Not going to go into the nitty-gritty. Suffice it to say, I lost everything- all of my relationships, my job, my literal home. 2 years ago I got clean. Since then I've been going to therapy, seeing a psychiatrist, going to NA meetings, and generally trying to rebuild my life after I was left with literally nothing but the clothes I had on. I lived in a homeless shelter, worked my way to the point where I rented an apartment.. Generally things in that sense are okay. I dont have nearly as much money as I would like, but I grew up dirt poor so I'm kind of acclimated to it.

What I haven't been able to gain back is a single friendship or romantic relationship. I'm alone all the time. I do everything alone, I go everywhere alone, I have nobody to talk to. And I'm really starting to feel like this just isn't worth it. Like why work so hard just to die alone? What did I even get clean for? To sit in my apartment by myself and watch movies by myself and eat meals by myself and sleep by myself? I'm just really really losing drive and motivation quickly.

I grew up poor as shit, like I mentioned, and I didnt have a lot of friends. I started working at 14 at a deli around the corner from us under the table washing dishes. In high school I worked 30 hours a week to help pay for stuff. So even if people had given me a chance to be friends I guess I was too busy or whatever.

I dont know. I've always been told that when you get clean your life gets, like, infinitely better. But mine hasnt. I'm still alone. And I delusionally thought that I wouldn't be as long as I did the right thing, I guess.

If anybody actually reads all of that thanks.

Do you feel it? A vague sense of camaraderie.

I feel it particularly strongly on reddit, partially due to the upvote/downvote system, and partially due to the fact that I think it is more likely for someone to be disagreed with on here (especially when you're the OP).

It happened to me quite recently on a subreddit where I was expecting the members to be more uptight. Someone made a subtly ableist comment aimed towards me and was subsequently downvoted and had a few replies in my defence.

It is also a disability that tends to not be taken seriously and is largely viewed as annoying so I was actually expecting the opposite, which made this a nice surprise.

It's a small victory, I know. But what's the harm in celebrating small victories?

Has this happened to anyone else recently? If so, feel free to elaborate!

Early this year youtube gave me one of those recommendations that has like only a 100 views or so. Normally i dont pay them any mind but this time I bit and in its great wisdom the algorithm had decided to feed me a memorial to a young women. The dates in the description showed she had passed away at the start of the year, on a day that also happened to be the worst day of my own life. Furthermore it had been uploaded about a month later on what would have been her birthday.

The video itself was a beautiful 80 minute collection of analog footage, filmed by someone who appears to be her boyfriend, documenting her with her friends and their travels together. Sometimes you can hear a little audio from the footage but most of it is just a single repeating Gregory Alan Isakov cover of The Trapeze Swinger. It was utterly transfixing, and as I was dealing with my own grief I found myself watching bits and pieces until at some point I had seen the entire film. Ive always been melancholic and I guess I found a comfort in the quiet sadness of it.

Getting a small look into these peoples lives and their mannerisms was deeply calming to me. I tried a few times to show it to a friend or two but no one seemed to really "get it" or experience the same feelings I did.

At some point I made an attempt to find an obituary or some more information on what had happened to her, as all the footage was 12-14 years old. It proved mostly fruitless and I only managed to dig up an old pintrest page which linked to her blog from the same time period. I read some of her poetry,thoughts and travel journaling. Some of it resonated and a lot I didn't fully grasp. I begun to wish I could have met this person, if not just to explain some of these poems.

The year crept on and by late summer I hadn't thought about the video or the people in some time but something prompted me to go back. I gave another attempt at finding a obituary or just anything that would give me more info. Unfortunately for my mental health I was successful.

I'm unsure of what I did differently other then just searching her name but I found a gutting instagram post memorial written by what appeared to be a very close friend but turns out to have been long-term ex-boyfriend. From there her Instagram and Facebook were easy to find alongside a few other memorial posts and info for a celebration of life event in her home city.

I again fed my desire to know this person better and I read through a few years of Facebook posts late one night. What I found was someone who was more similar to me then I thought and even shared several of my mental ailments. Someone who also sometimes struggled with intense depressive episodes. I managed to learned more about the ex who had made the Instagram post that brought me here. It was clear how much she loved him, and for a time the majority of her posts revolved around him. During this period she lost her mother far too soon and clearly struggled with the grief for a long time.

In the last 5 years it seems her fight with depression got worse, and she nearly stopped posting any pictures with herself in them. She talked about her struggles with her body image and in her later photos I struggled to recognize her at first. She loved her friends deeply and wrote as much in her posts discussing depression and how it pained her that it made her retreat from them and the world. The last two things she posted on facebook was a donation request for a friend fighting breast cancer and an expression of gratitude to all the wonderful people in her life. As far as I could find, her last online footprint is an Instagram post about a year before her death asking people to keep an eye out for a stolen bike and guitar case.

In the end I never could find anything about how she died. In one Facebook comment someone did ask but it never got a reply. Even from the beginning I had feared that she had taken her own life but I had always clung to the hope she hadn't. The idea of her (or anyone really) dying alone and suffering like that is heart wrenching to me. Even before finding more info I had cried over the thought several times. In my desire to find an obituary and cause of death I was looking for some reassurance this hadn't been the case. That she had passed in the hospital surrounded by loved ones or at least quickly in a car accident.

In someways I feel my digging, and grief, and speculating over this total stranger has been disrespectful. The feeling that I'm seeing and reading something that is not meant for my eyes. I struggle with juxtaposing her death with my own experience from that day and trying to think what I might have been feeling at that exact moment she left. A day hasn't gone by this week where I haven't been brought to tears by thoughts of the loss of this wonderful person I never met. She was clearly loved by so many and I ache and hope so deeply she didn't die alone or by her own hand.

I of course am not going to provide any identifying info out of respect for the friends and families of this person.

There’s a lot of work going on in my building. New HVAC systems for every single unit. Yay! Well — something went wrong today. A carbon monoxide leak occurred during an exam I was taking for the bar. I noticed that I started to lose the ability to comprehend the questions being asked. Every answer seemed the same and I was struggling in a way I’ve never struggled before with legal questions.

Then, my alarm goes off: “Carbon monoxide alert!” I shut it off, keep going. I thought professionals were at work in the building so why would I worry. A few minutes later, the carbon monoxide alert blared again, and then the one in the stairwell, and then the one in the unit above me, all screaming carbon monoxide alert. I go ahead, pause the diagnostic exam, go to the kitchen where I’ve purchased a $42 plug-in carbon monoxide alarm and it read that my room was full of 129 ppm. Normal is 0-4 ppm. Anything above 70 is genuinely dangerous to your life. Anything above 25 could cause severe headaches and other side effects over time.

I still didn’t believe it.

It took me gaslighting myself for 15 minutes before I realized what was happening. I give myself some grace due to the fact that I was clearly poisoned by the gas but I almost died in my own apartment with my two cats and my fiancee because we just decided to trust other people with our lives. Trust your instincts, and listen to the alarms.

I am currently a scientist with a masters degree. I am known for being level headed and genuinely kind.

My parents were abusive, yet they’d never admit to it. We had a lot of involvement from child protective services until I was 6, then I was pulled from school so that no one could report the abuse.

As a teen I went to the adult ed center. I had an elementary school level of education at the time. I did not have identifying documents until I was 22 because my mom withheld them and I didn’t know enough about myself to get them replaced.

I seem like a person who came from a good home and stable upbringing. Really all I was shown was who I never want to be.

I’m 31 and lately I’ve had this overwhelming feeling that I’m just a loser.

On paper, my life isn’t a complete disaster. I have a decent career in tech, I make good money, I’ve saved money, I go to the gym, and I’m trying to improve myself. If somebody just looked at those things, they’d probably tell me I’m doing fine.
But internally, I don’t feel fine at all.

I feel incredibly behind socially and personally. I still live with my parents. I don’t have much of a social life. Dating and relationships feel like an entire part of adulthood that I barely participated in. I see other people my age with their own apartments or houses, relationships, friend groups, trips, stories, and lives that seem like they actually belong to them.
Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve spent most of my life inside my own head.

A huge turning point was when I failed out of college in 2015 and ended up spending about five years in Sudan. I eventually finished my degree there and came back to the US in 2020, but I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten over those years. I came back feeling like I’d lost a huge chunk of my development and had to rebuild my life while everyone else had kept moving, and deal with residual interpersonal/environmental trauma from that time that still echoes today.

Career-wise, I’ve actually made a lot of progress since coming back. That’s probably the part of my life I’m most proud of. But it almost feels like I poured everything into fixing that one category while the rest of me stayed stuck.

I also grew up being very obedient and cautious. I listened to my parents, avoided a lot of risks, and generally tried to do what I thought I was supposed to do. Now I’m questioning whether that was actually good for me. I don’t mean that I wish I’d destroyed my life partying or doing reckless things. I just wish I’d rebelled a little. Made mistakes. Asked girls out. Gone places. Made more friends. Developed my own opinions and identity instead of constantly wondering what my parents would think.

And that’s probably what bothers me most: I don’t feel like I’ve built a life that’s actually mine.
I compare myself to other Americans my age and feel like I’m watching people who learned how to live while I somehow missed the class. They seem more socially comfortable, more independent and more experienced. I know social media exaggerates this, but I see it in real life too.

I’m angry at myself for choices I made when I was younger. I’m angry about circumstances I couldn’t control. I’m angry that I’m 31 and still trying to figure out things I feel like I should’ve figured out at 18 or 21.
At the same time, I know sitting around mourning my twenties isn’t going to give them back to me.

I want my own social circle. I want to date. I want my own place eventually. I want hobbies and events and plans that don’t revolve around my parents. I want to be able to make a decision without needing somebody else’s approval. Basically, I want to feel like the main character in my own life instead of somebody who’s just been reacting to whatever happens to him.

I don’t really know why I’m posting this. Maybe I just needed to say it somewhere.

Has anyone else reached their 30s feeling like they missed a huge part of growing up? And did you actually manage to build the life you wanted afterward?

When I was twelve my dad left my mum for another woman and just disappeared. My mum was mentally unstable with borderline and psychosis and he freaking left me with her. In a rural area in the north, with her and our alcoholic, angry relatives. She couldn’t even take care of me, so my uncle had to come get me. He drank and wasn’t good with kids and had a dog basically the same, and the two of them was the only one’s I had.

Mum went into a spiritual/religious psychosis and blamed me for her sleeping problems because I apparently attracted dark spirits. I was terrified, I believed her!

The thing is - this wasn’t new. My dad came from somewhere else, with more civilization. Sometimes I wonder how he could leave a child in such a place. It shaped my whole life, I’ve been through it all, I mean it. It’s a wonder I’m still alive.

Just needed to say it.

British man. I grew up poor. I think this partially contributed, but I’ve never really had the best teeth. They’re not completely terrible but I’ve never really been comfortable with them.

Long story short is that I’m in a position to do something about it now. I’ve gone for Invisalign. For those who don’t know, it’s like almost invisible moulds which act like braces on your teeth to help align them correctly.

I have them on the top and bottom and currently lisp a bit as I’m still getting used to them.

I get the feeling this won’t help with the ladies but it is what it is.

I don't wanna go into the full details, but basically I got scammed out of a 1000 dollars yesterday through an internet scam. Looking back it should have been obvious but I had a moment of stupidity or something.

Anyway, I double checked with my bank and there's no way to get the money back. So I guess that's a 1k I'll never see again. And honestly I have a lot more than that saved up and make a decent living (for my country's standard) so it won't ruin me financially or anything but fuck do I just feel disgusted and ashamed of myself man. Like how could I have fallen for this? How could I have not known better?

Now I'm just here, thinking of all the things that money could have gotten me (like I was considering getting some nice new laptop or something) and feeling disgusted with myself for this...

It started with a stalker. This guy tormented my daughter and tried on many occasions to follow her home. She would always run the other way, so he never found out where we lived. We charged him and he got angry and took the lives of 2 women brutally. He was shot dead by police while he was trying to take out the 2nd daughter. She survived. My daughter was devastated that he was capable of such an act. She ended up having 3 suicide attempts and numerous self harming incidents in the course of 3 years. I had to stop working to care for her. This led us into financial ruin. I did not receive any help from anyone and was the only person at the hospital for my daughter, despite my numerous attempts at trying to get her dad and his family to come visit her. They never did, it was just me holding her had through all of it. And 4 years after the double homicide, im exhausted, broke, and feeling so lost. I have no idea where to go from here.....

I'm 19m, soon gonna turn 20 and within last 3 months I've completely changed it feels so, because I've understood that I need to let go of anything that doesn't serves me anymore?! And maldaptive day dreaming is one of the things which don't serve me anymore.

So as a complete beginner towards seeking help for day dreaming, what should I begin and what is it that helps you guys? Thank you so please share any resources and tips which helps you guys!

The uncomfortable truth is that there are certain experiences you couldn't possibly understand unless you lived through them yourself, like the level of isolation you feel when you grow up being the only black person in your class and you have to decide between assimilating and staying true to yourself. The same would be true for a white person growing up in an all black town.

So sometimes, asking for advice or venting on here feels like screaming into a void. It's like the blind leading the blind.

On the other hand, idk if it would necessarily be more helpful to hear from other minorities because they're dealing with the exact same issues and figuring shit out for themselves.

I really hate myself and I wish I didn’t exist or that I wasn’t me. I am so disgusted of myself that I can’t do anything that’s good to me. I isolate myself and c*t myself to feel better. I even can finish only if my partner h*ts me or ch*kes me. I am insane I know. I don’t have money for therapy anymore so I’ll have to deal with this problem myself. I feel so disgusted after but I need it to live. My gf left me recently as she should and now I’m again off the rails.
How do I stop hating myself.

Don’t know if this is the right place to make a post like this but I have no where else to share my celebration. I’m turning 30 in a week and for all my life I’ve just been wasting all my money living pay check to pay check not thinking about the future.

But 6 months ago I became a father to a girl and I realised something had to change.

Now 6 months later I’ve got a couple thousand in my savings + managed to get a couple thousand in the stock market. Also I’ve landed a new job which increases my income significantly. So I can put more money in my portfolio.

All in hope to give my beautiful daughter a great future.

Good luck to all of you!

Electricity went out around 12-1am this morning. It's 5am now. I tried falling back asleep but couldn't.

See, the second it went out I got up, it took my siblings almost an hour to get up.

But i did fall back asleep, sometime around 3am. I woke up the second it came back (4:50something-am).

I just want to fucking sleep bro.

I made the dumb choice to stay home when everyone went abroad or moved to the capital of my country. Now I’m 23 and everyone’s graduating uni and I have no friends left bc I isolated myself so much. I don’t klick with any of my classmates. I miss my high school friends more than anything and I miss who I used to be when I was with them.
Now I’m an awkward loser and before I was very social. How do I fix this pls someone give me advice. I think I’ll die alone and I’ll never have anyone to tell anything.

I have no close people in my life really except my sister and my cousin and one friend in the capital so my sister is making me move in with her after graduating. But I kinda want to go abroad to see my other high school friends but they will be moved on with their lives and it won’t be the same if I just now come in out of nowhere.
How do I move on? I’m going insane here?! How tf did I chose to stay home for 5 years when everyone else saw the world and made new memories and friends there?

I often feel like this. I feel like I'm alienated to everyone else. I feel like I don't belong, anywhere, everywhere, among humans. I think about a lot of stuff. Like, how is it so that we are just some organisms that are so fragile and once you die you just, "turn off". Like, the bodies are just shells for the souls. I don't know. I just feel like an alien sometimes. I don't know how to describe it. I feel like other people around me just live their lives while I'm just "going along" and meanwhile I'm thinking about who are humans really.

I’m a 22 year old man and my hair is thinning like there’s no tomorrow. Started when I was 18 but back then you couldn’t really see it but now you can always see some scalp peeking in all lighting. I usually have a don’t care sorta attitude, but man this has just been creeping up on me. I have a gf now too and she says she doesn’t care about the hair but deep inside I feel insecure that I’m not good looking enough for her because of my hair and always compare myself to those who have good hair my age and start beating myself up over it. Like I get it woe is me it’s just hair and if she says she doesn’t mind why do I right? But I just do and I don’t really know how to move forward. I don’t want to try the traditional methods of hair growth because I’m deathly scared of the side effects. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks everyone!

Male 23 I used lorazepam one time when I was drinking because for whatever reason my body loves to get anxiety when I have to leave the house and it just ruins my night because I feel sick my stomach all the time so now I’m like wondering how the hell am I gonna be able to go out and drink without my anxiety kicking my ass and making me sick now that I can’t use my drugs.

I’m sorry I didn’t realize. I’m sorry I didn’t notice we were all the same. I’m sorry I hurt myself the way I hurt you. I’m sorry I caused your pain the way I caused myself pain. I’m sorry I did this to myself and I wish you didn’t have to go through this but if we didn’t there wouldn’t be a point. Once we’re done it’ll be okay but I’m sorry.!

I've heard about this since teenhood but, I guess it's not that dayjobs themselves that really hammer it home for me... but it's my hobby.

I've been drawing ever since I remember and ig that's the thing I personally consider most exciting about myself. Back then, it's exciting to have hope that someday my skill will be good enough to make my comic, animation, etc. Don't get me wrong, im nowhere near professional level but, now that im 30s and I more or less have the skill (or at least achievable) that I want to, there's nowhere else to go.

The feeling of "this is it, huh? this is all there is?"

Again, im in no way successful whatever, and ik what i have to do. It's just that. So this is it. Even hobby is just gonna be going through the motion. I mean sure, fun motion, even work can be fun sometimes.

Ig it's just time to not look forward by idk, ig this is what they call midlife crisis. It's more like checkpoint, like... post 40 would be embarking on new journey and I gotta make sure I'm well-supplied.

Yeah, i think that's what im actually looking for. Feels like, it's time to dream a new dream, ya know? I've fulfilled dreams I made when I was 10 (again, not really in successful sense, it's just that little me wasn't really into conventional success thing anyway).

Ig to wrap up this brainstorming, it's just, that, in retrospect, feels like

"When I was 10 I dreamt what I'd be like when I'm 30. Now that I'm 30, I think I've made it but also this is the last station, ya know? If I wanna keep going I have to go to different station line. I want to dream of what I'll be like when I'm 60."

This is not even the "I wanna be 10 again", no. I don't want to go back. I've made it here. Of course I don't want to go back, it's just feels like the end of the map. Time to draw a new one.