BooksandTrees

I submitted my application for the apartment today. I really hope it works. I can move in next week if I get approved so it's something to look forward to.

Were you hungry for a type of meal (lunch, dinner, etc.) when you craved sweets or was it more of a sugar craving due to an emotional or environmental situation? If you were hungry, what size meals did you eat beforehand and did you do anything physically or mentally straining that might urge your body to crave sustenance?

I started a nofap diary as well. I think this community is smaller or more close together than that one, but I'll try to get and learn some good information from it.

Lol I always read your posts and think something very important and urgent is being announced and come to full attention to read the post like a dire news bulletin.

I met with my father on father's day and spoke with him for the first time in 8 years. It was a tremendous relief and felt great for me. We both discussed what went wrong in our relationship and reconciled in a positive way. I feel like a burden has been lifted off of my shoulders. Years of hatred can begin to be healed now. He was respectful and understanding. He just listened to me and helped. We spoke for 8 hours or so and it really put a bandage on a wounded part of my heart. Let's hope it can progress and be ok. My mother was very angry about it and got extremely defensive. She kept insulting him in a passive aggressive way. She always seems to deflect anger onto others. If it's not me it is someone else. She didn't say she was happy for me or anything. She just kept making comments like "I'm surprised he didn't fuck you over". "did he try to do this..." etc. It was another frustrating conversation. I left the room to watch TV and came downstairs to just relax on the couch with her. We did not speak and I felt very sad. This is just what I wanted. I wanted us to relax together and not hear any mean words. This made me sad because I know it is just not going to be a reality. I just appreciate that moment. I decided not to buy a house yet. I am not emotionally ready for this. I quit video games but I'm so mentally unstable. I'm relying too much on the opinion of others and that is creating conflict between varying opinions and I've lost my voice and path. The apartment I'm applying for is more expensive than anything I've lived in, but it provides me everything I wanted in a place. It's luxurious, comfortable, has every amenity I need, a private gym, pool, community events, and security. This provides me with the comfort I need to heal while building myself up again.

Are you a hockey fan?

That trip sounded fun. I'm glad you were able to enjoy it. Hopefully it gives you motivation to keep changing some things, not everything, but some things in your life for the better. Where is your native country again?

I'm 34 weeks free of gaming. The weeks are going by and I'm very proud of my ability to not only abstain, but believe in a life where video games are not a necessity to my happiness. As promised, I have big news to share. I was hired again as an engineer. I really missed being an engineer after my time away. People will comment how I gave up on my dream for animation and comedy, but I didn't. I don't think I was ready for such a leap. I had hardly put any effort into developing my skills as a comic or cartoon producer. I also enjoy bridges. I had said I was tired of them, but I think I was burnt out. I actually miss the fact and appreciate how I was able to design our infrastructure. It is cool knowing what goes on behind the scenes and having the inside scoop on what is going to happen around the country years before anyone else knows about it. I also recognized the pride of being an engineer and my great accomplishments in becoming one. Just one look back at my resume/LinkedIn biography just hit me with how accomplished I am. When I look back at the post I wrote before regarding my timeline, I see how much I struggled to get out of my home life and become an engineer. Taking time to be introspective really helped me realize this. My company also treated me very well and I think I got carried away with thoughts regarding my insecurities and self esteem issues. I think having my own space and not sharing with people will help. I place heavy expectations on them and myself and that isn't always the right thing. I need time alone to focus on myself. I also want my own space to work on these new hobbies I've been practicing for the past month. I'm not longer afraid to write a script or create a website. I'm eager to do it now. My issue is there are some nights where I require rest. I wasn't doing that. Having rest is important to recharge. I wasn't allowing myself to watch TV for an hour or read a book because it was unproductive. Calling a friend was a waste of time. It's not. It's just called living life. I appreciate that now and want to work on that more. I was so hooked on being the best student, best employee, best goalie in NHL video games, best and efficient clan leader and RuneScape player, best Overwatch player, most efficient at the gym or yoga, etc. It just made me avoid new hobbies because I needed to be the best at them and it was a tremendous amount of unrealistic pressure and expectations. I started to hate myself and I also let that hate seep into my opinion of others. I'm going to be grateful for my new life. I want to treat work as work, but appreciate what they do for me and not be so entitled. I get entitled when my ego gets large. I have a very large ego that sways my vision and perspective in life. That needs to be destroyed a bit. Ego is good, but too much turns me into Napoleon. I'm putting an offer in on a condo that I really want to own. It's a great property and very affordable for me. If I do not get it I will rent a very upscale apartment because I'm tired of living in these shit apartments that I don't look forward to seeing at all. I need to enjoy life more and part of enjoying life is enjoying your environment. Thanks for reading and helping. Matt

Good job sticking with things and just remember to keep a good sleep schedule, eat regular meals, and stay hydrated. I know that sounds dumb, but maintaining your health promotes a strong mentality and helps you make decisions. Good luck.

Thank you. Big updates tomorrow I think.

I have 17 apartment tours this week as well as 3 job interviews at companies outside of the city and where I have friends working. My mother woke me up at 7:30 after I finally went to bed at 6 AM to start another argument with me. I have never felt so harassed and verbally abused in my life. I am accepting the fact that I need to be an engineer for the next few years while I develop my animation skills, comedy skills, and develop myself in a regular way. I miss being at work honestly. The commute I had was hurting me as well as the bad living situations I've had.

Thank you. I'll see what happens from here. I am taking action from now on.

It is officially over for my relationship with my mother. We agreed to talk tonight about strategies in supporting each other and reconciling our differences to form a habitable environment to heal at home. The conversation lasted 3 hours and was a disaster that I won't spend time divulging. What I will say is that it was the final straw for me. I put so much effort tonight into discussing what I can do better, what has been hurting me, and the reason I don't want to give up on her because I love her and she is so important to me. The night ended with her ignoring everything I said, flipping it, harassing me and manipulating the conversation. Anything I said she'd flip it and repeat it at me as if she was staying a brand new conversation. She then said I only moved home to treat her poorly as an act of revenge against her since I lived with my father for 3 months in 2011. I feel so hurt by all of this. I need to leave. I am heartbroken. I already lost my father because he was so abusive and now my mother just treats me like him and enjoys picking fights with me. I have to accept that both of my parents hurt me and move on. My next step is an apartment and then an engineering job. I will work on my hobbies in my spare time and treat this as the humbling experience I needed to understand patience and self help. I have never met someone as brainwashed and delusional as my mother. I honestly do not know who is worse between her and my dad right now.

Thank you. I appreciate this. I'm trying to keep a note to myself to not reach out to so many people for advice now. I'll talk in the diary, but I have been asking everyone under the sun and that also makes it impossible to clear my mind. I will do my best.

The job is something you'll have to weigh. I'll add some of my thoughts: Don't commute longer than 45 minutes to a job. I did longer than this for 4 years and it made me want to commit suicide. I'm not joking when I say that. I got in a very bad spot mentally. Jobs should be secure. The pressure of someone getting fired will always be in your mind. I was doing well at my old job and someone was fired last year. It still hit me. If I had a few bad days where I wasn't as productive as possible I got very paranoid. I'm not saying you will, but since you are already mentioning it as a red flag, that means you'll think of it on bad days as well. If the CEO is a lunatic that's something that you'd have to experience and weigh out. I have had a great relationship with certain bosses of mine and had people tell me that they were assholes. I got along just fine. I think that's something you'd only be able to decide on after working there. The first few months might be stressful, but after having multiple jobs over 10 years, as well as you, I think you know the first full year is really stressful regardless of how well everything is going due to learning how the company works, who is there, etc. I personally don't like the sound of this, but if it's something you're leaning towards then it could pay off. It's just something you'd have to decide and create a list of pros and cons. This kind of job could have lots of cons with the pros and weighing them vs your current situation is important.

I'm 33 weeks free of gaming and 1 week free of porn. I just got back from a fantastic bachelor party on a long weekend trip. It was something that made me feel like myself again. I was around people who wanted to talk to me and was with all of my friends. We talked, laughed, and just relaxed. I was also supported by them for the things I've been going through and got 3 more job offers. I'm making one last comment about my mother and then it's done. Talking about this has crushed my emotions over the past few months and I'm ready to move on somehow without committing suicide. I don't want to die. I want to live my life. I don't think it is possible to live here with my mother anymore. I am so exhausted. This experiment has been an unbalanced, unrewarding, and miserable experience. I would say we argue 1 to 5 times per week. I wanted to move home to save for a house and fix our relationship because she would never call me when I lived away from her and I always had to call. If I went over a month without calling, and called her, she would say many underhanded comments to make me feel guilty. We would most certainly argue. But she'd never call first. That should have been a hint that she didn't really want to talk to me, but when I tell this to her she constantly would cry and yell at me saying how dare I say she doesn't care about me. So I go from anger and desolation to sadness and guilt. Neither are happy. I have tried so hard to fix things because I already don't speak to my father and I didn't want to lose my mother as well. Whenever we sit down to talk about things she does little things to hurt my feelings. She never drinks alcohol and I've never seen her do it in my 28 years. Now, whenever we talk about something that's bothering me, she reaches for a full bottle of liquor within 10 minutes of the talk and looks painfully burdened by me. It makes me feel so terrible about myself and I know she is doing it on purpose. She will then start scratching at her skin and go and smoke cigarettes. After I finish talking about something bothering me (over the past 6 months) like buying a house, a gym routine, hockey, hobbies, work, etc., she just doesn't offer anything to me and starts complaining about her life. This evolution started with her talking about her life after I talked. She'd then control the conversation, yell about how everyone uses her, makes underhanded comments to me in a passive aggressive way by saying "some people just do...X" and "X" is something she says I do during other arguments. It's very clear. So then I try to give her advice and she screams at me saying she doesn't want my advice. I take note of all of the things she mentions that I do or don't do, and I work on them. I wash the dishes all of the time now; I cook multiple times per week; I cook with unhealthy foods because she yelled at me for cooking vegetables but never asked me to make anything specific; I tried walking with her and taking her to places but she'd always yell at me after because she kept wanting to do more so she could avoid living at home; I help with groceries but she hates using a list and got mad at me (what the fuck?); I talk to her friends and our family as often as possible when they're around; I stopped giving her advice because she doesn't want to hear it (but is following all of it now and then saying it was her idea to do it - this is another mind game); I try not talking about my problems anymore because it is a burden to her; and finally I also told her back in January (1 month into the experiment) that I could stream hockey from my room and let her watch TV on the 2-3 nights per week that hockey games were on because she needed to de-stress. Just let me know and I can let her use the $800 TV I bought her for Christmas. She never has. I now just don't know how to talk to her and I don't really want to do it anyways. I am an emotional person. If I don't like you I can't even begin to talk to you. I have been hurt too many times to try and try again. It is hard to explain because some people see the fact that I'm living rent free as a chance to work on my hobbies. But it's not that easy. If I limit my conversation with her and just work on my things, I am productive for 3 days until she unloads on me and starts saying I ignore her and I'm a terrible person to live with and because I'm not talking to her as much I'm just making her depressed. She then starts crying and making comments such as "every person I live with - all of my boyfriends, family, ex husband, and you - always end up not wanting to talk to me and hiding in their rooms. It must be something I'm doing! But I am just being used like a doormat!". She verbally abuses people and makes them feel bad. Then they run away from her and ignore her. She then smokes a cigarette and forgets the argument, calms down, and tries to tell them a joke and make the situation better. That worked on everyone in her life except my dad and me. My dad would hold it against her and they'd argue. But he'd also just go from angry to happy. It made no sense to me. I would try so hard to break down the situation I was in and study what was going on if my parents went from happy to sad to happy again. It was painfully quick and when I logically broke down the interactions leading up to, during, and after the altercations, I realized very few of the arguments were logical at all. So I then studied their histories starting from childhood to the date of the incident. I did this over the course of 15 years. I learned that the two of them don't deal with stress well at all. Both of them hold things against everyone and are too stubborn to apologize. Growing up with two people who don't apologize means I had to apologize for everything, even for things that don't require apologizing. I found this out because I was working one day and apologized for several dumb things that had nothing to do with me. I got asked why I did that. I said I don't know, but took it to heart because I thought it was odd as well. I found that I was blamed for a lot of things. I currently get blamed for my mom's cholesterol going up even though I eat 3-5 meals per day consisting of balanced proteins, carbs, and fats and track my diet on MyFitnessPal. She sits and eats whole cases of Oreos and M&Ms and keeps buying fattening foods. It is difficult not to eat these because I had lost 50 pounds after moving out of the house. I have gained 17 pounds since living here even though I'm tracking my diet. I record my failures and the failures are happening often because the food is just in front of me at all times. I also wanted to make a point to say that if I talk about certain people or environments impacting my mentality and actions, it is not because I'm blaming them and can't handle responsibility. I am more responsible than most of the people I know and interact with, including this website. I have two degrees in some of the hardest fields in science with a 4.0 GPA, multiple friends who include me in their lives and reach out to me, I have quit video games longer than most people I know and have been improving many areas of my life, I donate time every week to students and teach them math and science as well as team building techniques, I was working 40-60 hours a week in a demanding field and now work 40-50 hours a week on my passion projects that I'm trying to develop into a career, I pay my bills, work hard, and acknowledge when things are bad. If I complain about people it's either one of two things: a reaction where I can't handle something that's bothering me so I post it in here and then most likely delete it because it's personal like this post, or I am studying something that I'm working on regarding personal development. I am trying to figure out something such as a why I am afraid to open up to people and let them into my heart. So a smart thing to do is research what all of those emotions are and whether I've experienced them. I've experienced a lot of ignorance and neglect in my life. Not neglect in the sense many people like my mother would think is neglect such as a dog starving on the side of a road without an owner, but rather key emotional developments in life and spending quality time with depth interactions. I don't need to write multiple reasons for my cases of neglect or issues because they are private to me and I fear that one day my family will read these posts and just misunderstand things because they never seem to understand things. But just trust me that I'm not being some ignorant idiot who is "lazy" and can't control my feelings. I find this very ignorant if anyone believes I participate in this behavior. I have battled so hard to battle through depression and achieve goals that most people who say these things couldn't do in multiple lifetimes. For that I am proud of myself. I complain on here because I am so desperate for help that I can't explain it. Environments change moods and so do the people you spend the most time with. I'm tired of people like my mother and other friends saying "you just need to drop things" because that's unfair. People put these "things" on my plate to drop them. They leave them on me and run away. Then I try to create something with them and turn bad things into a positive. When I bring the topic back up again that person who "dropped the burden to move on" gets very angry and can't handle dealing with it and starts doing bad coping mechanisms. This is not targeted at any specific person, but multiple people in my life constantly bring this up whether it's my mom, my dad, my family, or people on here. The reason I am asking so many people for advice is because I feel so exhausted and lost and I'm getting paralyzed by decisions in my life. I already moved home from a bad living situation, I then tried saving for a house and tried to buy it before I was ready because living with my mom was really making me depressed. I had a 3 hour commute and that wouldn't let me de-stress. I had to get more stressed out by getting cut off or being stuck in traffic. I then come home to just garbage comments over everything and have it turned back on me. I then quit my job to alleviate things and now I'm just lost. Looking back on this I've found that I need to do things to pull my mind out of the bad situation. If I fixate on things then they become worse and I can't escape negative thinking. This leads me to staying up all night with chapters of anger being unraveled in my mind. Insomnia through anger. I could have just bought an apartment for a year, but multiple people keep giving feedback about buying etc. I think parts of what @fawn_xoxo and @Mouxine and @Vera have said have clicked with things my close friends in real life have said. But do they align with what I need? I've been thinking about this. Everyone has been helpful in different ways and I appreciate that. I quit my job for a reason regardless of my situation. I didn't like the upper management there. Most of the young engineers there quit to find better companies who treat them better. They have a low retention rate after 3 years for many employees. In the past 10 years my department has acquired and lost so many people that there are only 2 people working there longer than 5 years. When I liked an engineering project I actually dove right into it. The only reason I thought of my cartoon career was that I was unhappy with both of the jobs I've held so far. At the first company I worked at we had 15 people in our department. Only 2 are left today. 13 quit in 9 months after I left. Similar things are happening. Engineering is a fun field sometimes, but it burns you out and you need a strong structure in place to keep going. I get so fixated to the idea of owning a home because my family never owned a home. I am a home body. I don't like long vacations, I don't like camping, and I don't like getting drunk at parties. My ideas of fun are spending quality time with people doing fun activities or just relaxing and talking about nothing. I want to work on hobbies and create things rather than watch TV or bar hop. A home is like a vessel for me to do that, but it's painfully expensive. It's the most difficult time in the history of the United States to buy a home right now and it's difficult. Many families in the 1950s or 1980s could go to college, get married, buy a home, and have kids before the age of 30. That's been pushed back by almost 10 years now on a national scale. Rent is super expensive and most places to rent are terrible with bad maintenance. But I think it might be worth renting something slightly higher than my initial budget so i can live comfortably. I was trying to spend only $12,000 on rent per year when I was making $70,000 per year to save money for a home. If I changed that to $15,000 per year I'd be in a much better environment at the cost of a biweekly pay check. That's it. $3,000. I can afford that easily. If I do that for a few years and gain my independence back then I'll be in a spot where I'm comfortable, independent, and able to work on my hobbies. I'm just comparing my life now to when I was working and I was much happier working than I am now. Although I complained about my job and everything, I found that home has been difficult. My life has gotten more difficult each month and I can't take it anymore. Regarding my hobbies: I've found that no matter what part of life I'm in and what hobby I'm doing I still get anxiety or frustration before starting it. That's what pushed me to video games and porn for so long. I found that if I just dive right into it and mess up for a bit and fix it, etc., that I'm way happier and find that I benefited from the experience. This builds confidence and helps me keep working on things. My artist didn't quit his job and still draws me tons of concept art. I think I just have been so depressed over a few things at work and home that everything kind of hit at once and I wanted to quit everything. So I left work, left home, and just got to think. I know it's bad that I'm wanting to go back to a career right now, but I'm not able to work on all of my ideas at home because of my environment. I can't just drop issues that are stressing me out at home because they get repeated and I need to communicate them if I want to save this relationship with my mom. This hasn't worked, but I still just can't drop everything. That isn't called "thick skin" it's called being a push over. I was bullied in school, bullied at home, and told to just drop things. I believe if someone does something wrong to you they explain what went wrong and you both work things out. If you can't work things out then one or both parties are not mature or intelligent enough to do it. Just dropping things is how my mother and father became pushovers and ignorant. I can't do that. Thanks for reading, Matt

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It's difficult to sleep tonight. My mom bothered me again making little statements to try and piss me off. Just statements where she tried to act intimidating and at the end ask when I planned on fixing our relationship. She's insane and I can't take it. She belittles me and tries to hurt my feelings, then apologize, then argue, then won't listen, then believes everyone is attacking her. She starts saying how she hates when I give her advice because she wants to rant and not hear anything from me. So I tell her my opinion and she yells. I haven't given her my opinion in 4 months now but she's telling me how much progress she made in the past 3 days since we haven't talked. It's all stuff I suggested to her and she's claiming she did it on her own. She then tries giving me a hug and saying I hold on to anger too much. She is going through too many emotional stages for me to handle. I can't emotionally handle going from angry defensive to calmly open and warm. I also can't forgive her because she never listens. She's suffocating to be around and then cries to make me feel guilty. She laughs at my depression because hers is worse and she tries the tough guy approach on me. If you try the tough guy approach on me I'm going to get angry at you. Just do a fucking calm approach where you clearly state your opinion and how you came to that conclusion. I'm disappointed really. I don't have a clear place to think. I don't have a calm environment. I'm just here and hate it every 3 to 5 days because of something stupid she's doing. I can't even write my cartoon. I know ruminating in negative thoughts is bad. I have questioned why I do it and it's because i hate my environment. I didn't like my old roommates or the apartment I had befor living with them. I hated the dorms and hated my home. I hated my dad's home. I want a nice place for myself and it's so expensive. I quit my job because I was bored there, but it was worse at home because being at home made me want to give up on life. I'm miserable here. I'm so embarrassed to ask my job for my job back. But I miss my coworkers. I saw them on Wednesday and I felt good. But I felt like an outcast. They took a company photo without me in it. People were just focused on climbing and I learned which ones wanted to talk to me and which didn't. I also learned none of them care about my problems. I just feel like I need a lot of help solving my problems because I'm so desperate. After thinking about my list above it's clear that i hated being home and hated my last job. I felt like they didn't appreciate me much. But I think I constantly seek self validation. I want to impress my bosses due to a deep seeded pain of never impressing my dad or coach. My self esteem is low. I'm having trouble working on that here at home because my emotions keep going from good to bad to worse to bad to worse to bad to good. I thought I was going to get fired but I was doing a good job. It's annoying. I just wanted attention because my mom was making me feel sad and I left work as this petty way of getting them to show affection for me. Like when someone asks what's wrong and you say nothing but want them to keep asking. What I'm going to do is go on a vacation alone. I need time away from everything to think. I'll still journal. But I need to be away from home. After that I believe I'll start interviewing again and ask to go back to my old job. I'll see if I can change my mindset. I either need to not seek self validation or find an office culture that rewards people the right way and don't fuck you over. I miss my independence and want to live alone but I'm not ready to buy a home yet. I want to experience a cool bachelor pad. Not for sleeping around but just to have my own space again. I really took it for granted. I want to love my mom again but she's so irrational that I'm completely out of it right now. I'll work on my hobbies outside of work and just practice discipline but also lower my expectations for success. I push too little and dream too big. It's a bad combination. It's an hour later and I can't stop thinking about how much I hate my mom right now. I haven't been this angry in a decade. I'm irate. I've been awake over 24 hours out of pure hatred. I don't know what to say anymore.

I wanted to discuss 3 points with you. I numbered them above and highlighted things that stuck out to me, similar to how Mouxine talked to me. I liked that. 1. I was wondering if you feel regret about the way you acted with people in your past community. Do you wish you could communicate with them and apologize, but also wish they would apologize to you for their participation in the arguments and fallouts? I know I won't apologize to my dad because I don't expect him to apologize to me. But I think for my own health it is better if I apologize to get it off my conscience. That might be the right way to forgive yourself. It might be a hostile environment, but sometimes apologizing and moving on could be the path to forgiveness and letting go of pride. 2. Why haven't you accepted you were addicted to games or that prior environment? Why must you feel guilt and shame if you're not admitting you had an addiction. I also highlighted something. Are you looking for a certain feeling in your heart to click and resonate with you to which you say "You know, I have felt enough shame and guilt and understand that I was addicted and can move forward."? I am not trying to be mean by that statement. I am just wondering if you're burying yourself with guilt and shame to make yourself feel terrible enough to break and understand you were addicted to a degree. I think you're too strong to be broken and that's a good and bad thing. I don't think you'll allow yourself to be broken because you know it's not worth it. You know you can live the life you want and be the best you can be and that breaking will hold yourself back. I am wondering if you'd benefit by quickly stating you were addicted, but aren't anymore and can move on with your life. The label of an addict is not as bad as it seems. Not all game addicts need to avoid games forever. Sometimes you find other things that fit your life better and your passions change. Then you can game sometimes and be in that environment again. I relapsed while gaming in moderation because my career sucked and I had no hobbies. Now that I have hobbies and left my career, etc, I don't game anymore. (I do watch porn, but that's more relationship/self-esteem/connection issues). 3. You're not a fucking loser. Correct. You've taken steps away from the drawing you did before and are now doing professional and social development. That takes a shit load of effort and is hard to do all of the time. It's exhausting. I was amazing at runescape. But I remember the first 4 months I played I had to look at the keyboard to type and get killed every time. Now I can type my thoughts without looking at the screen, turn to someone else, and talk to them with an entirely different conversation. I'm not only bragging because I'm also not a fucking loser, but I am making the point that your journey through game quitting hasn't lasted a year yet and you have so much to prove and do for yourself. The more control you gain in your life the better it is for you. I think as long as you're not derailing your future by getting depressed, playing for hours, getting offline with regret and shame, then crying yourself to sleep, then you're fine. I was doing that when I played in moderation and had to quit. I knew it was not for me because my life was not right for me yet. This is different for everyone. I hope this helps.

I'm posting my schedule below. I'm trying to be able to focus on my emotions and where I want to go in life, but being at home is making it difficult. I try to reason with my mom and explain my issues, but she just acts so asinine and it's good for 1 week and bad for 1 week. It's making it difficult because if my environment is bad then my production is bad. First I want to recap the past few years of my life to better understand myself so I stop moving backwards. I think moving home was a step backwards. I wanted to post it here to help clear my thoughts up and show other people a timeline since they've been so kind in helping me over the past few months. I currently want to move out of my home because I just see that my mom and I argue too much and it is going nowhere. I also don't like my career so far. Recap of events to clear my thoughts, understand negative thoughts, and help plan my future: 2008 My dad moves out. 2009 I get involved in a fake relationship on Runescape. 2010 I fail out of college. 2011 I stop talking to my dad after he is an asshole to me and my mom. 2012 I struggle to stay in college and am battling hard to even find a reason to stay in engineering school. 2013 I finally move out of my mom's house into an apartment. I can't take the dorms anymore and I hate living at home. June 1st 2014 I get my first internship as a civil engineer. I did not like any of the transportation, traffic, civil, or survey work. I only liked structural. December 2014 I intern with them again as a structural engineer intern. It went well, but I hated the commute into the city because it was so taxing on my mental wellbeing June 1st 2015 I start full time as an engineer at the same company. I was given a decent work load. Company was decent. I am living alone in my apartment. September 2015 I enroll in the Master's Degree program for structural engineering at the advice of my boss. February 2016 I start to hate my commute but also hate where I lived. A chinese family moved above my apartment and their children could not adjust to the timezone difference. They spent 3 months running around and I hated the sound of someone above me. May 2016 I got a beautiful apartment on a lake with 2 friends. My commute got worse because of it December 2016 two of my coworkers commit suicide, I get scared because I was depressed and hated my job. I call a therapist February 2017 I start thinking of my cartoon Idea June 2017 I reach a point of frustration where my company had nothing to work on. I wasn't working towards anything. I was just looking for projects to spend my time on so I could charge my 40 hours without charging to overhead July 2017 I get a job 10 minutes from my house at a better firm, but for less pay. August 2017 two of my bosses fuck me over on two different projects. I want to quit. April 2018 I defend myself to multiple bosses and gain support from my entire company. I instantly get placed on the largest projects with the best middle managers and work is more enjoyable. May 2018 I get burned out from the argument with my bosses and the stress of the past few months. I also finish a very difficult masters degree with a 4.0 GPA. I get told my company doesn't care about my master's degree and won't give me a raise. July 2018 the project I'm working on is so stressful that there's a submission to the state every week and I have to work on weekends and until midnight some nights to get it done. I would be the only person in the office doing this. I sacrificed my summer doing this and not doing anything fun. I also made my first GameQuitters post. September 2018 I can't find new hobbies and the workload from work is killing me. I make my first relapse with gaming after not gaming from April 2018 to September 2018. I try to play in moderation, but quickly just play 18 hours per day and get sick because I don't want to go to work again and I love the escapism. October 2018 I breakdown and quit gaming fully. My roommate situation dwindles because one of them is moving out. He hated his job and just played video games all day. He could not afford to live with me anymore and had to move out. It was not a friendly environment in the apartment from June until October because of this. I was very frustrated about my job, he was frustrated about his job, and we were both frustrated with our lives outside of work. We both had different forms of depression and anger issues. Our 3rd roommate was neutral, but understanding to the degree required of him. For the most part, he just played games and kept to himself. I think I leaned on him a lot for advice and he had his own issues and didn't want to help others when he didn't have the strength to help himself either. November 2018 my roommate moves out. I make the decision to move home with my mom to save for a house. December 2018 I move home. I am very burnt out from work. That huge project is finally submitted. One of my other bosses (different from the other two who tried to submarine me) chooses to target me in his anger. I get reprimanded for talking, but complimented for my ability to get projects done incredibly under budget. It makes me angry because my boss was just picking on me when he had a bad day and then forgot about it. I didn't forget about it. I wanted to quit after getting yelled at FOR HELPING THE MARKETING TEAM SET UP A POPCORN MACHINE. January 2019-March 2019 I get into periodic arguments with my mother which are very explosive and emotional. April 2019 I go on a vacation with a girl I thought I liked. It turns into a disaster. I get angry that I wasted 5 vacation days. I start to hate work more and more. The commute is killing me. I find a few apartments to rent because I can't live at home anymore. My mom and I can't stop arguing. She is trying to pick fights with me and won't communicate. I have a feeling it is to get her old roommate back in with her because she thinks he is going to be homeless. May 2019 We reach an understanding about my displeasure with my company and wanting to leave. I only like my immediate coworkers, the work is boring and not rewarding and I am not understood by my upper management. I also write my first cartoon script. Today I am home. I'm making progress on my cartoon and projects. But Not this week because I keep getting into massive fights with my mom. She's getting more stressed out with her job, her old roommate potentially being homeless, and a surgery she has. She can't handle talking to me about my problems, but wants to help. When she tries to help she either backs out of the conversation entirely or switches after what I say to start talking about her issues. I get angry that she's not helping me so I stop talking. She then starts crying often.

That makes sense to me. I don't think I could handle that right now with my volatility but I'll support you with that journey.

Thank you. I think I just have these bad days where my mind explodes on me. I start to hate myself more than words can imagine. Then I look to turn that hate outward on other people. I'm not a good person I don't think. I just don't really understand how to stick with the process. I have a schedule for how my week is planned and individual schedules for my projects. I just keep hearing that I haven't scheduled fun into my schedule and I get very angry at my mom for saying that. I get very angry when I'm not working on my goals and it takes so much effort sometimes to start. I keep questioning myself instead of trusting myself and others. I keep hiding these issues inside of porn. I think I watched it 6 times last night. I spent all of today angry and then went rock climbing, had fun with friends, and called my mom on the way home. She bothered me minorly and then I ignored her the rest of the night and then yelled at her for never talking to me. I made her cry for 2 hours after I left the room. I've never felt so low in my life. I can't handle what I'm becoming. I don't think I'm really blaming her but more desperately seeking her help because I feel so lost. I'll try to remind myself of my purpose for quitting work, games and porn. I'll also remind myself that I don't hate my mom and don't want to carry hate anymore. I'm drowning in it and it's pure evil. Anyhow, thanks for the words and thoughts.

I wanted to ask people what they live for, but I think it's not a destiny sort of thing. I think at the end of the day I want to be independent. I really can't take being at home anymore. I might just go back to engineering so I can have my own freedoms again.

Thank you. I do have a therapist. I just keep breaking down and am very insecure. I have to keep discussing this stuff with people because I can't hold on to it and I just keep reverting. I don't understand it. I didn't like my job because I felt like I had no motivation to do it. The paycheck was it. There was no reason for me to write a report during my waking hours so I could be tired at night. It got worse when I moved home because the commute was now 3 hours and my mom would argue with me for the other waking 2 hours. My mom does love me and I do love her. It's just she has so many problems that she is trying to get me to solve them without asking. She tries to listen to my issues, but does not offer any solution. She thinks that if I just get them off of my chest it's over and she can get her issues off. That's not how that works. If I open up to you and talk then I want my problem solved. Once my problem is solved I will solve your problem with you and together we can reach a solution. I was going to explain my whole story here, but it's not worth it. I don't think it is smart for me to be here. I'm upset because I wanted to own that house and be on my own. I should have bought it and just kept working there. I am so upset about this. But I just felt like I had no purpose in life doing this job. It was such high pressure to get something finished and then I'd never see it again. It was driving me insane how emotionally taxing this job was and that it meant nothing. I didn't even want to get promoted because of how angry and stressed my bosses were. They're all overweight, distant, very stressed, and operating at a "simmering" level. Where they could explode easily. I'm starting to not care about others because I know they won't care about me. I haven't met a single person who has proven they care about me outside of my mom. That relationship is gone after tonight as well since we just got into a massive argument. It's just not right. I just want someone to love me and understand. I'm so upset because I wanted that house so badly. I just feel like Tyler Durden in Fight Club. I keep trying to talk to more and more people and I just can't find a single person who will be there. And unfortunately I have so many issues to talk about that I drive people away because they don't want to hear it anyways. I feel like I'm becoming emotionless. I can't tell if I'm turning into a sociopath or a narcissist. I am developing traits of both. I just feel so lost. What's the point of working when I don't believe in the cause I'm working towards? It's unrewarding being an engineer and I'm not motivated past the paycheck. What's the point of making money if I buy a house to feel alone inside? Then return to work, trapped because I hate it and trapped in a mortgage? I'm trying to understand the reason for everything. Why was I neglected at times by multiple family members? The only reason I know I'm not a sociopath or narcissist is because when I see others hurting I feel like I've been stabbed and start to feel terrible. I want to help them so they never feel the pain or loneliness I felt. I was happy enough going to work and having my apartment. I just felt ignored by my last roommate. I expect people to talk to me and help me and be invested in my emotions. Nobody is. Everyone hates hearing my problems and always wants to talk to me about theirs. Life is such a let down. This forum has been nice because people listen, but I just don't know. I got my degree in college for what feels like nothing. I put all my hope into this career to make my life better and I'm just as lonely. My roommates just wanted to play video games and just share memes with me and that's it. MEMES ARE NOT FUNNY OR A CONVERSATION PIECE. I got angry and tried leaving that place and I moved home to save for a house. I saved for a house then let it go away and then got so depressed that I just quit my job because I couldn't take the job or the commute anymore. Now I am home with a volatile relationship to my mother because she has a lot of issues to work on and spends all of her spare time helping others and herself. She doesn't help with my emotional problems because it's too much and she has her own. But it is easier to help other people than it is to help me, so that happens. Then I get bitter about it. I just don't care anymore or understand life. I appreciate your long post and I will re-read it tomorrow when my mind is clear. I am so depressed today.

That's great to hear about the girlfriend. I hope it continues to go well. This will also help finances I think if you share an apartment. You can get something better for technically cheaper due to the split of costs.