Hi! Boy I wish the internet was a bigger, better thing when I was in my 20s, because having a forum like this back then would have helped SO much. Instead I muddled through the first 12-15 years of my adult life not understanding why I couldn't seem to figure out how to be a functioning adult when it seemed so easy for other people. I waitressed and bartended, truly believing I was nowhere near "good enough" for a professional job, having no clue how people even got professional jobs to begin with. The idea of a professional job interview made my mouth go dry. I didn't go to college until my late 20s, because I didn't know how to pick one, or how to decide what to major in, or how on earth people paid for it--it took a close friend going back to school and talking me through the FAFSA process to understand that there were forms, certain types of advisors--a process to follow. In short, I had no life skills, and no understanding that there were processes and stepwise progressions that people used to accomplish tasks both large and small. I cried a lot, drank a lot with my coworkers, and watched a lot of TV.
Around my 30th birthday I started to realize that my upbringing had had a negative effect on me. I don't know what exactly made me realize I needed to get help--I think it was a combination of chance observations of parents with their small children in public, like in line at the grocery store, and I realized that instead of, say, berating their 5-year-old children when they were being whiny and temperamental and yelling at them to "LEARN TO BE PATIENT"--these people were calmly reminding their children what patience meant, and coaching them on how to do it. I realized parents are supposed to be the ones who teach their kids how to do all the things my own mother constantly punished and chastised me for not knowing how to do. I realized I had no life skills, because she had no parenting skills, and little to no life skills herself. I also realized, somehow, that crying my eyes out at least once a day every day year in and year out was not actually normal, and that looking back I thought I'd probably been clinically depressed almost my entire life. So, I decided to look for a therapist.
It was rocky at first. I live in a big city with several big university systems, so I was able to get $5 therapy sessions through one of those with a student therapist putting in their qualification hours. The first student therapist I had was great and helped me a lot, but then suddenly after just a few months she graduated and was gone. The next few people I got weren't as great, and they disappeared just as quickly, so I stopped going for a while. I tried EMDR and didn't like it, so again I stopped going.
I started my first professional job outside bartending. I still aimed really low--I'd always been told I was an excellent writer, but I was terrified to try writing outside an academic setting, so I took a very low paying proofreading job at a daily deals company. I didn't think I could possibly be "good enough" to write professionally. How did people know what to write? Where did they ever learn enough about all those topics to talk about them intelligently? How was it possible to understand what a client wanted and deliver it? Once again, I thought everyone else "just knew" what to do, and I didn't understand that there were processes and well-established steps to follow. I thought it was up to me to figure everything out on my own, from scratch, with no help or input--and it never would have occurred to me to ask.
Two things happened while I was working there. I had insurance and designated work-from-home days, so I started going to a therapist again. During that time I somehow had a lightbulb moment that all the trying in the world didn't seem to be helping my depression, and that maybe it was because I needed medication. So, I got referred to a psychiatrist and started on antidepressants. That's when things started to suddenly become clear--instead of feeling helpless in a given situation, I felt like I could clear-headedly think through what to do. Instead of these extreme reactions to everyday adversity, little things suddenly didn't bother me. And, most importantly, I realized that most of the writers I was working with were really terrible, and they still had jobs, so expectations must be way lower than I'd assumed they were. I could do at least as well as them. I started pushing for a transfer to the writing department, and was given the responsibilities of a writer--not the title or pay bump, because there was a hiring freeze.
It felt pointless, and I was really angry about it, but before I knew it I had a portfolio of writing samples. A writing job opened up at a company a friend worked for, and suddenly here I was with enough to show for myself to get it. The stakes were pretty low--it was in a heavily regulated industry where most language goes through a strenuous legal review process, so you aren't expected to be wildly creative every day, something I still wasn't confident I was good enough to do. I developed a lot more skills at this job and kept going to therapy, got married, finally started making more money than I needed to survive and was able to grow my savings. I started writing a novel, something I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd be "good enough" to do.
For a while, I thought the antidepressants had "cured" what was wrong with me -- I felt so great compared to before, and life seemed to be so so much easier than it had ever been before. I felt like "everyone else" for the first time in my life. In the past year, it's started to become clear that clinical depression was one piece of the puzzle and that abuse and trauma is the other piece, the piece that I'd sort of shoved to the back of the closet, so to speak, because I was so excited to finally be living a happy, un-terrifying, functional life. So now I've been working through that. I think it's taken this long for me to get to a place where I can look at it and work through it safely on my own, and I'm starting to feel like I'm finally unlocking my true emotions, true values, true needs and wants--the "me" I was always supposed to be. It's not all rainbows--it's causing me to question a lot of things, including my marriage--but it doesn't feel scary anymore, because it feels like every move I make is closer to who I really am, finally.
This is long, but I hope it helps! I'm almost 39 now, so none of this was an overnight phenomenon by any means. It takes time, you just can't give up even if it seems like what you're doing is pointless.
