IncredibleSteve
New member
Hey everyone, I'm Steve, as you can tell I'm new here. I've had a life that should be cushy, but I wouldn't wish what I've been through on anyone. I think I had to just find somewhere to finally be open about. It's been a long and bumpy ride, I'll try and keep it as short as I can.
I've been socially awkward pretty much as far back as I can remember. It's pretty much destroyed any chances of me being able to live a 'normal' life. I've never had a lot of close friends, partly because I often find it hard talking to new people. Sometimes it clicks, like with the few people I can actually call good friends, but mostly it's tough. I still struggle making conversation with some people I've known for years. Sometimes I find it easier to look in the general direction of people without making eye contact so that I can feel like I'm talking to no-one in particular, and I'm not sure why that is.
A lot of it's confidence. I was overweight as a child and that's never easy, once I got to adolescence it became even harder. Puberty was a rough time, especially since I was a late bloomer. Rougher than anything was developing man boobs (I would finally find out last year that this was entirely genetic, I'd need to have them surgically removed but barring going private, no-one will perform the surgery). After dropping out of university and not being able to find work I spiralled into a depression, which was only made worse when my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer shortly after. I began abusing drugs and alcohol, completely isolating myself from the outside world and letting my weight get out of hand. I weighed 356lbs at my heaviest, which sure enough, damaged my confidence even further.
Things eased up as I got myself sober a year later and was able to focus on my true passion, writing. I never got anywhere with it, often failing to finish projects, but I enjoyed it. I tried going back to college, a valuable mistake, as I hated what I was doing and realised exactly what I wanted to do. I got some part time work and was able to write a screenplay which I came very close to selling. I also took some acting classes, which seriously helped my confidence. I say that as someone who still has pretty low self-confidence, but I'm a million times more confident now than I was a few years back. Sadly a short time into the college course I really wanted to do, my mother passed away. That's tough when you're only 21. I kinda feel like it's something I've never really dealt with and that could come back to haunt me, but I know she would've wanted me to get on with my life. Since then I've made a few good friends and cut my weight down to around 230lbs. I also realised that I could drink in moderation and use certain drugs recreationally, which have surprisingly helped my social life.
Towards the end of college I had a mental breakdown caused by stress, anxiety and mild depression (I have some pretty bad anger issues too, but that's neither here nor there). The NHS, again being useless, basically told me I wasn't mentally ill enough for them to help me. I isolated myself from the world for a couple of weeks but phased myself back in and graduated college. Since then things have been poor. I've been unemployed for the past 9 months, living off benefits. I still stay at home with my dad (which I'll get back to shortly) so there's no financial peril, but with seemingly all of my friends living the best part of an hour away (and no thanks to extortionate public transport costs) I can only spend time with them a few times a month. Depression loomed again, to the point where I was contemplating suicide on my birthday. Things got better, and I ended 2012 feeling good about life. Since then, ups and downs. I'm in talks with a production company about potentially getting a TV series commissioned, so it feels like my hard work at writing is finally paying off.
But now we're getting back to the social problems. I'm 24 and I've never left home or had a full time job. The whole 9 to 5 thing isn't something I feel capable of doing, whether that's due to my need to be a creative person or the fact that I just couldn't handle an environment where I'd have to deal with so many people all of the time I'm not sure, but it means I have no money to get out into the real world, finally become an independent person. It feels like I've never really grown up, and I'm stuck in some sort of limbo between child and adult. And to be brutally honest, I absolutely hate my life here. I live in a small town just outside a big city. A small town where I feel like a lot of people look down on me for having a dream to get out. And I know for a fact that a lot of people dislike me around here, some of it due to typical small town gossip, some of it still a mystery to me. So yeah, not really helping me with my social anxiety.
The worst part though is my love life. Considering after puberty I was about 15 before I could really talk to girls, along with aforementioned confidence issues and not having a lot of friends, I was never able to try my hand at getting anywhere romantically. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that just to get it over with, I lost my virginity to a prostitute, and on occasion since have been with a few more. I've had one night stands with a few girls, usually when we've both been drunk. It stuns me to think that I've had sex with several women, almost all of them completely out of my league. But I've never had a relationship. I fell in love with a close female friend when I was younger, and it nearly killed me inside when she started dating my (at the time) best friend. I got over it eventually. I let myself fall into the same trap a couple of years back, this time it was worse because she had (still has, actually) a boyfriend who is the nicest guy in the world. Once she drunkely came onto me and I turned her down because I didn't want to hurt him, but it hurt me more doing that. I would later find out she cheated on him a couple of times with a complete scumbag, at which point I gave up on her. We're barely even friends anymore. Her boyfriend is a saint for forgiving her, I don't even like to think what I'd have done in that situation.
Anyway, a few weeks back I tried my hand at online dating. It made sense, it was a way to try and meet people in a setting I was comfortable with, rather than in a social setting, which I don't really do very often, and when I do I'm pretty much useless. I started talking to a girl who seemed really cool. We were into all the same things, there was a mutual attraction, everything seemed great. Then we met up. At 24 years old, this was my first ever date. Not through lack of trying, I've been rejected a good few times. But anyway, here it was. And it was a disaster. Long periods of silence (which I can only take half the blame for, I think she suffers from social anxiety too in all honesty), pretty much every word was small talk or me trying to coax a real conversation out of her. She kept looking at her phone throughout and seemingly made an excuse to leave early. She hugged me and said we should do it again sometime, which surprised me. I tried to talk to her a couple of days later and she ignored me. No great loss, she wasn't what I expected in real life at all. But still, why lie to my face? This has put me in a bit of a funk, I know I'm a nice, selfless and caring guy, so why doesn't this matter? Why do I struggle so much to find someone to spend time with? I'm not the most interesting person, I get that, I don't have a lot of interests and the ones I do have are geeky and niche, and I'm very obsessive about them. But I know I'm so much better than the type of guys a lot of girls seem to like. I'm lonely as all hell, but on the rare occasion I put myself out there and try to change that, I get burned.
Phew. That turned out to be a LOT longer than I expected. I don't blame anyone for not reading it all. In a nutshell, I'm messed up. But just venting all of that, a lot of which I've never told anyone, makes me feel a lot better. Now I just need to figure out how to truly fix myself.
I've been socially awkward pretty much as far back as I can remember. It's pretty much destroyed any chances of me being able to live a 'normal' life. I've never had a lot of close friends, partly because I often find it hard talking to new people. Sometimes it clicks, like with the few people I can actually call good friends, but mostly it's tough. I still struggle making conversation with some people I've known for years. Sometimes I find it easier to look in the general direction of people without making eye contact so that I can feel like I'm talking to no-one in particular, and I'm not sure why that is.
A lot of it's confidence. I was overweight as a child and that's never easy, once I got to adolescence it became even harder. Puberty was a rough time, especially since I was a late bloomer. Rougher than anything was developing man boobs (I would finally find out last year that this was entirely genetic, I'd need to have them surgically removed but barring going private, no-one will perform the surgery). After dropping out of university and not being able to find work I spiralled into a depression, which was only made worse when my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer shortly after. I began abusing drugs and alcohol, completely isolating myself from the outside world and letting my weight get out of hand. I weighed 356lbs at my heaviest, which sure enough, damaged my confidence even further.
Things eased up as I got myself sober a year later and was able to focus on my true passion, writing. I never got anywhere with it, often failing to finish projects, but I enjoyed it. I tried going back to college, a valuable mistake, as I hated what I was doing and realised exactly what I wanted to do. I got some part time work and was able to write a screenplay which I came very close to selling. I also took some acting classes, which seriously helped my confidence. I say that as someone who still has pretty low self-confidence, but I'm a million times more confident now than I was a few years back. Sadly a short time into the college course I really wanted to do, my mother passed away. That's tough when you're only 21. I kinda feel like it's something I've never really dealt with and that could come back to haunt me, but I know she would've wanted me to get on with my life. Since then I've made a few good friends and cut my weight down to around 230lbs. I also realised that I could drink in moderation and use certain drugs recreationally, which have surprisingly helped my social life.
Towards the end of college I had a mental breakdown caused by stress, anxiety and mild depression (I have some pretty bad anger issues too, but that's neither here nor there). The NHS, again being useless, basically told me I wasn't mentally ill enough for them to help me. I isolated myself from the world for a couple of weeks but phased myself back in and graduated college. Since then things have been poor. I've been unemployed for the past 9 months, living off benefits. I still stay at home with my dad (which I'll get back to shortly) so there's no financial peril, but with seemingly all of my friends living the best part of an hour away (and no thanks to extortionate public transport costs) I can only spend time with them a few times a month. Depression loomed again, to the point where I was contemplating suicide on my birthday. Things got better, and I ended 2012 feeling good about life. Since then, ups and downs. I'm in talks with a production company about potentially getting a TV series commissioned, so it feels like my hard work at writing is finally paying off.
But now we're getting back to the social problems. I'm 24 and I've never left home or had a full time job. The whole 9 to 5 thing isn't something I feel capable of doing, whether that's due to my need to be a creative person or the fact that I just couldn't handle an environment where I'd have to deal with so many people all of the time I'm not sure, but it means I have no money to get out into the real world, finally become an independent person. It feels like I've never really grown up, and I'm stuck in some sort of limbo between child and adult. And to be brutally honest, I absolutely hate my life here. I live in a small town just outside a big city. A small town where I feel like a lot of people look down on me for having a dream to get out. And I know for a fact that a lot of people dislike me around here, some of it due to typical small town gossip, some of it still a mystery to me. So yeah, not really helping me with my social anxiety.
The worst part though is my love life. Considering after puberty I was about 15 before I could really talk to girls, along with aforementioned confidence issues and not having a lot of friends, I was never able to try my hand at getting anywhere romantically. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that just to get it over with, I lost my virginity to a prostitute, and on occasion since have been with a few more. I've had one night stands with a few girls, usually when we've both been drunk. It stuns me to think that I've had sex with several women, almost all of them completely out of my league. But I've never had a relationship. I fell in love with a close female friend when I was younger, and it nearly killed me inside when she started dating my (at the time) best friend. I got over it eventually. I let myself fall into the same trap a couple of years back, this time it was worse because she had (still has, actually) a boyfriend who is the nicest guy in the world. Once she drunkely came onto me and I turned her down because I didn't want to hurt him, but it hurt me more doing that. I would later find out she cheated on him a couple of times with a complete scumbag, at which point I gave up on her. We're barely even friends anymore. Her boyfriend is a saint for forgiving her, I don't even like to think what I'd have done in that situation.
Anyway, a few weeks back I tried my hand at online dating. It made sense, it was a way to try and meet people in a setting I was comfortable with, rather than in a social setting, which I don't really do very often, and when I do I'm pretty much useless. I started talking to a girl who seemed really cool. We were into all the same things, there was a mutual attraction, everything seemed great. Then we met up. At 24 years old, this was my first ever date. Not through lack of trying, I've been rejected a good few times. But anyway, here it was. And it was a disaster. Long periods of silence (which I can only take half the blame for, I think she suffers from social anxiety too in all honesty), pretty much every word was small talk or me trying to coax a real conversation out of her. She kept looking at her phone throughout and seemingly made an excuse to leave early. She hugged me and said we should do it again sometime, which surprised me. I tried to talk to her a couple of days later and she ignored me. No great loss, she wasn't what I expected in real life at all. But still, why lie to my face? This has put me in a bit of a funk, I know I'm a nice, selfless and caring guy, so why doesn't this matter? Why do I struggle so much to find someone to spend time with? I'm not the most interesting person, I get that, I don't have a lot of interests and the ones I do have are geeky and niche, and I'm very obsessive about them. But I know I'm so much better than the type of guys a lot of girls seem to like. I'm lonely as all hell, but on the rare occasion I put myself out there and try to change that, I get burned.
Phew. That turned out to be a LOT longer than I expected. I don't blame anyone for not reading it all. In a nutshell, I'm messed up. But just venting all of that, a lot of which I've never told anyone, makes me feel a lot better. Now I just need to figure out how to truly fix myself.
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