Thread by @StphanieTheBest

Neither my mom nor my dad (both date men) ever got remarried or had relationships lasting more than a year after they got divorced.

My nana has been single for over 10 years after 3 failed marriages and my grandma has been living her fucking life now that my grandpa is dead.

After an 11 year marriage that I'm not at all sure is salvageable, a year long partnership where I was emotionally and financially abused, and casual sex with half of my fucking town, I'm almost positive I'm going to be single for the rest of my life.

Men are definitely garbage in their own special way but it turns out everyone else is also garbage.

Me included I guess. I mean, I'm not missing the common factor in all my relationships.

I'm sure I have other problems but the ones that I keep recognizing as they're fucking me over are my inability to set healthy boundaries with people who want to take everything from me and my inability to ask for help when I need it bc I'm just so tired of being disappointed.

Cn: emotional abuse

Strap in bc I'm about to tell you my sad fucking cornerstone.

When I was a kid, I had two close friends. We'll call them J and B.

It was only two bc B was VERY possessive of me and rarely let me bring new people around w/o being super rude to them.

CN: emotional abuse

But in J she recognized someone she could make fun of me with AND make fun of with me, a winning combination for her abusive ass.

That was my support network growing up and it was brutal. I never felt safe. I never felt like I could be honest or direct.

CN: hoarding

So that's part of the set up. The other part is that my mom is a hoarder.

She had boxes of magazines from as far back as the 70s and she put everything off until the last minute so when we moved, our boxes were half filled with trash and then never opened again.

CN: hoarding

Not only that, but she hoarded cats. Every time one cat died, she got two more from a shelter.

And she hated cleaning litter boxes so the cats pissed on everything. Our beds, our laundry, the trash filled boxes she took from every move. It was a nightmare.

CN: hoarding, emotional abuse

And she either didn't know she was the problem or knew we wouldn't know if she gaslighted us enough about it.

It was always, "DO YOUR FRIENDS' HOUSES LOOK LIKE THIS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU KIDS?" while she created a hurricane of trash everywhere.

CN: sex offender, child services, hoarding

I learned way later that my nana was calling social services on her constantly even though my dad is a sex offender and would definitely not get custody of us if we were taken away from my mom.

When I was 14, we were taken away.

CN: police, custody

My brother lit a fire while he was home sick, the FD came to put it out, saw the conditions we lived in, and my sister and I were taken out of school by the police and we were all three put into a children's home that was basically a holding area.

CN: separating families

We were separated from my brother at the facility and only saw each other during meal times.

We were only there for 3 days while my mom and B's mom cleaned up the house but it was still pretty fucking terrifying.

A couple years later, my mom moved the four of us into a one bedroom apartment bc that was all she could afford and my grandparents couldn't deal with his increasingly destructive behavior.

The apartment became a cat-piss covered trash den within a couple months.

I was 15 at the time and had just started high school.

One day there was a knock at the door and I opened it to another social worker.

I was immediately aware that the place was even more of a mess than usual and one of the cats had peed directly behind the front door.

CN: separating families, child services, hoarding

The social worker basically told me we had a couple days to get the place clean and livable or we'd be taken away again, this time for good.

I was a fucking mess. I was panicking.

I was cleaning for hours and hours, an impossible amount of mess all crammed into such a small area. There was nowhere for anything to go.

Mom wasn't helping. My brother was lazy af. I'm pretty sure my sister didn't care if we got taken away bc our parents were abusive af w/her.

So it was just me engaging in the fucking Sisyphusian task of cleaning up after a hoarder.

I called J and B to help.

B got there first, did a small amount of work, and then sat down to watch movies with everyone else in the house.

I couldn't stress enough that we were literally never going to see her again if she didn't help but she barely made an effort.

J showed up with her boyfriend at the time, peeked her head in, congratulated me on the work I'd done, and said she was going to head to a party.

I had already done SO MUCH and it didn't even seem like I needed her after all!

I was so numb and panicked. I didn't even know how to contradict her and no one else seemed to care what was going to happen to us either.

I just let her go bc I couldn't keep fighting.

We didn't get taken away but I don't think I've ever really been able to trust people since that.

Cut to my relationship with S this past year. Me and S and S's other girlfriend V were talking about our various traumas and I started to tell that story.

S was barely paying attention and started chatting with V about something else.

I'm 30 now and much more capable of standing up for myself so I told S what they had just done.

They were like, Oh, sorry, please tell this story.

I was like, Eh, it's fine. It's not the right time

S had been asking me for months why I wouldn't just ask people for help with Justice or the house when I needed it so I had figured that context might be illuminating but being cut off and ignored just sapped my spoons and I didn't have the energy to tell it anymore.

But S insisted bc once they heard I wasn't going to tell them, they HAD to know. It wasn't even about me at that point.

So I tell this story and it's fucking hard to tell and I'm already so drained.

As soon as I'm done, S says they and V have to take a shower&go somewhere.

So S&V leave me half in tears in my living room trying to cope alone and as I'm sitting there dissociating I start to hear sex noises from the bathroom.

I'm just like, SERIOUSLY? You ignore me, then force me to tell a story I don't have it in me to tell,&then leave to fuck???

Like, just out of sight, out of mind from the closest person in my fucking life at the time.

It becomes unbearable enough for me that I knock on the door and ask them to please stop and I get, "Oh we weren't having sex. We were just fooling around." COOL THAT IS SO MUCH BETTER.

It's just like, every single time I try to ask for help or open up about why I don't ask for help, I am made painfully aware of why I don't ask other people for help.

CN: suicide talk

I don't know how to stop being an island bc I don't trust anyone, but my inability to work the last few years has made true independence absolutely impossible.

Like I said, I'm not suicidal anymore but jfc death seems like a real easy solution.

Also I'm waiting for the next denial letter from disability bc my hearing did not go well.

The government will just fuck me around until I'm dead and stop asking for help.

Asking the government for help was the hardest fucking thing I had to do while I was literally unable to eat solid food for 8 months and it continues to be the most difficult thing three years later.

The only thing my hearing succeeded in doing was cutting almost a year off the amount of time they wanted to cover bc I was still technically working when all my health problems started even though I was calling out more than once a week.

I feel stupid for thinking that conceeding those months would make them more likely to approve my case. It's just insult on injury always with them.

Ugh, life is trash. I'm so fucking tired and nauseated and jaded.

Also fun, I was feeling like our marriage had started going down hill when my gallbladder tried to kill me three years ago.

Last night my husband said it was more like when I got into a car accident 6 years ago and couldn't hike with him anymore.

Anyways maybe my body will let me sleep before therapy tomorrow.

And maybe if it lets me do that, it will cool it on the horrific nightmares it's been tossing at me for the last few days.

Like, does life actually get better or do we just tell ourselves it does?

Uh oh, I thought too hard about what a shit show life is

I always forget how much worse I feel when I'm screaming into the void. I should have just stuck to RTing a bunch of things that weren't this vulnerable.

Cn: suicidal feelings

It's weird being at this point where I don't even want to be talked down anymore. I just want everything to stop being so shitty and painful.