How I have been scarred

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I have no degree.

I have never had a job.

I am a 33 year old male, privileged, upper-class parents.

My parents have the most f****d up relationship I ever heard about. They mentally torture each other, trying to make the other as miserable as possible, and cling to the other in a deadly embrace. They both gave up on their own lives and happiness. My mother is completely dysfunctional and dependent, anorexic, depressed, alcoholic, can barely walk, completely passive and joyless, chain-smoker, sleeps 14 hours a day, literally does nothing all day.

I lost 9 years of my life, complete living in social isolation, the only human interaction those with my toxic parents.

I have one 'friend' who I last saw in person about 10 years ago, didn't speak to for 7 years until a few months ago.

I never had any other meaningful friendships.

I think I was normal until age 8 or so. Then I was bullied and as far as I can remember, I did poor to terrible at school.

At age 19, I fell in love for the first time. I didn't know I could fall in love, back then. It was absolutely insanely intense. Let's call this girl Laura. I dreamed about her every night for about a year. Completely innocent cute normal dreams. I thought about her every day until at least 2 years after last seeing her. Falling in love with her, I realized I may have Asperger's.
She was very nice to me, but also strung me along. It is a complex story. I tried to be friends. I actually rejected her, in a way, despite, or because of, my absurd intense emotions for her.

After her rejection, social isolation started.

I tried to flush away pain with addictions/obsessions/special interests. I became so numb. I lived 25 hour days. Every day my day-night cycle would skip by one hour. And that for years. I just sat at my computer, trying to find new obsessions to give some internal meaning to myself. I created fantasy worlds to live in, ignoring the real world. I wasn't suicidal, but I knew that when I got older, my father would have passed away, I imaged at some point I would have no more desire to live, and then I would end it, without anyone ever realizing I was dead.

After not speaking to her for 5 years, I got a card from her informing me of the birth of her first child.
That threw me into actual depression. I was happy for her, but it made me realize my life was actually real and that this life is the only one I had.

I tried to change my life around. I started studying, acing all exams, somehow, moving up the academic ladder. First, with high school dropouts. Then with college students. Then finally, I was able to enter a top30 university. That had been my dream for years. I was 31 now, studying with 18 and 19 year old's. Most of them super-talented or naturally easy going high achievers.

I didn't really socialize or engage in student life, but I finally moved out with my parents. At least during week days. And I got good grades and enjoyed myself.

I slowly fell in love with a fellow student. Let's call her Rachel. I do not know how to describe her. She has a completely natural personality, completely spontaneous. But, flawless. Everything she does is flawless, thought out, refined, pleasant, nice, but still completely spontaneous. She is absolutely genius. Her IQ must be near 160. She passes the most difficult exams without even attending lectures or doing problems. And unlike most of my fellow students that ace all exams, she seems very social and more interested in living a rich student life and leaning a lot and pleasing the teachers or impressing fellow students. She has a special ability to make other students feel smart and confident. She also is completely neat and refined. I swear, she must never have seen her parents yell at each other; a completely non-toxic person when it comes to relationships. She has some of the nicest handwriting I have ever seen.

The first time I really met her was when we and one other person had a lab practical together. The three of us had perfect teamwork, after a few weeks we didn't even need words to communicate, we got the highest grade and presented our results to our 400 fellow students.

She was also one of the few if not the only person to realize how to socialize with me. She was able to get me out of my shell. Many fellow students just don't consider me as a person to chat with, as I am 13 years older. She knew I was older, but had guessed me 10 years younger. All she saw was a smart and nice fellow student, I guess. She started to randomly talk to me after class about quantum mechanics.

I try to hide who I truly am as hard as possible. I want them to think I was successful in IT, quit to go back to study. They must think I am aloof rather than a loser with no friends. So I keep to myself, mostly. She didn't care. She walked right through the wall I put around me, when it pleased her.

I wanted to join a certain international competition between universities. That's how I wanted to boost my academic record and somehow compensate for my age.
I realized I wanted Rachel on my team as well. That was my fantasy. Us talking science together and winning a competition. I wanted to talk to her about it, see if she was actually interested, but she started skipping lectures during that time, probably having a good time.

I fell in love with her, 13 years after my first falling in love helped trigger my 10 year social isolation. I began questioning every tiny element of my personality. Had I really changed my life around? All I did was study. I had no friends and had no desire for friends. I concluded I had schizoid personality and that years of isolation and terrible parents had destroyed my personality for good. It shocked my at my foundations. I had a complete meltdown, I guess. I cried for days. Instead of going to the meeting to sign up for the competition, I went to my parents and cried, walking through the forest, like I had done during my 10 years of isolation.

I recovered somehow, and decided to figure out how to change myself. I fell in love. It would last maybe 2-3 years. Then it would be over. But eventually, it would happen for a third time. Maybe in another 10 years. And then I had to be ready. Ready to actually engage in romance, ready to give the female the romantic experience they crave. I decided to force myself to be more social. I got very little out of it, it anything.
I decided I had to focus on other things, not on the science competition, and I did not join.

Weeks later I learned Rachel did join. Out of the thousands of students at the university, she did join this thing I wanted to join. The science project I obsessed about how me and Rachel would both work together in. It was the biggest kick in the nuts ever to learn this. A freakish play of fate. I couldn't sleep for days. I wasn't sad. It was just a bizarre cruel coincidence.

Things became 'worse'. Rachel had been nice to me at some occasions, and we had shared some words. Yes, I did put myself near her a couple of times, but she not only engaged conversation with me, while I still acted aloof. She actually started flirting with me. I was already in love with her, but I am completely fragile to that. I have never felt a woman's warmth.

For about 9 days or so, I felt like a normal person. Not an autistic freak. Not a troubled person. I felt I had masculine energy. For 9 days. Until I asked her out and she said 'no'. There are more cruel coincidences between her and the first woman I fell in love with, but this is already long enough.

Of course she stopped flirting after I asked her out. We did talk a few times. But I guess she did it to not make me feel awkward.

After we had our final course together, I managed to get a research project at the same lab as her. We spend the summer together. She working on her team project, I did my own thing. I guess there were awkward and nice moments. she slowly got colder and colder towards me, while her team-members became more and more friendly with me. That was very odd. In the end, I was almost a team-member as her team-members invited me to some of their social events.

She kept on working for a few more months on the science project after I left. They almost won first place, beating 300 other universities. I realized I ought to have been on that team. I realized we would have won if I had been. I realized I became very close to getting the most amazing girlfriend I could ever imagine and winning a major science competition.

It was hard to move on from that. Even more than before, it felt as though my romantic interest had the ability to cure me, to make me normal. Like she had a piece of me that I had lived without all my life, but a piece that I desperately needed to feel complete. But more than before, I realized how scary my obsessive thoughts were. It was not normal. I guess me being much older than her made it that much more creepy. Before, the girl had been years older than me. But I was also so happy to realize I could actually like other people and that I wasn't a true schizoid. And that a girl would go out of her way, despite age gap, despite my maybe not so stunning looks, despite my obvious Sheldon-like awkwardness, to flirt with me.

And still, it was a complete mindf**k.

Now, I am doing the same competition that she did last year. I desperately want to win. I need some outlet for my frustrations. But she had amazing team members. I got along with all of them great. My current team members, most of them are friends already. Somehow, their group of friends hijacked the whole process, which chased out some other people. And their personalities are a bit different from me and from those of Rachel's team. Rachel's team-members made me fit in, somehow. I need a very good team to win. Some of them seem lazy. Some of them seem weak on the science. We don't have very good ideas yet. We are moving forward with one of my worst ideas. Everyone proposed ideas. My team-members ignored my good ideas. Then we worked out one of my weaker ideas, and everyone voted to move forward with that one, as well as one other idea. I do not have a lot of faith in this so far. After somehow being able to accept I wasn't in Rachel's team, I am reminded more and more that I am in the wrong team. I should have been in last year's one.

Somehow, my life turned own the wrong path again. I am in the wrong universe. There is a universe where I did join together with Rachel. In that world Donald Trump isn't president. This universe, it is f****d up. It is stacked against me, to get maximum torture out of me.


Slowly, I became friendly with one girl. Let's call he Norah. She is also a fellow student, same year. She on some occasions also made me feel appreciated. I don't feel loneliness, so if I feel I am a burden to people, I retreat myself, still. I am reserved and keep people at a distance. I am polite, engage in some small talk. But at the first opportunity, I make sure it stays shallow, I guess. Norah, me and some other guy, we had many practicals together and would each lunch the three of us.


Because I felt rejected by Rachel, once shared courses stopped, I invited Norah and the guy to arrange a lunch together, as we wouldn't end up having lunch together anymore. I also had an actual deep meaningful conversation with Norah, which I never managed with Rachel.
He said 'no' for some reason, so she proposed lunching just the two of us. We had lunch several times. Yes, she is one of the few people I actually feel some affection for. But while she is attractive, somehow, it feels completely platonic. I feel guilty for inviting her to boost my ego. I want to tell her about Rachel. I want to tell her that I asked out a fellow student, and I want her to guess who she things it was. I want to know how surprised others would be. Norah never flirted with me, never did anything Rachel did. After having lunch 2 times in the university canteen, she proposed lunch in a fancy lunchroom. I don't know how close to a date she thought that was. I don't think it was a date. But she did pay for both of us, paying 30 dollar. And she knows I have money (my father gives me tons of money because he feels guilty) and she things I worked a well-paying job for 10 years.

I tell all my fellow students I graduated and had a respectable job, to avoid having to talk about mental illness. All my life I tried to stick out. But now I lie to fit in. I hate it. I lied to Norah and indirectly to Rachel (for some reason she never asked, but she was there secretly listening when someone else asked, and I lied to them).

Norah and I talked about the other guy. She told me she knew the other guy had autism. He seems like a ADHD person to me. He talks to everyone, chats up random people. She said she realized immediately and seemed mildly surprised that I hadn't noticed as well. She said he had problems processing and recognizing emotions. I guess that made me feel a bit worried. Is Norah only hanging out with me because she also things I have autism? I mean, she told me she knew instantly about the other guy. I worried about having it for years. I even went to a psychologist because of the Rachel meltdown, and her guess was 'gifted' and 'autism' and suggested I could get tested.

All these girls in my life, are they only nice to me because they feel sorry for me. Norah, Rachel, and even Laura. I talked about my lack of romance, sexual experience, feelings and Aspergers with Laura. I felt naked to Laura. She was so social.

I tried to email Laura about a year ago, just after getting rejected by Rachel. I feel I can now face her with some price. I feel if I tell her how I ended up she won't feel guilty. But she never replied. I messaged her on Facebook, and she kept quiet. A while ago I send a friend invite, and she accepted. But I haven't talked to her yet. I want to know if she realized how strong my feelings were. I want to know how close to romance I was. I want to know what she remembers and thinks. I want to know she wasn't just being nice to me because she felt sorry for me.

I still have no friends, no romantic interactions, no social life. I still go to my toxic parents when I have no obligations at university. I still feel confused about who I am, how others see me, what people like and dislike about me. And most of all, what I actually want from others.

I feel that if I actually go on a date, kiss or hug a girl, or have sex, I will only be doing so out of desperation, to finally get some experience. I will feel I will be using her. All I want is Rachel. Everything else is completely shallow.



I guess I feel so damaged, when no one has actually been mean to me. People go to through s**t. People haven no opportunities. I was bullied a tiny bit, ignored some more, and yes my parents. But otherwise, I have been completely privileged, getting infinite changes to salvage my life, at least academically. But still, it seems to be very rare for someone not to talk to anyone besides their parents for years. Everyone I have ever told that, recruiters at school and my psychologist, have been very shocked by it. To me, it was normal and I was content with it. But it seemed to alienate myself from the life I actually wanted, and which might not be completely impossible, had I not alienated myself from it.

Yes, I will have a degree soon. I will be able to get a PhD. I know that now. I will probably be able to get a few jobs. But how will that actually make me happy. I am 33 right now. All I want is to be a 21 year old student and stay that way forever.

One thing to know about relationships has to do with recently discovered Nerve Zero. It exits the skull along with Nerve One to the nose, but is actually separate, and probably older. Its job is to analyze scents to check if a potential mate smells like the mother. The less resemblance, the stronger the basic sexual attraction. This is, of course, a great way to avoid inbreeding. It also makes a major lottery out of trying to pair off. Whoever has the lesser basic attraction has the power in the relationship. We can be paying attention to shared interests, dating activity and all kinds of other factors, and miss the absolute limits imposed by that little nerve.

How about a TLDR cliff notes version of the first post?