I Fail...

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at life....and that is all there is to it. But maybe if I could just accept it and not care if people notice, and I'd feel better about myself. I am just so sick of feeling like such a disappointment to everyone, and then I beat myself up over failing at everything and never seeming to be able to do anything right........I cannot even get taken seriously because I look like I'm like 15 even though I'm 22. So if I could just not care, it would be better.

I mean I fail so much I couldn't even follow through at the mental health center and I think that now that I could get a regular doctor since I got on this program in my state to help with medical costs and such...I could talk about the mental health stuff to them and if they needed to refer me to a psychiatrist or something they could.....But still even though I feel I'd prefer that route anyways I still feel like such a fail for going to the intake appointment and then not even following through with going to the initial meeting thing or whatever. I just feel like I fail at life....and am just aimlessly drifting through it.

Sweet Pea hugs

We all fail what we do to get around it is what makes us individuals. Let me quote Billy Joel "You're not the only one who's made mistakes But they're the only thing that you can truly call your own""You're only human, you're allowed to make your share of mistakes You better believe there will be times in your life When you'll be feeling like a stumbling fool So take it from me you'll learn more from your accidents Than anything that you could ever learn at school" And Sweetleaf you better believe I f***ed up a lot in my life. I should have died several times but some things do get better with time. Have hope!

I will keep that in mind....it just gets so frustrating, maybe the following venting will describe things better.

The whole issue is I don't think there is a way around it for me...I mean I've failed at everything ever since I graduated from highschool, and my childhood sucked life hasn't improved any and so. I feel like a stumbling clueless idiot all the time and all I learn from these failures and crap is how useless I am and how much I probably burden friends/family.

I just don't see a reason for being hopeful, all it ever does is bring me more pain because then I start convincing myself it will maybe get a little better and then things just get worse....and I cannot even blame the current state of my life on my mistakes alone a lot of it is stuff that had nothing to do with my mistakes but rather how I've been treated in my life like at school and then dysfunctional family crap is pretty stressful to grow up in and then try and be on good terms with family as an adult but then none of them understand. Then there was the incident of the girl at my school getting shot that one f****d me up, luckily it happened towards the end of my time in public school though because it totally destroyed my enjoyment of reading books, my ability to concentrate on reading and/or writing which would have sucked if it happened sooner because then I might have been held back in that horrid school and 12 years was long enough for public school. But when I went off to college it kind of became an issue.

My mom for instance now knows about me having AS, PTSD, Depression and Anxiety....she acts like she at least gets it and understands I struggle with it......but then if she gets irritated or angry she tends to say things she either doesn't mean or its what she actually thinks and shes not holding back because the anger is reducing her impulse control. But anyways she will pretty much throw all the understanding she has out the window. Then she'll tell me things like 'don't take stuff so personally', 'quit complaining(if I am venting about something that is actually causing me distress) 'look at me'(that pisses me off because she knows damn well I am bad with eye contact especially if I am stressed out and arguments are not exactly calm situations) and just generally acts like I am treating her some way or doing something wrong by not being able to just bear it all inside with a smile on my face and a great positive attitude.

I cannot live with her because I cannot deal with these sorts of arguments....yet I have no choice for the time being. The longer I stay here the more likely I am to end up in a mental institute because its very hard not to lose it on her when she starts going on like that, and yes she is the type that would call the cops or the ambulance if she felt I was getting out of hand.......not that I totally disagree with that action because yeah if she set me off that bad I might need someone to stop me from doing anything stupid. But yeah my mom and her side of the family are the worst well I guess some relatives on my dads side but they are in another state, Anyways though being around them just makes me feel even worse because I know I could never even fathom living up to their standards of life, not that I want to but they look down on me for it even if they don't say it. I am just waiting for them to tell me how it disgusts them that I have things in common with my dad who they all hate. But yeah they including my mom kind of bring me down......I mean its like in order for my mom to help me with transportation and medical type costs I have to deal with her bringing me down further than I already am.

And then the sad thing is I think its partially because of her own problems...I mean I don't know if she even realises it all the time, though that might just be wishful thinking because she does have a bit of a nasty streak to her.

But yeah I don't want all this stupid family drama, don't want to be a part of it but it seems impossible to totally separate myself from it especially when I am living at my moms house. Other then that I am not too confident that I will be able to find or keep a part time job....and when it comes to SSI well I'd probably even fail at applying for that.

What type of things do you want for yourself out of life exactly?

I don't really even know.


I think it would be cool to someday have some isolated land with solar/wind and whatever other off the grid energy is in the area, and a greenhouse to grow whatever plants, herbs, fruits, vegetables I want to. And that energy would also provide electricity for the regular living quarters probably an RV or trailer....the RV would be better for if I have to leave overnight or something, then I can just bring my whole house with me. Maybe eventually I would upgrade to a house. But that idea if it ever happens is pretty far off, I wouldn't even know where to begin.

When you make the broad generalization that you are "failing at life" you can easily blind yourself to whatever skills you might actually have.

One thing that comes through in your posts is that you think fairly deeply and seem to be fairly compassionate about others. While you clearly have areas where you do not function as well as you'd like, I think you often ignore or forget the areas where you actually are pretty successful. Your posts show you have a strong ability to assess problems and find the core conflicts that you are struggling with. You tend to do this with a balanced understanding of other people's problems. You do not go around blaming everyone else for all your problems (just some of them ).

On the whole, I get the impression that you are very intelligent and a fairly decent person. It sounds to me like there are a lot of things that are causing you stress in your life and this makes it hard to get a long enough break to more realistically assess yourself.

In my own experience, it can be very hard to see one's own better qualities. But it's easy to only see our own failings. Whenever I succeed at something, I start to feel like "anybody could do that." My successes become what I consider to be a minimum level of achievement. While it pushes me to keep getting better at what I do, it also leaves me feeling like I have failed at everything I have tried to do. In my more rational moments, I know that this is not the case.

But my comments here come from the perspective of being 47 and not 22. I vaguely remember how overwhelmed I felt at having to face the real world. I spent 7 years in college because it was safer and easier than dealing with reality. The jobs I took tended to be "safe" jobs that didn't require that I interact with people. I had wanted to become a film maker and should have tried to get work in film production, but this kind of work requires a lot of social networking that gave me too much stress. Also I did not grow up with the kind of stressful, un-supportive environment you describe. I had some advantages you may not have.

But the quality of your thinking reminds me a lot of myself, although frankly I think you understand yourself and express yourself better than I did at 22. I guess the gist of what I'm trying to say is that, despite what you feel, you do not appear to be anywhere near as much of a failure as you believe. You have, if nothing else, a successful mind. While intelligence alone won't solve your problems, it does give you analytical tools and the potential to create your own solutions.

And I won't deny that it's going to take a lot of hard work. I think you need to push yourself to do some of the things that you are avoiding. It doesn't matter that they cause you stress. If you don't take action now, you are only delaying the solution. You mentioned in a post a few weeks ago that perhaps you needed to reach a crisis before you would make the changes you feel you must make. It may come to that. But if you can push yourself to do one or two of the things that cause you anxiety, you may find that they are no where near as difficult and overwhelming as they appear. It's kind of like being at the top of a slide and being terrified of pushing yourself off. But once you go down the slide, you realize it's no where near as scary as it looks from the top.

It's easy for me to say this, mostly because I've survived, but if you can face your fears and have the courage to walk right into them despite the fact that you don't know if you will come out alive, you might just find out you have a lot more in you than you ever expected. Of course you might not... that's always the risk. It wouldn't be scary if you knew you would come out okay. But it seems to me that your only other choice is to withdraw from life and to eclipse yourself further and further. If might be a safe route to take, but it certainly isn't a lot of fun.

It might be helpful to just give up any hope that things will work out on their own. Once you stop hoping you can get by without the horribly painful amount of effort I suspect you will need to make, you can get on with the work of making your life what you want it to be. (Jeeze.. I sound like I'm writing a self help book here... Sorry. But there really is some validity to this.)

The key points I want to make are:

1. Despite appearances, you haven't failed as much as you think. Heck at 22 you just aren't old enough to have really screwed up.
2. Face your fears. Look them straight in the eye and don't flinch.
3. If it's a struggle to climb a hill, climb a mountain instead.

A little clarification on point three is in order here. I enjoy biking. There is a hill in Griffith Park in Los Angeles that, when I first added to my bike route, was extremely difficult. I would get about 1/3 of the way up and want to stop and turn around. It's a bit of a steep climb for about a mile and I hated that part of the ride. But I also wanted to conquer that difficulty. And then one day I had the stupid idea that I would like to bike up to Mount Wilson which is a little over one mile high over a 35 mile ride (18 of which are in the mountains). I started riding up the mountain and I hated it. About 1/3 of the way I wanted to turn around. I kept going for a while, but eventually I had to stop and go home. But the next weekend, I tried it again. I got further, but didn't make it all the way. It wasn't until my forth try that I got up to the top of the mountain. The thing was, since I knew that going up the mountain would be a huge challenge, I accepted that I would suffer a great deal more than going up the one mile long hill. One mile of riding in the mountains felt like far less than 1/3 of a mile in Griffith Park. Now riding up the hill in Griffith Park is no big deal.

My point is this; life is difficult. If you set yourself to conquer challenges that are more difficult than the challenges of daily life, you will find that the things that seem impossible now, really aren't as insurmountable as they currently seem. Your intelligence is one of your greatest assets and you can utilize that to get yourself though some pretty difficult circumstances. It won't be easy and you'll probably want to give up fifty times a day, but you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Nothing is guaranteed in life except that you only get a small amount of it. It's often difficult and there are some problems you will never be able to solve. But there are some problems that are well within your abilities. Start addressing the smaller challenges now and build your way up to the more difficult ones. You haven't screwed up enough to give up yet.

I hope some of this helps.

Good luck,

Lars

Well it does make sense......but what happens if I cannot handle the stress, I mean the more I push myself the more dysfunctional I seem to get. I mean obviously I cannot just do nothing, but I feel its better to try and make sure I don't get to overwhelmed with stress.

Also I wont deny that I might be intelligent but then it seems like I have intelligence but no use for it...I mean whats the use of being intelligent if I cannot put it to use.

But yeah I'll probably have to re-read that and think about it some more because it was a lot and there was some truth to it, so yeah.

jagatai said a lot of the things that I wanted to but lack any tact with my words. That why I was quoting songs.

I am not sure putting it that way 'fail at life' is accurate. You finished High School, you attended Colledge (not sure you completed). In a way you are now at the point adult life begins, so it's premature to talk about failing.

I think you have worries & concerns, and that is natural, but you must not let that hold you back. You probably already figured out that Life does not come to you. You have to go out and get it.

The harder part is knowing what exactly this "Life" is that you supposedly have to "go out and get".

Do you know if it's the thing itself that's so overwhelming or if it's the anxiety leading up to making the decision that's overwhelming? The thing is sometimes it might be that the only way out is through and you're subjecting yourself to even more stress by second guessing yourself and then beating yourself up afterwards.

What jagatai said.

I hate to see you keep seeing things like this, reason being that at 22, you're about where I was at ... only a few years ago, really. Maybe at 33, 34?

If you're failing at life ... where does that leave me? I think this is why I respond so much when you post stuff like this.

As far as it goes, I think there comes a point where you just accept your limitations, and once that happens, the focus shifts to your capabilities. Your intelligence is one of your best assets, though probably not in the way you or others expect, given your limitations. But to really capitalize on it you need to develop presence of mind, which is something I have realized doesn't just apply to emergency situations, but to life crises, repetitive problems, limitations and so on. It even applies to the most mundane tasks, if/when performing them becomes a crisis. I have learned that - the reason I was never able to make much use of my intelligence is that I refused to submit to it, saw it as a handy tool or servant that I could dismiss when it suited me, or turn to mere amusement, or enslave it to the goal of achieving foolish desires. The only way to capitalize on it, is to make your intelligence your master and dictator, to command you instead of the other way around, at any time it chooses and in any way it chooses, this is what I now understand to be presence of mind.

I think this is easier for people the less intelligent they are. They only need to serve less demanding, less terrifying masters.

Yeah I don't really care that I graduated highschool, its not like I really learned anything useful there...and I failed college 3 times. the last time I attempted was at a community college and I took two classes per semester and I couldn't even handle that. Also if I had a choice in the matter it wouldn't hold me back but ptsd, anxiety and depression don't really give a crap what I want and that includes not wanting to be held back.

Probably a combination of both.

If you consider birds, like say the experience of a Sparrow or Robin from beginning to end, it is fairly simple, but still a good model. It's basically the same with people. Questioning the purpose or utility of life is kinda over-thinking.