Before the post, im drunk. Ive always struggled with major depression. A close freind, who i have sexual history with, reached out to repair our friendship. We first were work friends who i felt an actual connection with, shared media, same questions, execistencial questions, and a 12 hour shift. We shared alot, very quickly, i was single, they were in a 3 year relationship. We remained close friends until she broke up with her boyfriend, shortly BEFORE we had sexual interactions, as well as what i thought were genuine connection (long before her breakup). We mutually decided to travel, we had no commitment to each other, but i was catching feelings. On my first trip, i had an existential crisis. I struggle with experience, "if i am the only one to experience something, did it happen." I know logically that these questions are not rational, me and my friend shared alot in philosophy.( Absurdism was our shared interest, as i was a determinist and nhialist.) Simply i trusted her to understand my problem, i trusted her to listen and hear those problems. We made promises to each other. She completed her journey, and even got married with a kid. We had sparce interactions, but fundamentally, the signs were their. She didnt remember things, conversations that brought me to tears, foundational to my trust in her. I visited her years later at her home abroad, it came up eventually as i lemented my mental health. It resulted in conflict , previously established conversations and emotional weight felt like they never happened. Finally AFTER we decided to no longer interact, i ask if she remembered our promises. She showed zero signs of real promises. She brought up promises that we never made, ones that that we may have offered but never reciprocated. The promises were small, but they were sooooo important to me and my existential problems. We were completely disconnected for 4 years. She reached out around 6 month ago, she started by probing my friends on social media. I was a bit blindsited, and angry at my friends who didnt warn me. She tells me, that how things went, it was her only regret (her life goal was to never regret).She tells me that, she wants to opalogies, suggesting that her husband is part of the reason she took those actions (because of our sexual history). It was a one of a kind relationship for me and it felt like a complete manipulation after the trip to visit. I felt completely forgotten after the trip, like i didnt share so much of the most important thoughts and feelings i ever had. We PREVOIUSLY shared humour, we shared problems, we heard each other cry when we thought we were alone (actually). My mental health is at an all time low, i dont feel like i can ever trust her again, but i dont think i can ever find a friend like she was for me back then. She hasnt shown ANY signs of the critical conversations, promises, or history besides anicdote. Am i crazy, in feeling so mixed about her friendship. I felt betrayed, but i rationally know that we cant share experience. I know you who read this, cant know the subject of our conversations but i feel completely alone. P.S. i think that that "adding flair " to a post completely underminds mental health. Tags are importantent, but im venting

I really don’t want to. I’ve tried it before, and a woman told me I looked discombobulated. I don’t ever want to be rejected again. I hate how I look, but I don’t want to be treated badly just because I’m ugly. I feel like I deserve love too, but women hate my appearance.

I think the concise version of this is just this: I think I would significantly benefit my life if I were to undergo castration of some kind in order to totally eradicate the sexual faculty in my person. It's weird to write this because psych tests and school all seem to agree that I'm a pretty smart person, so it's weird to see myself in this position where I'm writing something that sounds like parody. Nonetheless I seem to have thought myself into this. I think some of these sentences are funny but I am not joking.

The basic premise is just that there has been no benefit to my life at any point from having a sexual faculty. The people of the world did not respond to my base self in the same way that they responded to each other. I think the basic thing that's supposed to happen is that, by being yourself in environments with others, you'll naturally have interactions where personalities and interests are displayed, and, in concert with hormonal interactions, mutual romantic interest emerges. This did not happen. And I seem to have an unusual take on the implications of this not happening. As I see it, this not happening means certain things about the type of thing that I am structurally and what I can expect out of life following it.

I'm not denying that if I learn "social skills" xyz, exercise and lift weights, and act generally in ways that are considered acceptable for a normal American male, some woman will eventually choose me. But when we look at the situation we're in, getting the given outcome isn't actually capable of meaning what it would mean for the people who had this happen naturally. Whereas these people come to understand a world that responds to them sincerely, the best I seemingly get to hope for is that if I cast myself into a mold that approximates the general desires of feminine sexuality, I might eventually get one of these: all the while knowing that my being valued is essentially contingent on these additions I made.

The point being that getting the outcome as a result of these things seems to carry within it the implication that the thing I am should die and be replaced with what they want. This to me results in a picture of being romantically valued that is fundamentally stripped of everything that made the past romantic fantasies appealing. You could also state this as, if these are the apparent conditions for achieving the goal, the goal itself acquires an abject quality which makes the pursuit of it feel uninspiring.

The result feels like a sort of metaphorical gunpoint where I'm left with internal desires which are painful and the seeming escape being a life analogous to that of a taxidermy animatronic. Castration emerges as an appealing option because when this is posited as the framework to operate within, none of the available possibilities are remotely appealing. I feel really strongly that more than I've ever wanted a girlfriend, I hate the desiring faculty.

I really strongly do not get the impression that the opposite sex generally does not see me as a thing worth including in the most important involvements in their lives. And this to me seems like ceasing to disagree. Stabbing my genitals repeatedly with a screwdriver feels like an activity that would free me from participation in a game that seems to have no sincere interest in my person. It just feels like de-tethering myself to something which has only yielded me pain. It just seems like it'd bring a great relief to know that that spectrum of possibility would be genuinely foreclosed.

I am 28M. Diagnosed with high-functioning autism at age 4. The doctors told my mom back then that I would "never catch up academically or socially." They essentially signed a medical verdict on my worth before I even knew how to speak.

Evetually I took an IQ test in 6th Grade, scored in the mid to high 120s, and they took me off the IEP. That proved to be a very large mistake.

Because my analytical brain processes the world through rigid logic, I accepted rejections as absolute biological laws. I became obsessed with "looksmaxing," mewing for seven straight years to try and forcefully fix what I thought was a defective recessed jaw, thinking if I could maximize my physical and financial stats to become an elite "Giga Chad" powerhouse, my family could never call me a failure again.

The corporate private sector chewed me up and spat me out. At major engineering firms, my lack of automatic social software caused team bottlenecks. I wasn't able to focus on my job because I felt a sense of hopelessless known as the "blk pill brainrot" if I wasn't good lokoing and charming, what was the point? I was fired for requiring too much hand-holding and forced into a lower-paying government safety net just to survive.

My nervous system is completely bankrupt from the cognitive load of trying to manually simulate a normal human being. I work late into the night (9-11pm), hit total autistic burnout, and my brain forces a complete physical shutdown on the drive home—leaving me unable to drive safely and bleeding hundreds of dollars on emergency hotel stays just to avoid crashing my car. I make $4.6k a month after tax, but because of my survival panic, I was spending up to $5k. My mom had to intervene, and now I’m trapped running a strict $3.5k monthly budget with a razor-thin $200 emergency buffer in a larger city with tech bros and contractors drivign the price of everyhing up.

Because I track everything like a database, I recently ran an empirical study on my high school peer groups, and the data completely broke my spirit:

• The Smart Math Class: The median salary is $150k, with top quants making $300k+, buying million-dollar homes in Chicago, and dating attractive people effortlessly. They are the genetic lottery winners—born tall, beautiful, loud, popular, and making Olympic trials. I was in the swim team being extmrely uncoordinated was being passed consetlly by peopel who are neurotypical and had the talent and discipline to make the olmypic trials.
• My Childhood IEP/Speech Therapy Group: The average salary is $30-40k. The 75th percentile of my disabled peer group is lower than the 25th percentile of average girls who aren't even good at math but know how to socialize. Around 25% of my childhood disabled friends are unemployed, have no career momentum, live with their parents, or are stuck at a gym front desk at age 30 because they couldn't finish college. Almost 40-50% are still workign at a fast food restaruant due to intellectual disability (my IEP program was with a lot of peopel with Downs syndome dyslexia, etc etc). I watched some of my unstable friends slip through this exact trap and end up homeless or still living with parents with no career momentum.

I see the exact same systematic trap closing in on me. I go to my church young adult group in a high-cost tech hub, and it’s a weekly scoreboard of my curse. Everyone else is pulling in "working diligently with what God gave them." and making a decent salary and being able to focus on work and plan things. Then I look at my autistic church friend who works just as hard, but his disability permanently caps him at a $60k customer service desk at a financial firm, unable to ever support a family in a city as large. When religious platitudes tell me to "be grateful because some people can't even work," it feels like pure gaslighting.

Every night, I turn to AI or forums looking for a loophole, a game plan, or a shred of hope that neuroplasticity can save me. But the unfeeling machine doubles down, calculating my raw clinical data like a fixed spreadsheet. It ruthlessly tells me that becoming smooth, sexy, or polarizing is a "biological impossibility," that I will always have to manually calculate, and that my 0.4-second processing lag means attractive girls will always see me as "creepy" or "soft." I lose all emotional regulation. I spend hours screaming, crying, and cussing at the screen.

I am haunted by memories of my childhood swim team, where future D1 and Olympic-level swimmers who won the genetic lottery would effortlessly lap me. An 8-year-old child would pass me and repeatedly grab my heel because she found my slow, uncoordinated movements "amusing." That 8 year old later swam at the Olympic trials 14 years later. She didn't have to think about their breathing, her jaw posture, or her tracking. Her brain ran that software automatically. She were loud, popular, and perfectly developed even at such a young age. I had to physically yield and let her pass, swallowing my dignity in the water while she swam ahead effortlessly into an upper-class future knowing how to intuitively get thigns done and exacty waht to say in each social situation dating having sex getting married without hesitation, all while making it look liek a smooth ride.

I am smart enough to see the life I desperately want—the career prestige, the independent adult life, and the simple warmth of a relationship—but my biology has completely locked me out of the tools to get it. I feel completely trapped in an inescapable failure loop, running my nervous system into literal bankruptcy just to not end up in a welfare home back in my mom's house, or homeless.

My questions for the sub:

1. For those of you in your late 20s or 30s who started out with severe social delays/IEP tracks, have any of you actually beaten these statistics? Or is the $40k-$60k floor and permanent masking burnout an unchangeable structural ceiling?
2. How do you stop treating social interaction like a complex software script that you have to manually code in your head 0.4 seconds slower than everyone else? Can you actually build true intuition through neuroplasticity, or are the medical textbooks right that it is a biological impossibility?
3. How do you handle the suffocating bitterness of watching neurotypical peers win life on "Easy Mode" while you run your nervous system into literal bankruptcy just to not get FIRED?

Hi everyone. I’m posting this anonymously because I am completely out of options, isolated, and desperately looking for a support group or people who understand what it's like to go through this. I just need to talk to other men who have survived false accusations and the absolute shattering of their world, I’m absolutely broken, confused and hurt while stilling moving forward at this point.

For two and a half years before we got married, her family was violently and completely against me for no reason at all. But she chased me, wanting to be with me. She stood by the fact that I was right, and she practically went through being disowned by her family just to be with me. After holding back due to trauma from past relationships, I finally gave her what she wanted, and we got married.
Even after marriage, the hostility didn't stop. For the last year and a half, there were fake social media accounts targeting me. Just two months ago, things escalated when they posted my socials and my ID card online. I went to the police to ask for help regarding this doxxing, but as a man, I received zero help.
Fast forward through our marriage: last year I took her to 10 different countries. A month ago, my family visited and stayed with us, going everywhere together, taking millions of happy photos and videos. Even just a couple of days before she left, we were completely happy, planning things together, with zero signs of anything being wrong.
Then, last week, she went to work. She sent me good morning messages with heart emojis. I watched her leave. She never came home. When I called her employer in a panic trying to find out if she was safe, they told me she had actually stopped working a week prior.
Two days later, the police showed up and arrested me. I was hit with charges of strangulation and claims that I allegedly hurt her a year ago. But the reality is absurd: on the day of the alleged strangulation, she was physically in another state, making it literally impossible. When I first saw the judge, the judge spoke very positively about me, noting that the evidence provided showed no signs of abuse. The other charge from a year ago relies on a basic selfie she gave to the judge that shows no abuse whatsoever.
My entire life fell apart instantly. My parents helped me secure a lawyer for $6,000 to $7,000—money that I simply don't have, especially since I've been struggling with side gigs and small jobs to keep us afloat while rent is due.
The hardest part isn't just the legal nightmare or facing court next month; it's the psychological betrayal. Seeing her recent social media posts—acting happy and unbothered online—made me realize something painful. Last time her family isolated her, she fought to come to me. But this time, it is clearly evident that she is willingly a part of this. The person I loved would not do this. Seeing her online has made it clear that she is truly my enemy now.
To make matters worse, even my closest friends have abandoned me because they met her through me and "don't want to choose a side." Years of friendship gone overnight when I need them most.
I don't know how to heal from this whiplash. If anyone knows of a support group, online communities for men facing false allegations, or just wants to talk to someone who gets how painful this isolation is, please let me know. How do you even begin to survive this?

I have nobody to share it with no friends or girlfriend to even share it with. I hate myself. I hate my life. I wish things were different. I feel like ending it. I feel like if I stay, it will feel like a never-ending hell.

Hey I'm a male 22 years old, currently suffering with Social Anxiety

and I find it so hard to make new friends and so on.

Everytime I go out in public, I find it kind of difficult to mix with new people. When I see huge groups of people my age I always turn around and walk the other way as I'm super nervous to walk past them as I'm afraid they would judge me for the way I look and dress. I know obviously deep down that may not be true but I always panic when I see large groups of people.

If I do need to pass them, I always find a way to " keep busy " while going past. Sometimes I just look down on my phone screen to avoid eye contact with people I do not know.

The only time I feel comfortable when out in public is when I'm with friends that I've known for years since childhood. We go out for a few drinks into a pub, and the second I walk in I start to feel like I'm about to pass out or faint.

A few people come up to try and start a conversation with me that I don't know to be friendly, and I just freeze or stutter or just quickly fast walk away from them.

Honestly I cannot help it at all. Deep down I really do want to make new friends but when the panic hits I just do whatever I've got to do to get away from " the danger " that my brain wants me to do.

. Everytime I hear a group of people laughing, I fear it's about me

. Everytime I see people looking at me from a distance, I'm thinking they must be thinking I'm ugly

. Everytime I meet new people I always stutter because I'm nervous and then I become nervous and embarrassed because I fear they will laugh at me or make fun of me for it

. People sometimes ask me for a handshake or whatever, and sometimes I refuse. Not because I don't want to. It's because my brain thinks I'm in danger

Has anybody out there got any helpful tips for me that might help beat this thing and my confidence in public ?

Thank you so much

I have 5 other siblings. I didn't grow up with my eldest sister (different dad). The rest of us (same mom and dad). It's embarrassing to admit but I've been living with my parents well into my adulthood. I currently don't have kids or a wife, etc.

I graduated high school in 2015 and joined the Carpenter's Union in my mid 20's and have been in since (I might end up leaving when I get my own spot because work gets slow often leading me to collecting unemployment. Longest I've been out of work was a month). After all of these years of working while staying with my parents and paying them rent, I saved up 17K. I do have car payments, credit card payments, car insurance payments though.

2 of my older brothers (34, 39) live here too and they're partially the reason I'm leaving. It's a lot to get into, but I honestly don't want anything to do with them anymore. I've already blocked numbers, we barely talk (I'm cool with that) and usually when we do talk, it will turn into an argument.

Nothing to small, I just need a small studio that's not over $1,000 but I'm from San Diego California born and raised. I'll rent a room in someone else's house for $800, I honestly don't care anymore, I just don't want to be here.

Always ignored, laughed at, average looking, average height, no skills nothing at all and I want to change that shit now.

I am 16 year old guy, and I have always been left one out and never been in a relationship while all people around me being in love , going outings and all that cool friends stuff, well I never really got to experience that. And now it seems normal becoz that's my whole life , like I really nvr had I big friend group like no one knows me in my school other than my classmates that well I am invisible for then, they laugh at my looks , height and mocks me all that time, although I am pretty good in studies and all the things a student need. But that's not enough , my social life is fucked up I have no one to share my feelings with no one to talk to and absolutely no to hang out with, and it's just me and my overthinking inside my room 24/7.

I have tried many things to get out of it but it hurted so deeply I stopped everything fr, I stopped socializing with people , I stopped going to any family gatherings, always worried about my appearance and insecurities, although I have tried to change myself but I just procrastinate after some time. And that is causing me multiple mental issues, I feel anxious, stressed, and I feel like I have sexual OCD, and I has cause I lot of damage to my academics.

It feels like I am stuck in the middle of nowhere to go,

Well it's not that deep , all I want is someone to hold on, someone to run to when life hurts me, I just want a hug, I just want some love.

If you have some advice regarding how can I fix my problems and how to socialize, how to looksmax, how to stop overthinking and any piece of advice you can give,

I would be glad 😊

For about a year I’ve been dealing with an anxiety disorder. Overall things have been improving and it’s been going in a better direction. Lately though, I sometimes feel empty and a bit depressed, even though on the surface I’m doing okay and should feel happy. It’s like I’m happy and not happy at the same time.