since at home and at my school I was not feeling very safe. Couple that with the fact that my dad has always been absent in my life even though I've SEEN him usually every weekend and since I was 16 I've been living in the same house with him, he possibly suffers from Bipolar disorder and prioritzes women and friends before his family, his life is a mess. My mom also possibly has bipolar, at least one therapist has said this but she later denies it was ever said. Plus on both sides of my family there is major depressive disorder.
I mean when I think about it the very fact that I dropped out of school at 15 then went to online school then dropped out of that school at 16, having moved into my grandparents house, and then at almost 17 moviing in with my other gradparents and starting to attend college that probably says a lot about my upbringing, because I feel like that's not usually normal? I'm pretty sure when I was 16 I was suffering from some form of depression and I had 2 panic attacks in that year, so I have been suffering from mental health stuff for a long time but it never seemed "serious"? I even contemplated hurting other people (never had been suicidal) and was glad that I had been taken out of school because there was the chance I might have acted on my impulses. A lot of things changed when I moved out, namely being separate from my mom and sister helped me but I still struggle with anxiety and it effect stupid areas of my life, like my #1 fear of getting a job is having to drive to work in the snow because a couple years ago I slid out of my lane while driving in snow because it was really bad and i literally cried about it for hours I was nearly in a carwreck it was very very scary.
So I don't know if I have bipolar or depression or just anxiety or what is wrong with me, but I'm pretty sure something is wrong with me and I don't know what to do or what to make of the situation. I've been to therapy before, in fact a few years ago when my sister had attempted suicide I went to therapy because I was struggling with fears of her hurting herself and stuff and then I went to therapy when I had dropped out of school to work and more recently I went to therapy for aneixty and when I was 15/16 I went to therapy but none of these times seemed to help or do anything. I don't think I was able to express what's going on in my head and even when I did like my last therapist said "well just break down your goals one step at a time" and like I get that but he let me go saying I seemed to understand myself and could think through my own problems and I didn't need therapy and it was like now here I am with all these issues again and I just don't know how to get help or what to do. I know this post is long and disorganized and blah but really I know how to EXPLAIN what is wrong with me, I don't know how to EXPLAIN this feeling of like...almost....it's gotten to the point where, no, I would not hurt myself, but the dread of thinking of my future makes me wonder why I am alive at all, like what purpose is there in me being alive? My big fear is that I will have to work a boring, miserable job and be "Stuck" in it the rest of my life to pay the bills and I realize this is a reality for a lot of people and it just makes me think like what is the big deal why is this so devestating for me there are some people out there who live in on the streets like so many people have it worse, I have so much to be grateful for and so I don't understand why it seems like i don't want to do anything or rather, I want to be successful but at the same time it seems so hopeless and I feel stuck where I am. Like I have NO worries, my grandparents are helping me financially go through school, and all I can think about is how I am "using" them and what is going to happen when I get my degree and am forced to do something, like I'll be 24 and that's assuming I don't flunk any classes and everything goes smoothly, like I'm just not sure if I am cut out for this world because it all seems to be going nowhere, like what is the purpose of anything anymore???
So, once she started doing this it helped her alot to reduce the amount of times she succumbed to the stress.
