Ok, I do feel a bit weird starting a thread, but this is playing on my mind. I'd like some advice. I feel I'm letting my childhood/upbringing spoil my life. My DH feels this way too. I can't stop thinking about things that happened. They're not so bad, compared to many people, so I feel that I'm just playing the victim of my own life. Some bullet points:
- I was reasonably ok as a child, but I never felt safe or secure, because I wasn't. I was raised by a paranoid pathological liar (my mother), and have a lot of memories of homelessness, sleeping in bus stations / tents / strangers' bedsits. I didn't understand what was going on, but I loved my mother. I also was forced to live with a (physically) abusive uncle when I was 8/9, of whome I was afraid.
- I was brought up thinking my dad had died before I was born. I realised this was a lie during my childhood (because my mother is an inconsitent liar), but was never able to find out the truth until I was in my 20s, after a lot of pleading down the phone. I found out who my father was a month before my 29th birthday. He had died three years before. I found this out through facebook, and was devastated. More so when I learned that he had looked for me when I was a baby, and my whole family (maternal side) knew and had kept it from me.
- My mother's periods of homelessness continued after my childhood. It cost me homes (I would pay for her, she would let me down), and a job. I was sacked from my dream job at 21, and have felt incompetent ever since. I had a breakdown during my Master's at Oxford, when a homeless woman approached me and told me the violence she regularly experienced (my mother was sleeping rough in London at the time, for which I blamed myself. She visited me once, and as I showed her round my college she pointed out the best trees to sleep under).
- In the last two years (during which I found out about and was profoundly bereaved by my father's death) I've been dealing with unexpected but significant infertility. We just had a failed round of IVF. I have many things wrong with me, and the infertility is mine. DH's sperm are awesome.
- My career is screwed. I trained for ten years to be an academic (including four years doing a PhD), but couldn't hack the teaching and pressure and gave up. Everyone I know from that time now has an academic post; I'm a stay-at-home-nothing, and can't even get a job in a shop (I've tried).
This is a massive sob story but I feel so broken and fucked. I feel I'm stopping myself from being successful, failing to live up to my potential, and just dwelling on the past. I've tried psychotherapy and counselling before, and just ended up in fits of tears and found it unhelpful. On good days I feel I have a lot to offer, but I don't know how to get started. My mother still causes me distress, but she can't see it. I have developed a bit of a drinking problem over all this. I have felt jealousy towards my peers, who don't seem to have these problems. I'm jealous of people who can have babies; I'm jealous of people who get academic jobs. I have felt drawn to down-and-outs, with whom I feel I share something. I miss my dad, who I never met. I feel I let down my husband massively, though he would never agree with that. Most of all I just think I'm too late to do anything with my life (I'm 30). If I wasn't infertile we would pay for me to retrain as something that would give me a career and some meaning. But the future of IVF treatment means that we feel we have to keep any future credit card debts for that.
I don't expect anyone to have any answers. I just wanted to vent. I feel so lost. Please excuse typos. Also, feel free to tell me to snap out of it. But please be gentle, if you can.