Sorry for the wall of text but I feel like I need to get this off my chest. I meant this to be a story but towards the end I feel like I started rambling or venting.
I'll start off saying that I did not have a bad life growing up. I'm an only child to a single parent and we grew up in a very small town(less than 400). We were a little poor, eating 1 or 2 meals a day, usually a bowl of cereal, but I've known too many people who were worse off to complain about something small like that. I also had plenty of loving family members around me growing up. The only thing I know about my father is that he loved drugs, alcohol, forced my mom to give him money that she worked for and never held a job of his own. She divorced him after I was born. Not wanting to be like him is the reason I've always avoided drugs, alcohol, and generally tried to be nice to others even later on in life when I really didn't want anything to do with people.
When growing up I was very outgoing, friends with everyone, and loved sports of all kinds. That persisted until I was 10, 11 or 12 (been so long I can't remember) when the real problem began. I started getting migraines almost daily, you know, the nasty ones where it feels like your head is splitting in four ways, the world is spinning and the slightest light or noise was excruciating. Back then, they didn't have specific medicine for migraines, you just took something like tylenol and laid down for a bit. Found out about rebound headaches that way and to this day I still can't take tylenol without it giving me a rebound. After a couple months of visiting various doctors in the nearest city, from good doctors to quacks, they finally decide they can't do anything so they send me to a specialist hundreds of miles away. Well they really couldn't do anything either except try to put me on various experimental medicines that gave worse side effects than anything but my mother agreed since she loved me and just wanted me to be better. The medicines didn't work and were just another drag on her finances and ended up with her being depressed. After a couple years or so, the migraines just went away and now I only get one a couple times a year.
Though at this point everything has changed. I no longer had a passion for sports, I didn't want to be around people, and I just didn't want anything to do with living in general. I just wanted to curl up and not exist. To me, life was just something you had to go through until it was your turn to die. I acted like everything was fine though because I didn't want to see doctors anymore and I didn't want to worry my mother. I hung out with people though I never really got involved. At some point after getting into high school I did eventually get a girlfriend because that's what was normal and I didn't want to stand out.Then I discovered an issue I didn't know about before since I had already quit sports, I dislike physical contact with others. I can power through a handshake or quick hug if I see it coming but more than that just made me sweat, shake and nauseous. I just played it off as being nervous with her but eventually the relationship fell through from a mix of bad intimate moments and my lack of attention to her. I didn't try to get another because I didn't care enough so I just didn't argue when the assumptions of me being gay were brought up since it was easier to explain and wouldn't get me sent to a therapist or doctor.
At one point I was offered a job on my grandparents farm after my uncle quit(should have known something was off about the offer) so I took it to help my mother pay bills. The job was perfect, away from people and it gave me an excuse to no longer hang out with others after school or on weekends but I was only getting paid $5/hour. My plan at this point was alienate myself from everyone, including family, so that if I did decide to cbt it would have very little effect on others. I knew I had to be smart about this and do it slowly so that no one would notice anything wrong, so I kept acting like everything was fine in public. Nights were always the hardest because if I tried to go to sleep without being dead tired I would start running through different ways to end it which usually just ended up with me being very tempted to end it all then.
When I graduated I actually had managed to get a scholarship to a university that would have paid for almost everything. The day of orientation I got ready and was walking to my vehicle when I guess I had a panic attack or something. I broke down and started sweating, shaking, and, embarrassingly, crying, so I called the university and told them I was no longer going to attend. With hindsight I know that should have raised a red flag for me but I let it go as I was only living because I felt my mother didn't deserve to have to be bury me since she worked so hard to raise me.
My mother started dating again at this point and my hope was she'd get into a strong, happy relationship so that I could cbt and she would have the support to get through it. Needless to say since I'm still here, her new marriage that she finally got into was never really a good one. He liked to spend money that they didn't have. One day she had a fall that ended up putting her into disability for severe nerve damage. After she lost her job because she could no longer sit at a desk for hours, her health, both physical and mental, have just gotten worse. After 9 years or so they finally separated for good where she moved in with me because she couldn't afford to live on her own. He eventually cbt'd leaving her with a lot of debt because they never finalized the divorce since she couldn't afford the lawyer. I would have paid for it if I had known it was never done but she never told me.
At one point in my mid 20s a family member told me about a job with them. It would have been perfect for slowly trying to get back into being social again. Working with him and a few other guys while making good money. I truly tried to get get the position. Even the interviewers said I was the most qualified that had signed up and they told my family member that it was almost a guarantee that I would get it. When they called the headquarters of the company to tell them they wanted to hire me, the owners said they already were hiring someone who was the son of a friend. I guess that probably hit me harder than I'd like to admit.
Now I'm in my mid 30s and haven't been able to focus on really anything for the past few years to keep the thoughts away and it's getting harder to resist just ending it. The worst part is that if I had ended it earlier, say high school or shortly thereafter, my mother wouldn't be in the bad shape that she's in now. She wouldn't have had that fall that basically ruined her life. I know that if I cbt now, at best, her health would deteriorate rapidly or at worse, she would also try to cbt. Sometimes I feel the only reasons she hasn't tried to cbt is because I'm alive and she's a christian.
My grandparents are wanting me to buyout their farm and takeover (mostly because they're so deep in debt themselves) but I really don't want to put myself into that much debt even if the banks would allow me to since I'm not sure how much longer I can or even want to keep fighting. If I don't take over the farm then they'll be retiring at the end of the year which mean I'll lose my job anyways. The jobs I do qualify for I'm too far out of shape to do or too worried and scared to try(anything with customers). I'm not exactly fat since I still only eat 1 or 2 meals a day that's usually a bowl of cereal but I am rather small and weak(I can load or unload 80lb cement bags about 30 times before I'm exhausted). If I tried to get into shape for the more physical jobs I'd have to start working out and actually eating more food. Food has never been a pleasure of mine. I wish they'd invent pills or something already for meals.
Looking back I know I should have talked to someone about how I felt after the migraines but back then, I truly wanted nothing to do with doctors anymore. Even now I want nothing to do with the lot. Now I'm so old with almost no social skills and no marketable skills that it feels likes it would be more hassle than it's worth to try to get help even if I thought it would work. I literally have no friends since I cut off all contact over a decade ago and I'm not good with people, even on the internet. This is probably my 7th forum post on the internet since I figured out the internet even existed all those years ago. Even if I did get better, what I have to look forward to is diabetes (all my older blood relatives have it) and a certain cancer that everyone in my family seems to get, not to mention skin cancer from the years under the sun with short sleeves and no sun block.
Now I feel selfish for wanting to cbt when I really haven't had that hard of a life but I also don't want to cbt because of the pain it would cause my mother and the humiliation the rest of my family would have to go through since I live in a small area and pretty much any attempt to cbt whether successful or not would be in the headlines of the local paper. I'm starting to hate living instead of just not wanting to live and I'm afraid I'll end up blaming the people that care about me. I would never hurt them physically but I can easily see me putting them into emotional distress. It just feels like this is the year everything comes to a head.
Sorry for rambling. After reading this over and over I feel like a PoS for feeling the way I do when my life, compared to the lives of many of the people here have had to suffer through, looks blessed.
I'll start off saying that I did not have a bad life growing up. I'm an only child to a single parent and we grew up in a very small town(less than 400). We were a little poor, eating 1 or 2 meals a day, usually a bowl of cereal, but I've known too many people who were worse off to complain about something small like that. I also had plenty of loving family members around me growing up. The only thing I know about my father is that he loved drugs, alcohol, forced my mom to give him money that she worked for and never held a job of his own. She divorced him after I was born. Not wanting to be like him is the reason I've always avoided drugs, alcohol, and generally tried to be nice to others even later on in life when I really didn't want anything to do with people.
When growing up I was very outgoing, friends with everyone, and loved sports of all kinds. That persisted until I was 10, 11 or 12 (been so long I can't remember) when the real problem began. I started getting migraines almost daily, you know, the nasty ones where it feels like your head is splitting in four ways, the world is spinning and the slightest light or noise was excruciating. Back then, they didn't have specific medicine for migraines, you just took something like tylenol and laid down for a bit. Found out about rebound headaches that way and to this day I still can't take tylenol without it giving me a rebound. After a couple months of visiting various doctors in the nearest city, from good doctors to quacks, they finally decide they can't do anything so they send me to a specialist hundreds of miles away. Well they really couldn't do anything either except try to put me on various experimental medicines that gave worse side effects than anything but my mother agreed since she loved me and just wanted me to be better. The medicines didn't work and were just another drag on her finances and ended up with her being depressed. After a couple years or so, the migraines just went away and now I only get one a couple times a year.
Though at this point everything has changed. I no longer had a passion for sports, I didn't want to be around people, and I just didn't want anything to do with living in general. I just wanted to curl up and not exist. To me, life was just something you had to go through until it was your turn to die. I acted like everything was fine though because I didn't want to see doctors anymore and I didn't want to worry my mother. I hung out with people though I never really got involved. At some point after getting into high school I did eventually get a girlfriend because that's what was normal and I didn't want to stand out.Then I discovered an issue I didn't know about before since I had already quit sports, I dislike physical contact with others. I can power through a handshake or quick hug if I see it coming but more than that just made me sweat, shake and nauseous. I just played it off as being nervous with her but eventually the relationship fell through from a mix of bad intimate moments and my lack of attention to her. I didn't try to get another because I didn't care enough so I just didn't argue when the assumptions of me being gay were brought up since it was easier to explain and wouldn't get me sent to a therapist or doctor.
At one point I was offered a job on my grandparents farm after my uncle quit(should have known something was off about the offer) so I took it to help my mother pay bills. The job was perfect, away from people and it gave me an excuse to no longer hang out with others after school or on weekends but I was only getting paid $5/hour. My plan at this point was alienate myself from everyone, including family, so that if I did decide to cbt it would have very little effect on others. I knew I had to be smart about this and do it slowly so that no one would notice anything wrong, so I kept acting like everything was fine in public. Nights were always the hardest because if I tried to go to sleep without being dead tired I would start running through different ways to end it which usually just ended up with me being very tempted to end it all then.
When I graduated I actually had managed to get a scholarship to a university that would have paid for almost everything. The day of orientation I got ready and was walking to my vehicle when I guess I had a panic attack or something. I broke down and started sweating, shaking, and, embarrassingly, crying, so I called the university and told them I was no longer going to attend. With hindsight I know that should have raised a red flag for me but I let it go as I was only living because I felt my mother didn't deserve to have to be bury me since she worked so hard to raise me.
My mother started dating again at this point and my hope was she'd get into a strong, happy relationship so that I could cbt and she would have the support to get through it. Needless to say since I'm still here, her new marriage that she finally got into was never really a good one. He liked to spend money that they didn't have. One day she had a fall that ended up putting her into disability for severe nerve damage. After she lost her job because she could no longer sit at a desk for hours, her health, both physical and mental, have just gotten worse. After 9 years or so they finally separated for good where she moved in with me because she couldn't afford to live on her own. He eventually cbt'd leaving her with a lot of debt because they never finalized the divorce since she couldn't afford the lawyer. I would have paid for it if I had known it was never done but she never told me.
At one point in my mid 20s a family member told me about a job with them. It would have been perfect for slowly trying to get back into being social again. Working with him and a few other guys while making good money. I truly tried to get get the position. Even the interviewers said I was the most qualified that had signed up and they told my family member that it was almost a guarantee that I would get it. When they called the headquarters of the company to tell them they wanted to hire me, the owners said they already were hiring someone who was the son of a friend. I guess that probably hit me harder than I'd like to admit.
Now I'm in my mid 30s and haven't been able to focus on really anything for the past few years to keep the thoughts away and it's getting harder to resist just ending it. The worst part is that if I had ended it earlier, say high school or shortly thereafter, my mother wouldn't be in the bad shape that she's in now. She wouldn't have had that fall that basically ruined her life. I know that if I cbt now, at best, her health would deteriorate rapidly or at worse, she would also try to cbt. Sometimes I feel the only reasons she hasn't tried to cbt is because I'm alive and she's a christian.
My grandparents are wanting me to buyout their farm and takeover (mostly because they're so deep in debt themselves) but I really don't want to put myself into that much debt even if the banks would allow me to since I'm not sure how much longer I can or even want to keep fighting. If I don't take over the farm then they'll be retiring at the end of the year which mean I'll lose my job anyways. The jobs I do qualify for I'm too far out of shape to do or too worried and scared to try(anything with customers). I'm not exactly fat since I still only eat 1 or 2 meals a day that's usually a bowl of cereal but I am rather small and weak(I can load or unload 80lb cement bags about 30 times before I'm exhausted). If I tried to get into shape for the more physical jobs I'd have to start working out and actually eating more food. Food has never been a pleasure of mine. I wish they'd invent pills or something already for meals.
Looking back I know I should have talked to someone about how I felt after the migraines but back then, I truly wanted nothing to do with doctors anymore. Even now I want nothing to do with the lot. Now I'm so old with almost no social skills and no marketable skills that it feels likes it would be more hassle than it's worth to try to get help even if I thought it would work. I literally have no friends since I cut off all contact over a decade ago and I'm not good with people, even on the internet. This is probably my 7th forum post on the internet since I figured out the internet even existed all those years ago. Even if I did get better, what I have to look forward to is diabetes (all my older blood relatives have it) and a certain cancer that everyone in my family seems to get, not to mention skin cancer from the years under the sun with short sleeves and no sun block.
Now I feel selfish for wanting to cbt when I really haven't had that hard of a life but I also don't want to cbt because of the pain it would cause my mother and the humiliation the rest of my family would have to go through since I live in a small area and pretty much any attempt to cbt whether successful or not would be in the headlines of the local paper. I'm starting to hate living instead of just not wanting to live and I'm afraid I'll end up blaming the people that care about me. I would never hurt them physically but I can easily see me putting them into emotional distress. It just feels like this is the year everything comes to a head.
Sorry for rambling. After reading this over and over I feel like a PoS for feeling the way I do when my life, compared to the lives of many of the people here have had to suffer through, looks blessed.
