Hello everyone, I’m a 38 year old man and struggling with bipolar disorder, dysthymia, general anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, body dysmorphia, possible schizophrenia, and severe stomach pain. Every day feels like a brutal, unwinnable war, and I’m finding it very hard to see a way out. This post turned out to be very long, I have no idea what I’m expecting to happen from posting it, and I most likely wouldn’t read it either, but seeing as I’m already seeing a therapist, a case manager, and a doctor exclusively designated to prescribe mental health meds (all through medicaid, I take 3 different meds right now for mental health reasons), I don’t know what else to do besides the basic momentary things meant to hold over the more extreme thoughts of self-harm.

While I am an only child, I’ve never lived on my own away from my parents for very long. They are much older than most people’s parents my age and have a very conservative, antiquated, entitled outlook on parenting. They did not see my success and prosperity as a priority, but rather something that I was solely responsible for even as a child left completely unattended in my room for hours. I have grown into an embarrassingly incompetent adult, bullied and mocked despite my age. While I am not blaming them entirely for this and am aware that there were better choices I could have made to prevent this outcome, I often wonder what they were doing and what was going through their head at points in my life where I desperately needed help while they believed it was their inalienable right not to care, such as when I attempted suicide at 13 by overdosing on medication, ending up in the ER, and then being made to go back to school the next day. One memory that especially stings is when I tried to bring my mother into a therapy session, only for her to vehemently stress that it wasn’t her responsibility to pay to help me beyond what medicaid could do before accusing my then-therapist of being in love with me and walking out.

I have no education beyond high school, as my attention span and mental illness have rendered me completely useless academically. I have read an embarrassingly low amount of books as well for the same reason. I was a horrible student from kindergarten all the way through senior year of high school, I never did my homework because of my hyperactivity and attention span, but still got shamed and scolded for it. To this day, aside from trivial things like music and cats, I have no interests that I have any desire to pursue an education/career in. Things like technology and the way things work hold no mystery to me at this point, and all I really want to do for the rest of my life is be free of pain and relax.

I have tried and failed to hold steady employment for most of my life. Since I was 16, no matter how hard I work, I never get promoted or given a chance to earn much more money than minimum wage. I have never made more than $17/hr in my life. When I need money, I have no option other than working customer service jobs, where I often am made to work alongside teenagers who are 20-30 years younger than me. I worked at a movie theater in 2015 where a bunch of them got me fired because they thought it’d be funny. I worked at Planet Fitness in 2019 where I was told that if I worked 3rd shift for 3 months that I would be promoted, only to find out that this was a lie the 21 year old general manager told me to get out of working those shifts himself, and when I brought this up to the district manager, I was told to “stop causing so much drama.” When I finally got a job at a non-profit that worked with homeless people as an executive assistant, I thought I had found my calling, only to again do the jobs of several different people, run the entire intake program by myself, get abused/harassed by clients despite trying to help them, and never be scheduled for more than 35 hours a week while the CEO’s family worked hardly ever and made 6 figures a year while being annoyed at my presence (at this job in particular, I was fired 4 days after my friend passed away. They also told the state that I quit in order to try getting out of paying me UI. I eventually got it, but it took 7 weeks of deliberate hold-ups and calls to the governor's office.)

I don’t have any close friends I can turn to, and often fall out with them due to my temperament and inability to control my emotions despite people always telling me that they’ll stick by me no matter what. My parents choose to move a lot, flushing money down the toilet and chasing an idea of flipping a home that never works out like gambling addicts, and as soon as I feel like I’m putting my feet in the ground somewhere, the rug is pulled out from under me and I’m made to start my life over again, especially as I can never afford to stay by myself anywhere.

I have never had a serious relationship with someone who genuinely liked me, and the relationships I have had have been very so hurtful that it’s nearly impossible for me to trust anyone anymore. Some of the things my exes have said and done still stick with me, despite having been single for 9 years now. I have a knot in my stomach and am still always a little scared to leave the house after my then-girlfriend in 2015 dated me seemingly to just bully me for fun, using me for insult-comedy material for her friends, getting me mad on purpose or straight up telling me to kill myself (as a “joke”) before sending screenshots of my reaction to her (mostly male) friends (she saw herself as being above accountability for things like this simply because her mom had passed away a few years prior). She once asked for a video of me masturbating, and I only discovered recently that she sent this video to multiple people, and this video has since become an inside joke within their friend group. (I have had free consultations with lawyers over this but I can’t really do anything without proof that is all long gone)

One of my major insecurities is my height/size. Being 5’6” as an adult man has always made me feel less than, and I often feel judged and overlooked because of it. I never physically grew to the potential I could have, and it seems my parents really didn’t care that I spent hours upon hours alone in my room playing video games and never sleeping. This insecurity adds to my feelings of worthlessness and makes social interactions even more challenging. The fact I can’t change this feels like a knife to the gut. The jokes and memes about how I’m ugly/worthless are never just jokes, and I worry that I will most likely die without anyone having truly known me simply because they don’t want to be seen with a short guy. No matter how much I work out, no matter how much I eat, I can barely keep on weight due to my anxiety, my arms, hands, and wrists are smaller than most young girls’, and 99% of the time I enter a room, I am the smallest person in it, male or female, and regardless of age. Many times other guys have said to me something to the effect of (with decent intentions) “man I feel bad for you, if I was that small I’d kill myself.”

The intrusive thoughts and memories never stop, to the point where I often find myself saying ‘god fucking dammit’, ‘jesus christ I hate myself’, ‘god what is wrong with me’, ‘i wanna die’, ‘i wish [person] would fucking die’ multiple times a day. It is hard to find even a moment of peace. When I go for walks or when I’m at the store or something, I’ll sometimes have this urge to just lay on the floor face down, and I really couldn’t tell you why, it almost feels like my place. I will relive traumatic moments in my head and then become enraged when I imagine what I would have done in those instances knowing what I know now. My heart will race and sometimes I’ll even cry, simply because my mind just remembered a random occurrence from my past (or sometimes something that didn’t even happen.)

I’m not gonna lie to you and tell you that suicidal thoughts are not a big part of my daily life. If anything, my fear of heights has saved my life in a way, as it’s prevented me from jumping off various bridges, despite trying a few times and getting too overwhelmed. I’ve never had access to guns or certain drugs that would be a sure thing in ending my life, but I’ve definitely looked into it. I guess it’s a good thing I’m too stupid and incompetent to learn how to tie a noose either, but I still wish I had the guts sometimes to just call it quits. I do however think about what it would be like for my mother to have to get that call that I’m dead, and she doesn’t deserve that, regardless of her abuse/neglect.

Throughout my life, I have often had the thought of “in the future, when everything is ok and I have everything I need to be at peace…” but nothing changes, no matter what I do, and now I’m almost 40 in the same place I was when I was 15 and people are still telling me to hold on. It just feels insulting. When I was forced to attend christian programs as a teen (despite my parents not attending church), I thought a lot about the concept of heaven and would say to myself “well at least after I die, I ‘ll be happy in heaven.”

Again, I don’t know what I was looking to accomplish in writing this. It did feel satisfying to get everything down in an organized fashion. There are other factors I obviously wish I could touch on (my past hard drug use, my current struggle with quitting marijuana, my stomach issues, my unhealthy relationship with porn), but I guess I’d just like to know if there’s anyone else out there who is even close to being in the same boat, because I don’t know how to deal with the panic that sets in when thinking about the literal decades I’ve spent rotting away in my room. Any tips or personal stories would be really appreciated. Thank you for reading.