I am experiencing a serious meltdown at this time, and don't know where to turn. I've been starting to share some of my difficulties with a few others, but have made the decision I need time away from work and other people in general, and I hope to move from my current city within two to three months.
I have lost all interest and pride in my work, despite having established enthusiastic relationships and getting positive feedback. Just a couple of weeks ago I applied for a position that will pay twice as much, but I'm walking away from it. I can't cope. I am overwhelmed, profoundly sad, and have been experiencing mental/emotional abuse from some family members and some others for a long time.
I am a 46 year old woman, straight but never married (had a few boyfriends in the distant past), have no brothers or sisters, and have ended up profoundly isolated in life because of some dysfunctional family dynamics. Did I contribute to my isolation? Surely I did.
I made mistakes, because I could only guess at what normal was and what was expected of me. I made many foolish mistakes trying to fulfill everyone's expectations and disprove I was a variety of things that I was accused of being over a lifetime (nerd, ugly, lesbian, overprotected, thin-skinned, stupid, spoiled, and I can go on and on.) I feel like I've had a lifetime of experiencing that as soon as I exhibited some momentary happiness, others felt obligated to wipe the smile from my face and replace it with a lot of tears.
At this point I have no desire to associate with other people, not right now.
My symptoms include apathy about work and family (except for my mother), horrible headaches 70-80 percent of the time, inability to fall asleep despite terrible exhaustion to the point that I have to take 100 mg Trazodone, depression, numbness, the urge to run, horrible inability to concentrate or focus even on the simplest things, preoccupation with reading up about emotional abuse, severe impairment of short term memory, stress eating, and inability to "keep up" with life in general.
I notice that literally everything is taking me at least twice as long, and often much longer, as it used to. I cannot wake up at a productive hour in the morning and get to work on time. I feel very misunderstood and pressured.
My 16 year old brother died (cerebral hemorrhage) when I was five. Despite the stresses prior to his passing, those first five years were the most normal of my life. Even then, though, my parents had a very estranged marriage.
My father traveled a lot and his way of dealing with ways that he said my mother made him unhappy (chief complaint was that she did not like his parents or sister) was to have affairs. That came to a head when I was 13, when my mom and I walked in on my father and his girlfriend du jour at a motel in Kansas City.
The next 19 months were centered around very bitter and hostile divorce proceedings, with my mother trying to lay exclusive claim to me, with my father becoming determined to maintain contact with me. As the only child, I ended up trying to please them both.
Only at this age can I see how my father and stepmother were using their quasi-covert contact with me to torment my mother. They were not sincere; I was used. Over many years, they kept showing up in my life, which caused me to make clandestine arrangements to accommodate seeing them when they would make trips to my city (I was living with my mother, who had cancer; she has recovered). This disrupted my life, caused me stress, and set me back in school. My mom's additional demands on my time set me back even more.
I went through my 20's and 30's always trying to cajole all of them in order to avoid any big conflicts, which I perceived as being worse than what I was going through. I feel like this situation was so unusual that no one could understand. Naturally it isolated me socially as well.
Too frequently I realized that I was merely an interesting case study for those to whom I explained the situation. They were not true friends, but rather found me an interesting case to gossip about. My trust for people went down the drain.
It came to my attention in 1998 that my mother's relatives were proclaiming how unfair it was to my mother that I was not earning enough money and remained living under her roof, despite the fact that she is the one who desperately wanted it that way. I had tried to leave several times, only to be relentlessly pursued by her until I moved back. None of her relatives ever bothered to contemplate how unfair this was to me.
In 2001, I left her household for good, although it cost me academically and professionally. I gave up pursuit of a master's degree and a job. I was blacklisted for a variety of reasons, including a reckless involvement with the academic department's IT jerk, due in large part to my severe depression at that time. He took full advantage of that and said all the words he knew I wanted to hear, got his way, then very unceremoniously and abusively dumped me.
I was unable to get any meaningful employment, certainly none in my field of choice, and ultimately pursued work in unrelated fields.
After my stepmother died, I moved to the same city as my father. I still didn't get how he had used me along with my stepmother, and thought we could finally have a normal father-adult daughter friendship. He did assist me financially along the way, because despite my education, my jobs have never paid sufficiently to cover my expenses. I've always been in "desperate for a job" mode, and would take whatever I could get. My top year was $27,500, and it has gone downhill from there due to time off from work thanks to severe depression.
In recent months, my father has become increasingly mean and selfish. My 80-year old mother, like myself, can barely afford to meet expenses. I have been unable to help her, being too restricted myself. My father is loathe to help me out significantly, as he expressed he doesn't want one thin dime to go to my mother. This is horrible for me.
Several years ago, he was worth in excess of $800,000. Last year, his worth dropped to $622,000. This year, he was worth $577,000. I have no idea where his money has gone, because it seems to me one could live quite comfortably on the interest alone, in addition to the handsome social security checks he was receiving. Not bad for a traveling salesman.
Two months ago, he opted to pay Uncle Sam 35 percent of his net worth and put the remainder into an 10-year annuity. He is 84. He has fixed it so that I would get half of the remainder and my stepsister and two step-brothers get the remaining half (they are not related by blood to him that I know of, and are all well off).
It is also set up that the money cannot be withdrawn upon his demise without paying a significant penalty. He just moved to an independent living facility that is costing him over three times as much as he was paying for a nice apartment "because he needed more social contact." He had my stepbrother sell a sofa bed that I was interested in, citing that I didn't have enough room in my small apartment for it. It turns out that my stepbrother has the sofa.
My father also, for some bizarre reason, asked my stepbrother to sell my car (in my name!) and neither one of them bothered to consult me before my stepbrother listed it on Craig's list. I became upset and demanded he pull the ad, as this car is in my name. I asked my father who was supposed to get the proceeds of the car. He would not answer me, which told me everything.
A week prior to his move, same said stepbrother and his dominatrix wife were over "helping" my dad pack. Their idea of "helping" was for my stepbrother and dad to sack out on the sofa watching football while the wife was in my father's office quickly stuffing his financial paperwork into boxes with things like wreaths and junk. This struck me as more than suspicious. They were not helping to pack dishes or fragile items, but were caught up digging into his financial portfolio, previously set up trust, and will.
He is so enamored of my one stepbrother that I would swear they were gay if it were not for the step- relationship. I started feeling nauseated at witnessing the favoritism of a man who is not even his blood over my mother and me. I began to realize what a fool I've been to have had any faith or trust in him whatsoever.
On more than one occasion he made wild claims about the amount of money he lent to me over the years. I finally called him on it, but I was sickened that he regarded me as such a burden.
In addition to all this, over the course of two years my father has been calling me several times a day, at work and at home, trying to track where I am. It is embarrassing and annoying at work, and additionally stressful when I'm at home, because I understand his motives. He wants me to report to him where I am, where I've been, what I did, what I'm doing, and no matter what I've done it's the wrong thing (it should have been something else instead).
He has negative feedback for any constructive or enjoyable activities I am pursuing (currently enrolled in two business courses and my parakeets are having baby birds). He's made "jokes" about eating the birds - sick.
He looks for what I'm not getting done as opposed to acknowledging what I am doing. Also, I have been happily working in an office that serves minorities and have been enjoying it. On several occasions when he called me, he used the n-word, which is against my values, and I had to tersely remind him that he was doing so on an office phone (calls are randomly recorded) and that this was against both office policy and my personal policy. It seems to me he was trying to sabotage me.
After he moved in to his new expensive independent living complex, he decided he needed a new desk with a filing cabinet and comfortable chair. Since he no longer has a car, I was elected to drive him to the furniture store to help him accomplish this.
I don't really know why I accommodated him, but I suppose I was numb with depression and not thinking straight. He stole yet another afternoon of my time for his own selfish concerns. He needed a new desk and chair like a hole in the head. It's all to appease his ego and image. Because of doing this and helping him move in, I ended up falling further and further behind with everything in life. My concentration went -- totally blown.
I'm in severe depression as I'm failing miserably at everything due to his interferences and selfishness. He's totally self-centered and uncaring of the fact that both my mother (severely crippled) and I barely make it paycheck to paycheck. I have not returned his repeated sarcastic calls for several days now. I'm worn out, sad, and numb. He says things like, "Hey, remember me? I'm your Dad. I request you return my calls." Funny - he hasn't remembered he is my father and not my stepbrothers' father for 30-plus years now.
I just want to run - I feel sick. Hardly anything matters to me right now, because I feel like so much of my life has been based on, and destroyed by, lies. The things that keep me hanging on are my mother (we communicate daily and she is being 100 percent supportive), and my birds (I want to provide them a happy and healthy home, and I want them to live; they have become my family).
I'm sorry to have gone on so long. I'm just hurting a lot and need time out. Thanks for letting me share.
