Okay, this isn't normal for me. Normally I would never bother with anything like this, I actively avoid expressing feelings in such a public and out spocken kind of way to such a number of people. I'm only doing this because I need to. For lack of a better word I feel like, I'm choking, I've felt like this many times before but I've usually had a way of expressing it that would satisfy me at least for a little while. The chances are I'll just say all this and then never say anything again, as I said I just need to do this one thing.
Let's see, where to start. A little bio first; I'm male, 17 (about to turn 18 on the 26th), living in London and am in a working class family. I have dyslexia, depression and agoraphobia. I'm also a "strict" atheist if that's note worthy. Right now my life consists of going to college, doing a Level 3 ICT Suport training course and trying to find a placement for an apprenticeship at entry level. When I'm not in college I spend almost every second of the day at home, in my room trying to escape from the reality and the real world.
I have very few friends and I'm close to no one, the only friends I do have I know from the internet and rarely talk to now anyway, friendships always seem to slip into nothing in the end anyway. The only person I've truly actually been close to never exactly existed in the first place, I'll explain. Recently I found out that the person I'd been talking to for the last 3 years and had grown extremely close to, purely on a friends basis (it was already established that there was no want for any kind of a relationship) was someone else. Female, 19 year old [insert Name] was infact Male, [insert Name], 16 years old. A compulsive lier with the intelligence like I've never seen before. For your information I never had any reason to suspect the person of being anyone other than who they said they were, I had 10-20 different pictures and 2 voice recordings of a female voice that mentioned specific names of people, including mine. That said that little event crushed me in ways I have refused to come to terms with properly in an attempt not to feel anything about it. I only feel pathetic about the whole thing now.
Moving on. I'm an only child and I live with both of my parents, I have extended family in other countries that I don't have any desire to have any contact with. This is pretty much the same policy I have with my own family, my father doesn't have anything to do with me, we hardly ever speak to each other and that suits me fine. My mother is largely a good person but seems to have the idea burnt into her that she gets to make executive decisions about my personal life. She treats me no more than a child and consistantly fails to understand how difficult my life is made by my dyslexia. Generally she knows nothing much about me, nothing of my depression or agoraphobia. I have no intention of telling sharing it with her either, I don't accept that just because my parents are who they are I should automatically want to have anything to do with them. To me they're just strangers. Oh and whenever I talk about them like this I can't help but feel deeply paranoid that I'm just a ungrateful little brat.
Onto my mental health. My depression stems for years of bullying, disappointment and rejection. Pretty much from Year 5 of school (I don't know what grade that is in America) til I finished school in Year 11 I was bullied, and yes, from that far back. I was bullied and isolated before I could even understand the concept of bullying. There isn't much else to say, I'm sure you can imagine what it was like to wake up every single day, hate yourself, be bullied all through out the day and get bad grades no matter how hard you worked. The bullying itself was mostly verbal and physical abuse, thankfully I avioded being seriously hurt on any occasion. I really don't know how I got through school, for years I just knuckled down and put up with it. Simply as that, looking back on it I'm surprised I didn't kill myself a long time ago. God knows it crossed my mind though.
I left school with largely mediocre grades (2 Bs, 6 Cs and 2 Ds if I remember correctly, which I probably don't. Ironically one of those Bs was in English). They were enough to enroll me onto the college courses I wanted to take at college though so at the time I was pretty glad, I was leaving behind years of torment and onto success. At least I was praying that would be so. As a note I took Philosophy, Religious Studies, Politics and ICT. They were all topics I really took some pleasure in. unfortunately, in another turn of irony, they were exactly the wrong topics to take. At first I liked them, the subject matter was interesting and we weren't being given that much work to do outside college. Jump ahead about half a year by now I'd done as much as I could and decided I couldn't go on, like an idiot I tried to solve this problem by going home and hiding in bed. By now most of my essays given to me to complete from Philosophy, Religious Studies and Politics were just copy and paste jobs. I still found the subject matter engrossing and took an active role in classes but when it came to doing the essays I just couldn't seem to do well no matter how hard I tried.
It was about then I started seeing the college counsiler. Which again, for a while worked out okay-ish, mostly the sessions were pretty forced, I spent a good deal of time staring at the floor. I continued going to classes and doing the same old copy and paste jobs. Eventually at some point I decided to voice the theory that I might be dyslexic. Now this was my own theory, no one had ever even mentioned the possiblity. Since it was paid for by the college I had an assessment which returned what I thought, I was dyslexic and have always been so. About now I'd like to say a personal thanks to all the teachers that failed to recognise a learning disability in me for more years than I care to remember. Nothing much changed after that. I was too far into my courses to just give up so I decided to go ahead and struggle with them. My parents response was mixed, my father's response was, and this is a direct quote, "No you're not," only after showing him an offical letter saying that I was he accepted it. My mother accepted it but refused to have any understanding of how much it affected me, eventually I made her read a book on the subject I'd finished reading myself. Not that that did much. At college I started going to what was called the 'Learning Skills Workshop', that was a joke. I was pretty much given lessons on spelling and grammar, rather than anything aimed at tackling dyslexia itself. After a while I gave up counsiling and then the extra lessons feeling abandoned and let down.
More time passed, I took my exams and then had the summer holiday. Eventually results day came along and I got my results. Two Ds, one E and a U, a year of hard slog and I got worthless grades. The only thing I could do with those was shove them somewhere the sun doesn't shine. That was pretty much mimiced when I went in to be enrolled for whatever courses I could take at the same college. At that time I found out that I couldn't change my course options now because I have the chance to do that on 'Revision Day', a day I didn't have because my form tutor was in another country at the time. Thanks, really. More feelings of being let down hit hard right about here.
After going through about 6 more people thankfully I was able to enroll on a course called 'Gateway to ICT Support', all pratical work on a subject I could do really well at. That being said I completed the course early this year after, coming out top of the class, finishing a week early simply because I was that far ahead. And I know I'm boasting here but that was my first piece of acedemic success ever, I have the right to be proud. Of course good things never really last, the plan was for me to go onto an apprenticeship, learning and working in a business environment. A month and a half passed and the college got me one interview which I failed to secure the placement for reasons I still don't know yet, feed back is still pending apparently, I doubt it though. They more or less stopped communicating with me and when I tried to find out what was happening I managed to get the blaim, don't ask how. Insert even more feelings of being let down. So basically after trying to do their job for them I started doing some searching, calling companies whose names I gave to the college. Of course nothing got done about that so I re-enrolled on the college and took the course I'm doing now, even though I have 6 weeks catch up work to do and am having to work double lesson schedules.
Enough of that subject.
I've sort of run out of steam now so I'm going to finish this soon. God knows you're probably sick of listening to this by now. I won't blaim you if you go do something else at this point.
Agoraphobia. There's very little to say about this, I suppose I've had it for ages, just only recently have I been able to give a word to certain things. I get anxiety that I simply can't control, whenever I go outside I'm constantly aware of my surroundings, I get extremely nervous around people even if I don't show it. Which I usually don't. Even when buying things from a shop I stutter my words, begin to sweat and my hands will shake long after I've done my business and left the shop. It sounds so pathetic too, but I can't control it at all. I've done my best, I've certain of that. Like with dyslexia I've just done my, best figuring it's this hard with everyone and I'm just dumb or something. Public transport is a sore spot too, I like traveling, I like to look out of the window even if I'm taking the same route every single day and it's just the same old sights. But I'm haunted constantly by the idea that I might do something wrong, like maybe the ticket inspector will come along, ask me for my ticket and tell me it's wrong and I'll just be stranded. Even though it's never happened to me once, I've only been asked once for my ticket and then it was valid. It's only made worse by the fact that I get confused easily in those kinds of situations and generally people treat me like crap, if I look vunable people usually take it as a chance to made me feel worse. I imagine it's just a 'having power over someone' else thing.
Very briefly I'll go over past relationships, it's not much of an issue to me now, I'm at a point where I'm not actively looking for a relationship with anyone. I think love is something we make up and want to believe it, like God (and I apologise in advance for the two groups of people I've just offended; couples and theists), so it's not like I'm looking for love. If the right person came along maybe I'd consider it though.
Okay, on the point. My first relationship was when I was 15, long distance, about a 4 hours high-speed train journey away from each other. In short that lasted three months (to the day), ending with her cheating on me, telling me how we can never see each other again and spending the next year randomly sending me emails and text messages detailing how much she still loves me. Didn't reply to a single one, I hope to tore her up inside.
Second relationship was slightly better, only about an hour of trains journeys accross London. That was all sunshine and tweetie birds until she decided that even though she said she loves me and though she wanted a serious relationship, she actually would rather just go to parties and sleep around. That ended in a really long argument, never spoken to her since.
And now I'm seeing someone, we're not so much in a relationship as just having sex. But don't get me wrong, we get on fine, there's just no emotions involved.
I guess I lied about wrapping this up shortly. One last rant, I promise.
One of the main things that's making me feel like I'm sufficating is my complete lack of artistic out put. This isn't because I can't think of anything, I can, I pride myself on my imagination. Being dyslexic I have an extremely vilid vision imagination and use it as much as I can, I also spend a lot of time just writing out conceptual ideas for storylines I might have. The thing that kills me the most is that I can't, no matter how hard I try, act on them. It's probably difficult to understand for someone who isn't dyslexic but I feel like I'm being blocked by a brick wall the moment I try anything creative. Writing creatively is an extremely taxing task that I can do but not only takes up a huge ammount of time (I could spend 6 hours writing and end up with a single paragraph) it's draining. When I stop it barely seems to effort.
With drawing it's more or less the same story, I have imagine perfectly what I want to draw and even see it on the page but the moment I put pencil to page it all goes pear shaped. I consistantly fail to understand the basics of drawing anything that isn't right there infront of me. No matter how vilidly I see something in my mind I can do anything about it. That kills me in ways I can't describe with words.
There you have it, that's me. Congratulations of you've got this far and haven't died due to bordem. Since I can do this fairly anonymously ask any questions you like, I don't mind answer thing. It'll make me feel validated and give me something to do.
