Hello, I hope you are all having a good day. I'd say I'm "glad" to stumble across this site, but really, I feel deeply ashamed about everything I'm about to write and I don't feel great at all about the state I'm in overall. I can tell I really need help and I'm very desperate for what little of anything I can get.
I'm a 25 year old male who happens to be a childhood cancer survivor (Hooray, I guess). I went through nearly a year of chemotherapy at ages 9-10, as well as numerous surgeries for years afterwards that culminated in me becoming an amputee when I was just 18; barely entering my senior year of high school at the time.
My childhood was deeply unhappy. Early on my dad got fired from his job as a store manager, which caused a lot of conflict between him and my mother, since we were living in what was supposed to be a "temporary" single-story duplex way too small for a family of 6. A little around the time I was just starting treatment, my mom found out my dad had cheated on her with another woman and even married said woman, a fact I only found out a few years ago because she'd basically kept it hidden from us. I rarely saw dad again in my life for years up until he started trying to be more active in our lives prior to his death in 2020. If I had to guess, I think he knew things were catching up to him and he felt guilty, hoping he could mend things before anything happened to him as his health was already shaky.
I had issues at school, too. I'd get frustrated and cry a lot over things like getting a bad grade on a test or because someone said a joke that made me sad, and so people started to actively avoid me. I quickly became the "weird" kid, not helped by my disability. From elementary school to early high school (since I stuck to the same area school system) I was bullied by two people, one being your typical prep kid whose parents had connections within the administration that used others to do the harrassment, and the second being a thuggish "bad" kid who physically confronted me on multiple occasions. My reputation followed me into high school, where I continued getting frustrated and crying over a lot of things. There were times where we'd have to get grouped up for projects, and absolutely nobody even wanted anything to do with me. My only two friends and I started drifting apart at the same time, leaving me with barely anybody. If I wasn't with a group of spur-of-the-moment "temp" friends, I was basically alone.
My mother was a violent narcissist with her own unresolved issues involving her grandparents. She'd frequently scream at us, throw and break shit, and call us horrible, vile things when she got angry. We lived under a very tense roof because nobody wanted to "piss off mom", but try as we could, nothing was ever good enough for her. My older brother got it the worst. She'd constantly mock his appearance and his weight, insult him, disregard or break his stuff, and find any excuse she could to go for him. She even punched him once when he was just 6 or 7, drawing blood. This all continued into adulthood, and when I got out of high school she totally stopped caring about us beyond the basics. We were never pushed to be successful, we weren't pushed to make anything of ourselves in the world as adults. She just gave up, and nowadays she is a hoarder who refuses to do hardly anything for herself and hasn't worked in over 20 years. She makes my sister do everything, even putting the house under her name so she has to foot the bill for utilities and everything associated.
Things were already beyond bad enough when my mental health decided to take a sharp downward turn about a year after my amputation. I started getting very frequent panic attacks accompanied by agoraphobia that was so bad I stopped going out. This meant I had to deal with my mother more often, which as you might imagine was devestating to me since going out was the best way to give myself breathing space from that gutter hole of a "home". I lost what little peace I had at night as well, since I started having bouts of sleep paralysis, strange episodes where I'd feel like my body is in freefall for a milisecond and jolt awake, and increasingly disturbing nightmares that I still get to this day. It's at this point I started staying up late on purpose, since the issues didn't seem to occur as often if I waited until afterhours to go to bed. Eventually, I got so fed up with my episodes that I sent myself to the ER in an ambulance, apologizing profusely the whole time for "wasting their time". It was there that the physician suggested I had some kind of severe anxiety disorder, giving me a sedative I didn't really like to take because it made me sleepy more than anything.
I really owe it to my fiance for helping me through that horrible time honestly, as she also suffers from an anxiety disorder and gave me lots of grounding techniques and methods to help. She helped me start to go out a lot more and confront my anxiety directly, gradually building up a tolerance and allowing me to feel like I was in control again. It was thanks to her and her family's help that I managed to move across states far the f*ck away from my mother to be with them and the panic attacks + agoraphobia are no longer really an issue to me, even. They still happen on occasion, but I can work through them and it's rare when they get to me.
But even now that I have relative peace, support, and stability in my life, my mental health has just somehow gotten even worse. I started having increasingly extreme anger issues that I've since realized are caused by deep-seated perfectionism. I feel angry at least once every day, and as weird as it is to say, it's very attractive to me. If it's not because something in the day seriously pissed me off, then it's because I pissed myself off from getting in my own head and ruminating about something in my life that makes me unhappy. When I say extreme, I mean it: I've hit myself hard enough to leave marks or draw blood, acted like a total jackass to certain people, and have embarrassingly even threatened suicide when I go off because I truly feel like whatever I'm failing at or losing control of is making me feel like I actually want to die. I've always been told all my life that "I'm too hard" on myself, and I honestly don't really get why. It really feels like I'm a total failure in life and that I'm worth nothing, and these new failures cement what feels like a universal fact.
At one point, my fiance got especially concerned because even though I'd never drank in my life before, I started drinking semi-regularly for a little while until I got laid off from my job. From what I remember, I was just so tired of being such a skittish pussy all my life that when a co-worker offered me a drink after work hours, I took that opportunity without batting an eye. I've also engaged in other risky behavior, like road rage and flipping people off while driving, pulling dangerous maneuvers on the road, and driving extremely fast at night when I feel like the cops won't see me. I'm convinced if this doesn't stop, I'll likely end up in legal trouble or worse, but I've been at a point in my life where I feel like that doesn't really deter me anymore.
My fiance is scared and worried about me, frequently checking on me all the time to make sure I'm okay. She's been encouraging me to go to therapy for almost a year now, something I'd felt powerless to even consider due to my poor financial situation and having lost SSI shortly after that ER visit. Matter of fact, I've always felt like something doesn't want me to go to therapy, because every time I express interest in going something happens that conveniently cuts me off, like being fired from my job, which happened in the same month I had started making plans to go.
I have a new job now, and I plan on getting diagnosed once and for all moreso for closure's sake than anything else. But admittedly, I'm intimidated. I don't know what it is, but the idea of being labeled as having CPTSD, depression, or whatever else this all may be feels like it marks me as this broken, f*cked up person. Writing all this stuff alone makes me feel like shit, it's like all I'm doing is admitting that I'm a failure, and that I can't function like normal people. But I'm doing it anyway. I want to try to get better. I want to understand the deeper intricacies of myself,
In spite of the daily feelings of cynicism, self-hate and animosity I have towards my life, there's a nagging little part of me that earnestly believes I deserve to be happy. I think somewhere in the future, there's a bright period of my life where I escape the darkness of all the unresolved trauma and anger. I hope I can eventually get there, leave those horrible nightmares behind me, and start anew.
In the meantime, I'm going to be lurking on here as a form of self-help while I try to get diagnosed. Other than all of that, I guess if there's any questions or concerns or anything, please let me know. I'm more than happy to answer them.
I'm a 25 year old male who happens to be a childhood cancer survivor (Hooray, I guess). I went through nearly a year of chemotherapy at ages 9-10, as well as numerous surgeries for years afterwards that culminated in me becoming an amputee when I was just 18; barely entering my senior year of high school at the time.
My childhood was deeply unhappy. Early on my dad got fired from his job as a store manager, which caused a lot of conflict between him and my mother, since we were living in what was supposed to be a "temporary" single-story duplex way too small for a family of 6. A little around the time I was just starting treatment, my mom found out my dad had cheated on her with another woman and even married said woman, a fact I only found out a few years ago because she'd basically kept it hidden from us. I rarely saw dad again in my life for years up until he started trying to be more active in our lives prior to his death in 2020. If I had to guess, I think he knew things were catching up to him and he felt guilty, hoping he could mend things before anything happened to him as his health was already shaky.
I had issues at school, too. I'd get frustrated and cry a lot over things like getting a bad grade on a test or because someone said a joke that made me sad, and so people started to actively avoid me. I quickly became the "weird" kid, not helped by my disability. From elementary school to early high school (since I stuck to the same area school system) I was bullied by two people, one being your typical prep kid whose parents had connections within the administration that used others to do the harrassment, and the second being a thuggish "bad" kid who physically confronted me on multiple occasions. My reputation followed me into high school, where I continued getting frustrated and crying over a lot of things. There were times where we'd have to get grouped up for projects, and absolutely nobody even wanted anything to do with me. My only two friends and I started drifting apart at the same time, leaving me with barely anybody. If I wasn't with a group of spur-of-the-moment "temp" friends, I was basically alone.
My mother was a violent narcissist with her own unresolved issues involving her grandparents. She'd frequently scream at us, throw and break shit, and call us horrible, vile things when she got angry. We lived under a very tense roof because nobody wanted to "piss off mom", but try as we could, nothing was ever good enough for her. My older brother got it the worst. She'd constantly mock his appearance and his weight, insult him, disregard or break his stuff, and find any excuse she could to go for him. She even punched him once when he was just 6 or 7, drawing blood. This all continued into adulthood, and when I got out of high school she totally stopped caring about us beyond the basics. We were never pushed to be successful, we weren't pushed to make anything of ourselves in the world as adults. She just gave up, and nowadays she is a hoarder who refuses to do hardly anything for herself and hasn't worked in over 20 years. She makes my sister do everything, even putting the house under her name so she has to foot the bill for utilities and everything associated.
Things were already beyond bad enough when my mental health decided to take a sharp downward turn about a year after my amputation. I started getting very frequent panic attacks accompanied by agoraphobia that was so bad I stopped going out. This meant I had to deal with my mother more often, which as you might imagine was devestating to me since going out was the best way to give myself breathing space from that gutter hole of a "home". I lost what little peace I had at night as well, since I started having bouts of sleep paralysis, strange episodes where I'd feel like my body is in freefall for a milisecond and jolt awake, and increasingly disturbing nightmares that I still get to this day. It's at this point I started staying up late on purpose, since the issues didn't seem to occur as often if I waited until afterhours to go to bed. Eventually, I got so fed up with my episodes that I sent myself to the ER in an ambulance, apologizing profusely the whole time for "wasting their time". It was there that the physician suggested I had some kind of severe anxiety disorder, giving me a sedative I didn't really like to take because it made me sleepy more than anything.
I really owe it to my fiance for helping me through that horrible time honestly, as she also suffers from an anxiety disorder and gave me lots of grounding techniques and methods to help. She helped me start to go out a lot more and confront my anxiety directly, gradually building up a tolerance and allowing me to feel like I was in control again. It was thanks to her and her family's help that I managed to move across states far the f*ck away from my mother to be with them and the panic attacks + agoraphobia are no longer really an issue to me, even. They still happen on occasion, but I can work through them and it's rare when they get to me.
But even now that I have relative peace, support, and stability in my life, my mental health has just somehow gotten even worse. I started having increasingly extreme anger issues that I've since realized are caused by deep-seated perfectionism. I feel angry at least once every day, and as weird as it is to say, it's very attractive to me. If it's not because something in the day seriously pissed me off, then it's because I pissed myself off from getting in my own head and ruminating about something in my life that makes me unhappy. When I say extreme, I mean it: I've hit myself hard enough to leave marks or draw blood, acted like a total jackass to certain people, and have embarrassingly even threatened suicide when I go off because I truly feel like whatever I'm failing at or losing control of is making me feel like I actually want to die. I've always been told all my life that "I'm too hard" on myself, and I honestly don't really get why. It really feels like I'm a total failure in life and that I'm worth nothing, and these new failures cement what feels like a universal fact.
At one point, my fiance got especially concerned because even though I'd never drank in my life before, I started drinking semi-regularly for a little while until I got laid off from my job. From what I remember, I was just so tired of being such a skittish pussy all my life that when a co-worker offered me a drink after work hours, I took that opportunity without batting an eye. I've also engaged in other risky behavior, like road rage and flipping people off while driving, pulling dangerous maneuvers on the road, and driving extremely fast at night when I feel like the cops won't see me. I'm convinced if this doesn't stop, I'll likely end up in legal trouble or worse, but I've been at a point in my life where I feel like that doesn't really deter me anymore.
My fiance is scared and worried about me, frequently checking on me all the time to make sure I'm okay. She's been encouraging me to go to therapy for almost a year now, something I'd felt powerless to even consider due to my poor financial situation and having lost SSI shortly after that ER visit. Matter of fact, I've always felt like something doesn't want me to go to therapy, because every time I express interest in going something happens that conveniently cuts me off, like being fired from my job, which happened in the same month I had started making plans to go.
I have a new job now, and I plan on getting diagnosed once and for all moreso for closure's sake than anything else. But admittedly, I'm intimidated. I don't know what it is, but the idea of being labeled as having CPTSD, depression, or whatever else this all may be feels like it marks me as this broken, f*cked up person. Writing all this stuff alone makes me feel like shit, it's like all I'm doing is admitting that I'm a failure, and that I can't function like normal people. But I'm doing it anyway. I want to try to get better. I want to understand the deeper intricacies of myself,
In spite of the daily feelings of cynicism, self-hate and animosity I have towards my life, there's a nagging little part of me that earnestly believes I deserve to be happy. I think somewhere in the future, there's a bright period of my life where I escape the darkness of all the unresolved trauma and anger. I hope I can eventually get there, leave those horrible nightmares behind me, and start anew.
In the meantime, I'm going to be lurking on here as a form of self-help while I try to get diagnosed. Other than all of that, I guess if there's any questions or concerns or anything, please let me know. I'm more than happy to answer them.
. Feeling like a failure...!! Yep, also part of the illness. Pretty difficult to achieve stuff when your head is f*cked right...!!!
I like to make people who are against me feel bad not people who done me no wrong. Personally I walk at night even when completely alone I still wait for the lights to turn green, something tells me you're going through multiple red lights and you can't see most people in time to stop. I have walked in front of cars who continued driving way after their turn and surprisingly I've heard the tires skid loudly and they always have stopped in time, they also seemed fairly slow.
