Dear jock and anita,

Thanks for your replies. I have been very busy at work and didn’t get a chance to check the forums back again. With this particular issue, my team told me that it was fine since we had not finalized the whole analysis. A similar situation arose last week, but I wasn’t as anxious. I don’t like the way things are done out here and that adds to a lot of anxiety and frustration.

@anita – it is possible that as a child I did not receive the support that I needed. However, that’s in the past and I need to be responsible for how I feel now. I’m not sure I would blame my mom for this. She did the best that she could do. It doesn’t help me in my current situation. I think my health may also be affecting my anxiety.

Thanks again for your replies. It’s good to know that this is a safe place to look for support.

Dear anita,

I am so sorry that I made you feel this way. I just feel really bad that I made you feel this way. It wasn’t my intention at all. I do appreciate that you always respond to my posts here and are always very supportive. When you wrote about your loneliness and depression, I thought I am not the only one to go through this and there are other people as well. It gave me a sense of how universal these feelings are.

I feel so bad right now like I’m a horrible person. Sometimes, I feel I’m not a good person and that everyone must hate me. I’m not sure all my interactions like the ones above. Also, most of them happen on instant messaging. I don’t really have a life in the real world.

Again, I am so sorry about making you feel unacknowledged. 🙁

My hypothetical relationship would be warm, affectionate, empathetic, someone I won’t have to keep explaining why I didn’t like or like something, someone who is emotionally intimate and shares their stuff with me.

What I feel sad about is that people do not acknowledge my emotional pain. I have friends who say but you are better off than so many. You don’t have to take care of so many things. It’s like I am not allowed to feel unhappy and lonely because I am better off than others. Am I not allowed to have negative feelings? Agreed, that in the recent past, the negative feelings have outweighed the positive ones, but things haven’t really gone my way and I feel anxious. I am unable to control my anxiety. It is hurtful and I have decided to cut down on interacting with these people.

I have had seasonal asthma since I was 10. I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism in 2014. It’s because of an autoimmune disease. I gained weight because of that. Then last year when my asthma season was on, I had a side effect to my inhaler. I didn’t know it at the time, but I do now. It led to a lot of fatigue, brain fog, lack of concentration, anxiety, depression, irritability. I feel I am 50% as productive as I used to be. I also gained weight which resulted in half of my wardrobe not fitting me anymore. I also have an iron deficiency, Vit D deficiency. I sleep for 7- 8 hours but never wake up feeling rested. This has been the case for the last 11 years. These things are just getting worse.

I have lived away from my parents and I do prefer it. But, I need a new job or to get married to move out. Neither of those are happening and those seem to be more of a problem. As for my part, I don’t really help around at home. We have a part-time domestic helper, but I don’t take care of any other tasks. My parents are the ones who spend money as well, they won’t take it from me because I am their baby and it’s all my money anyways.

When I say speaking my truth, I mean taking decisions that I want to do rather than what seems like the right thing to do. In my country, we need to pick our future career at the age of 15. My school had rules based on grades and I ended up getting something that I didn’t know much about. I wasn’t very certain what I wanted to do. I wanted to do research but my family said it wasn’t a worthwhile career. Then after high school, I again picked something that I thought was the next logical step. Same goes for my graduate school. I tried to switch to something else but I wasn’t able to get into the top schools. I only wanted to go to the top schools and did not apply anywhere else. When I started working, I didn’t enjoy the work or the work timings, so I quit without another job in hand. It took me 6 months to get another one that I thought I would like. But, it wasn’t the right place for me. That company shut down and I tried to find another job. I found one but turned it down the day before I was supposed to join because I was verbally offered something else. That offer also was taken away and I joined one of their other divisions, at a much lower level than where I should be and on a contract basis. It was the only job I had in hand, so I took it up. It was a good place to be, but I felt strange because I was much older than my peers and seemed behind them. I decided to go back to school and majored in something that turned out to be an incorrect decision. I had too much work experience for the kind of jobs in the market or they needed a PhD. I applied for jobs but got the only job that I didn’t want. I could make out in the interviews that the work environment wasn’t conducive and it did turn out to be toxic. I was also not very interested in the work content. I am still in the same job and unable to switch to another one. My health hasn’t permitted me to look very actively for one. It also broke my heart to not be able to find something that I wanted.

I don’t have high expectations of my friends anymore. I just want to be able to relate to them and have a good time. It’s always been hard for me to make friends since I was little. I don’t have much to talk about with people and there are lots of things not going right for me that it’s hard to not come out even if I try. If I say, I’m not happy with my job situation, so I’m not able to focus on a couple of other things right now, they start giving unsolicited advice and I keep saying that won’t work because of so and so reason. At the end of the conversation it all comes out. I didn’t mean to give them specifics. The friend who was trying to help with the shopping for pants, is someone I can’t relate to on many other topics as well. I do want to limit my interaction with her because of that. I don’t come out of our interactions feeling joyful. I know I am always anxious, it’s always lurking below the surface. I wouldn’t even know how to find a competent therapist. I’ve tried therapy twice and it helped only 5%.

But, the situations I’m talking about happened more than a decade ago and I’m wondering if by remembering how I was hurt, I’m being resentful.

I don’t feel powerless. In some cases, it has been more than a decade. If I meet these people again, I will be civil, but would not want an intimate relation with them.

Yes, anita, that is why I was annoyed. More because of the second reason today. It’s not the first time and I don’t see what’s so hard to understand because we don’t have the same size. Not sure why she wouldn’t get that I don’t get my size at any of the stores she mentioned. I replied with a fairly terse comment saying she didn’t know what slim fit pants or straight fit pants are. It gets on my nerves when other people try to fix their version of me on me.

Inky, I have a friend too who complains all the time. That is another thing I need to deal with.