Wow- this Cracked.com article really hits home :(

[brianmanahan]

this article hits close to home

 

[squarecut1]

Some very insightful and poignant posts in this thread. Once in a while this forum does provide quality reading

 

[Kyle]

Some very insightful and poignant posts in this thread. Once in a while this forum does provide quality reading

Couldn't agree more...dozens of posts in this thread really hit me and really appreciate the honesty and insight you guys have shared

 

[SirStev0]

cracked.com is once again the best opinion journalism about a major event.

 

[GeekDrew]

This thread hits close to home, unsurprisingly. Gay, fat, live in Ohio (that is to say, a religious and retarded area).

My mind is currently racing with so many thoughts that I don't have any idea how to begin expressing any of them coherently, heh. Apologies for this probable clusterfuck of a post; I'm just going to comment on other posts.

-In reality, I don't actually have any close friends (other than my wife). I get together with people at the office maybe once every 18 months or so.

I don't have any friends who live nearer than 6 hours away (by car). (And no, nobody's moved.)

-If anyone...ANYONE...tries to hug me, my body tenses up like you shoved a bowl full of slugs under my nose.

My stomach immediately starts flipping (or wtfever is going on) when someone hugs me and I don't want to hug them. I have a few friends whose hugs somehow briefly make me feel like everything is going to be OK. I feel like a failure in life if I go to hug one of them and they weren't expecting it, or worse yet, if I actually ask for a hug, because I'm that desperate.

-I can't remember anyone's name. My neighbors know everything about me, but I know nothing about them. This leads to me bumping into them and they'll say "Hey Doug! How's the kids? Your son is starting high school this year, isn't he?" This leaves me to respond with "Hey....buddy! Things are great! How's that....thing you have going on?"

-I have a bit of a hearing problem, so anyplace that has crowds or ambient noise means I have to keep saying "excuse me?". I know this gets annoying, so when I do have conversations I try to lead them so I know what we're talking about (hearing aids don't really work for my condition).

Ditto.

-I have a wide area of expertise, but I never want to share it with anyone because, from experience, I may come off as a know-it-all, or I'll be the subject of someone asking for unending favors.

I realized a long time ago that I value quality of friendship rather than quantity. As a result, I generally give no fucks if people think that I'm a know-it-all. I don't speak up unless I feel comfortable/certain about the subject matter, but those subject matters come up constantly, in certain IRC channels where I'm relatively well-hated.

I agree with you that people telling me to get help or go see a professional just don't get it. I don't want to go and see a professional. I want a fucking friend or just someone to be around that doesn't make me feel like I'm a worthless piece of shit. I certainly don't want to have to pay for that privilege, but I realize how stupid and ironic it is for me to say that as when I am around people I want to be around, I go way above and beyond, like buying drinks/paying for dinner/pay for trips/etc, just so people think that I'm cool enough or whatever to be around.

Telling me to get help makes me angry. I've tried that. Hearing someone enumerate the reasons why all of my opinions and morals are wrong is not something I care to go through yet again. I just need a friend to be there. I don't necessarily want to chat about depression. Or what's troubling me. Or how impossibly stupid my coworkers are. Or my friend's coworkers are. Sometimes I don't want to talk at all. Just having an IM/IRC/whatever chat buffer open, when I know that a person I trust is actually present on the other side of it, who will read whatever I type, provides immense comfort.

I'm generally the wallet when I'm in any social setting with others who I do not despise. I'm not trying to flaunt money (I really don't have that much of it to begin with); I'm just trying to make it ever so slightly less painful to be around me. heh.

I don't do or say the things I do because I want people to pitty me, feel sorry for me, whatever. I just want someone, ANYONE, to accept me for who I am and want to be around me.

This, with the added stipulation that I need them to not want to be around me for purposes of trolling me. I've been tormented (as a kid, many times in high school, innumerable times as an adult) by acquaintances who I thought I was developing a friendship with... only to later find out they had some kind of ulterior motive, generally at my (monetary|emotional|physical) expense.

And to be fair, many of them are under immense pressure from their bosses, owners to dispose off as many patients as they can as quickly as they can. It's all about greed, the bane of our society

That's not "fair". Any doctor who actually does that - and I expect that it's most - needs to be immediately and summarily executed. They're condoning emotional and mental torture by representing themselves as being able to help others, when they either cannot or will not.

Do you have a local youth or church group near you? It seems she needs to learn social skills, and if you could get her exposed to large groups of people while under your supervision, she may eventually be able to grasp the concept.

Unless that's the exact thing she wants to avoid, in which case you'd possibly be intensifying resent or anger. I (mostly) internalized my anger when I was a kid, while it sounds like she is loud about it.

The school systems are just not set up to handle it. Home schooled from the age of 12. Some run ins with the law. Doctors didn't help much, nor did the meds. Wasn't for lack of trying on the professionals part, it just didn't take. In the end patience and persistence by his family helped him the most IMHO.

I feel incredibly sorry for whatever his family forced him to go through, re: "just didn't take". My parents forced me to go to a series of counselors, and then to take drugs to 'enhance my calm'. Those and other factors lead me to resent them with nearly every fiber in my body.