Man that dude was not your friend. To turn on you and not understand it, and let his boyfriend kick you while youre down. Yeah, your friend can be upset with you, but still should support you. You're the victim. Fuck that guy.I'm just another broken asshole ERA, that's all. Let's call this story 'Been Down', feels right all things considered haha
My life has crumbled in the last couple of years; maybe even the last decade. Lost my ability to trust or be comfortable around acquaintances, close friends... it wasn't long before I couldn't even get a sentence out to the people at work because my anxiety had just flown right off the charts. It's rooted in my childhood, bc of course it is, years of being bullied and then sidelined and made to feel invisible has left me with massive trust issues. Follows me into adulthood with an increasingly out-of-control weed habit.... followed by a codeine habit...it was just numbing me. Social to begin with, then it became a burden to see people as I would feel deep panic setting in and it was humiliating for me to experience that around these confident, outgoing people who are supposed to be my best friends. Slowly my walls got higher and higher, I became more and more distant, more and more insular....unable to sleep for the constant insomnia, unable to eat properly because of bulimia. Just out of fuckin control with no way to assert authority over my own life and regain the wheel because it was all just too much. I became manically overconfident in my skills; writing, music, comedy in spite of a complete lack of vision for how to execute these actual career paths or goals. They were just keeping me buoyant. I still haven't let go.... I'm twenty-eight and lacking in a vision for my life that I truly care about. I'm three years deep into an English degree and I still don't know where the fuck it's going to land me. I had worked menial jobs for so long just to dig myself out of fuckin weed debt...
Despite my life becoming quiet throughout all this I was able to stay relatively open and honest with my ailing father, who supported me no matter what. He had my back, gave me emotional support, we would speak all night sometimes, even when he had to move away for treatment in England. He was my rock; perhaps my only real rock. Well you know where this is going.... he passed last year, the cancer finally got the best of him, to the surprise of everybody and I'm still just fuckin devastated. Can't really speak about it without cracking up so I won't, but I will always, always feel heartbroken by the look he had the last time I saw him, so painfully hopeful, yet so clearly frightened and incapable of accepting what was about to happen to him. And what happened to him.... I only ever got to hear about it because he requested that I didn't see him like that.
Of course, before he left he felt obliged to tell me all about my mother and what she had done to him and how it had nearly driven him to suicide; bringing strange men and women into the house while my dad (and me, and my brother) were all there to fuck them. Stuff I'd already kind of known... but the bad blood and cruelty in my own home, that tore it apart? I didn't know that. And I didn't know the effect it had on my old man, either, which was both infuriating and heartbreaking.There have been issues between me and my mum for a while now but now I simply can't trust her. She was literally the person who encouraged me to tell white lies whenever it was beneficial to me. Well anyway....
After my dad went, I managed to quit the weed, I dropped the codeine habit and I feel relatively clear... but I still just feel fuckin empty. Desireless. There's nothing that excites me any more, there's nothing around the corner that I am actively looking forward to. All I really want at this point is to feel accepted and loved wholly, and this desire has consumed me at the expense of just about everything else. But it's futile. My walls are up, my issues are abundant. I'm not your garden variety creep. I simply don't trust people and they can feel it, they don't wanna be my friend. There's one guy that has stuck by me through the years; this crazy, super-outgoing new-age hippie guy who has spent most of the last decade traversing Asia with no money and a guitar. Generally he does this to great effect, and once or twice we have done it together to great effect. Because he's never home any more, however, I never really have a chance to meaningfully connect with him, and as things have gotten worse for me, I have felt myself grow distant even from him.
Well, when my father died I did come into an inheritance... so I chose to spend some of it travelling; no thinking, no planning.... just doing. I didn't really care about the places I was going, I didn't really have an itinerary of things I wanted to do and see... I just wanted to feel less pain, and more connected to others. Maybe I would meet somebody who could actually accept me, and help me overcome the trust issues that I couldn't tackle alone. And, of course, I wanted to take this adventure on alone. After traversing China and Hong Kong for some combined forty days, I elected to go visit the aforementioned friend in Mongolia. He had told me he was feeling pretty isolated too, having spent the entirety of the past year around his boyfriend who was increasingly falling back into old, terrible habits (alcohol abuse, emotional abuse...). I had a choice between Vietnam, Japan and Mongolia; and were it not for my concern about him I would have arsed it to Japan. Instead, I went to Mongolia.
They pressured me a lot to hurry up, expedite my Visa process, get planes instead of trains so we could leave the city post-haste, and I dropped significant amounts of money, effort and patience to get this done and make it there. Only to make a terrible realisation; that I had left the bulk of my medication back in a hostel in Guilin; meaning that I only had enough Sertraline (Zoloft) to last me about a week. That's where my hippie friend comes in with his classic bullshit; 'you're always going to be fucked up taking those pills', 'come let mama nature take care of you', 'stop hiding behind your screen and just let go already', etc etc. Kill me now. Despite arriving almost a week sooner than I original planned to, they refused to accept that I needed to spend an extra day in the city at least investigating my situation and trying to figure out a way forward for me - there are hospitals, pharmacies, and so on - they demanded that we leave tomorrow at 8:45am for some pokey lake somewhere out in the sticks, no leg room for my own needs, despite the major allowances I'd made for them.
Well I told them that morning I couldn't come and they flew off the handle at me, so I spent a few days by myself in Ulaanbaatar mainly drinking coffee and figuring out where to find meds (they've been shipped from my local GP at home to the place I'm staying at rn). When we reunite the boyfriend won't even fuckin speak to me. I cook for them and he refuses bc it 'makes him sick' Next morning they come in together and the boyfriend declares that he doesn't like me, never has, and lists everything about me that he dislikes. Friend tries to moderate. I walk out. Some time later, the friend meets me for coffee and tells me I was being 'cunty'. I'm just done. I leave the two of them. I didn't put a damn foot out of line, his boyfriend was just so fucking jealous and insecure about there being a single other person in my mate's life that he (successfully) managed to take a shit on our friendship. And my life, once again, gets just that little bit quieter...
There was a girl I was seeing for a couple months. Someone who was frankly too good for me. Warm and accepting, ridiculously beautiful, charming and hilarious; but my colossal trust issues ultimately scared her off, because I said one stupid thing taken the wrong way... and the last words exchanged were 'leave me alone'. Well I fuckin feel alone more than ever right now, to be honest. Throughout all this crazy bullshit recently she has been an absolute rock for me and I've blown it, and now I'm alone again. I care about her a lot, but what it means symbolically to have been rejected by even her, for my issues, is just overwhelming me a bit. I feel like my problems are insurmountable, that there's always going to be this air of the untouchable around me; I repel everything but plant life at this point. Not even cats like me. I'm sure I even get less mosquito bites than the average person. But I do have a fungal infection....
Yes I do like myself. I'm relatively charming, have a nice smile, I'm full of love and empathy, often quite funny and on the right day (not this one) I can write the fuck out of a good few paragraphs of prose. But no, it's not enough. I am tired of feeling empty and isolated and alone and devoid of passion and love. I've tried for so fuckin long to fix myself and I just don't know how any more. Tried registering for online therapy tonight only to be told my kind of problems required face to face help; tried calling the samaritans in the UK through skype to no avail. The hostel is under no illusions that I am a nutter and does not want to touch me, even w a barge pole... not that I'd be able to handle it, to be honest.
I can't go to the same people from home that I'm running away from, I'm still grieving heavily, I haven't overcome as much as I thought I did, and the two people remaining to me; my best friend growing up, and the girl I was falling for hard, have both just gotten me entirely to fuck. So here I am Era, incapable of getting a simple post out because of a slippery keyboard and a lifelong case of essential tremor that is not working in my favour at all right now.
The worst thing is that I know I'm going to get a half dozen replies telling me to be grateful for what I'm doing right now, but that's the unforgivable part to me, I just came out here to try and feel a connection. The location means almost fucking nothing to me. It's just better than the entrenched pain at home.
I'm done now. Kinda smashed it out... I missed a lot... but you get the gist of my situation. Sorry if it sounds like colossal self-pity. I'm just being honest. I can handle the normal shit in life, work, savings, general obligations... but my emotional state is and has been broken for a long time and I just can't manage it, or the isolation it causes, any more.
The OP can/should stay as is, it's actually made me smile a bit and made this easier to write.
And that mom shit is fucked, but she can get fucked. She sounds like a broken person thats done damage, and there is a process to forgiving and whatever, yada yada, but you're right, how can you trust her.
I do think the fact you have some love for yourself is the strength here, and makes me believe you can work/wait it out to get to the brighter side. God that's corny, but you get what I'm saying I hope. Yes things are shit, and all that must be adding up to your mental state, but still at the end of the day you'll make it through. Others here will give better advice and ways you can break the cycle and maybe get help, but man, all I can do is say I'm hoping for you man. I know that's not much, but I'm sorry for you, and I'm hoping for you.
