I feel  if someone whom I was attracted to wanted me and actually put in an effort  I would turn into this loving person. I wonder if I would sabotage the relationship the way I unconsciously sabotage my friendships. Relationships of any kind are difficult for me unless it’s in service to someone and that someone never criticizes me. I do have someone like that in my life. She puts up with me being late which I am almost always late. She listens to me and tells me she understands. There is another person and these two people are somewhat authority figures in my life. They never lose their high opinion of me no matter how much I get upset or cry or am late..

I am always in survival mode with little bursts of ambition that fizzle out and then I just remain in survival mode. I have always wanted to be an artist. I have done murals for my family and friend but nothing professional. I took art classes at Community College but didn’t finish my associate’s degree. I earned a certificate in Interior Design and never pursued a job. I wanted to be a journalist and a writer when I was in grade school but everything after grandmother died happened and I went off track of having interests or pursuits.  I wanted to be a teacher but the school I wanted to go to was too expensive. I’ve wanted to be an art therapist, art teacher…later on I actually took classes in real estate and barely graduated only to fail the exams. I can retake the exams but I’m not sure I want to.

In recent years I have thought of being a writer and illustrator but I am so tired from my job. So stressed. I can not make these things happen. All the while I am dreaming of myself in some alternate universe in a relationship with a man and I am sometimes dealing with worse problems that I actually do in my real life. The only difference is I am not alone.

For most of the 90’s it was just me and my dog with passing chances with men. I could get initial attention but rarely beyond that. I had two tiring but somewhat fullfling jobs in my life that I spent many years at. I could have moved up but lost both to my mood problems and crying.

I have tried medication, diet, exercise, affirmations, self help tapes, a couple seminars, hypnosis, psychics, gemstones, therapy, therapy, therapy, yoga, outpatient treatment, group therapy, Self help books, books on how to flirt, I have tried even more.

The only thing I haven’t tried is dating for fun. I can’t do that. I have never done that. Friendship is different but a romantic relationship I think something more has to be there than just liking someone. I also hate the idea of rejecting someone even though I have had to do it in a kind of blowing off initial attention towards me.

I feel as if I would know him if he showed up. I felt that way with a man I talked with online a few years back and when he just stopped talking to me I was devastated. I am not pushy and would wait for him to talk to me. It got to the point that I had to always be the one to start conversations. I still miss him. He definately was someone I was looking for. He was intelligent, funny, sensitive but strong, thoughtful, cared about the environment, politics, what was going on in the world, extraverted, critical when he felt it was needed, caring about people, caring about animals, I know I said funny but he was often funny in a very subtle way that I loved, handsome.

I didn’t grow up around many guys who had these traits at least I didn’t notice any. The guys I grew up around were very critical but not constructively critical. They often seemed to have narrow interests consisting of sports and beer. I have no problem with either, it’s the lack of interest in any thing else I don’t understand. What is strange is I have discovered along the way that men who were married to my friends did have other interests but you had to delve into a deeper conversation to find those interests.

Well the 90’s consisted of me working at a low paying job and the best thing I did was be a nanny to children.

I lived for the most part in my not so nice apartment with my dog. I worked and spent a lot of time with my best friend who just got married and was starting a family. We were definately not on the same page and she wanted me to have a relationship as well. I met a friend of her husbands who was cute and funny and who seemed to like me but after I said something kinda negative, not about him but other men, he really didn’t pursue any kind of relationship with me. Even when we were alone sleeping on the couches at the beach in my friend’s family house.

So yeah I went out a few times in the 90’s but only with friends watching them have relationships, develop relationships, receive flowers for valentine’s day. Cried a lot.

Around 2000 I had a job that paid well by my experience anyway but was very difficult and badically more of same as far as my relationship with my co workers go.Oh I had a job just before this one and after the one I had a long time in the 90’s. Here is a good example of a consistant theme in my life. I was working at a department store with the naive notion that this could be fun. I was put into one department that I loved but stocking was something I was not very good at and I had to do it quickly and I couldn’t. I wanted to clean everything. I also had to tend to the cash register. I was great at the register. Often the department store would have me cover two departments at once and one department required me to go up to the stock room every time someone wanted to make a purchase because they were large items. It often took me away from my first department. This was 1998 so you can imagine how thin workers are being spread today in department stores if you wonder you can’t find someone to help you.

One day the register was short and my register was always on point but there was no explanation for it. Then it happened again and one of the managers looked at me with a glare and walked away like I did something wrong. It was obvious that someone was stealing from the register at that point. They acted like they were sure it was me and even put me in this room with no windows talking to a detective and what did I do? I cried of course. I cried because I was insulted not because I did anything. Apparantly in their world and I guess everyone else’s that means you did something wrong but I felt like a victum. Like I was being punished for doing a good job. There were so many things I was not but I was miss honest and I took this as an insult and just another instance of being treated shabbily by men. The woman who was head cashier believed me when I said I did nothing wrong. I was in there a long time and I mantained I did nothing wrong and vecoming depressed. They had no choice but to leave me back on the floor.

Well they find out on camera the someone who found a way to open the register and I am clearly in the other department at the same time. They simply informed me of this and offered no apology for what they put me through. My immediate manager didn’t think they needed to apologize. Another manager asked me “Did they straigten you out on what happened” so he showed concern. As far as I was concerned the damage was done. I gave them notice and quit. That is just one example of many in my life.

The 00’s were worse than the 90’s as I didn’t have my best friend anymore after an argument in 2002. I lost my dog. I didn’t really have friends to go out with anymore. I had younger roommates and everyone my age had moved on to having families. I spent a lot of time alone. Going out alone. Staying in my room alone. I went to art museums and cafes and bought music and books. I lived at the bookstore. Still searching for ways to have a life. I lost my home that I was renting in a fire a week before my natural mother died. I had to live with my family. So I was not only alone. I had lost my independence.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Lisa.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Lisa.

I am “not” wholly sure

A correction from the last paragraph.

Let me see if I can consolidate my basic experience all these years. I started seeing a therapist when I refused to go back to high school. She was very nice but she couldn’t get me back into school. No one could but I didn’t feel like the effort to get me back in school was very strong. I thought they all gave up too easily. So at 15 I stayed at home with my grandfather and uncles. I didn’t go out. I had no friends. I cleaned the house, did everone’s laundry and after a couple of years was pressured to get a job. Me, who loved school but didn’t feel I could go. Me who was bright and talented was pushed to get a job and left with people saying they couldn’t believe how I turned out. I was an artist who loved books and school and my schooling was given up on by the adults around me because I didn’t fix my situation overnight. I always felt that people never thought I was worth the effort. They try once but then give up on me.

I cried on the day I was suppose to graduate high school. I missed out on dating. I missed out on the proms. I missed out on friendship. I missed out on being on the honor roll. I missed out on graduation. I missed out on being a teenager. People just let me do it too. I lived with my grandfather and with other men who didn’t always treat me well and I was criticised for not working after cleaning for them.

A fews years after my next door neighbor asked me to go to an aerobics class and that kinda pulled me out of the house to do more outside of my home. For the most part I spent time in the library and fantasizing about being someone else. A version of myself. I never imagined a perfect life with no problems. The only thing different were my connections to people.

Di I mention that my grandmother died when I was 14? It wasn’t long after I found out she wasn’t my real mother.

Dealing with real or imagined rejections from people I continued to imagine being a different version than myself, cleaning the house, barely going out and I also got a job. I did this until my grandfather died when I was 23 and then I was forced to take care of myself completely financially. I lost my home but I will talk about that later and continue this over the weekend.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Lisa.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Lisa.

I would like to post more and summarize what life has been like from my teens till now because I feel it’s important but I want to be able to summarize it well and that might not be until tomorrow. Thank you Anita and Pinch of Attitude for your thoughts so far. ♡

I would like to provide you with more information. I will as soon as I can.

Thank you,

Lisa

Anita I was described as a hyperactive child. I was put on a pill daily. When I was around 14-15 a doctor who took over the practice of my other doctor refused to prescribe the pill for me. I heard him tell my grandfather that it was “speed.” I remember being upset that he wouldn’t prescribe it because I felt I functioned better while on it.

I can be foggy I guess in my thinking sometimes. I do remember people thinking I had a hearing problem because I genuinely could not hear people saying my name while I was watching TV. It does take a second sometimes to absorb information. The only subject in school I struggled with was math but I always felt it was because I didn’t want to do it rather than I couldn’t do it.

I also have a problem meditating. I always wanted to do it but my mind wanders too much.

Alone is definately what I feel and you are right overwhelmed is what I have always felt also. I would have liked emotional support and have things explained to me. I feel I was left to figure it out on my own and I have learned nothing more than to just survive. I am definately just an observer of people who have actual lives. You are right…my life did freeze in time. I was moving ahead until everything got to be too much.

Everything I can/could be I can’t manage to be. I don’t have anything to give it life.

Thank you pinchofattitude.

My parents were teenagers when I was born. They were possibly involved in drugs and drinking of some kind in the late 60”s. They couldn’t take care of me and my mother’s family did not like my father. I understand there was a huge fight when he came around to see me and was told to stay away from me. Hearing other people besides my mother, they had their reasons for disliking him but my mother defended his memory saying he wasn’t the bad person they made him out to be. I also heard that my father had many girlfriends but he seemed to have a “relationship” with my mother. I am going back a little but when I was born I think my mother put me in a forster home in the next state over from where I was born. Strangely that was the state where my father’s family is from. So my maternal grandparents didn’t know where I was for 6 months after I was born. Well I was found and brought back to my mother’s parent’s house and they began raising me as their child. Their names are even on my birth certificate. They referred to my aunts and uncles and my mother as my sisters and brothers and that’s all I knew. I was abused briefly by an uncle and verbally abused by another. My grandparents were a bit old fashioned but despite not having a lot of money were generous with material things, schooling, clothes. My grandfather I believe wanted things to stay as they were but I hear that my grandmother wanted desperately for my mother to mature enough to take care of me. Her lifestyle didn’t sit well with them and I believe they thought she had substance abuse issues and I think often she was not allowed home and they wanted her to create a life for herself but she had problems. The house was sometimes peaceful but sometimes terrible fights among the siblings who were in their teens and twenties by then. I would hide in my room when their fights broke out. Most fights started from one of the sons who split from his wife and drank heavily and who was now home.

I went to school which I wanted to desperately a year late because the first time I took the test to get in the Catholic school teachers or nuns didn’t believe I sat still. I remember all through childhood I had to take a pill everyday supposedly to calm me down. I was a good baby I was told but as I got older would be more prone to tantrums I guess. I also remember having frequent accidents through the night at bedtime which was seen as a behaivoral problem and I was often chastized for it. I am trying to be honest as much as possible as I feel the help I need is imperative. I was also a sensitive child and a target for bullies, often from other children even on my own street. One day one of them and her brother whom I tried to be friends with even though they were mean to me told me casually, Lisa we know something bad about you. They proceded to tell me I was adopted and that my sister was my mother. Apparantly they found out from their mother who was friends with my mother. When I confronted my family with this they said that she was lying. I kept questioning whether it was true or not and I often wondered why I was so much younger than my next sibling up. The go off track for a second the brother of the girl who td me I was adopted was nicer to me than she was and we had a little crush on eachother at that time. I was about 11 or 12. Well he joined in telling me about being adopted and seemed to think it was kinda funny and would even at other times say mean things to me. I didn’t know why.

Well I agonized over whether I was my sister’s daughter and that the woman who I thought was my mother might not be. Meanwhile I became more withdrawn. I was an outgoing kid with an open heart for the most part. In school though it seemed my teachers weren’t overly impressed with me as they were with other students even though I thought I was bright and talented. (In art) I didn’t impress anyone except a few classmates with my drawings. Friends started to withdraw from me. My cousin who the neighborhood boys would somehow compare me unfavorably to once asked me not to tell anyone I was her cousin. I started spending more time in my room where I could create my own reality. I often would pull the dresser drawer open so no one could open the door.

One day I was bullied on school grounds and without going into detail about the bullying, two nuns who saw the bullying made me feel as if I did something wrong and had no compassion for what I went through the next day in school. I was often called a baby or sissy for not standing up to kids that bullied me but my thoughts often went to wondering why they wanted to bully me? When I was told so gleefully about my “adoption” and that I was illegitimate I really retreated into my room. I started getting books out of the library and pretended I was someone else. I also developed a rash that was possibly from rheumatic fever. I know I definately had a strep throat. I finally got the truth out of my mother one day about her being my mother and it upset me because no one liked my mother and I wanted to be liked. They all lied to me from the first time I confronted them with this. I asked about my father and they said he took off. I find out much later in life that my father was still living in my neighborhood up until I was well into my twenties. I didn’t know him. Just before I finished grade school my grandmother died young. I was devasted by her death. I finished my last year in Catholic grade school and spent to majority of my time in my room and not going out at all.

Too much to write. I hope I can continue this tomorrow. I am trying to give an accurate description of my childhood in order for people to understand but too much to write right now.