Hello everyone, this is my first time in this community and I hope this post is in the correct format/place. I’d say I’m glad to be here but I’m sure most people’s first encounter with a site like this isn’t usually a happy one. I’m about to give a synopsis of my troubles in life up to this point, it’s going to be extremely long-winded and I’m sorry in advance. Anyways, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read some of my story.
I’m a 24 year old guy, I grew up in a small town. For as long as I can remember, there’s been something eating at me. It’s never mattered what exactly. As a child it was always something trivial; do my friends really enjoy playing with me? Why do they like another friend’s house more than mine? A self-doubting type of thing, I guess I always had an image problem. You’ll see the phrase “I guess” a lot throughout this, as I’ve never been diagnosed or had any serious therapy or help from a professional. Whatever the case, as I grew older and my world was quickly populated with more things to worry about (ie. Highschool), the anxiety and worry I experienced grew tenfold, and something in particular I latched on to was the quest to get a girlfriend. By that I mean a relationship, I’ve never in my life been someone to appreciate hookup culture. Now a quick rundown of me: although initially pretty shy and awkward, I’m a smart and relatively funny guy, and when I’m completely comfortable I have no problem making most people laugh. There’s nothing too wrong with my face or body, and I can even be something akin to charming if I’m not freaking out on the inside. Which almost always happened to be the case. However, I powered through my shaky knees, and throughout highschool I did have a few different girlfriends. The last few years of highschool and my brief foray in to college, I was in a serious relationship with a girl I’ll call CA. She was great, we were great, and life was pretty okay for a couple years. Then one morning, my world was shaken. I was 17 at the time, and I woke up to my dad crying (first I’d ever seen that), telling me my 13yr old cousin had been in accident and passed away. I was very close to him, he was the closest thing I had to a little brother. The night before i was at a family party hanging out with him the entire time. And just an hour after I left was when his accident happened. I became very depressed, and thoughts of suicide became a regular occurrence. CA was very supportive throughout this time, in fact she was perfect and exactly what I needed to get through it. To be clear, I’m someone who almost never decides to cope with things in a healthy manner. I bottle pretty much everything up, and when I’m really down in the dumps I reach straight for the booze (especially as a teenager). Although I have never been a regular drinker (only at parties or if something really horrible just happened), I’m definitely a binge drinker. I’ve matured enough now to not get so excessive, but it’s still what I would turn to. Several months, maybe a year passes by and I start thinking less of ending my life, and looking ahead to my future. I start a semester at a big expensive university, hoping to major in Computer Science. From here, I’m not sure what exactly went wrong, but oh boy did it ever. That anxiety id felt in the background my whole life was immediately much more intense. The first month I went to all of my classes, did all my work, but didn’t really attempt to socialize. I didn’t have any friends there, only the ones back home, and my girlfriend (who was the most important thing in my life, I’ve never been the best with priorities) was further away than I’d ever been from her. I felt alone at school, which devolved in to feeling outcasted. I started coming back home every weekend to see CA (the drive was too far for her), and consequently, I started caring about classes less and less. A couple months later, I had decided college was not for me, and I moved back home. CA did not like this, and further exasperating things, I went several months without having a job, telling everyone I wanted to figure out my next chapter. So begins the end mine and CA’s relationship. Although we were reunited, we only became more distant. Fights became regular, and when words were pushed too far, all of a sudden we were over. It felt like an ending of the world to me, half by my own creation. I felt hopeless, and for the first time in a long time, I felt almost completely alone.
Thankfully, I did have someone to lean on, my best friend Mylo. I met Mylo in 8th grade, and from the first time we spoke, we were two peas in a pod. We liked the same things, talked the same way, even thought the same way. We were inseparable, and we both considered our friendship to be on a different level than any others in our lives. However, at this point in life, he was off at college and I was back at home trying to figure things out. I’d picked up a job at a warehouse, and I was surviving. We still talked pretty frequently, but didn’t play video games all the time like we used to, and we became a tad distant, at least more distant than we’d ever been. This is backstory for the next chapter, where things really start to get ugly and confused. Mylo was the most important person in my life, because he understood me on a level I thought nobody else could ever come near. Even CA at the peak of our time together, we were in love, but she didn’t know or get me like Mylo did. Ok, if you’ve made it this far, get ready, because this next paragraph takes us up to the current point in my life, and it will not be pretty.
Enter a girl who I’ll call KN. I’m working at the warehouse, and we get a new co-worker who I immediately find to be very attractive in every aspect I can imagine. She has a cute face, cute voice, overwhelmingly nice while holding her ground with a razor sharp tongue, smart, funny, the whole nine yards. The only problem? She’s married, just gave birth to a daughter a few months prior, and is 5 years older than me. Now remember when I said I’ve never appreciated hookup culture? I was being honest. As soon as I learned she was married I instantly dismissed any hopes of being with her, but man was I interested in her. We had similar interests and similar humor, and this led to us becoming friends at the warehouse. Now I was still reeling from the breakup with CA (almost a year prior at this point and my state was pathetic), and this cute, wonderful girl giving me attention and wanting to be my friend made me start to forget about all of that. My interest in KN and our budding friendship quickly turned in to a huge crush. Like, really huge. I actually enjoyed going to this warehouse job at 6 AM every day just to see this girl. But I knew the obstacles here would prevent anything from happening between us, especially with how pure and innocent this girl seemed. Right? Absolutely not. Within 2 weeks we were furiously texting eachother back and forth, not able to learn enough about eachother, never enough time in the day to get through our seemingly endless, effortless conversation. Honestly, it was like nothing I’d ever felt. A week later and we both confessed that we were in love with eachother. However, the elephant in the room was immediately addressed and we said nothing could come of it, this is how we feel and we need to be careful it doesn’t become more. Then one day at work, I notice something that made my heart sink all the way to the bottom of my feet. What seemed at first like a sleepless night or an errant shadow under her eye, was in fact a rather nasty bruise that she had done her best to cover with makeup. I asked her about this, and she confessed to me that her husband hits her sometimes. This turns in to her spilling everything to me. I won’t get in to details because this is becoming as long as a book, but this girl has had a really rough go of it. All this sharing just brings us closer, and I start hating her husband. The idea of us immediately seems much more justifiable in my mind (I know it isn’t, but my brain gets stuck on ‘I’m head over heels for this girl and some asshole is making her live in fear?!?!’) and things start to heat up between us. We kiss in the warehouse (the epitome of romance, I know) one day, and man oh man as soon as that happened, everything seemed to spiral out of control. It wasn’t just love or desire, it was electricity. I’ve never ridden a high like that in my life. The path ahead of us seemed doomed, but all I cared about was KN and how to get more of her. The specifics didn’t matter to me, I just knew this girl was all I’d ever need, if we could just find a way to be together. We were best friends too, and I know it’s ridiculous and childish to say, but it seemed like something that was fated. I’m not especially religious, but I deeply believed she was my soulmate. Life started to revolve around her, like it had with CA, although on a much bigger scale, because this time I felt that she was constantly in danger by staying with her husband. Our relationship developed in to the closest kind of relationship you could have while keeping it a secret from your husband. Every day for a year we’d text non stop, FaceTime whenever there was a chance, and I’d come over or she’d come over quite frequently. This is horrible, I know, but I became very close with her daughter. She even called me her dad a couple times (I’m an awful person I know). I fully became ready in my mind to accept the stepdad role, and this seemed to be KN’s plan. A few months later and she tells me we need to talk. I, being hopeful about the whole ordeal, am expecting her to give me good news, like she’s started the divorce with her husband. Nope. She tells me that she’s very sorry but she’s decided to have another kid with her husband, and she’s been pregnant for a month now. It wasn’t something that was forced, she had to make a choice between us and chose to have another child with him. I don’t know how to react to this. My whole body and brain goes numb, and I can’t accept that this little dream of a life with my soulmate could be over. I don’t blow up on her, I don’t break down in to tears, instead I tell her that it’s okay, I respect her decision and I still love her very much. The only thing that changes from here is we stop having sex. We still talk nonstop, because honestly we both needed someone to talk to, and for the past year wed been madly in love. So we continued to be madly in love, despite this new bombshell. I know I have to give her up because I can’t have a life with her and get over this decision that she made, I just know I’m not capable of doing that, no matter how strongly I feel about her. But I can’t give her up, not when she’s really the only thing I cared to care about. And not when she still makes me feel so happy just by being there for me. This extremely messed up love affair continues for another year, and after she gives birth, our relationship gets back to how it was in the beginning, making frequent house calls. As backwards as it was, I felt so relieved to be fully back in the midst of our almost-relationship.
Let’s circle back to my best friend Mylo. Because of KN being in my life, him and I grow more distant than we ever have before. However, every time we talked, it was just like it’d always been. The one guy id met who was just like me, and would always instantly know what I was trying to say. Now is a good time to mention that in highschool, mylo and the rest of our friend group all dabbled a bit in drugs. We wanted to party and to experience everything. Thankfully for our whole friend group, this didn’t turn in to a serious problem for anyone. We all mostly left behind drugs, or at least anything more serious than marijuana. That is, until Mylo discovered in college that he could make a tidy profit selling painkillers obtained over the internet. He started to use the painkillers occasionally to get high, and he’d tell me about it. He said he was being safe about it, he’d acquired a testing kit to ensure the pills weren’t cut with anything harmful, and he wasn’t doing too much at once, or too frequently. So I thought. After seeing a couple worrying Snapchats of his face looking more ragged than I’d ever seen, I reached out again and implored him to be careful, basically tried to have a guy moment with him and told him how important he is to me. 2 weeks later and I wake up to our other friend who lived nearby Mylo blowing my phone up. I answer, but after my friend speaks, I’m not capable of doing much more than that. Mylo died to an accidental fentanyl overdose. Those pills that he was supposedly testing were in fact cut with fentanyl. Just like that, Mylo was gone. It felt like the remains of the tattered rug left beneath my world had just been yanked away. Suddenly, it seemed like aloneness was a new feeling. Like anything I’d felt before with a semblance to loneliness was just a cheap faux. I felt broken.
This takes us to the past year of my life. The relationship between KN and I spiraled down (obviously for the best), and we blocked eachothers numbers. I haven’t been able to fully give up on that; I unblocked her number and text her regularly when I’m feeling down to see if I can talk to her again. She’s been good and has left me blocked. I can’t go a day without wanting to explode in tears over Mylo. I still can’t come to terms with that. I feel so angry about it and like I’ll never be able to let it all out. My anxiety is higher than it’s ever been, and suicidal thoughts are always there, I just do my best to not take them seriously. Which mostly works, I do not think I’m currently in danger of ending my life, it’s just something I fantasize about. I could never put my mother through all that pain, especially after seeing Mylo’s mother grieve for him. Surprisingly I’ve been able to keep my professional life relatively on track, I now own a small flooring installation company with a couple of employees. When I’m at work I’m able to push almost everything else out of my head and focus on that, although my anxiety does still get in the way sometimes, and can make me apathetic about going out of my way to forge new paths. But when I get home for the night, and I’m sitting there alone, everything comes rushing back in, and I won’t get to sleep unless I lay there for hours letting my head run its course. Some nights, maybe once a month, I won’t get any sleep due to that. During day to day tasks that don’t involve my professional work I feel overwhelming anxiety, and I feel like it’s hopeless for me to ever get a new girlfriend or even a new friend, because socializing or going somewhere new by myself sounds like the scariest thing in the world.
If you’ve made it this far, I can’t thank you enough just for all the time you had to put in to reading that. This is the first place or person I’ve spilled all of this at once to. I’m worried now that I won’t even be able to post this because of a character limit. Anyways, I’d like to say I have acknowledged now that I should start therapy, and I am interested in trying some medication for the anxiety. But every time I hop on the internet and start making steps towards doing that, I get way too anxious about the whole thing, and don’t want to spend all of that money. I’ve bottled things up my entire life and I’ve felt comfortable doing so pretty much up until now. I need to make a change or I fear I’ll grow in to a lonely, bitter old man.
My friend said really harsh things
One more, this is my way of getting through many things, sleep, stress
Accepting that I’m just not “normal”
I don’t see things getting better... don’t know how
What are some things you all do to get through your anxiety?
