some help here, please
So, I'm a 29 y.o. male heterosexual virgin, blah blah. The entirety of my experience with women was three dates with the same girl I met off Okcupid last year; she flinched whenever I so much as brushed up against her and wouldn’t shut up about Dr. Who and steampunk conventions. I wanted to bludgeon her. That was 14 months ago and I haven't had a positive response from anyone there since.
I've had a late start with dating because, generally speaking, my life is a fuck. Since I was 4 or 5, I’ve been legitimately mentally ill. It didn’t start all at once; the obsessive compulsive disorder was the original problem. My first real memories are of imagining myself cutting off my own face with a knife. This would continue nonstop and I really felt like I should do it I invented rituals of repetition to distract from the compulsions and ended up in therapy throughout elementary school. Needless to say, I never made any little friends; even the teachers thought I was completely nuts. Each year, it was the same suggestions that I be sent 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 as well. 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 I’m in one;their downside is that I become self-destructive. I’ve cursed out teachers and professors, smashed up the cars of people who pissed me off, shoplifted, the works.
High school, I developed Crohn’s 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.
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 don’t take a Klonopin every 6-8 hours, I start to feel as if I can’t control my body and (hopefully) pass out from hyperventilation soon after. 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 I’m sterile too.
So, as you might imagine, all of that hampered my social skills a bit. I’ve 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 (I’ve gotten in a carwreck because I fell asleep behind the wheel), frequently dizzy, very low metabolism, and lower than normal libido.
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). I’ve been looking for a full-time position for several years now but haha, no. The energy drain from sixteen pills/day makes job hunting virtually impossible on top of real work. I have no ‘free time’, no ‘social life’, certainly no friends. If you were to track my movements, it would be a straight line from work to bed for four years. Hell, I haven’t even left the city in more than a decade. I get sick so often that my vacation time always has to be used up recovering.
My sexuality is pretty fucked up. I don't see myself as sexual at all. I'm completely masochistic and submissive as far as it goes; I want to be beaten and laughed at by women for being so worthless. I feel like I'm going to be sick just writing about this.
I don't know what I could offer a girl besides trauma. This is likely to be as healthy as I ever get and I can still feel myself slipping towards another breakdown whenever I'm not distracted by work.
In case you're wondering, I cannot wean myself off the pills, its taken 20+ years to get them just right. The last time we tried, I almost ended up like David Foster Wallace. Also, without decent health insurance, my meds end up costing me a quarter my income each year. So, I'm even more strapped for cash than I would be otherwise. Finally, I know I seem dashing and brilliant from my writing but in person I'm an oaf. This is partly due to the very large dose of Topamax I take (it dulls your mind) and partly because I freeze up.
I need a realistic plan to get control of whats going on in my life. Therapists are useless, they keep asking their cute little open-ended questions and I keep getting older. Somebody tell me what to do because I'm not good with thinking.
Posted Feb 5, 2012, 11:00 PM UTC
[deleted]
Hey, are you my kid brother? That sounds almost exactly like something he would write, only much more coherent. He has a lot of the same mental issues I have but saw me struggle with pill dosages growing up and vowed never to take any sort of medication other than the 'natural' kind. Its hard to say if it's helping him at all but I tend to think he uses marijuana as a crutch in his own way. He really needs professional help; he can barely leave the house and just rants endlessly about how society is persecuting him.
Also, he punched my little sister, who has multiple sclerosis. That was the last time anyone contacted him.
As for me, pot just makes me paranoid, my neurosis is way too deep for something like marijuana to calm me down. It typically takes a couple Klonopin or a dose of Dilaudid before I can relax.