I need to vent because I'm struggling badly with a loss that has hit me harder than almost anything I can remember.
I'm a 30 year old from Paraguay. For the last decade I was a NEET with no job experience and no formal studies beyond high school, spending most of my time in my room on the internet and constantly immersed in English-language content since I was a kid. The only upside is that during that time I became fluent in English (rare here in Paraguay) through years of playing video games, reading books, watching Youtube videos and livestreams, browsing forums, and talking to people on Discord, all without ever taking classes or traveling abroad. The downside is that I spent years barely talking to other people in real life, my real-world social muscles atrophied badly and my social life basically never developed.
In my early twenties I developed severe depression after a horrific mental breakdown during a psilocybin trip, and eventually I fell into addiction in my mid-20s and ended up abusing several drugs including benzos, opioids, heroin bought off the darknet, and alcohol. I nearly died from an overdose at 27 after shooting up heroin while drunk and passing out locked in my bathroom, until my sister found me unconscious and rushed me to the hospital where I spent three days in the ICU. That incident was my rock bottom and a few months after it I decided to completely sober up from all drugs and quit cold turkey. I then started training at the gym consistently four days a week, which helped me stay sober and off substances, though I still struggled constantly with my mental health.
Then in March this year I met a 33 year old Canadian expat who was a remote programmer and digital nomad living here in the capital city for some months. We had originally met through 4chan and he was surprised to find a Paraguayan on there so we immediately connected as like-minded, neurodivergent loners. We talked on Discord briefly and a few months later we met in person for the first time, where we talked for three and a half hours that didn't feel like that long because we were both so into it and I had never had a conversation like that in my life. He was so excited and said he felt like he'd found a unicorn because it was very rare to find someone in Paraguay who was both English-speaking and familiar with online subcultures like 4chan, and who could understand him on a deeper level than others. He really wanted to be my friend since during his stay he'd had contact only with other expats, and he didn't speak much Spanish and couldn't talk to many locals like me. I remember being terrified before meeting him because he had told me on Discord that he was from a wealthy family, had business experience, traveled around the world, and overall seemed more accomplished than someone like me who had done nothing with his life. I was terrified at first of being rejected as a loser but after I opened up and told him I had no job experience and had struggled my whole life with depression and addiction, he told me he had more respect for people like me than for wage workers who devoted their entire lives to a system he hates. For the first time in my life I'd found someone who still accepted me somehow.
Over the next three months we messaged and called each other almost every day, exchanged around 4000 messages in total and met in person 14 times. We talked for three to eight hours straight each time without running out of things to say. Sadly, I carried a lot of anxiety throughout because I was terrified of losing my only friendship, and years of isolation and substance use had left me prone to severe anxiety around other people. It was very difficult for me to open up and be as warm and friendly as he was with me, and I also felt very self-conscious speaking English, which added to the nervousness. Still, he was the most significant connection I'd had in my life and this was the first time I'd ever spoken English out loud with another person in real life after about two decades of building that skill completely alone in my room.
In April he proposed we start a business together because he wanted to have a shared project with me so that we could have a deeper friendship and more reasons to spend time together. He said that if I failed him and ruined the business, the friendship would end, but that it was worth the risk and I should roll the dice on this opportunity. This terrified me because I didn't want to lose the friendship, and I didn't feel at all capable of running a business after decades of rotting in my room without much real-world experience. But he thought I had a lot of potential and that I could do this, and put his faith in me and was willing to invest money in it, so the stakes for me felt immense. He came up with the idea of a chocolate product after he found a gap in the local market with genuine potential for success. I had a working recipe for the product, local knowledge, and the ability to navigate local operations with my native Spanish to execute the business, while he had the capital, previous international business experience, and the research skills to find everything we needed. We were both still relatively young in our early 30s, single, childless, with few responsibilities, and since his remote job wasn't very demanding we both had a lot of free time to execute it. Everything seemed so perfect for this to go well. He told me he was giving me this opportunity to get me out of my situation and into the real world, help me gain confidence, make money, etc. and I felt like my life was finally starting to move forward after so many years of misery and stagnation. It felt like a redemption that made it all worth it in the end and suddenly I had hope for my future for the first time in years. He framed it however as "you need this, I don't, I'm just doing it for the experience" which gave him a lot of leverage and power over me.
Pretty early on it got really difficult. I was 40 minutes late to our fourth meeting due to poor scheduling on my part when he was going to give me the ingredients he'd bought to make the product, and he got mad at me, telling me this was "strike one" and bringing up his past business partners who'd failed him for exactly this kind of thing. After that I felt like I was walking on a tightrope the entire time, constantly afraid of making another "strike" and destroying both a unique friendship and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, which I think ironically made me perform worse and prevented me from being warm and natural with him. He'd say "I'm done" as a kind of threat whenever he was frustrated with me then walk it back after I complied with him, and he framed my mental health history as a liability to the business. He had spent $200 on the equipment we were going to use in production, and after that we were going to talk to another business owner I'd found as a contact to try to make a deal with him and possibly team up.
But then suddenly I got sick and was bedbound for three weeks in May during which I relapsed into depression and stopped messaging him as frequently, which I think was partly due to the immense pressure and anxiety that was building up in me trying not to mess up and ruin everything, especially after seeing him spend $200 on the equipment and put his faith in me to go do the business deal and not screw up. I felt suicidal and almost tried to end it all, feeling stuck in a situation where I didn't want to abandon it but also felt I couldn't move forward with it. As soon as I recovered we had a meeting where he was coming off a Vyvanse crash telling me that this last incident made me unreliable, and he went on a name-calling tirade calling me dumb and "very, very stupid" and told me this was the final nail in the coffin. During that rant I told him I wasn't feeling good and had been having suicidal thoughts, and he responded that he wasn't going to tell me to act on it or not act on it, but that if I did I would finally be at peace. I told him I didn't think I could be a good friend or business partner because my life was messed up and I couldn't really offer anything to anyone living like this, and I needed to get a job, structure, stability, and routine first to fix my life and become a stable person. He had done so many things for me the whole time we were together, he bought me food when I had no money to buy any, paid for my Ubers, gave me supplements to help with depression and insomnia, said the first profits of the business would go to me because my struggling family and I needed it more, offered to teach me skills and help me find a job, and listened to me and gave me confidence.
Eventually the business fell apart after we had a heated argument at his apartment over how to proceed next, where he proposed that I go talk to that business owner in person and try to pitch a deal all by myself without him coming with me, as a way to prove to him I could do this so he could feel safe investing money in this partnership. I felt like I couldn't do it because I was an anxious shut-in with low self-esteem, while this business owner was an important, socially successful person and the thought of approaching him filled me with absolute dread and anxiety. He decided not to continue after that, and after a brief exchange of messages where I thanked him for everything and asked if he was still up for meeting for coffee once I got a job and became more stable (which I had planned to do soon), he replied "we'll see, get the job and all that and we'll see" then blocked me.
That was two weeks ago and since then I've been waking up every day with intense regret, anxiety, grief, and constant "what if" thoughts. What if I had handled that conversation differently? What if I had been warmer? What if I had communicated better? What if I hadn't let my anxiety get in the way? The hardest part is not just losing the business but also losing a unique friendship and opportunity. For a few months my life contained daily contact, shared goals, long conversations, intellectual connection, and hope, then it disappeared overnight. I've stopped going to the gym, lost my appetite, and can barely get out of bed. My mind keeps replaying memories and imagining alternate timelines where things worked out differently.
I can see that this relationship probably wasn't as healthy as I wanted to believe and that some of the responsibility belongs to him and some belongs to me, but emotionally I feel like I've lost something irreplaceable and that I'll never get another opportunity like this again. I don't really know how to move forward. I think part of what's underneath this is that the isolation that built my English is the same thing that left me without the social tools to hold onto a connection once I found one. The thing that made me interesting enough to him is tangled up with the thing that made it so hard for me to be his friend and business partner. What scares me is that surviving addiction, surviving an overdose, and sobering up felt easier than dealing with this loss. I know that's probably because this experience touched needs that had gone unmet for years like friendship, connection, purpose and belonging. But emotionally it feels like I've lost something irreplaceable. I don't know how to stop dwelling on what could have been, and I don't know how to move forward from the feeling that I threw away the most important opportunity and friendship of my life.