All I want is help, I'm so tired.
I was diagnosed with PTSD with BPD traits at the age of 27, I left work due to mental health issues at 25. I learned a large variety of my personality traits and way of being coincide with these disorders.
Since leaving work I have been in freefall. I thought I had employment insurance to fall back on but one bureaucratic disaster after the next I've fallen through the cracks.
I feel constantly like I have to prove I'm mentally ill. I've had people on reddit tell me other people would beat my ass for saying I had ptsd, and a few people have gone out of their way to PM me what a piece of garbage I am for trying to get social assistance. Part of my story is not getting paid money I paid into so it's very frustrating to be told I don't deserve it. I'm limping along half amazed and half ashamed I haven't had the courage to end it.
I tried to kill myself when I was 11 and no one noticed. I didn't make a big deal of it or anything, I just tried failed and not one person was involved enough in my life to notice at all.
As best I can tell I've just always had the problems from PTSD. Childhood signs include leg pains and chronic headaches which I had. I was tested for chronic fatigue disorder in my teens which is also an often misdiagnosed symptom of childhood ptsd. I developed this through being exposed to impoverished life. Insane shit just happened behind closed doors. Caregivers would drink and no one was there to step in. I was found once purple in my crib asphyxiating with a soother taped around my head when I was a baby. When I was a child I was often held down and tortured until all of it turned into a blur of white and pain. I watched as this happened to my siblings and I was beaten unconscious several times trying to prevent it.
These experiences have altered my nervous system in a way that I am yet to fully realize. For my entire life I never understood why it would take me at minimum 45 minutes to fall asleep if I was able to at all. I ballooned up to over 320lbs by age 22 because I coped with the issues with food and binge eating. (On a positive note I am minorly internet famous for losing 120lbs playing games on a treadmill). I'm kinda fucked up and I know it. I see videos on here of people losing their minds in a rage and I am sheepishly thankful it's not one of my equally explosive eruptions. I'm incredibly impulsive sometimes and even when I know I shouldn't do the thing thwarting that impulse makes me very very angry. I have live by teasing my impulses, utilizing the ones I need.
All of this stuff is just a response to the situation I found myself in but none of it has a place in the business world, or the workplace. My anxiety and issues make me an undesirable employee, I know this. That's why I stopped working to "get help". I have found it simply doesn't exist. You will free fall and when you lament that fact you will be told to go fuck yourself for not pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.
I can barely leave my home anymore and in order to get certain benefits I need to maintain the story I can't work. If I risk something by getting a job and then getting fired again I will lose the processes I have been going through and be less likely to get the benefits I need for treatment. I have been told that my pretty much only effective option will cost upwards of $350 a week. Which will be covered absolutely only if I get onto disability or magically become healthy enough to get a job that would land me benefits to do it.
To make this clusterfuck even better last May I was inspired by Reddit to try and make a game about my experiences with mental illness. It might not have been a very smart move (again remember sick person openly seeking help and finding none) but I tried and failed. I got some money and went off assistance for awhile finally able to support myself even for a few months. When I was unable to launch it into something to sustain myself and needed to go back on assistance or lose my place of living. I found myself unable to afford any place to live and was sequestered in a ladies basement for a few months until I could finally work out the issue (my ex wife lives in a worthless condo we co-own which means I can't get assistance... can't sell it to send that mess because it's worth less than the mortgage) They only put me back on after 4 months of fighting, lawyers getting involved and even a member of parliament. All to get a measly $600 (keep in mind another department won't release around $13,000 that I paid into because my issue is medical).
It's completely fucking insane, I am only going to make it out of this situation alive if I am VERY VERY ambitious and VERY VERY clever. I have been fighting for 2 years at this and I'm so surprised I'm still here. Why do I wake up everyday? I feel like a coward for how bad I want it to end and how much I'm afraid to go through with it. I've even tried twice with it failing. My g/f just left me as well and without her credit I have no options. I'm likely going to have to go live in a trailer without power or water until I can scrape enough savings together to try something else. Or something comes through and I get some help.
To summarize I have untreated mental illness from years of abuse. The treatment I need is either one on one counseling to the tune of up to $350 a week (this is what my psychiatrist came up as the really only effective plan). I can't get a job to earn the money because being impoverished trying to get help for my mental illness has made it so much worst that I can barely interact with people to even have a job. I know that's fucked up and I need to fix it but treatment is too expensive. Disability programs will cover the treatment if I get approved, which is next to impossible for someone like me and I can expect up to another 2 years of fighting before I see anything help wise there. I might be able to treat it myself but I would need to be able to socialize like a normal fucking human. I live on $600 and can't afford to eat and medicate myself let alone go out and interact. I wind up not sleeping, kinda hungry and no ability to socialize at all. So I work on games pretty much as a distraction to not killing myself. I'm a talented software developer but my mental illness seems to block me at every fucking turn and I can't get help for it. I made this game but because I'm too anxious to push it, it's only made enough money to cover its own greenlight fee :/ (which again should I have ate better for a month instead? I don't know). I worked on that 12hrs a day for 6 months. I was also told by someone I was a piece of shit for doing it while on assistance (which technically I was only getting assistance for 2 of the 6 months). It still hasn't fucking changed anything. I didn't want to be minecraft big but I was so fucking hoping to even be able to afford a case of beer to celebrate its release... which I just couldn't justify with how little it brought in. I don't know what else to do if I'm too terrified to work to earn the money to get the help to work to get the money to get help to work to get... etc.
I'm so fucking tired. I've wanted to write this out elsewhere but I hate the null response. Sometimes the blind compassion is worst "I'm here if you need to talk" I don't know what the fuck that even means. How do I tell if I need to talk? My social cues and concepts are fucked beyond belief and I need to fix them but there is no one to help me with it. I'm isolated, alone, and very quickly running out of more and more options. By July this year I will most likely be looking at how to live without a roof at all.
I didn't fucking ask for any of this, why does it have to be held against me so fucking much? I don't want to be rich, I don't want to even be middle class. I just want to know that next month my food and housing is ok and then maybe I can work on being a human again.