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@BuddhistLover Also, yeah, I've been coming to that realization over time too. I'm coming to understand that in terms of relationships, I should be focusing on self improvement and getting to at least somewhat of a better level in life before I even bother to attempt that sort of stuff again. Afterall, if I'm pursuing relationships, I'd want to show off a better version of myself rather than this current one who still has a lot to work on and doesn't feel anywhere near the self confidence needed anyways.

@Michael Jackson, @Michael569 I think what I'm experiencing that I need help with is this overshadowing emotional smog that I keep feeling within me. At least I think that’s what it is? It's like a big part of me is very self aware, self conscious, and understands what I should and shouldn't be doing. However at the same time, there's this feeling in my head that fogs that sense of motivation up a lot of times. Somedays, I'll take a good hard look at myself and rant and have a serious 1 to 1 conversation about what I'm doing with my life and how things have to change and how I need to escape the pit of toxic muck I've been wallowing in all my life. I get very motivated and start feeling good, but then something happens, and that uplifting feeling starts to slow down within me. Maybe it's that the path isn't exactly as clear as I'd want it to be, so I get demotivated and sink back into my old ways and bad habits. Maybe I have an addiction to this way of life, and while I feel I'm slowly escaping it, the fact that it still surrounds my being keeps me still addicted to it. Part of that could be the monotony of the day of living as a worker ant. That by the time I'm back from my jobs, I crave these addictions to recover from the mental drainage I just sat through at work. So, I stay up late to squeeze every ounce of that stimulation my brain gets when it gets back home after work. Doesn't help when I usually dread leaving for work, so I had a tendency to stay up until 8 hours before an hour before I have to walk to work. I used to do this back during school years too. Which I guess was something the education system trained my brain into feeling because I would dread school as much as I'd dread work (and nowadays part of me wishes I could go back to that instead, as worker ant work feels 10x worse than school work). @Eph75 also has a good point in that yeah it also probably is that sense of this self fulfilling prophecy I keep telling myself is keeping me feeling the way I do. That because I keep remaining in this self depreciation, self hate and fear, I'm only making myself more and more into what I try to avoid becoming. And on what you said, Eph75, about taking those steps is some pretty inspirational advice. I am taking steps, small steps, but steps nonetheless to work things out, with my focus at the moment being trying to plan out how I'm gonna get to a point where I can get my license, a car, and a way to move out from my family. It's just that like I said, no matter how self aware I am, even when I do take steps, there's that emotional smog that still overshadows me even as I'm typing this. That sense of self doubt and even laziness at times. They say the best way to stop feeling demotivated is to just do it and keep doing it, and once I see results it'll motivate me to push farther. Maybe it's because I haven't seen those results yet and I'm still impatient even if I don't want to admit that to myself. I guess that's what happens when you gets hooked on instant stimulations like I have. I guess I'm wondering how do I effectively clear all this lazy unmotivated smog out of my head when it comes in and I start feeling impatient like this when it gets unbearable and I haven't seen results yet? How do I halt and resist that very loud itch to slow down when it starts creeping up on me? That feels like a hard hurdle to leap. Probably what's holding me back the most, mentally.

...Anyone out there willing to give me some life advice on any of this that I'm going through? Sorry, I kinda opened myself up a lot earlier posting all this. I know all this is quite long and detailed, and I hope this isn't coming off as needy or anything like that. I was just hoping that maybe if I fully explain myself, then maybe someone out here could share their thoughts on all this and maybe give some helpful life advice about it all. Again, sorry for the long post. If it's too much for everyone, I understand and I'm sorry for going this much into details about my life here. I tried to restrain myself from getting too dark about how depressed I am about all it, but I am serious in that I feel very trapped in life and really want to make a change for the better instead of letting it completely comsume me and possibly leading me into suicide in the future.

Greetings, fourm. I've come to you all, hoping to maybe hear some personal motivational advice on the current state of my life, and to tell those listening my own life experience, as short as its been so far, admittedly. You see, I've been going through a deep existential crisis since October of last year, and about a month ago came across Leo's videos on life and self improvement. I've always felt like I have a sense of untapped potential within me, and can make great things, but it's been very wasted over the years due to a really bad upbringing. I want to make changes to my life to be on the path to self improvement, self actualization, and success, but I am trapped within a very unstable toxic situation that feels like it's forever holding me back. If I don't escape it, I feel as if I'll never get to be the kind of person I want to be, and it might just break me completely. Let me tell you all my story here. I live in Alabama. I used to have some pride in being here, but for awhile now, I've been so sick and tired of the south as a whole, which I've never truly been outside of my whole life. My family is... very toxic. They're all in conflict after a whole mess that happened in 2015 due to DHR getting involved and splitting my siblings across them all. My siblings themselves... well first off, none of them are full siblings. Only half. My biological father abandoned me when I was 3, and my mother would cheat around on everyone. I am the oldest on my mother's side, and since then she had 3 other kids all from different fathers. My own biological father did the same to me as he did all his others. Had multiple children from different mothers and abandoned them all. Needless to say, my parents are pretty bad figures. They are not good role models in the slightest. I was raised moving all over Alabama and sometimes around the other parts of the south. I've never left this backwards minded bible belt region all my life. The only reason I even have a more clearer sense of self awareness than most here is due to my nurture of internet culture and my lack of connection to the conservative southern culture here. I was born here in Alabama, then my now former step dad made us move around when he joined the army to fight the war in Afghanistan. From North Carolina, to Oklahoma, to back here. We were never settled in one place for long usually. Thus, I never got to psychologically develop as well as other children. Usually I would get made an outcast, as kids wouldn't want me as the new kid in their friend circle. I would face a lot of rejection and loneliness. I have a very hard time making new friends, and when I do, usually I become very over attatched to them to where it ruins the relationship between us over time. On top of that, my mother had an awful toxic habit of taking her anger out on her children as a way to metaphorically take it out on their fathers. She would become an addict to Klonopins and other sorts of mental pills and pain/anxiety killers, and they would drive her nuts (on top of the fact that she has BPD, a running theme across my family) She would emotionally abuse us, and sometimes even occasionally physically abuse, usually my sisters because over time I understood to stay away from her while they wouldn't. It got to a point where in Oklahoma, she would go out and leave us every time our stepdad got home from work, and honestly we didn't even want her home anymore anyways. One time, around the time of my 3rd grade year, they took everything out of my room except a stuffed bear of mines that I held dear, and locked me in there. In that state of solitude is when something changed within me. I would make a story involving him and I going on adventures. Since then, I would use that story to draw and constantly develop it's plot in my head. It never left my mind, and it made me creative and feel a sense of what I'm actually passionate about in life. Creation. I have a deep spiritual attachment to the idea of story and world building. I'm very into building lore in stories of my own, and also studying the lore of franchises I'm interested in. Storytelling is the only true thing that makes me feel any sense of life purpose and meaning. Especially when my whole existence was made from an accident by two blundering awful people. I was almost even about to be aborted, but somehow, for some reason, my life was spared by some cosmic fate. In 2014, I actually got to settle down with some people who I grew tight bonds with, and even had my first girlfriend and love. With this newfound group of mines, I began actually making my series with them in it too. And even before them, this story started to get more and more personal (mixed in with fantasy elements granted) and it was at that moment when I was talking to one of them on spirng break night that he convinced me I could actually make this story into something big and feasible. Like an actual idea that could actally be the thing I wanted in life that I've been missing. I should make this an animated series I thought to myself. A show, maybe even something I could make a franchise out of. Years before that realization, I thought maybe I'd wanna be a game developer, but realized the work that goes into coding probably isn't my strong suit. I'm not a big math guy, in fact I'm terrible at a lot of it. Maybe someday I could experiment, but for now, I had realized I had a passion in drawing. Even if I wasn’t that good at it yet, I could keep improving, and animation might be the medium to bring this series to life. And for those years with my support group there to hold onto, I actually began improving my drawing skills significantly. Even if they weren't 100% great, I was still only 13. I had a long way to go. I have/had potential. Everything was going good in life. I was set to go to high school there with my friends and girlfriend, escaping my miserable family, and I actually felt alive for once in my life. Everything was going well... all until the dark times began... When the DHR drama started happening (which led to my mom and stepdad divorcing) all of this build up I was getting to all fell apart. First off, my ex. She was always very secretive and mysterious in why she didn't want her family to know about me. Turns out, her mother is a Jehovah's Witness, and they have very strict dating rules. We weren't allowed to date until we were of age to. On top of that, she would be heavily pressured to either reject me for not being part of their cult, or she would try to indoctrinate me. My ex was desperate for the approval of her mother as that family in itself was a mess (hence why her mother fell for the cult in the first place, abusive household). I became so attatched to this girl that I vowed to stay close to her, and to wait for the time where we would be able to get back together. This was clearly a massive mistake. She had lied to me about herself and our relationship. My trust was shattered by her, and staying around her would be one of my major downfalls. Second, all my friends slowly over time abandoned me one by one. In the end, most of them it just feels like they turned all out to be nothing on the inside but shallow people to me who at the end of the day never truly cared enough about me to actually stay with me and be the real friends I once thought they were. Maybe part of that was due to my growing obsessive nature and clinginess, but with the DHR stuff on the horizon I needed them and my ex more than ever, but they all back stabbed me and left me to rot. Some tried to stay more than others, but it clearly felt that they only did because they felt obligated. That if they didn't I'd off myself or something. Which they'd feel guilty for. Life only went downhill from that point on. My family was split up, everyone was bickering even more than they ever have. My friends distant and cold. My ex always going up and down with my emotions, feeling like it was always this conflict between us that made me only grow more attatched and paranoid and worse and worse. I could've just walked away back then. It would've left me as the one in the right and her in the wrong in this whole thing, but no... I stayed and stayed like an idiot, and fell apart, becoming the villian in this sham of a "relationship" that I tried holding together. I was becoming a toxic person, like my family. And I hate myself for it till this very day. In the end, a self fulfilling prophecy had occurred with that whole mess, and as of about a year ago, she finally abandoned me too, just like everyone else, just as I predicted. I really did love her deep down, but that love became tainted with the drama of the religious uncomfortable smog she brought onto me. The immense amount of pressure and anxiety it gave me for such a young developing mind. I thought that everything I ever was is evil. That everything I am is evil. That my passions and wants in life are all the devil in nature. The two of us wanted to grow up to be animators. Wanted to make cartoons and have creative jobs and lives. But the Jehovah Witnesses hated that. Its devils work apparently. She was swayed to abandon the dreams she once had similar to mines, and I was going to throw them away too for the sake of us. And even in the midst of doing this, I was also realizing this was going to be a massive mistake. That doing this is wrong. I'm ruining my life by staying with her. It was just so hard to let her go because the primal thought of losing her was so hard on me due to how I've already dealt with so many years of rejection, abandonment, and pure loneliness. I felt threatened by the idea of this cultish entity haunting my head, taking her away from me. I felt like maybe I could save her from it. That love would get her to understand that staying in all of this isn't good. That we could do this together. How delusional was I to think something like that would ever work? Fear twisted me into something awful. I pondered a lot on if what I was feeling had been corrupted from what was once genuine love into just a very backwards form of lust and loud desperation to escape the cold, harsh loneliness within me. Even if her side of the story wasn't innocent either, you still can clearly understand why she left. I admit to my screw ups of being a bad partner. Sure, I wasn't abusive, I never physically hurt her or ever sat there and called her awful things like others do, like my mother has. I'm glad I never stooped that low, but had this whole mess with her continued, who knows wtf could've happened between us. I hate just thinking about that, becoming like my parents, but everyone around me agreed that it could've ended up that way. So I don't come here for advice on how to "fix" that disaster. I was blinded by extreme, embarrassing denial before, but now I'm fully aware that the bond between her and I is dead, and I've pretty much lost most of my love for her since she left me. These past 6 years of darkness have really done a number on me. A really bad one. I grew to be extremely depressed. Every day felt like hell. I couldn't escape the awfulness of the life around me. My friends, family, partner, all of it corrupted. My grades continued to slip, I started gaining weight, I started bad habits and addictions. To a point where I became just as addicted to all the drama as my family is. My drawing skills halted. I would still draw here and there, at school, sometimes at home. But I never had any real feelings to want to improve. I got comfortable and unconfident in my abilities to do anything else. I couldn’t draw as good as I used to. I started drawing abstract things and demons. My series I was working on got way darker and more personal with how I saw the world and my own life. I grew demons in my mind. Everyone around me felt like piercing voices in my head, torturing me with depressing thoughts. I would shut myself off from everyone in any new school I'd get relocated to when I'd jump from family member to family member. I hated it all. Nothing mattered to me anymore besides getting back to that town before DHR and setting everything right again. It was like a desperate addiction to fixate on that. To cope with the demons in my ape brain, I distracted myself in unhealthy ways like most do. I lazed around, staying up late, playing video games, siting on social media, watching TV & YT, eating sloppy junk foods, doing "other" teenage guy things. All this unhealthy toxic habit crap, and I felt utterly trapped in it. There was no "escaping" the DHR system. They had my family by the balls. Even if I could've tried to make new friends, I felt like it wouldn't even matter anymore since I'm either gonna move again or I'll graduate soon anyways... what's the point anymore. I ended up back with my mom for the last years of high school, where I live now under the old withering house her current husband has. He of which I view as a pathetic two faced dipshit of a guy. Once I did graduate, I felt like I needed to take a gap year to take a break from everything. I did that, but I still didn't get better. Then, they pressured me into college with threats to make me pay a lot more in helping out on bills. Something which they ended up doing to me anyways. I knew I wasn't ready for college. My grades were bad enough in high school with my deteriorating mental state. But nevertheless, I signed up for Full Sail University, tried online courses for Computer Animation, and what do you know? I ofc failed. I didn't even get through the core courses and get to the actual animation parts of the degree. I instead flopped them, and even when they gave me multiple make up chances and even a recovery course to see if I can get back into my degree, I flunked that too! I'm now about to be 6K in student debt from that bullshit, all because I was forced to start when I KNEW I wasn't ready at all yet. And so all this disgusting pathetic self pity and hatred continued to spiral more and more out of control to this day. I hate my life. I work two soul crushing retail jobs at Dollar General & Dollar Tree where I sell cheap manufactured consumer garbage to porverty stricken rednecks who complain about $1 differences on items and coupons. God it's pathetic seeing someone pitch a fit over a bag of damn Doritos. I barely make enough money to get by. They pay me $9-$10 an hour, but barely give me any good hours on top of that to pour salt onto the wound. Not like I even wanna be there anyways. Half the paragraphs I just wrote earlier was while sitting behind the counter. I'm forced to pay the power bills and some of the water bills, and I also made the very stupid decision to make payments on an expensive phone, and the college payments haven't even begun yet. I don't own a car, nor do I have a license, only a permit which none of my family actually try to teach me. Other jobs nearby me are either too far away or just as bad a deal as the ones I'm currently working. I try saving up money, but the bills take all that money away usually. I need to save for a car and a laptop so I can start building skills and self teaching myself, but I can't even do that. On top of that, my mother keeps taking my money to buy stuff, and keeps saying they'll pay it back when I know they won't for a long while. All while they demand money from me for the bills. I feel like I'm trapped here, and on purpose even now. That they need me trapped with them. My grandma kept my uncle (her son) with her (both of them are miserable with eachother) and now my mom is trying to do the same. All while it feels like they emotionally abuse and taunt me because its in their nature. No one wants to roomate with me, and most people in my life have given up and abandoned me. The only ones who are there are shallow people who really don't care in the grand scheme of things. They get on Xbox with me, but they'll leave me alone if they have something else better to waste their time on. The only real companion I feel that I actually have with me is my pet ferret who keeps me company. I feel trapped here with a family I hate in soulless jobs I hate, in a state I've also grown to hate. Even if I leave and get out on my own, I'll just end up being stuck as a wage slave to pay the bills anyways too. Nothing feels like it is an actual viable solution to get myself out of this garbage pit and off the ground. So, I wake up late, feeling like death. I work feeling already tired and jaded. A lot of days it gets to a point where I just genuinely feel like putting a bullet through my skull by the end of every shift. I feel all of that, but go home and laze around to distract my brain from the demons fogging my head up. I've become an addict to sugar, salt, fat, YouTube, social media, video games, porn and sometimes I've began partaking in things like weed and alcohol, and feel like those will be another thing I'll inevitably gain bad habits to. I already feel weed crawling up on me, but not in a good way. it's been giving me very deep depressing revelations about myself that make me feel bad the morning after. Plus I'm having trouble sleeping while on it. I feel so tired on my feet at work, but when I'm on my ass at home, I all the sudden get jolted with this procrastination energy, and become an insomniac staying up late in worse and worse self destructive behaviors. I look in the mirror and hate the person looking back at me. I hate myself inside and out. This isn't who I wanted to be at all. What the hell happened to me? I was so innocent and promising. I had potential in me. I wanted to be someone, I wanted fame and success for my creativity and improving my skills. Now I'm nothing more than the accident that the world has always seen me as. I've been proving them all right and I'm ashamed to even exist. I'm a terrible artist and creator, lazy, ugly, toxic, desperate, and pathetic. The only things I've ever made are inspired by my personal life which makes me feel like an egotistical narcissist. Something which I realized while high searching deep within myself. I have this urge to be more to feel worth something and prove everyone wrong, but the urge has turned from a motivating determination into a narcissistic rage within me. All while self hating myself for not ever being good enough or feeling like I'll ever be because I wasted 6 crucial important years of my life in darkness. I'll have spurts of motivation where I'll try to get up and do something productive, but it'll fall apart eventually. Because I don’t get enough sleep, my body doesn't have time to work like normal. It lacks development in the REM stages, which worsens everything. Even when I have dreams, they're usually very depressing or nightmares. My mornings are wack. I miss breakfast and have to resort to eating miserable unhealthy processed junk at work to compensate. Wasting the money I already have few of. In October, I felt like I hit an ultimate rock bottom. I was snooping around on social media where I shouldn’t have and discovered my ex had someone new now. It got to me bad, and I kinda had a really really stupid episode happen. It left me feeling like utter dog shit. After that, I had to take serious look at myself and think "what in the hell am I doing with my life?" It was then when I started having a serious existential crisis within me. I started to fully realize the dread that holy shit, I'm going to die one day. I'm 20 years old now. 20! Why do I feel twice my age?!?! Why aren't I seeking out my full potential? Oh my God, what has my life become?! I'm trapped in a system which wants me to fail and be in a sense trapped and enslaved by it. To wages, to family, to corporatism, to society. I'd rather die than to live the life I see everyone else living around me. In fact younger me even made a pact to future me to do just that at our old childhood base in the woods if it ever got this bad. Why am I even still here... I should be gone already. I failed him, bad. That's how it would genuinely feel. That's when I knew I've hit rock bottom, and I need serious mental help. If I continue to live the life I've been living over and over and over, it will be the end of me someday. I see the future this path is headed down, and I hate every bit of it. It's a fate worse than death, and I'd legit rather take death all than turn 25 or 30 still stuck in all of this mess. I'm not the type of person who can handle staying a worker ant all their life. I have a deep feeling within me of wanting to create things. Everyday I continue to live in this external filth, I feel like more and more I'm draining myself of that spark within. I'm losing who I was back all those years ago when my creativity was born, siting in isolation. I still work on my series, still working out the story and details, but I could be doing so much more, but feel like I can't. I'm now going back to my therapist I had when I was under DHR, now outside all that. We've been making some progress so far, but I feel like I have a hard time full opening up about everything and never fully feeling as depressed enough as I do at work where I could express the intense emotions I'm feeling right now. We did try to see if I could maybe make myself a plan for what I'm going to start doing, but everytime I try to think out a plan in my head, it starts to fall apart as I run into a dead end. I could buy a computer, but I don't have the money, plus I'd still be stuck here. I could try to get back into college at Full Sail, maybe go on campus this time, but I'd still end up in loan debt with no guarantee of graduating or getting a job afterwards that isn't factory work. It all can feel very tricky and claustrophobic and hopeless. The only thing I have ever had that's remained a consistent beacon of hope is the creativity I know is always deep within me. My passion for wanting to make something of myself and create stories that people will remember long past my death. I don't want to die a nobody. I don't want to die knowing that my existence from beginning to end was nothing more than a mistake, some smear on a window not even worth wiping off. I want to die at peace with the self fulfilling accomplishments I'll have to look back on in fondness in life. Knowing I did what I thought was the impossible and prove to everyone and to myself that I'm not a mistake or a failure. I started watching Leo's videos when his video on "How to Escape Wage Slavery" was recommended to me when researching the topic one night. The things he said in it were some of the truest down to Earth things I've ever heard in my entire life up to this point honestly. He's 100% right with the way this whole game works, and he really made me realize it more than I already have been since I started reflecting back on myself. I need to escape this mess. I can't keep doing this all my life. Something needs to seriously change. There needs to be some way out where I can finally start to fix and truly begin my life and seek out my ultimate purpose. I have a feeling I already know what the purpose is. What I want to accomplish. But I'm struggling to actually get somewhere where that healing can truly begin. Perhaps I will find that out on my own and/or with the help of therapy at some point here soon, and once I start improving, I can truly begin self actualization and full on improvement in all faucets of my life. Regardless, this is a rough n' tough uphill battle I've been dealing with all my life. For some reason, I'm still here when I had never expected me to ever be at this point. So clearly something is keeping me alive and still fighting. I can't give up, there is something inside of me that refuses to, something that must mean something out of all this. I have to keep going. I have to try and try and try again no matter how many times I fail and feel like I hate myself for it. Idk what it is that keeps my heart pumping and my mind from going 100% insane. Maybe deep down I am just some insane narssistic egomaniac who isn't at all fully aware of it. Or maybe I'm just a creative person who fell into the trap of external nihilism and have lost my way spiritually at the moment. Whatever it is, clearly it wants me to keep going. Things really need to start changing in my life, but the road ahead feels near impossible some days it seems like. I might need some sort of guidance to push me to guiding myself. Perhaps, idk. Sorry if this post was way too long for anyone to read. If you did then I can't thank you enough for hearing out my story. If anyone has any thoughts, advice, or motivating comments, please let me know. Thank you.