Adult life feels very grim (especially if you had a bad childhood) and fuels the urge to ctb

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

It's just not worth it, when the demands, responsibilities, and expectations compound, and the compassion from wider society starts to run dry. Everyone feels sympathy for a broken child, but there is no pity for a broken adult. You're left on your own to a struggle in an increasingly atomized and complex system which doesn't give a damn about you.

This is glaringly obvious if you had a horrible upbringing, and were suddenly slung out into the world at 18 years old with no guidance. You're still the same abused child you were the day before your birthday, but now you're an abused child with an absurd amount of responsibilies and beurocracy to navigate. Congratulations, the law has deemed you mature and competent now with no basis to support that!

Everyone expects you to have everything completely figured out when you become an adult. They expect you to need 0 help and to be fully independent and to self-fulfill every need, something that goes against intrinsic human nature to be part of a tribe. Needing help, or love, or care is seen as a weakness and a character flaw. This behaviour gets you pegged as mentally ill.

This system becomes increasingly artificial and alienating the older you get, as 9 to 5 work is now a staple of your existence. Increasing numbers of people live alone and do nothing but work, pay their taxes, and sit in front of the tv/screens at night to soften the blow of this monotony. Activities that people enjoyed as children and teenagers begin to dry up, now that they no longer have the potential to be turned into a profession in one's future.

Music groups are for the talented who have been playing since childhood. Theatre and drama are competitive. Non-lucrative hobbies and interests become "for children" because they are unproductive. Everything is about grinding transferable skills as opposed to having fun. Wearing bright colors or enjoying girly things is now "unprofessional." One has to curb their personality and their interests to be more corporate and presentable to a dull pallette.

You can be anything, is a mantra we often hear as children, but it couldn't be further from the truth. You can only be yourself in very limited company as adult. First and foremost, you are a worker and your life will revolve around this no matter what, unless you become a billionaire and drop out of society. Secondly, there is the expectation that eventually you marry and raise children or you'll be alone forever, despite most modern marriages being ephemeral and falling to pieces quickly. The ultimate goal is to reproduce.

To be a lonely or sick adult is to be castigated and blamed by wider society because you've "done something wrong" or aren't taking personal responsibility to fix your life. Ever heard that shitty phrase, "The trauma wasn't your fault, but it is your responsibility to deal with!" As if anyone on this planet actually knows how to deal with the after effects of trauma, and we aren't all pissing in the wind and placing blame on individuals to solve a problem so complex that even researchers who have studied this topic for decades have no clue where to begin when it comes to mitigating or solving these issues.

People don't want to acknowledge that your adult brain is shaped and molded by childhood experience. It is common knowledge that unless you learn a second language as a child, becoming fluently bilingual later in life is nearly impossible. Not completely out of the realm of possibility, but you'd need years of in depth immersion because your brain hasn't formed the necessary synaptic connections to process another language, and adults are no longer sponges when it comes to retaining and learning new information.

So why is it so surprising that patterns of behaviour, wants, desires, needs, wishes, aspirations, and fears can carry from childhood to adulthood? Wounds are left unattended to with no one to nurse them, yet society tells you to grow up and deal with it, go to therapy, you're an adult now! I remember when I was 17 and finally received an on paper autism diagnosis, I asked, what now? Surely, you'd expect there would be SOME sort of help.

Instead, I was told that it was too late to help me, because I was pretty much an adult and any kind of service ended the moment you left the state education system. All of the problems I'd dealt with my whole life remained, yet I was left without even so much as a life preserver because I'd arbitrarily aged out of the system. By no means was I "high functioning" either, neglect and abuse had impeded any progress I'd made with learning social skills, I got fired from jobs, I learned very slowly in school, and I will always have odd patterns of speech, be unable to make eye contact, or deal with certain textures and sensory stimuli.

The extremely high standards of indepdence thrust upon me aren't uniformly enforced though. When someone around my age, 23, needs to live with their family to save money or for emotional support, it is celebrated and encouraged, especially if they are in university like me. When you're a disabled woman forced to stake it out on your own and rely on partners for help because you have no family and had to deal with abuse from previous romances for years, you are chastised for being codependent, when these high standards of self sufficiency are never applied to your peers. The same people who blame you for not trying hard enough never had to spend a day in your shoes themselves, they've always had loving families and support and have never hit the rock bottom of society.

How little people care about each other is what truly breaks my heart. Everyone is a stranger to each other, no one cares about the people they pass on the street everyday, or their neighbor living alone, the world is now far too big and less interconnected than ever. No one trusts each other. People's hearts are as barren and lonely as ever, and when you've missed that starting gun in childhood, it feels like there's no way to recover from it.

My entire life has objectively been wasted due to neglect I suffered at the hands of my family. It was nothing but non stop bullying and ostratisation in school. I see other people my age who grew up having parents, and their parents cultivated talents and social skills with their children, continually nurturing them. I can go on social media right this moment and see people I knew since pre-school who are already married, have children, go on big holidays with their family, had a movie like experience at university, and constantly hang out with their friends.

All of those things are off the table for me. Well intentioned strangers will say, "Oh it's okay that you have no family, you'll just have to get married and have kids. That's the solution!" However, my health deteriorates over time. My chronic fatigue makes me the most bland and uninteresting person because even if I desperately want to socialise, I can't say or do anything and sometimes sound like I have dementia. I've tried everything I possibly could, more medications than you can count, but I am never getting better and these issues have only worsened since I got covid. My spinal discs are degenerating and it's only going to get worse with time. I spend most of the month constipated and I have to take laxatives bc my IBS is so severe. I don't see how I could raise a child in this state.

I can't hold down a job either because I cannot sleep on a schedule. At my last job, I was constantly causing problems due to my forgetfulness and brainfog, requiring a lot of help and being babied through protocols to do basic things. I kept pissing off my supervisor because she was a healthy, young energetic woman who wanted to go to the gym everyday, cook all of her own meals and go out constantly with friends and family, so she did not appreciate having to stay later and babysit me because I couldn't wake up at the hours she could.

I don't see myself being able to attain anything that makes adult life remotely worthwhile. Making friends is no guarantee and the opportunities for socialising significantly dry up as soon as you're finished with education. Exercise groups or anything else that would require me to expend a lot of energy accessing are off the table for obvious reasons. Yet, I get told over and over again that life is what you make of it and I'm not trying hard enough to fix it.

Getting older and older leads to more disappointment. Not only is my body failing me, but I have to lay in my bed alone constantly replaying horrible memories from the past. I have to think about how all of my childhood friends are gone, and they're never coming back for whatever reason. I have to think about how I missed out on 2 entire years of life as a teenager bc my family locked me up and made me a NEET at 14 years old. I have to think about how most of my family members are dead and the remaining ones might as well be because they didn't want me in the first place and abandoned me. I have to think about how I lost a promising career due to being so disabled and will struggle my entire life, probably in poverty if my partner left me. I have to think about losing my innocence and being taken advantage of, and how all the good times have already passed me by. How I've had ptsd since I was 5 years old and it's completely untreatable bc it's ingrained into my very sexuality.

But yeah, there's so much hope right. It's never too late to do x and y! Wish people would get it through their heads that for someone like me there is only one option, and that is inevitable ctb. There's no more wonder or hope in the world, only the cold realisation that life doesn't care about adults who are struggling or vunerable.

 

[whatevs]

This is exactly how it is for me. You really explain it quite well!

I get it, I was set on a dark path long ago and the destination could be fixed and unavoidable with enough time, but somehow I think suicidal thoughts become much louder when I'm in an office sorrounded by people that fit and exert themselves for completely alien reasons to me, or I'm trying to have my bank account working because of an application bug, or when someone drags me into a dinner or a holiday trip with borrowed friends, or when my father presses me to get a driving license and stop using him to reach my job.

In these instances when I feel the coarse, demanding, brutal grip of adulthood on top of my pre-existing problems, my now chronic sadness climbs to high points of murderous impotence, where ending my life gains substance and loses abstraction.

But it's a very slow process. I reckon it will take years of a background struggle, at least for me. Then a conclusion will be produced and passed off to the conscious mind, and actions will be taken, or rather, be actioned by the emotional wave.

The bottom like for people like me and probably you is really prosaic and anticlimactic: our grand struggle isn't some Sartrian wrestling with the levity of being or a (largely spectral) Nietzschean dark night of the soul in search of yonder, but with having normal bodily functions during sleep, sexual discharge of fluids/muscular contractions, digesting food or during a visit to the toilet.

 

[Rounded Apathy]

Thank you for sharing your sad tale. Most everything you say, I believe, is and rings true. The individualism created by the modern, urban, western, capitalist way of things is very out of step with what many see as a still fundamental way of human existence - interdependence. The sad things is in a large enough society, we can't care about everyone we pass on the street, because our brains just don't have that capacity. We've already capped out by 200 people, so how can we possibly handle a number many hundredfold?

I wonder just how much ancient cities were also like this; Babylon, ancient Rome, so on...we are tribal but we have been amassing in sizes greater than tribes for longer than most of us think of. That said, I think it is also cultural how things are now, as I've been to and spoken with people in places like Latin America where even in huge cities there is a sense of community identity.

Of course, those with the most power and influence only stand to gain from the lower strata being broken and fragmented; this isn't just totally random, how things are. Most humans and life in general has this innate drive to persevere and fulfill the biological imperative, and/or to seek out whatever it deems missing from its existence...hence the constant struggle, the feeding of the machine. When this has been adopted on a culturally level, it really sucks when anything takes you out of the equation. I can only imagine having degenerating discs and knowing that save for some ridiculous breakthrough in medicine you are just facing a gradual decline. If we were a more compassionate kind of species you'd at least have understanding, support and companionship, but instead everyone is too caught up in the things you have already observed. And you're only 23.

I try to remind myself in less dark times that the universe is grand, indifferent, and cosmically balanced, but those things often don't help in the more dark times. So I can only send you whatever insignificant amount of loving energy that will transit from this computer in my dark room to whatever you are using to receive the words I create here.

 

[FuneralCry]

I've always found the thought of getting older to be very depressing. For many people the longer they stay alive the more that they will suffer and problems will increase. It's awful how life can torture people in so many ways with no real relief.

 

[Julgran]

It's just not worth it, when the demands, responsibilities, and expectations compound, and the compassion from wider society starts to run dry. Everyone feels sympathy for a broken child, but there is no pity for a broken adult. You're left on your own to a struggle in an increasingly atomized and complex system which doesn't give a damn about you.

This is glaringly obvious if you had a horrible upbringing, and were suddenly slung out into the world at 18 years old with no guidance. You're still the same abused child you were the day before your birthday, but now you're an abused child with an absurd amount of responsibilies and beurocracy to navigate. Congratulations, the law has deemed you mature and competent now with no basis to support that!

Everyone expects you to have everything completely figured out when you become an adult. They expect you to need 0 help and to be fully independent and to self-fulfill every need, something that goes against intrinsic human nature to be part of a tribe. Needing help, or love, or care is seen as a weakness and a character flaw. This behaviour gets you pegged as mentally ill.

This system becomes increasingly artificial and alienating the older you get, as 9 to 5 work is now a staple of your existence. Increasing numbers of people live alone and do nothing but work, pay their taxes, and sit in front of the tv/screens at night to soften the blow of this monotony. Activities that people enjoyed as children and teenagers begin to dry up, now that they no longer have the potential to be turned into a profession in one's future.

Music groups are for the talented who have been playing since childhood. Theatre and drama are competitive. Non-lucrative hobbies and interests become "for children" because they are unproductive. Everything is about grinding transferable skills as opposed to having fun. Wearing bright colors or enjoying girly things is now "unprofessional." One has to curb their personality and their interests to be more corporate and presentable to a dull pallette.

You can be anything, is a mantra we often hear as children, but it couldn't be further from the truth. You can only be yourself in very limited company as adult. First and foremost, you are a worker and your life will revolve around this no matter what, unless you become a billionaire and drop out of society. Secondly, there is the expectation that eventually you marry and raise children or you'll be alone forever, despite most modern marriages being ephemeral and falling to pieces quickly. The ultimate goal is to reproduce.

To be a lonely or sick adult is to be castigated and blamed by wider society because you've "done something wrong" or aren't taking personal responsibility to fix your life. Ever heard that shitty phrase, "The trauma wasn't your fault, but it is your responsibility to deal with!" As if anyone on this planet actually knows how to deal with the after effects of trauma, and we aren't all pissing in the wind and placing blame on individuals to solve a problem so complex that even researchers who have studied this topic for decades have no clue where to begin when it comes to mitigating or solving these issues.

People don't want to acknowledge that your adult brain is shaped and molded by childhood experience. It is common knowledge that unless you learn a second language as a child, becoming fluently bilingual later in life is nearly impossible. Not completely out of the realm of possibility, but you'd need years of in depth immersion because your brain hasn't formed the necessary synaptic connections to process another language, and adults are no longer sponges when it comes to retaining and learning new information.

So why is it so surprising that patterns of behaviour, wants, desires, needs, wishes, aspirations, and fears can carry from childhood to adulthood? Wounds are left unattended to with no one to nurse them, yet society tells you to grow up and deal with it, go to therapy, you're an adult now! I remember when I was 17 and finally received an on paper autism diagnosis, I asked, what now? Surely, you'd expect there would be SOME sort of help.

Instead, I was told that it was too late to help me, because I was pretty much an adult and any kind of service ended the moment you left the state education system. All of the problems I'd dealt with my whole life remained, yet I was left without even so much as a life preserver because I'd arbitrarily aged out of the system. By no means was I "high functioning" either, neglect and abuse had impeded any progress I'd made with learning social skills, I got fired from jobs, I learned very slowly in school, and I will always have odd patterns of speech, be unable to make eye contact, or deal with certain textures and sensory stimuli.

The extremely high standards of indepdence thrust upon me aren't uniformly enforced though. When someone around my age, 23, needs to live with their family to save money or for emotional support, it is celebrated and encouraged, especially if they are in university like me. When you're a disabled woman forced to stake it out on your own and rely on partners for help because you have no family and had to deal with abuse from previous romances for years, you are chastised for being codependent, when these high standards of self sufficiency are never applied to your peers. The same people who blame you for not trying hard enough never had to spend a day in your shoes themselves, they've always had loving families and support and have never hit the rock bottom of society.

How little people care about each other is what truly breaks my heart. Everyone is a stranger to each other, no one cares about the people they pass on the street everyday, or their neighbor living alone, the world is now far too big and less interconnected than ever. No one trusts each other. People's hearts are as barren and lonely as ever, and when you've missed that starting gun in childhood, it feels like there's no way to recover from it.

My entire life has objectively been wasted due to neglect I suffered at the hands of my family. It was nothing but non stop bullying and ostratisation in school. I see other people my age who grew up having parents, and their parents cultivated talents and social skills with their children, continually nurturing them. I can go on social media right this moment and see people I knew since pre-school who are already married, have children, go on big holidays with their family, had a movie like experience at university, and constantly hang out with their friends.

All of those things are off the table for me. Well intentioned strangers will say, "Oh it's okay that you have no family, you'll just have to get married and have kids. That's the solution!" However, my health deteriorates over time. My chronic fatigue makes me the most bland and uninteresting person because even if I desperately want to socialise, I can't say or do anything and sometimes sound like I have dementia. I've tried everything I possibly could, more medications than you can count, but I am never getting better and these issues have only worsened since I got covid. My spinal discs are degenerating and it's only going to get worse with time. I spend most of the month constipated and I have to take laxatives bc my IBS is so severe. I don't see how I could raise a child in this state.

I can't hold down a job either because I cannot sleep on a schedule. At my last job, I was constantly causing problems due to my forgetfulness and brainfog, requiring a lot of help and being babied through protocols to do basic things. I kept pissing off my supervisor because she was a healthy, young energetic woman who wanted to go to the gym everyday, cook all of her own meals and go out constantly with friends and family, so she did not appreciate having to stay later and babysit me because I couldn't wake up at the hours she could.

I don't see myself being able to attain anything that makes adult life remotely worthwhile. Making friends is no guarantee and the opportunities for socialising significantly dry up as soon as you're finished with education. Exercise groups or anything else that would require me to expend a lot of energy accessing are off the table for obvious reasons. Yet, I get told over and over again that life is what you make of it and I'm not trying hard enough to fix it.

Getting older and older leads to more disappointment. Not only is my body failing me, but I have to lay in my bed alone constantly replaying horrible memories from the past. I have to think about how all of my childhood friends are gone, and they're never coming back for whatever reason. I have to think about how I missed out on 2 entire years of life as a teenager bc my family locked me up and made me a NEET at 14 years old. I have to think about how most of my family members are dead and the remaining ones might as well be because they didn't want me in the first place and abandoned me. I have to think about how I lost a promising career due to being so disabled and will struggle my entire life, probably in poverty if my partner left me. I have to think about losing my innocence and being taken advantage of, and how all the good times have already passed me by. How I've had ptsd since I was 5 years old and it's completely untreatable bc it's ingrained into my very sexuality.

But yeah, there's so much hope right. It's never too late to do x and y! Wish people would get it through their heads that for someone like me there is only one option, and that is inevitable ctb. There's no more wonder or hope in the world, only the cold realisation that life doesn't care about adults who are struggling or vunerable.

You are correct!

We are all disposable, and if we have any serious life issues, we won't even be counted... we are lambs to the slaughter of life.

 

[LaVieEnRose]

I agree with what you've written. Unsurprisingly, I don't have any solutions to offer, just my commiseration. If it makes you feel any better, I just want to praise your writing. It's exquisite.

 

[y'ffre]

It's just not worth it, when the demands, responsibilities, and expectations compound, and the compassion from wider society starts to run dry. Everyone feels sympathy for a broken child, but there is no pity for a broken adult. You're left on your own to a struggle in an increasingly atomized and complex system which doesn't give a damn about you.

This is glaringly obvious if you had a horrible upbringing, and were suddenly slung out into the world at 18 years old with no guidance. You're still the same abused child you were the day before your birthday, but now you're an abused child with an absurd amount of responsibilies and beurocracy to navigate. Congratulations, the law has deemed you mature and competent now with no basis to support that!

Everyone expects you to have everything completely figured out when you become an adult. They expect you to need 0 help and to be fully independent and to self-fulfill every need, something that goes against intrinsic human nature to be part of a tribe. Needing help, or love, or care is seen as a weakness and a character flaw. This behaviour gets you pegged as mentally ill.

This system becomes increasingly artificial and alienating the older you get, as 9 to 5 work is now a staple of your existence. Increasing numbers of people live alone and do nothing but work, pay their taxes, and sit in front of the tv/screens at night to soften the blow of this monotony. Activities that people enjoyed as children and teenagers begin to dry up, now that they no longer have the potential to be turned into a profession in one's future.

Music groups are for the talented who have been playing since childhood. Theatre and drama are competitive. Non-lucrative hobbies and interests become "for children" because they are unproductive. Everything is about grinding transferable skills as opposed to having fun. Wearing bright colors or enjoying girly things is now "unprofessional." One has to curb their personality and their interests to be more corporate and presentable to a dull pallette.

You can be anything, is a mantra we often hear as children, but it couldn't be further from the truth. You can only be yourself in very limited company as adult. First and foremost, you are a worker and your life will revolve around this no matter what, unless you become a billionaire and drop out of society. Secondly, there is the expectation that eventually you marry and raise children or you'll be alone forever, despite most modern marriages being ephemeral and falling to pieces quickly. The ultimate goal is to reproduce.

To be a lonely or sick adult is to be castigated and blamed by wider society because you've "done something wrong" or aren't taking personal responsibility to fix your life. Ever heard that shitty phrase, "The trauma wasn't your fault, but it is your responsibility to deal with!" As if anyone on this planet actually knows how to deal with the after effects of trauma, and we aren't all pissing in the wind and placing blame on individuals to solve a problem so complex that even researchers who have studied this topic for decades have no clue where to begin when it comes to mitigating or solving these issues.

People don't want to acknowledge that your adult brain is shaped and molded by childhood experience. It is common knowledge that unless you learn a second language as a child, becoming fluently bilingual later in life is nearly impossible. Not completely out of the realm of possibility, but you'd need years of in depth immersion because your brain hasn't formed the necessary synaptic connections to process another language, and adults are no longer sponges when it comes to retaining and learning new information.

So why is it so surprising that patterns of behaviour, wants, desires, needs, wishes, aspirations, and fears can carry from childhood to adulthood? Wounds are left unattended to with no one to nurse them, yet society tells you to grow up and deal with it, go to therapy, you're an adult now! I remember when I was 17 and finally received an on paper autism diagnosis, I asked, what now? Surely, you'd expect there would be SOME sort of help.

Instead, I was told that it was too late to help me, because I was pretty much an adult and any kind of service ended the moment you left the state education system. All of the problems I'd dealt with my whole life remained, yet I was left without even so much as a life preserver because I'd arbitrarily aged out of the system. By no means was I "high functioning" either, neglect and abuse had impeded any progress I'd made with learning social skills, I got fired from jobs, I learned very slowly in school, and I will always have odd patterns of speech, be unable to make eye contact, or deal with certain textures and sensory stimuli.

The extremely high standards of indepdence thrust upon me aren't uniformly enforced though. When someone around my age, 23, needs to live with their family to save money or for emotional support, it is celebrated and encouraged, especially if they are in university like me. When you're a disabled woman forced to stake it out on your own and rely on partners for help because you have no family and had to deal with abuse from previous romances for years, you are chastised for being codependent, when these high standards of self sufficiency are never applied to your peers. The same people who blame you for not trying hard enough never had to spend a day in your shoes themselves, they've always had loving families and support and have never hit the rock bottom of society.

How little people care about each other is what truly breaks my heart. Everyone is a stranger to each other, no one cares about the people they pass on the street everyday, or their neighbor living alone, the world is now far too big and less interconnected than ever. No one trusts each other. People's hearts are as barren and lonely as ever, and when you've missed that starting gun in childhood, it feels like there's no way to recover from it.

My entire life has objectively been wasted due to neglect I suffered at the hands of my family. It was nothing but non stop bullying and ostratisation in school. I see other people my age who grew up having parents, and their parents cultivated talents and social skills with their children, continually nurturing them. I can go on social media right this moment and see people I knew since pre-school who are already married, have children, go on big holidays with their family, had a movie like experience at university, and constantly hang out with their friends.

All of those things are off the table for me. Well intentioned strangers will say, "Oh it's okay that you have no family, you'll just have to get married and have kids. That's the solution!" However, my health deteriorates over time. My chronic fatigue makes me the most bland and uninteresting person because even if I desperately want to socialise, I can't say or do anything and sometimes sound like I have dementia. I've tried everything I possibly could, more medications than you can count, but I am never getting better and these issues have only worsened since I got covid. My spinal discs are degenerating and it's only going to get worse with time. I spend most of the month constipated and I have to take laxatives bc my IBS is so severe. I don't see how I could raise a child in this state.

I can't hold down a job either because I cannot sleep on a schedule. At my last job, I was constantly causing problems due to my forgetfulness and brainfog, requiring a lot of help and being babied through protocols to do basic things. I kept pissing off my supervisor because she was a healthy, young energetic woman who wanted to go to the gym everyday, cook all of her own meals and go out constantly with friends and family, so she did not appreciate having to stay later and babysit me because I couldn't wake up at the hours she could.

I don't see myself being able to attain anything that makes adult life remotely worthwhile. Making friends is no guarantee and the opportunities for socialising significantly dry up as soon as you're finished with education. Exercise groups or anything else that would require me to expend a lot of energy accessing are off the table for obvious reasons. Yet, I get told over and over again that life is what you make of it and I'm not trying hard enough to fix it.

Getting older and older leads to more disappointment. Not only is my body failing me, but I have to lay in my bed alone constantly replaying horrible memories from the past. I have to think about how all of my childhood friends are gone, and they're never coming back for whatever reason. I have to think about how I missed out on 2 entire years of life as a teenager bc my family locked me up and made me a NEET at 14 years old. I have to think about how most of my family members are dead and the remaining ones might as well be because they didn't want me in the first place and abandoned me. I have to think about how I lost a promising career due to being so disabled and will struggle my entire life, probably in poverty if my partner left me. I have to think about losing my innocence and being taken advantage of, and how all the good times have already passed me by. How I've had ptsd since I was 5 years old and it's completely untreatable bc it's ingrained into my very sexuality.

But yeah, there's so much hope right. It's never too late to do x and y! Wish people would get it through their heads that for someone like me there is only one option, and that is inevitable ctb. There's no more wonder or hope in the world, only the cold realisation that life doesn't care about adults who are struggling or vunerable.

Beautifully written. I sensed very easily, the high intelligence behind the text.
I am wondering something. How do other people deal with this boring life? Are they immune to pain? If so can they endure physical torture like in the movies?
Why do they want to live a life as you explained?

 

[Everlong]

It's just not worth it, when the demands, responsibilities, and expectations compound, and the compassion from wider society starts to run dry. Everyone feels sympathy for a broken child, but there is no pity for a broken adult. You're left on your own to a struggle in an increasingly atomized and complex system which doesn't give a damn about you.

This is glaringly obvious if you had a horrible upbringing, and were suddenly slung out into the world at 18 years old with no guidance. You're still the same abused child you were the day before your birthday, but now you're an abused child with an absurd amount of responsibilies and beurocracy to navigate. Congratulations, the law has deemed you mature and competent now with no basis to support that!

Everyone expects you to have everything completely figured out when you become an adult. They expect you to need 0 help and to be fully independent and to self-fulfill every need, something that goes against intrinsic human nature to be part of a tribe. Needing help, or love, or care is seen as a weakness and a character flaw. This behaviour gets you pegged as mentally ill.

This system becomes increasingly artificial and alienating the older you get, as 9 to 5 work is now a staple of your existence. Increasing numbers of people live alone and do nothing but work, pay their taxes, and sit in front of the tv/screens at night to soften the blow of this monotony. Activities that people enjoyed as children and teenagers begin to dry up, now that they no longer have the potential to be turned into a profession in one's future.

Music groups are for the talented who have been playing since childhood. Theatre and drama are competitive. Non-lucrative hobbies and interests become "for children" because they are unproductive. Everything is about grinding transferable skills as opposed to having fun. Wearing bright colors or enjoying girly things is now "unprofessional." One has to curb their personality and their interests to be more corporate and presentable to a dull pallette.

You can be anything, is a mantra we often hear as children, but it couldn't be further from the truth. You can only be yourself in very limited company as adult. First and foremost, you are a worker and your life will revolve around this no matter what, unless you become a billionaire and drop out of society. Secondly, there is the expectation that eventually you marry and raise children or you'll be alone forever, despite most modern marriages being ephemeral and falling to pieces quickly. The ultimate goal is to reproduce.

To be a lonely or sick adult is to be castigated and blamed by wider society because you've "done something wrong" or aren't taking personal responsibility to fix your life. Ever heard that shitty phrase, "The trauma wasn't your fault, but it is your responsibility to deal with!" As if anyone on this planet actually knows how to deal with the after effects of trauma, and we aren't all pissing in the wind and placing blame on individuals to solve a problem so complex that even researchers who have studied this topic for decades have no clue where to begin when it comes to mitigating or solving these issues.

People don't want to acknowledge that your adult brain is shaped and molded by childhood experience. It is common knowledge that unless you learn a second language as a child, becoming fluently bilingual later in life is nearly impossible. Not completely out of the realm of possibility, but you'd need years of in depth immersion because your brain hasn't formed the necessary synaptic connections to process another language, and adults are no longer sponges when it comes to retaining and learning new information.

So why is it so surprising that patterns of behaviour, wants, desires, needs, wishes, aspirations, and fears can carry from childhood to adulthood? Wounds are left unattended to with no one to nurse them, yet society tells you to grow up and deal with it, go to therapy, you're an adult now! I remember when I was 17 and finally received an on paper autism diagnosis, I asked, what now? Surely, you'd expect there would be SOME sort of help.

Instead, I was told that it was too late to help me, because I was pretty much an adult and any kind of service ended the moment you left the state education system. All of the problems I'd dealt with my whole life remained, yet I was left without even so much as a life preserver because I'd arbitrarily aged out of the system. By no means was I "high functioning" either, neglect and abuse had impeded any progress I'd made with learning social skills, I got fired from jobs, I learned very slowly in school, and I will always have odd patterns of speech, be unable to make eye contact, or deal with certain textures and sensory stimuli.

The extremely high standards of indepdence thrust upon me aren't uniformly enforced though. When someone around my age, 23, needs to live with their family to save money or for emotional support, it is celebrated and encouraged, especially if they are in university like me. When you're a disabled woman forced to stake it out on your own and rely on partners for help because you have no family and had to deal with abuse from previous romances for years, you are chastised for being codependent, when these high standards of self sufficiency are never applied to your peers. The same people who blame you for not trying hard enough never had to spend a day in your shoes themselves, they've always had loving families and support and have never hit the rock bottom of society.

How little people care about each other is what truly breaks my heart. Everyone is a stranger to each other, no one cares about the people they pass on the street everyday, or their neighbor living alone, the world is now far too big and less interconnected than ever. No one trusts each other. People's hearts are as barren and lonely as ever, and when you've missed that starting gun in childhood, it feels like there's no way to recover from it.

My entire life has objectively been wasted due to neglect I suffered at the hands of my family. It was nothing but non stop bullying and ostratisation in school. I see other people my age who grew up having parents, and their parents cultivated talents and social skills with their children, continually nurturing them. I can go on social media right this moment and see people I knew since pre-school who are already married, have children, go on big holidays with their family, had a movie like experience at university, and constantly hang out with their friends.

All of those things are off the table for me. Well intentioned strangers will say, "Oh it's okay that you have no family, you'll just have to get married and have kids. That's the solution!" However, my health deteriorates over time. My chronic fatigue makes me the most bland and uninteresting person because even if I desperately want to socialise, I can't say or do anything and sometimes sound like I have dementia. I've tried everything I possibly could, more medications than you can count, but I am never getting better and these issues have only worsened since I got covid. My spinal discs are degenerating and it's only going to get worse with time. I spend most of the month constipated and I have to take laxatives bc my IBS is so severe. I don't see how I could raise a child in this state.

I can't hold down a job either because I cannot sleep on a schedule. At my last job, I was constantly causing problems due to my forgetfulness and brainfog, requiring a lot of help and being babied through protocols to do basic things. I kept pissing off my supervisor because she was a healthy, young energetic woman who wanted to go to the gym everyday, cook all of her own meals and go out constantly with friends and family, so she did not appreciate having to stay later and babysit me because I couldn't wake up at the hours she could.

I don't see myself being able to attain anything that makes adult life remotely worthwhile. Making friends is no guarantee and the opportunities for socialising significantly dry up as soon as you're finished with education. Exercise groups or anything else that would require me to expend a lot of energy accessing are off the table for obvious reasons. Yet, I get told over and over again that life is what you make of it and I'm not trying hard enough to fix it.

Getting older and older leads to more disappointment. Not only is my body failing me, but I have to lay in my bed alone constantly replaying horrible memories from the past. I have to think about how all of my childhood friends are gone, and they're never coming back for whatever reason. I have to think about how I missed out on 2 entire years of life as a teenager bc my family locked me up and made me a NEET at 14 years old. I have to think about how most of my family members are dead and the remaining ones might as well be because they didn't want me in the first place and abandoned me. I have to think about how I lost a promising career due to being so disabled and will struggle my entire life, probably in poverty if my partner left me. I have to think about losing my innocence and being taken advantage of, and how all the good times have already passed me by. How I've had ptsd since I was 5 years old and it's completely untreatable bc it's ingrained into my very sexuality.

But yeah, there's so much hope right. It's never too late to do x and y! Wish people would get it through their heads that for someone like me there is only one option, and that is inevitable ctb. There's no more wonder or hope in the world, only the cold realisation that life doesn't care about adults who are struggling or vunerable.

I swear I'm not being a smartass, but have you considered writing? You have a great vocabulary and very succinct. You don't waste words. I was pulled into your story. Not just because I relate to so much but the flow was inviting. I read your story and I hurt for you. I want to give answers but it seems patronizing. And when so many are compounded, it starts to feel overwhelming. That's how I feel trying to explain mania to my family. But you sound like someone I would totally enjoy a nice dinner with. We all share your pain here and your words are our words. I'm no prolifer but I advise everyone to exhaust every avenue before you make that final decision. It's for keeps and there's no do-overs. Stay here a bit and share. Let it out and if you have any interest and talent in creating story ideas, I would definitely look into that with your talent behind the keyboard. And writers create their own schedules.
You're loved, my dear. We all do. That's why we're here.

 

[Ineedtodie]

I relate a lot, my chidhood was traumatic, so was my adolescence, so was my twenties. And now missing all those years which scrambled my mind in every aspect possible, emotionaly, all my cognitive attributes are damaged and with other horrible life consequences as well and with the cruelty an insanity of the world. Now as an adult with no compassion, empathy or whatsoever from my environment, I' m supposed to be fully responsible for my charmic nightmare. Only ctb is making sens to me.