This is the best place I could think of to get this off my chest. I don't even know where to begin. I guess I can skip the part where I've been like this since I was a kid, always knew something was wrong with me, etc., to save some time and make it more digestible.
I can't function properly in my life and it feels like it's going to be the death of me. Sleep issues that have plagued me as a kid, drug/alcohol problems that I've largely got a hold of but remain as a tool for self harm when things get bad, difficulty forming and maintaining relationships, difficulty holding down a job--I could go on but I feel guilty rambling and am terrified of eliciting a bad response from people when I'm already feeling so down.
I have a kid who lives with her mom and step dad many hours away. I get to see her twice a month depending on when I can afford it and how the logistics work out of having enough time to drive her here with me and making it worth it for everyone involved. It has nothing to do with me as a dad or her as a mom--we had some issues and it was best that we split up--at this point it's purely just a logistics thing.
Fighting through those days between when I get to see her is a cruel, cruel weight to bear. It may be punishment for things I've done wrong in my life, and I accept that, but it's starting to feel like the dream of to breaking free from it and make enough money to be able to be closer to her or earn the freedom to see her more often is unachievable.
I feel like I try so hard to do everything right. I have poured my heart and feelings into hundreds of hours of music I've written and recorded over the years, developed skills and hobbies like weight lifting and fishing, I was the absolute star of the rehab I went to before I got clean from the vast majority of the crap I was doing (this was before my kid--I actually met her mom there and we both did very well together until our relationship fell apart). I try to seek religion and spirituality, I just recently finally got to a doctor and was seeing a therapist weekly towards the end of when my last relationship--the first one after things ended with my kid's mom--blew up and continued for a while before I ended up tossing that to the side too.
I took 12 weeks of leave off of work to get my mental health straight because the end of the relationship was absolutely atrocious on both sides, and was doing a lot better focusing on myself and healing. Almost every time I get a good thing going, I just convince myself to say "fuck it". A good job. A fun hobby. A love interest (my issues in relationships--insecurity, jealousy, feelings of inadequacy, lack of boundaries, you name it--go way, way deeper than that so I'll try to avoid talking about that too much); the point is no matter what it is I always return to this baseline of being some lazy fuck who can barely get out of bed to get a glass of water and would rather do nothing all day when I'm drowning in debt from when I lived with my kid and her mom (at one point I was paying for 2 apartments because we both wanted one so bad to get her out of sober living--long story but the point is I busted my ass to provide when we were together).
I have periods of extreme motivation, and I swear when I'm firing on all cylinders I can outwork anyone. I am a very, very good worker and I can do anything from manual labor to all kinds of computer software and administrative stuff. I also have my own small business that I've been slowly growing. I'm a really smart guy, I've always tested well and yes I was told I was gifted by I don't want to harp on that because who the fuck cares. All I'm saying is I'm totally capable, I take my vitamins, I exercise when I can, I try to limit blue light before bed, I fucking do everything in the fucking book that you're supposed to do to live a normal happy healthy life and it works for a while over and over again until it comes falling apart because in reality I was just holding pieces of the statue together as long as I could before my hands cramped up and I had to let go. Maybe it's because I fuck up my sleep schedule again. Maybe it's because I wake up and the devil on my shoulder tells me to just quit my job again. Maybe it's because my depression from not being with my kid and losing what I had when I was still with her mom eats me up and I decide to get drunk and that fucks my whole week up because I've completely used up all my chances to get drunk consequence free in life and it serves me no purpose anymore.
Rinse and repeat.
I haven't captured even the tip of the iceberg of my feelings here and what I'm going through because I just don't have the mental capacity for it. This is mostly just a "I don't have anyone to talk to right now and I need to tell someone" thing. I don't know. I just broke down crying after trying to open up to my mom about how no matter what I do I just can't seem to function like a normal person. I finished the conversation with her and came back into my room and just exploded into tears. The changing of the seasons isn't helping either, for whatever reason the turn of it just makes me way more emotional.
Last weekend I went out and got really fucked up for my friend's birthday. We ended up on a little side quest and had a crazy night that was arguably pretty fun, and I met a very kind woman who I'm now friends with and has been super supportive of what I'm going through. So I try to hold onto that as a silver lining because other than her I wouldn't have anyone to talk to right now.
But I can't handle getting fucked up--nor would I even have the desire to if I was able to be with my kid every day--and long story short it led to me quitting my job because it took me so many days to recover. I will say that "getting fucked up" isn't something I enjoy at all anymore, and it's more of a form of self harm than anything. Once it's over I have not even the slightest desire to go to it again for weeks or months at a time, and the only reason I say that is because I think it's a symptom not the problem and always has been, even when I was doing other stuff many many years ago.
So now once again I am sitting here with a business that does not make enough money to pay my bills, wondering what the next job I will get will be just to be able to pay those bills and see my kid, before I lose it because of insomnia, executive dysfunction, depression, anxiety, or any beautiful combination of the above. I don't have health insurance because my premium just went up literally 10x when I went to renew, and I haven't figured out why. I was going to get it through my job but I quit my job and that was only a matter of time. I want to get back in therapy, I want to start regularly talking to doctors and figuring out what's wrong with me, but the crushing weight of feeling like nobody will ever know ALWAYS catches up to me and burns it all down and forces me to start over again.
The brutal honesty right now is I'm pretty much just trying to stay alive until I can figure out a way to get enough health insurance to talk to a doctor. Other than that nothing really matters. I'm fully convinced if I didn't have a daughter I'd probably be trying to drink myself to death right now. She is literally everything to me and an absolute tether to me and this world. But it hurts, because something is wrong with me, has been for a very long time, and I can't figure out what it is because it seems to require so much goddamn time and energy. I refuse to believe I'm just a lazy person with a lack of discipline. I used to work 80 hours a week pouring concrete up and down the coast to keep a roof over my pregnant baby mom's head. I went from weighing 140lbs in active addiction up to 230lbs at my peak and being able to deadlift 405lbs before a bad hamstring injury. I can bust my ass, I can work hard. I've done manufacturing, landscaping, carpentry--any trade I've worked in I've gotten compliments on how hard I can work.
I could go on forever and ever and just rant about my problems but my thoughts are a mess and nobody has that much patience or lack of their own problems to read someone else's struggle biography. I think I'm just looking for people to talk to. Sorry for the wall of text and thanks for stopping by.
TL;DR - Things are really hard for me at the moment, I'm super sad and overwhelmed and I don't know what to do and was hoping to connect with some kind people