it seems like each mistake lead to a new, worse one. when i was young i never really fit in, was constantly bullied for being small, was poor at socializing because my home life sucked even though i lived a fairly comfortable life. my father was an alcoholic and did nothing to guide me, my mother is a saint but didnt have the emotional resources to help me as when i was just going into high school and things were worsening, my parents split up and she was forced to work all the time leaving my and my sisters at home. i had zero guidance through high school, limping through, staying up all night distracting myself with video games and porn i'm embarrassed to say, and sometimes falling asleep in class. by the end of high school my grades were crap and the friends i did have (who were wonderful for me) moved on to college. i pulled up my bootstraps and redid my senior year and got into a good college, but once i arrived the high school process started all over again. i was able to make a small handful of close friends but otherwise i felt completely alienated because i was a dreamer with no self-confidence, little social experience, and was very small to boot. i had nothing to say and no one took me seriously. i struggled through with crappy grades, never really being totally interested, and in my senior year when i had seminars i was always seized by anxiety and embarrassed myself several times. i graduated, having crap grades in a dumb major and not knowing what to do, moved back home where i continued the same destructive patterns i had in high school. not sleeping well, eating crap, pulling myself out of bed to go to a crappy job nearby while people i knew were getting good jobs, travelling the world, going on to grad school. during this time in my state of depression i was masturbating all the time and generally treating my body like garbage. i wanted to love myself but couldnt. i was eventually laid off from that job and by some miracle i got a good part time job back in the city which paid me enough to eke by in the city. that's when my rosacea started. it devastated me. i'm convinced it came from years of poor health. it worsened and worsened and threw me into a deep depression. i moved back home again. i had laser treatments on my face which seemed to managed it but i always looked like hell. i had a girlfriend through this who loved me but gradually lost confidence in me and we finally broke up. i didnt have the self-confidence to want her to stay anyway. i was in decline and i was psychologically destroyed. i could not love here because i could not love myself. the rosacea i'm in a constant battle with and i cannot even look in a mirror. i had an additional problem which is probably related to how poor my health was - my penis started to developing varicose veins as one of the ways i distracted myself from alienated life was through masturbating. a lot of it. now my penis has worsened and is started to become painful. i have no sex life to speak of. the rosacea cannot be fixed and my penis is becoming worse. i can barely eat though i go to work to the same job which is - thank god - very easy and not entirely soul-crushing, and i can screw around a bit while i'm there. but that job will probably become obsolete, which will mean no money for rosacea treatments or paying back student loans. (i forgot to say i'm also in debt). this is a unique job and it didnt provide me with any transferable skills. i'm facing unemployment or a shitjob, a permanently ugly face which becomes painful after a while if not treated intermittently, and zero romantic future. my face is awful and because of the rosacea lesions is gradually becoming scarred. i'm just hanging on to this worsening existence with no future. i haven't seen my father in a decade. the one thing i'm so lucky to have are a handful of friends in similar ruts (nowhere near as bad as mine) and an extended family who cares about me, a home i can go back to if i really need to. but i'm becoming more and more socially isolated as those friends start doing things i cannot do. they talk about things i cannot enjoy. i spend all my time watching movies, suspending myself in other worlds, trying to swap my reality. i stay up all night listening to the radio. i wake up alone in my bare apartment. i shower in the dark. i don't know what to do. | |