Hello All,

I have been reading Tiny Buddha for about a year now and never thought to post to the forums until now.

Sigh…where do I begin? I am a 32 year old woman who feels hopelessly lost in life. So I guess best to start at the beginning. My childhood was not easy. I was the victim of pretty serious mental abuse, and some physical abuse, which left me quite depressed, with little to no self-esteem, a total lack of social skills because of living in such a household and trying to hide things, a reluctance to trust anyone, and a lot of rage at my abuser and the world in general for letting it happen. After over 10 years of therapy, and a brief stint with anti-depressants, I seem to finally beginning to move on a bit.

Sometimes I wonder though if I will ever move on from it all. Depression runs in my family so it is very easy to get sucked back down into its blackness. Added to which, after all of that, sometimes it feels completely and totally overwhelming. I have to try to battle the depression, work on my self-worth and self-esteem, try to polish up my social skills and make some friends, in addition to all of the routine demands of life, and some days it seems a totally overwhelming burden to carry.

When I was small, I used to talk to God (I know, perhaps this is not the best forum for that) and tell him how out of place I felt. It seems like I knew deep down that I was not supposed to be here – on earth that is – and I used to beg him to take me back. Literally I would get down on my knees and sob and beg. Lately, more often than not, I have started feeling this way again. I feel invisible, misplaced, not meant to be.

Every aspect of my life seems adrift. My career is up in the air, because I feel like I just sort of let it happen to me. I did go to school, something I was always rather good at, but never had any idea of what I wanted to be in life. As a child I never dreamed of being a ballerina, or a doctor, or anything really – I honestly never thought that I would live that long. I thought that one day I would just die of the hurt of being alive. And so I find myself with a rather general degree, in a career that really means nothing to me. I am good at what I do, but it is essentially a job. All of my peers seem to have their careers figured out and are steadily advancing and making the corresponding good money, and I am adrift just kind of going through the motions to stay afloat.

My health is completely wretched. Over the years things have steadily gotten worse. In a family that is generally healthy, I developed lactose intolerance, then gluten intolerance, then an inability to absorb vitamin B12 – which means shots for the rest of my life, then general digestive difficulties, and most recently a rare and chronic pain condition. Some of my family has accused me of fabricating some of these things, which hurts. But I have learned to live rather normally within the confines of my “new normal,” though I do have my “why me” days and wish that I could just be healthy again.

Somehow I did manage to get married, though my family said that would be a long shot because of my difficult character. That would be the whole perfectionism thing my abuser drilled into me in my constant efforts to please him. But again, my marriage seems to be yet another aspect of my life that is out of order. I have been married for almost 10 years and the more I look back on it the more I think that my marriage was an escape for me from my home, that he was a temporary bandage. We live more like friends or even business partners than anything else, which saddens me. There is no affection, no passion, no romantic love. I don’t know if I ever really loved my husband, but now I mostly find myself resenting him – for all the things he could not provide me (and I am not speaking material things), for all the love that was not reciprocated (which I have gradually stopped sending out to him), and just the general lack. The cruelest twist of it all is that after many, many, years of not wanting children – now I find myself inexplicably drawn to them, wanting to become a mother. But amidst all this turmoil, how?

I often fantasize about just packing everything up, wiping the slate clean, and moving somewhere where no one knows me, my shame, my screw ups, my difficulties, and starting over. But the imagination is willing, the body is not. I see all these people around me, successful, content, etc. and I get so angry. What on earth did I do to deserve to suffer through this life of mine so, to have to very little going for me. I know this is a horrid way to think, to be so darkly jealous of other people’s lives and happiness – I just don’t know how not to do it. Especially when I feel like such a screw up. I feel like I’ve pushed so many people away because of it too, because I couldn’t bear having people happier than I around me as constant reminders of my lack. I really don’t wish to do that any more, because let’s face it that would mean a lot of people, but I just don’t know how not to be envious of their good fortune.

I read all these self-help books, and search for all these answers, yet none seem to come. My latest book is supposed to help you find your true calling, your purpose on this earth – or at least maybe point you in the right direction, but when I try to do the exercises nothing comes to me. Am I truly meant to wander this world perpetually lost and invisible to the point where if I screamed at the top of my lungs I doubt anyone would notice? Sometimes I wish I could at least just know the answer to at least that question. Because it seems like it would be easier to know so that at least I could brace myself for a life of nothingness, of invisibility, of trudging through life in an empty shell existence. At least it would be better than questioning…

So yes, there it is, my life (in a nutshell) laid bare. I don’t know if anyone could provide any insight that will help, but what’s the harm in putting it out there.