I’m 37, coming up 38, live alone (have for the best part of 20 years now) housing association. My family are toxic and enabling of abuse, and my mum threw me out at 18. I’ve never had a job in my life, but have done collage courses here and there because I chose to do so.
Over the years I’ve had many boyfriends, but no-one who was really consistent in their approach or emotionally available. In fact, many of them have either been unhealthy or extremely abusive. I’ve also played apart in some of this abuse. The most recent one ended 2 months ago and it lasted 7 months; he was cold, callous, completely without empathy or any real compassion. Whilst the emotional side was absent, he attempted to make me co-dependent by buying me things and spending quite a lot of money in order to keep me in his grip. It didn’t work because as nice as that was, I’m really not that shallow. Although I do have a habit of letting a male become overly chivalrous at times. I believe that this is partly due to abuse that I suffered at a young age: grooming, child sexual abuse, psychological abuse all between the ages of 11-16, going into adulthood. My mother enabling all of it. I don’t really have a good example of what a “normal relationship” looks like.
I’m diagnosed with several things: Anxiety, depression, Mixed Personality Disorder, Complex PTSD, Autism Spectrum Disorder level 1, ADHD (inattentive type,) Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (the worst of them all,) Functional Neurological Disorder.
There’s so many activities and things I want to do, but my anxiety and lack of understanding with certain things prevent me from doing them. I have a passport for example, which I’ve had for 8 years (never used it.) The last time I went on holiday was coming up 17 years ago. I want to go on holiday, but categorically won’t go alone. I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to approach this. I use my passport for ID purposes because I don’t have anyone to go places with, and when I do meet someone, it’s always off some shallow online dating app because I don’t go out, and I always make them come to meet me. I put myself at risk by getting in their car or occasionally meeting in a local park for example due to my overwhelming anxiety. Nothing bad has happened thus far; we’ll just go on a date, but then it feels as I use them just to get out of the house. Truth is, what I really want and need are friends, not a relationship. I pretend that I want a relationship with people in order to have some kind of a life; just to reiterate, it’s usually short lived because friendship is the ultimate goal, but men can never just be friends with me and women don’t seem to like me and are very impatient with me. Men are more forgiving I find, but only because they usually have an ulterior motive, sadly.
