I'm amy, or PQP, or whatever you wanna call me. I'm 38 & i've been listening to the podcast for two years (and I listened to all the episodes before I started listening)... I'm a podcast junkie, i subscribe to so many.
I'm 38 years old, & I've had psych issues for most of my life. I was a sad kid who had many OCD rituals (but i was a kid, so i didn't know it was abnormal.), I had my first panic attack in grade two, and I had a lot of (mostly verbal) bullying that i never told anyone about (my problems were always trivialized, so why would anyone believe that?), and I don't know whether that contributed to how i am now. My eating issues started when I was 11 or 12, but it was atypical anorexia that was initially connected to severe emetophobia.
I've been on disability for 20 years for my psych issues (so ashamed) & have only worked twice in that time; the last time was about 16 years ago. I feel like I've wasted my life and it's too late to make anything of myself (and I was supposedly "gifted," so i feel a... gifted guilt). I tend to get verbose when I'm typing (as you've probably noticed. I'm socially isolated & don't talk a lot, so when I do talk, it's far too much) and I use too many parentheticals, heh. I've got no real life friends, ATM, though I've visited & have been visited by long-time online friends. Now I don't make many online friends, bc I've become too shy even for most online communication (this might be the last thing I ever post here, IDK)
The chief problems I'm dealing with now are my ever-present generalized anxiety (it manifests mostly physically, I'm always tensed up) & depression, agoraphobia, and a lack of motivation to do anything but vegetate on my fat butt with a portable game console. My overeating has been slipping back into undereating, and i know that's not good, but i kind of like it, so i don't see it as a real problem. I do medication management at my county's CMH. They approved me for a whopping six therapy sessions last year, and when those were up, they wouldn't authorize more. But therapy's never been very helpful for me anyway. I could go on and on about my history, but why?
One more thing before I fuck off into the night. I've been allowing my mother to enable my agoraphobia for about a year in the form of driving me to appointments and to the store. I never asked her, so I tried to just take advantage while it lasted, bc while we're close, she's not really emotional support and is often openly hostile and resentful toward me due to my issues. She told me the last time I saw her that her therapist told her to stop enabling me (Lord only knows what she said about me... I've overheard her saying horrible things about me on the phone), and I think she took it to heart. We used to talk a lot, and we'd go for drives for fun, but it seems that she saw that as enabling me as well, so... well, I've got to get used to it. I do my laundry at her house & i didn't finish my towels last time, so they're at her house and I'm considering drying off with washcloths. I'm out of food, but can't get myself to go to the store ("well if you were hungry enough, you'd go out, now wouldn't you?"). And I have feelings of both missing my mom/feeling unloved, and anger toward her, which I know isn't fair. I haven't asked her for help, because i can't. Fuck, i can't ask professionals for help most of the time. Okay, that's enough verbal diarrhea and embarrassment for tonight. Sorry about the length of this.
