Kind of. Although I've had a materially successful and to be honest fairly easy life if you ignore family relationships & mental health etc, I do have some regret for some of the "normal" things I've missed out on. Like celebrating & reveling in family relationships, having good friends from whom I draw and to whom I give comfort and support & reasons for living, and simply having more "oomph" for life rather than preferring to hide at home. I've often said that I regret wasting my time at university by studying, when I should have been going to parties & having fun! Which kind of encapsulates what I'm talking about. Instead I was only ever enthusiastic about learning & succeeding academically, which I did, but even that holds little appeal now & my academic success is very "patchy" and specific - i.e. I have a deep understanding of some things but other (even related) things I'm clueless on.
Had I been free from the anxiety that has meant that I effectively want stuff around me to settle, stop moving, and take no risks, I might have enjoyed travelling & seeing the world. But I don't look forward to travel & have always found the stress & hassle of the preparation for it outweighs any enjoyment of the destination. I just love being at home. I've often said that I see no sense in being miserable working hard for 50 weeks of the year in order to fund a 2 week blowout that stresses you in the run-up and you forget 2 weeks later - so I prefer to "smear" this enjoyment over the whole year, and take things a bit easier every single day.
Then there's the fact that I was bullied all the way from junior school to the end of secondary school, and several times taken advantage of in my career and daily life, don't stand up for myself etc (& e.g. when I did stand up for myself in my first marriage it led to divorce).
And now I'm middle aged, no-one in my family seems to care about *me* unless it's couched in terms of what I can do for *them*. Even my autism diagnosis resulted in my parents & children for e.g. being grateful that they could understand me better, but not at all concerned to ask me about how I feel about it, or seek to understand how *I* experience how it affects me (because what's of prime importance is how it affects *them*), or offer any sort of compassion & forgiveness for how my behaviour has affected them over the years, or take the trouble to ask how I'm feeling.
My wife is the only person who genuinely cares for how I feel - which is how it should be & of course I celebrate that, but it would be nice if a few other people seemed to care.
Yes, I feel if I had been nt my life wouldnt be a constant train wreck. Even the simplest of things are a struggle and I dont know how to handle people
