23-year-old living in Northern Ireland with ADHD, high-functioning autism (Aspergers), hypertonia and dyspraxia as well as a lazy eye or something similar (can't remember what specifically.) that means I wear corrective lenses.

I'm not specifically looking for help. This is pure just venting to get all this out of my system for a bit.

I'm the youngest sibling of three and for the majority of my life, it's been me, my mum, and the middle brother with some visits to my dad and minimal interaction with the eldest brother. Though, middle brother moved out a year or so ago.

I always did well in school, excluding PE but didn't have any real friends—mainly because the onl real thing I was interested in was video games, with an active distaste for sports while living in a relatively small, no-name town where nobody even knew what Zelda or Metroid is—and often got along better with the teachers.

I generally mellowed out and reached a high level of maturity throughout high school so by the time I reached college, which was a much more chill environment, I had a pretty easy time get along with people, but had and continue to have an awful time actually maintaining friendships. Partly, this is because I never met anyone who lived anywhere near me, which makes meetups difficult but there's also the fact that the idea of initiating interaction often just doesn't pop into my head, and often when it does I'll end up talking myself out of it with some excuse like it being a bad time or not wanted to be a bother or too pushy or so on, a problem that extends to even my online friend groups. This means that whilst I'm fairly good at getting along with people, I'm crap at feeling like I'm properly maintaining those relationships.

Either way, college rolled around. I knew I wanted to try my hand at game design and didn't trust myself to teach myself at home due to a proclivity for procrastination, but there weren't any courses I found in a reasonable distance, so I decided to settle for a Media course. It was fun, I enjoyed aspects of it, but this started the trend of me being a bit of a defeatist, or at least me finally noticing it. Somewhere near I think either a second or third year of the media, (I forget if the level 2 was 1 or 2 years.) I started falling behind on a few of the at-home assignments which stressed me out and sapped a fair deal of what minimal drive I had, causing me to work less hard on my other course work?

The real kicker? Somehow, I still got mostly distinctions.

Either way, I had some basic media skills but not enough to start making games yet. I still didn't know nearly enough about coding or animation or game desgn. So, I figured since most of the college courses were free, I'd take on another one while I find a way to self-teach, (which predictably I didn't).
Whatever the case, I wound up picking performing arts. It was fun, I was decent at in parts but again, by the end of the last year the pressure was mounting and I kind of just wanted to bailout, because I knew acting as a career would be just too much stress for me and I've probably not enough passion for it. Plus, after bumping into one of my teachers from the media course, learned that they had legit just started a course for game design. So, I wanted to do that. I ended up staying on till the end of the course purely because the teachers coaxed me into it, but like with the media before, my drive was shot and I wasn't putting as much effort as I felt I could in part because it felt like the PA grades wouldn't really matter if I wasn't planning to go into a PA career. Even if I do, my understanding is that people casting for plays or movies care more about experience than certification anyway.

So, then I apply for the game design course. I go, I get interviewed, they tell me they'd love to have me, being interviewed by a teacher I already know from media, but that it'd be an awful lot for me without my GCSE in Maths and English.
I was vaguely surprised I didn't already have them, not remembering if I was given an option to opt in or out of doing them in high school. Fortunately, this college offered GCSEs as once a week evening courses.

I tackled them once at a time to avoid potential burnout or overlord. I did the English the first year, since I'd always enjoyed it in high school and it was a legit fun course that I basically breezed through, more or less. Then, I did the maths which was a harder subject for me, and since a lot of teaching was being condensed into a smaller time frame, it was harder to follow. So, for the first time, I had to do some additional studying and hired a weekly tutor to keep me focused on that.

I also recall that it was sometime around here, just before age 20 (19, I think,) where I saw a video or two with trans women in them, realized you couldn't even tell they were trans without seeing their bits and something clicked "what if I could look like that?" It wasn't a hard "I'm trans" revelation, moreso calling into question the possibility. Part of me says no, probably not, I don't feel strongly enough about or, there's some pushback that I can't decide is me being sis or just concerned about the big changes and potential consequences such a committed identity shift could cause, with any ability to find a definitive answer being muddied by nature as somewhere who can be paranoid, but is fairly self-aware, which leads to cycles of self-analysis where I'm not sure what my original feeling on something is, and what's a result of me self-analysing and overthinking.

Back to the life story.

I passed both GCSEs, yay, applied for the game course again, but again there was some push back because they'd noticed the way I flaked near the end of courses, saying the Game Design one was not easy. Honestly, I agreed. So I said, I'd take a year off trying to self-study some software to get a head start, the teacher even gave me a list of software to look into specifically.

Of course. That didn't happen. I gave myself a second gap year to try again and to try and relax a bit, hoping that a break from the constant schoolwork I'd grown up with might give my self-motivation, my drive, a chance to rekindle. Of course, that didn't happen.

Okay, whatever, I'd just apply for the games course anyway and force myself to stick it out to the end, tell my mum and brother to hold me to it. Sure, that could work.

Plus, I did finally feel like I was getting things back on track. I was looking into counselling to see if a professional take could help me recentre or whatever, I was applying for a provisional driver's license, so I could drive out to bigger cities where there's actual shit to do and I might find places to make real, lasting friends, I was even gonna start going to the gym on a regular basis, be a prettier girl if I decided to go that route...

And then, fucking corona happened. The timing, man. That timing.

I recognize corona as a proper threat, but knew media and such can exaggerate details, so i wasn't overly concerned, especially since I lived in a small town and already never went out. Hey, for once those were pluses.

Still, my plans were completely shot. I waited a year to see if that would blow over, it didn't and I was fed up waiting for my local clinic to pass me through the waiting list to assign me a counsellor that may or may not even fit me, so, I decided to find a private one.

Did that for a few months, it wasn't anything revolutionary, but it did help me establish some kind of direction in terms of how to tackle the game design situaiton: Tutoring. Surprised I didn't think of it sooner. Learn one or two skills via tutoring, similar to self-teaching just with someone there to keep me on track, then maybe find an online course.
I might give counselling another go at some point, but right now wanna use the money for the tutoring stuff instead.

So, coming closer to the present, my mum started seeing the signs of menopause, which basically takes her out of commission for a week or so. Sometime last year or the year before, my brother got his own place and moved out.

This leaves me alone now with mum who hasn't been handling her bouts of menopause well. She's told me about HRT, that they won't let her have it because of another health complication that could mix poorly with it (can't recall what specifically off the top of my head.)

In either case, every month or so, she spends a good week, maybe more, just laying in bed with the curtains drawn, breaking into sobbing fits and yelling in her sleep. She'll inevitably call me into her telling me to google symptoms of menopause, or how to help menopause or when it goes away or... stuff like that once or twice. Of course, being the selfless to a fault type, she hates being in bed cause she feels like has to do everything for me and keeps trying to force herself back into action when it eases just a little, when she should be taking it easy.
It doesn't help that she's always been the fragile nervous, lightly paranoid type.

Lately, maybe it's just me being paranoid but, it feels like it's gotten worse with her calling me what feels like every hour or so to do something completely simple for her like turn on a fan or a lamp that's within arms reach, or call me at 3, even 5am in the morning the make her tea and toast, which is disrupting my already erratic sleep schedule.

I overheard a few arguments before my brother moved out that sounded like she was hiding alcohol or something similar around her menopause periods. Don't know if it's still happening; I don't think so. But their paranoia's enough to cause stress.

Not that I could know for sure. Since I'm the youngest and I have stuff like autism, a lot of stuff's been done for me growing up and people rarely ever tell me anything about the serious stuff going on, even if I can overhear snippets.

Naturally, now, I feel totally underprepared. Never made to do chores growing up, never known how to cook until basically right now, never had to go to the shops or manage my own money which I'd probably impulse spend if a cut of it wasn't being put into a credit union account for savings.

And now, since I'm the only one left living in the house with mum. It means that when she's going through one of her menopause slumps, I suddenly have to do near enough everything. With a spot of help for stuff like cleaning the kitchen from her boyfriend.

​

And that's my life. At the moment. Of course, that's not even taking into account bigger picture stresses like my frustrations with how us vs them/confrontational people can seem now days, corona, climat issues, conspiracies and now a potential war.

It's all just... draining.

I'll be completely honest, I do sometimes I could go to sleep and live the rest of my life in a dream. But, you know, that's not how life works. Gotta keep trooping on, no matter how futile my silly monkey brain tries to tell me everything is.