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Very long and very raw. please be gentle. soul inside.
I'm 28, I live alone. I had a girlfriend once. I lost her. She was the one lucky thing in my life, and I took her for granted. I didn't love myself, so I couldn't love her. That was years ago now. Life has been a slow march to nowhere since then, for that and other reasons. Around that time I developed rosacea. Beforehand I never had much confidence -- the rosacea destroyed whatever was left. (It requires a $600 laser treatment every 9months - year or so to prevent it from becoming painful/looking completely awful.) If I had a chance to hold on to my girlfriend, that ruined it for good. I had a poor self image before hand. I'm very small for a man, young-looking, pale (not in my face anymore). So I'd always had a rough time. I slept my way through college and scraped by. I can do well when I apply myself, but I could never find the motivation. I would come to class and observe my classmates' certainty and effort and feel like an alien. I simply could not find a reason to care. I've been a cynic as long as I can remember and all I've seen in other people is vanity and ignorance. That's learned behavior that I ascribe to a difficult social upbringing and a home life with parents who were loving for the most part, but also removed from the outside world. They weren't really interested in much and had mostly sarcasm for other people. So a combination of actual social rejection and perceived meaningless made me insecure sometimes, arrogant at other times. I've always been on the defensive some way. I haven't seen my father in years as my parents got divorced when I was in my early teens and I gradually saw less of him. A lack of effort on his part and I have to admit, mine as well. He was an alcoholic (he beat it) but had little else to offer me besides. I became bookish in his absence and we simply had nothing to go on. He was a big gambler and had a lot of other bad habits. I had nothing to learn from him. In addition to the rosacea, I developed cherry angiomas (little red dots) all over my body. I also have been developing gross spider veins on my penis. This is due no doubt to a porn addiction in addition to whatever else I was doing that resulted in the other two vascular conditions. Not sleeping enough, sleeping too long, sleeping during the day, eating poorly, eating too much, too little, lack of exercise, etc. Masturbation was an awful habit. I relied on it for distraction from sense of alienation. It was like a drug, but (I thought) not as bad. Wrong. I've always been depressed and I've always had social anxiety. I can admit that to myself easily now even if I couldn't before. I should have been willing to take myself apart then but I was too afraid and too proud. Five or six years ago I felt awful and didn't have a clue as to how to move forward, how to heal. I watched people move away, get married, go on long trips, rise in their professions. Life is now on pause because I can't think of a way forward. I can't imagine getting another girlfriend with all my body image problems, let alone marrying someone. I can't see myself in a picture. I can't muster any interest in intellectual/career pursuits because I can't think of a reason for getting there. I feel as though I'm in a cell that's been slowly closing in. I could think of starting over before but I can't see a way to do it now. The health conditions I have are incurable -- that's the main difficulty. I can't think of anything else. If I could go back to when I was 22 or 23 I would have found a way to fix my problems, even though they seemed insurmountable at the time. I would have figured out a way to be involved in the world. Those problems were nothing compared to this. My negativity throughout life is a response to the way the world presented itself to me. What the world shows us is not our fault, but we feel guilt and shame anyway for things we can't control. There are the accepted and the unaccepted, on a spectrum. If a child or a teenager finds themselves closer to the latter, they can't help but have a negative view of life and themselves. This is not always irrecoverable. Some people have the will to change, the pliability of self, the right chemicals in their brain, whatever, to get past this and be happy. We've all seen stories of people who are horrifically disfigured in fires, or lose limbs, or suffer debilitating chronic illnesses who lead meaningful, purposeful day-to-day lives. Life now consists of simple pleasures. See my good, old friends. Watch the game on tv with them. Have the occasional beer. Surf the internet. Read philosophy, listen to podcasts. Watch movies, TV shows. Keep up on politics. My IRL has become more and more circumscribed. Regret, I've come to feel, is not a lament for things that could have gone better. It's a lament that they happened of necessity. When I think of my past, and reoccupy my position at a point in time, I can only see that I didn't know any better, that my mind was a certain way and made certain (wrong, very wrong) decisions. I want to believe that people have free will, but I can't do it. The world pulls us all in different ways, and it deranges us. I have sympathy for criminals because of this. But they must be locked up. Where is justice if I'm right? I want to ask you redditors, what would you do if you were me? How would you rebuild your self-confidence? How is someone optimistic in a world like this? Please help. I don't know how I'm carrying on and I can't imagine a future for myself. In fact, I can't imagine a future for the earth, given all the awful things that go on every day. It's becoming too much. I'm off to shower now, then work. God bless. more