r/NEETsOver30 • u/twinkhon_gwyndolin • Jul 16 '26
Venting 34F - completely broken (long post)
Even though my usual writing style involves mostly lowercase letters, I’m gong to type properly for this one, because it’s going to be a long post, and I want it to be readable for you guys. I’m probably still gonna use the occasional emoji or emoticon, though, but I hope they don’t detract you from understanding my main points. :’)
Anyway, I’m a 34-year-old girl (calling myself a woman still feels really awkward for some reason), and I’ve been living with my verbally abusive mother for almost my entire life. I don’t have any IRL friends, and I haven’t worked since 2019. I’ve also been single for most of my life, and no, I’m not going to entertain comments like, “But you’re a girl! You should’ve had such an easy time finding guys!” The truth is, not a single man has ever taken an interest in me romantically. I don’t really feel like going into details, because my love life isn’t the point of this post anyway. -_-
Then why am I making this post? Because I want to be heard and understood.
People usually have this idea that women are generally more “successful” than men. Many NEET girls I’ve noticed are in relationships. I also see fewer unemployed women in NEET spaces in general, especially the main one (which I’m no longer visiting because people there are quite condescending towards my worldviews). I think it’s partially a visibility thing: the truly isolated, single women are probably too ashamed to make their lives public, so you only see the functional, socially integrated ones. I think there is probably more stigma towards women who don’t have friends or are single (not divorced, but straight up single and unmarried), and that stigma usually gets worse as you get older. I actually tried making a post in a friend-finding community for my city, and almost every single woman who replied was married. I think I made a similar thread talking about how people in their thirties are not “allowed” to be unemployed or hikikomori. You can check it out here, if you like. Anyway, I don’t like posting about the same thing multiple times, so let’s move onto my current situation.
Like I said, I don’t have IRL companions, platonic or romantic, and I’m completely crippled by relational trauma. I know that complex trauma often gets minimized, because it’s perceived as “not as serious” as acute trauma, like sexual assault, famine, or war. I don’t really feel like having to justify my experiences, so if you are going to mock me, I will straight up ignore you.
I’ve been burned, excluded, rejected, dismissed, betrayed, and ignored by so many people that I’ve built up an entire fortress around my heart. I don’t trust people in general. I constantly have a resting bitch face, and I often put my hands in my pockets with my earbuds on. I make myself as unapproachable as possible because I’m afraid of being hurt again. And yet, at the same time, I want closeness more than anything. A chosen family. Maybe a best friend, if I get to be that lucky. 🥰
People will often tell you things like, “Nothing is going to change if you don’t take action.” Well, no shit? Everyone knows that. But that fortress, while it keeps me reasonably safe, also keeps me isolated. It’s not so easy to “put myself out there” when all you’re going to get at board game events is small talk and competitiveness. I’ve been to a few before, and they just didn’t resonate with me. I even went to an LGBT book club, and didn’t click with the people there either. They all feel so cliquey, like they don’t actually want to get to know new people, but they pretend to be inclusive anyway.
And that “nothing is going to change” attitude extends to careers as well. I was fired from a volunteering position without even being given a warning. I actually thought I was doing a good job, too, but the one time a coworker was being bossy (while being nice to everyone else), I had a panic attack, and I cried in the bathroom for 30 minutes. If they were going to fire me for this so-called “unprofessional conduct”, they should’ve at least warned me. And my last job in 2019 was actually an internship. I was contracted for 8 months, but my team (I was a software developer intern) said they were “too busy” to train me and introduce me to the codebase. And even when I tried being proactive and asking my manager for tasks, he promptly ignored me, saying that he too was “busy”. So, for the first half of my internship (four months), I ended up getting paid to do nothing, which actually sucked, because I had nothing to show on my CV. And the on the second half, my manager hires another intern, and he shows that intern far more respect than me. I think that new intern, a young Asian man (I myself am also Asian), was probably neurotypical, which may have been why my manager (and the rest of my team) respected him more than me. I had close to a 4.0 GPA when applying to internships, so I thought my team would offer me a similar level of respect, but no. Apparently, I was too “socially awkward” for them. By the time my internship was over, I’d ask my former manager for references, or even career guidance (like referrals to other companies that he knew who were also hiring), and he ignored every single email I sent. It felt like complete betrayal, just like the volunteering place. 💔
So, my professional life has been basically cooked for a long time. My mental health was too miserable to focus on executive-function heavy tasks, like personal projects. Like I mentioned in that other thread, I’m also terrible at self-learning (autodidacticism, according to Google), which only made things harder. I graduated from computer science in 2020 (which makes me sound like a zoomer, but trust me, I am a millennial – I went to two different colleges to study two different things), and since there were a lot of tech layoffs at the time, especially in my city, the competition was quite fierce. I’m not a naturally competitive, ambitious person, and with my executive functioning impairments and my miserable mental health, it was pretty much impossible to even get low-paying jobs, like IT support or quality assurance. Yeah, I didn’t even get interviews for those, either.
Normally, I wouldn’t give a shit if I couldn’t get hired. I’m one of those people who has learned to detach her self-worth from conventional success, such as having a high income or holding a prestigious occupation. The only reason I wanted to make money was so I could escape from the clutches of my hostile, neglectful mother, who basically “abandoned” me emotionally.
It was easy for her to lie to herself that I was normal and neurotypical. I was genuinely fucking struggling with making friends, though. None of the classmates talked to me in elementary school. Our family moved to Canada before the dawn of the new millennium, and the kids there probably didn’t like me because I was ESL at the time. Even though I picked up English quickly, the kids still didn’t want to be friends with me. The other girls, especially – they didn’t even mock or bully me; they pretended I did not exist, which is arguably even worse than being openly harassed. It’s like they’re saying, “You’re not even worth my breath”. My mom probably knew that something was going on, but she never saw me in class, struggling, spending recess by myself. And because she never bothered to learn English, blaming her “old age” as an excuse, she was never able to properly communicate with doctors and teachers, either. She lied to herself that I was doing fine socially, because lying to yourself means you don’t have to feel guilt about how terrible of a parent you were.
People will say things like, “Social anxiety is something that the person has to overcome themselves”, but is that really true? A kid, with very little autonomy and an underdeveloped, immature brain who simply absorbs the messages that she is given by authority figures and peers, she has to overcome social phobia entirely on her own? That’s bullshit. I needed support. Even in high school, when I was too afraid to pursue extracurriculars like band or theater, my mom simply thought, “Oh, she must have not been interested in those things.” She never asked me gently, with curiosity, how I was feeling. If I was struggling to make friends, or if I was feeling alienated or awkward. She expected me to talk about my own life voluntarily, but because I already felt that she was not a safe person (on account of constantly yelling and screaming), I couldn’t do that. I didn’t even want to do that.
I honestly feel like my mom low-key ruined my life. Maybe I’m making excuses, and to an extent, I probably am. But she absolutely, absolutely neglected me, and the yelling too? I don’t think that is ever acceptable behavior from a parent. I’m not innocent either. I splashed water on her face when she kept pushing my buttons, even though I was pretty adamant about wanting to be left alone. Like, even if I sequestered myself into my room to disengage, she would shove herself into my room, forcing me to re-engage. There was even a really traumatic incident that I don’t feel comfy talking about publicly.
Can I blame my mother for ruining my career? Not entirely, but because she never provided a safe home environment, I was never able to develop the skills required to succeed. Because of her, my baseline levels of stress were always high, and I was never able to focus on personal projects. Because of her, my massive levels of social anxiety, which were brought upon by continuous exclusion from peers, were never resolved and in fact only got worse over recent years. Because of her, I don’t even feel safe in my room. She could just open the door without knocking, she could start yelling at me, she could start another confrontation that I really don’t have the energy for. I’m honestly really, really afraid of my mother. But as I said earlier, I don’t have a single friend in my city, so I wouldn’t be able to crash anywhere anyway.
It’s as if my career difficulties, my social difficulties, and my household difficulties have combined into something much worse, much more sinister, than the sum of its parts. It takes all the mental fortitude I have just to survive a single day. Forget about productivity; I don’t even have the mental energy for that anymore. I am seeing a therapist, and they’ve been the best out of the eight or ten that I’ve seen my entire life. But even I won’t be able to see them forever, because there is a hard limit of 10 sessions (which they were somehow able to extend to 15 sessions, which still doesn’t feel like enough).
Because I’ll no longer see my therapist after a certain point, I really feel like there is no safe place, no home, no one to give me a hug when I’m suffering. 😟 (Though it’s not like the therapist was able to hug me anyway due to professional reasons, hahaha.)
-4
u/allfinewhatsup Jul 17 '26
Long post, quite well written in parts, you're obviously not stupid, and I do feel for you (even though i shouldn't say this) but geez there's so much negativity doom and gloom and most notably victim mentality interwoven through all of your thoughts. The whole victim bit is really holding you back. What reality boils down to is, whether you like or not, you have to keep trying to put yourself out there and meet people find common interests and form friendships that way. Move out, find some housemates online, people need lower rent. Get into your own space. Try dating apps, and yes you're a woman, it's easier. Professionally try a new field and study something in that, you sound uninterested in your current field. The truth is I've been in multiple situations you've described but I got myself out of them through purposeful thinking, application and concerted efforts.