KuriGohan&Kamehameha
想死不能 - 想活不能
- Nov 23, 2020
- 1,759
After months of stewing in it, I'm finally gonna make a post now, and hope cloudflare doesn't make me refresh the page and boot me off mid-sentence. I don't really have anyone else I can talk to outside of this forum, so being able to lay out my thoughts like this (whilst constantly being forced to repress them in day-to-day life) is extremely helpful and cathartic.
I'm well aware that we can never fully understand another person who isn't ourselves, it's an inherent limitation of human cognition. However, not being understood in any capacity is so insanely isolating, it will drive someone crazy if you don't have the necessary positive social interactions in your life. So where does it leave a person, in such a situation? Feeling trapped, like an animal in a cage, knowing the world will use you up to extract any resources/value it can from your being, then chew you up and spit you out.
No matter how hard I've tried to improve my lot and circumstances, it's never panned out, and I'm left with the reality that the longer I continue to exist, the more I am going to fail and be left with a life that I despise. This is a realisation I came to upon becoming a "real adult" as opposed to still being in the teens to early 20s young adult age bracket, where there is generally a lot more grace afforded if you don't have your shit together.
Ever since I was born, I have always felt like an alien species, which is part for the course when it comes to having autism. But this gap between me and others seems to keep considerably widening with age, to the point where I feel like I don't even occupy the same planet. I'm at the age now where many, albeit not all, people are career focused, having kids, making memories with their families, having big romantic connections, and amassing wealth or property. These scenarios couldn't be further away from the life I live.
When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a disabled, sad, traumatized, tired, exhausted person, a shell of a woman, who is held to the same standards as all of these people, and wants nothing more than an escape from it all. To disappear and be done. I wish I could travel back in time to my teenage self, the first time I seriously contemplated ctb, and tell myself that there was nothing good ahead, to spare myself from the decade plus of awfulness that was to come.
The number 1 reason why I want to ctb- especially because this reason bleeds into everything else and impacts every aspect of my life- is my health. I have been chronically ill ever since I was a teenager, and instead of being supported and helped when I needed it, have been gaslighted and put down ever since I could no longer put on the mask of a functional person running at 100%. It made me realise I am only valuable to others when I can provide them with something.
My symptoms have slowly gotten worse with age, and no matter how many blood tests or scans I had, no one can figure out why I have the core symptoms. I do have a birth defect that caused a small region of my brain to be misshapen, but doctors do not care about that and don't take it seriously. Over time, I've gotten more nerve damage, the circulation in my hands feet and legs has decreased, my fatigue levels have worsened, my memory and cognitive functions are shot, and I've also developed spinal issues and injuries that are extremely painful.
I am not kidding you that I have tried just about everything since the symptom onset when I was a teenager. I have probably spent entire days of my life just researching chronic fatigue and chronic pain, searching for a line of reasoning or a treatment that could lessen my symptoms. I have also been on nearly every psychiatric medication that exists, and tried many many different therapists and types of therapy, none of which has helped. Actually, I think all of that caused me more damage. One of the worst feelings on this planet is knowing you tried everything within your power and still couldn't solve your issue.
Anyways, despite the fact that trying to live a semblance of a normal life puts me in extreme physical pain, no one cares. Doctors don't care. The people around me don't care. I'm "too young" to be having this kind of pain, so they just refuse any medications which have shown to dull the horrible pain. There is an international psy op for lack of a better word against opioids to demonise them, so many people with chronic, intractable pain like myself are just screwed. No one will help us, there are many COWARDLY and spineless medical professionals in this world who turn a blind eye to suffering because they are too afraid of taking a single risk to help patients.
Not being in good health, and my condition not being acknowledged enough to receive any support, has meant that my prospects in life are greatly diminished. I am held to the same standards as a normal, healthy person, when I can never reach them. My health has destroyed many of my hopes and dreams, and I have to settle for a life where I know I will always be inhibited and prevented from reaching my highest potential, where others think I am lazy rather than struggling to keep up with them. I missed out on so much in life because of sleeping/laying around in pain or agonizing about the state of my life and that is time I will never get back.
The second main reason why I want to ctb is social life/relationships. Unlike many people, I have never had a big, or tight-knit loving family. Ever since I was young enough to be aware of it, I realised I did not have what others had, and I never would. My mother never wanted me and my father who did nothing but drink all the time died when I was so young, I never knew what it was like to experience having parents or a family that actually wanted you.
I experienced different types of abuse growing up and it permanently changed me as a person. Whenever I was sexually abused, my family was not very supportive and to this day, there was not a single person in my family who actually believed I had and still have, PTSD. I've had to sit by and watch relative after relative die, and am staring down the imminent reality that I am going to be completely alone. When you start getting older, you want more doors to open, not existing doors to close, but I can safely say at this point in my life the doors have closing at an alarming rate.
The few times I have been happy in life are when I had meaningful social interactions with people on a consistent basis. Even when I didn't have friends irl, I still had people I talked to online consistently. Now, they are all gone. I can go long periods of time with no contact with anyone outside of the workplace or my grandma. When I was younger, I thought that being an adult meant freedom and the ability to influence one's own destiny. I quickly realized adulthood has an entirely new set of circumstances and obligations that are far scarier than the lack of autonomy I experienced as a child. Knowing my only real value to anyone at this point is if I can offer them a sexual relationship makes me feel sick to the bottom of my stomach.
The loneliness is so bad, and I know it will only get worse. At my age, more and more people are marrying, having children, trying to invest in property, and all of that, and it is obvious that I am looked down upon as a selfish, immature individual because I don't want and cannot handle those sorts of responsibilities. Every time I'm forced to hear another pregnancy announcement or hear people at work talking about their families and children, I can anticipate the deeply hollow, and pitiful existence that awaits me as a woman who is not interested in having sex or reproducing.
I constantly feel like a failure, because I cannot do these things. There is a coworker of mine who is elderly, childless, also without family, and has experienced many relationship issues, and what she tells me about what her life is like, being so lonely, I realise I am in that same world and it is only going to get exponentially worse.
Whenever I was in university, even with my poor health, there were some rare days where my mood was on top of the world, because it was the first and only time in my life where I had consistent social interaction. It was the first time I felt like I had a friend group. Now, it's like the people I spent everyday with for years suddenly disappeared. One of the worst feelings I've had recently was walking out of university for the last time and knowing there were so many people I'd just never see again, the days of having a social life were over.
I look at happy couples and marriages and feel regret that I was basically pushed into a relationship based on my circumstances which made me deeply unhappy as he admitted that he did not love me for a long period of time, and am now trapped in a marriage with someone who resents me, and who knows good and well I can't truly survive on my own due to my conditions. My husband is also autistic and I know he resents me for being autistic myself, and not taking the lead in our lives/not being a girlboss. For 6 years I have been trying to get my husband to learn how to drive so our lives are easier (I can't afford a car but he can) and he would always say he's working on it and how I'm ridiculous because I can't walk over 2 miles to work everyday easily with all my health problems.
Even though I know it is risky to push back, I have frequently told my husband that if he is unhappy with the current situation he can leave it behind. I tried explaining my feelings to my husband many times before our relationship became fully committed, but he has continued to live in a whole other world where he believes something else, and is pretending things are a way that they aren't/acting as if it is an amazing relationship.
I have told him honestly how I feel, but whenever I reject him trying to push sex onto me, he gets extremely upset. Last time we argued about me not wanting to have sex, he walked to the train tracks and sent me a huge rant about how I'm cruel, evil, and making him ctb, that I should pretend to mourn him to avoid fallout because I really don't care and am evil in his own words, that it's all an embarrassment to his family. My husband is also vulnerable due to his mental instability when he is angry. I know I am going to be trapped in this awful situation because I can't work full time and earn enough on my own, and my husband won't acknowledge the power dynamic at play here whatsoever anymore.
For all of these reasons, I do not really believe in "love" anymore. If this ended, I cannot see myself ever wanting a relationship again, I no longer crave touch or physical intimacy, and I am just so tired and worn out by all the things that have happened in my life that I don't think I have the capacity to sacrifice what is necessary in romantic relationships anymore, there is a noticeable amount of give and take you need to be on board with and I just can't give anymore. I used to be known as the person who loved to joke around and be silly, and now I'm so somber and detached, because my brain is nothing more than a soup compromised of the variety of non-stop traumatic and demoralising experiences that lead me to this point.
Often times I have nightmares about my childhood but it seems like a much simpler time purely because all of my family members were still alive. Now, the majority of them have died. My grandmother is ill and has been on the decline for a couple years now, I'm constantly bracing myself for more grief. The last couple other relatives that remain have nothing to do with me, don't love me, and one has even mocked me for being ill and constantly calls me lazy because when I am not working I am laying down in the bed or sofa due to my CHRONIC PAIN AND FATIGUE not because I want to.
So socially, life is over for me. I realised after graduation that periods of education are really some of the few opportunities the average person has to make lasting social connections, due to lack of similar social settings for adults and the expectation that you'll marry and have kids which will take up the vast majority of your time and leave you with none to spare. Where I grew up is extremely secluded and there are literally no people or cities nearby, it's all wilderness. This makes me feel worse because when you are suffering here, no one will ever hear your cries for help. There are no resources or opportunities in close proximity, really. There is no one like me, and I am not like any of them, so I'll always be an outsider.
Which brings me to my next point. The third reason why I really need to ctb: Lack of progression and fulfillment. During my terrible childhood, I was locked away for several years and became extremely stunted. It took so much catching up to reach the level of my peers. There were high expectations placed on me since a young age, that I did not fulfill. For some reason, my family cared a lot about status and gaining wealth, and I was told ever since I was young I must work towards university and studying something that's high paying.
I did not get my bachelor's degree until I was 24 years old, and this fact deeply embarrassed my grandmother, because I was behind others. Within a year, I also got my master's, but my grade was much lower due to so much going wrong. Part of it my fault, and other parts the fault of my university, which I fought against to have a fair chance at those assessments, and lost. I worked very hard on my thesis only to barely scrape an average grade, and to spend months being treated like an idiot in the lab because I couldn't learn as fast as they wanted me to. I was genuinely passionate about my field of study, and now I'm embittered and jaded against academia.
Whenever I was working low wage jobs years ago, I was told that a STEM degree was the key to a better life. Now I have two STEM degrees, my first one with a top grade despite my difficulties, and internship experience, and yet I still could not find a job. My part time job where I had been working for years laid me off, and began immediately hiring new people. I applied for so many jobs, and got no interviews.
I decided I would stay with my grandmother because I kept becoming afraid she will pass soon. Once again, I was applying for everything I could, albeit there isn't really much there available in the first place, and getting nothing. It took me several months to get a job, and the job pays poverty wages, has unstable hours, and extremely bad working conditions. Everytime I go to work I am in mind melting pain by the time the shift is over because I am standing all day with only one very short break, and I constantly take abuse from the public. Yet, if I were working a corporate/desk job, I would fall asleep at my chair. I can't win.
Despite being an essential vocation that is necessary for society to function, my job is looked down on by many because of it's low wage, and multiple people have said, wow, you have all that education and are working as THAT? Which makes me feel embarrassed. Also, the things I have seen and heard at my job have made me even more black pilled about the world, to the point where it feels like a moral injury. I still cannot work full time yet, either.
When I was younger, it felt like the world was bursting with opportunity, if you were willing to work for it. Now, I realize it's all about where you live/where you were born and who you know, how likeable you are, and being in the right place at the right time. How else could jobs filter through hundreds of applicants?
With how soul crushing many jobs are, you'd think adults would be allowed to at least enjoy themselves outside of work. Yet, my hobbies and interest were always shamed by my family and others because they were weird, childish, or wouldn't lead to amassing wealth. Over the years, more and more of those hobbies are becoming off-limits to me due to the constraints of working, or my age/decreased stamina and mental prowess. I am cognizant of the fact that in many 'nerd' hobby spaces most people are teens or young adults, and being in my mid 20s feels ancient to them.
I always really enjoyed cosplay, and alternative fashion. With each passing day, I'm getting closer to the phase of life where I won't have a youthful appearance anymore, and I honestly do not want to live through that, when I already greatly dislike my appearance. Soon, I feel like I will be judged even more for liking cute things, and cute, girly fashion, or collecting plushies, or any of this, because women are only truly valued by society when we are cute and youthful, or when we become mothers and wives. I've already had multiple younger people call me an unc or think it's cringe/weird that I study in a class with people a few years younger than me. Someone even called me old and decrepit lol, if this is how it is at 25, imagine 30 and beyond.
My other passion in life, besides the fields that I studied, was language learning. Because my job makes me so miserable and eats up all my time, I signed up for a language class so I would have ONE thing that I could cling onto. I got shamed by my grandmother and she is still mad at me because I "wasted money" on the class, and how useless learning foreign languages is. I have overheard her talking about me multiple times and even comparing me to arrested development people who stay in school to avoid "the real world" and don't want to grow up/take responsibility, and how ridiculous it is I am wasting money on learning languages instead of working more. I'm at my LIMIT.
The country where I would go if I wanted to study the language full time is known for being ageist. There is a well documented, closing of the door for foreigners to study and work in the country after the age of 30, because youth is valued so highly, an older person is heavily scrutinized for wanting to build a life there. People often say you're never too old for anything, but some things unfortunately do become insanely more difficult or impossible if you miss certain windows of time where one can achieve those goals.
Knowing my career goals are almost shot at this point is a hard pill to swallow. I always felt like it was my calling to help people, and after the negative experiences I've ensured in life, some of them cultivating into PTSD, I wanted to prevent the same things from happening to others. The state of current medical science is grim for a great number of people, and I really wanted to improve this, but I know I will never have the finances to achieve my dream, and that I would be discriminated against every step of the way.
At this point, I have been suicidal for so long that I can only wonder if I'll ever reach the point where I have the courage to do it. I am afraid I will keep struggling like this, living this sad existence, where everyone sees me as a failure BUT HAS NO IDEA HOW HARD I TRIED. I've been trying and trying for years and my life has only become even more of a sad, pathetic joke. I really want to be dead.
I'm well aware that we can never fully understand another person who isn't ourselves, it's an inherent limitation of human cognition. However, not being understood in any capacity is so insanely isolating, it will drive someone crazy if you don't have the necessary positive social interactions in your life. So where does it leave a person, in such a situation? Feeling trapped, like an animal in a cage, knowing the world will use you up to extract any resources/value it can from your being, then chew you up and spit you out.
No matter how hard I've tried to improve my lot and circumstances, it's never panned out, and I'm left with the reality that the longer I continue to exist, the more I am going to fail and be left with a life that I despise. This is a realisation I came to upon becoming a "real adult" as opposed to still being in the teens to early 20s young adult age bracket, where there is generally a lot more grace afforded if you don't have your shit together.
Ever since I was born, I have always felt like an alien species, which is part for the course when it comes to having autism. But this gap between me and others seems to keep considerably widening with age, to the point where I feel like I don't even occupy the same planet. I'm at the age now where many, albeit not all, people are career focused, having kids, making memories with their families, having big romantic connections, and amassing wealth or property. These scenarios couldn't be further away from the life I live.
When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a disabled, sad, traumatized, tired, exhausted person, a shell of a woman, who is held to the same standards as all of these people, and wants nothing more than an escape from it all. To disappear and be done. I wish I could travel back in time to my teenage self, the first time I seriously contemplated ctb, and tell myself that there was nothing good ahead, to spare myself from the decade plus of awfulness that was to come.
The number 1 reason why I want to ctb- especially because this reason bleeds into everything else and impacts every aspect of my life- is my health. I have been chronically ill ever since I was a teenager, and instead of being supported and helped when I needed it, have been gaslighted and put down ever since I could no longer put on the mask of a functional person running at 100%. It made me realise I am only valuable to others when I can provide them with something.
My symptoms have slowly gotten worse with age, and no matter how many blood tests or scans I had, no one can figure out why I have the core symptoms. I do have a birth defect that caused a small region of my brain to be misshapen, but doctors do not care about that and don't take it seriously. Over time, I've gotten more nerve damage, the circulation in my hands feet and legs has decreased, my fatigue levels have worsened, my memory and cognitive functions are shot, and I've also developed spinal issues and injuries that are extremely painful.
I am not kidding you that I have tried just about everything since the symptom onset when I was a teenager. I have probably spent entire days of my life just researching chronic fatigue and chronic pain, searching for a line of reasoning or a treatment that could lessen my symptoms. I have also been on nearly every psychiatric medication that exists, and tried many many different therapists and types of therapy, none of which has helped. Actually, I think all of that caused me more damage. One of the worst feelings on this planet is knowing you tried everything within your power and still couldn't solve your issue.
Anyways, despite the fact that trying to live a semblance of a normal life puts me in extreme physical pain, no one cares. Doctors don't care. The people around me don't care. I'm "too young" to be having this kind of pain, so they just refuse any medications which have shown to dull the horrible pain. There is an international psy op for lack of a better word against opioids to demonise them, so many people with chronic, intractable pain like myself are just screwed. No one will help us, there are many COWARDLY and spineless medical professionals in this world who turn a blind eye to suffering because they are too afraid of taking a single risk to help patients.
Not being in good health, and my condition not being acknowledged enough to receive any support, has meant that my prospects in life are greatly diminished. I am held to the same standards as a normal, healthy person, when I can never reach them. My health has destroyed many of my hopes and dreams, and I have to settle for a life where I know I will always be inhibited and prevented from reaching my highest potential, where others think I am lazy rather than struggling to keep up with them. I missed out on so much in life because of sleeping/laying around in pain or agonizing about the state of my life and that is time I will never get back.
The second main reason why I want to ctb is social life/relationships. Unlike many people, I have never had a big, or tight-knit loving family. Ever since I was young enough to be aware of it, I realised I did not have what others had, and I never would. My mother never wanted me and my father who did nothing but drink all the time died when I was so young, I never knew what it was like to experience having parents or a family that actually wanted you.
I experienced different types of abuse growing up and it permanently changed me as a person. Whenever I was sexually abused, my family was not very supportive and to this day, there was not a single person in my family who actually believed I had and still have, PTSD. I've had to sit by and watch relative after relative die, and am staring down the imminent reality that I am going to be completely alone. When you start getting older, you want more doors to open, not existing doors to close, but I can safely say at this point in my life the doors have closing at an alarming rate.
The few times I have been happy in life are when I had meaningful social interactions with people on a consistent basis. Even when I didn't have friends irl, I still had people I talked to online consistently. Now, they are all gone. I can go long periods of time with no contact with anyone outside of the workplace or my grandma. When I was younger, I thought that being an adult meant freedom and the ability to influence one's own destiny. I quickly realized adulthood has an entirely new set of circumstances and obligations that are far scarier than the lack of autonomy I experienced as a child. Knowing my only real value to anyone at this point is if I can offer them a sexual relationship makes me feel sick to the bottom of my stomach.
The loneliness is so bad, and I know it will only get worse. At my age, more and more people are marrying, having children, trying to invest in property, and all of that, and it is obvious that I am looked down upon as a selfish, immature individual because I don't want and cannot handle those sorts of responsibilities. Every time I'm forced to hear another pregnancy announcement or hear people at work talking about their families and children, I can anticipate the deeply hollow, and pitiful existence that awaits me as a woman who is not interested in having sex or reproducing.
I constantly feel like a failure, because I cannot do these things. There is a coworker of mine who is elderly, childless, also without family, and has experienced many relationship issues, and what she tells me about what her life is like, being so lonely, I realise I am in that same world and it is only going to get exponentially worse.
Whenever I was in university, even with my poor health, there were some rare days where my mood was on top of the world, because it was the first and only time in my life where I had consistent social interaction. It was the first time I felt like I had a friend group. Now, it's like the people I spent everyday with for years suddenly disappeared. One of the worst feelings I've had recently was walking out of university for the last time and knowing there were so many people I'd just never see again, the days of having a social life were over.
I look at happy couples and marriages and feel regret that I was basically pushed into a relationship based on my circumstances which made me deeply unhappy as he admitted that he did not love me for a long period of time, and am now trapped in a marriage with someone who resents me, and who knows good and well I can't truly survive on my own due to my conditions. My husband is also autistic and I know he resents me for being autistic myself, and not taking the lead in our lives/not being a girlboss. For 6 years I have been trying to get my husband to learn how to drive so our lives are easier (I can't afford a car but he can) and he would always say he's working on it and how I'm ridiculous because I can't walk over 2 miles to work everyday easily with all my health problems.
Even though I know it is risky to push back, I have frequently told my husband that if he is unhappy with the current situation he can leave it behind. I tried explaining my feelings to my husband many times before our relationship became fully committed, but he has continued to live in a whole other world where he believes something else, and is pretending things are a way that they aren't/acting as if it is an amazing relationship.
I have told him honestly how I feel, but whenever I reject him trying to push sex onto me, he gets extremely upset. Last time we argued about me not wanting to have sex, he walked to the train tracks and sent me a huge rant about how I'm cruel, evil, and making him ctb, that I should pretend to mourn him to avoid fallout because I really don't care and am evil in his own words, that it's all an embarrassment to his family. My husband is also vulnerable due to his mental instability when he is angry. I know I am going to be trapped in this awful situation because I can't work full time and earn enough on my own, and my husband won't acknowledge the power dynamic at play here whatsoever anymore.
For all of these reasons, I do not really believe in "love" anymore. If this ended, I cannot see myself ever wanting a relationship again, I no longer crave touch or physical intimacy, and I am just so tired and worn out by all the things that have happened in my life that I don't think I have the capacity to sacrifice what is necessary in romantic relationships anymore, there is a noticeable amount of give and take you need to be on board with and I just can't give anymore. I used to be known as the person who loved to joke around and be silly, and now I'm so somber and detached, because my brain is nothing more than a soup compromised of the variety of non-stop traumatic and demoralising experiences that lead me to this point.
Often times I have nightmares about my childhood but it seems like a much simpler time purely because all of my family members were still alive. Now, the majority of them have died. My grandmother is ill and has been on the decline for a couple years now, I'm constantly bracing myself for more grief. The last couple other relatives that remain have nothing to do with me, don't love me, and one has even mocked me for being ill and constantly calls me lazy because when I am not working I am laying down in the bed or sofa due to my CHRONIC PAIN AND FATIGUE not because I want to.
So socially, life is over for me. I realised after graduation that periods of education are really some of the few opportunities the average person has to make lasting social connections, due to lack of similar social settings for adults and the expectation that you'll marry and have kids which will take up the vast majority of your time and leave you with none to spare. Where I grew up is extremely secluded and there are literally no people or cities nearby, it's all wilderness. This makes me feel worse because when you are suffering here, no one will ever hear your cries for help. There are no resources or opportunities in close proximity, really. There is no one like me, and I am not like any of them, so I'll always be an outsider.
Which brings me to my next point. The third reason why I really need to ctb: Lack of progression and fulfillment. During my terrible childhood, I was locked away for several years and became extremely stunted. It took so much catching up to reach the level of my peers. There were high expectations placed on me since a young age, that I did not fulfill. For some reason, my family cared a lot about status and gaining wealth, and I was told ever since I was young I must work towards university and studying something that's high paying.
I did not get my bachelor's degree until I was 24 years old, and this fact deeply embarrassed my grandmother, because I was behind others. Within a year, I also got my master's, but my grade was much lower due to so much going wrong. Part of it my fault, and other parts the fault of my university, which I fought against to have a fair chance at those assessments, and lost. I worked very hard on my thesis only to barely scrape an average grade, and to spend months being treated like an idiot in the lab because I couldn't learn as fast as they wanted me to. I was genuinely passionate about my field of study, and now I'm embittered and jaded against academia.
Whenever I was working low wage jobs years ago, I was told that a STEM degree was the key to a better life. Now I have two STEM degrees, my first one with a top grade despite my difficulties, and internship experience, and yet I still could not find a job. My part time job where I had been working for years laid me off, and began immediately hiring new people. I applied for so many jobs, and got no interviews.
I decided I would stay with my grandmother because I kept becoming afraid she will pass soon. Once again, I was applying for everything I could, albeit there isn't really much there available in the first place, and getting nothing. It took me several months to get a job, and the job pays poverty wages, has unstable hours, and extremely bad working conditions. Everytime I go to work I am in mind melting pain by the time the shift is over because I am standing all day with only one very short break, and I constantly take abuse from the public. Yet, if I were working a corporate/desk job, I would fall asleep at my chair. I can't win.
Despite being an essential vocation that is necessary for society to function, my job is looked down on by many because of it's low wage, and multiple people have said, wow, you have all that education and are working as THAT? Which makes me feel embarrassed. Also, the things I have seen and heard at my job have made me even more black pilled about the world, to the point where it feels like a moral injury. I still cannot work full time yet, either.
When I was younger, it felt like the world was bursting with opportunity, if you were willing to work for it. Now, I realize it's all about where you live/where you were born and who you know, how likeable you are, and being in the right place at the right time. How else could jobs filter through hundreds of applicants?
With how soul crushing many jobs are, you'd think adults would be allowed to at least enjoy themselves outside of work. Yet, my hobbies and interest were always shamed by my family and others because they were weird, childish, or wouldn't lead to amassing wealth. Over the years, more and more of those hobbies are becoming off-limits to me due to the constraints of working, or my age/decreased stamina and mental prowess. I am cognizant of the fact that in many 'nerd' hobby spaces most people are teens or young adults, and being in my mid 20s feels ancient to them.
I always really enjoyed cosplay, and alternative fashion. With each passing day, I'm getting closer to the phase of life where I won't have a youthful appearance anymore, and I honestly do not want to live through that, when I already greatly dislike my appearance. Soon, I feel like I will be judged even more for liking cute things, and cute, girly fashion, or collecting plushies, or any of this, because women are only truly valued by society when we are cute and youthful, or when we become mothers and wives. I've already had multiple younger people call me an unc or think it's cringe/weird that I study in a class with people a few years younger than me. Someone even called me old and decrepit lol, if this is how it is at 25, imagine 30 and beyond.
My other passion in life, besides the fields that I studied, was language learning. Because my job makes me so miserable and eats up all my time, I signed up for a language class so I would have ONE thing that I could cling onto. I got shamed by my grandmother and she is still mad at me because I "wasted money" on the class, and how useless learning foreign languages is. I have overheard her talking about me multiple times and even comparing me to arrested development people who stay in school to avoid "the real world" and don't want to grow up/take responsibility, and how ridiculous it is I am wasting money on learning languages instead of working more. I'm at my LIMIT.
The country where I would go if I wanted to study the language full time is known for being ageist. There is a well documented, closing of the door for foreigners to study and work in the country after the age of 30, because youth is valued so highly, an older person is heavily scrutinized for wanting to build a life there. People often say you're never too old for anything, but some things unfortunately do become insanely more difficult or impossible if you miss certain windows of time where one can achieve those goals.
Knowing my career goals are almost shot at this point is a hard pill to swallow. I always felt like it was my calling to help people, and after the negative experiences I've ensured in life, some of them cultivating into PTSD, I wanted to prevent the same things from happening to others. The state of current medical science is grim for a great number of people, and I really wanted to improve this, but I know I will never have the finances to achieve my dream, and that I would be discriminated against every step of the way.
At this point, I have been suicidal for so long that I can only wonder if I'll ever reach the point where I have the courage to do it. I am afraid I will keep struggling like this, living this sad existence, where everyone sees me as a failure BUT HAS NO IDEA HOW HARD I TRIED. I've been trying and trying for years and my life has only become even more of a sad, pathetic joke. I really want to be dead.
