Lost hope in life and love

[Gerby]

I've visited this forum from time to time when I'm feeling down but this is the first time it's felt so bad that I thought maybe I should post something. I'm 28, male, Software Engineer by trade and living alone in an apartment in East Melbourne and never had a girlfriend in my life and it's completely destroying me at the moment having nobody in my life for companionship. I've been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to think how to even start to explain my problems but I think I'll just recap briefly up to this point.

I feel like I was a normal kid up until about the age of 14 or 15 when suddenly I just stopped wanting to go out, I'd avoid my friends requests to hang out with made up excuses and the times I couldn't escape going out I'd be filled with anxiety and unable to enjoy myself. Then at age 16 my father died of lung cancer which was devastating for both me, my mother and my sister so from that point on I didn't have any male role models in my life. The following year my grandfather died (mother's side) so as you can imagine my mother was not in a great place mentally herself, after I graduated year 12 I started playing 'World of Warcraft' and doing virtually nothing else.

'World of Warcraft' was my life for about 6 or 7 years and it was not a healthy habit in the slightest, my anxiety issues worsened along with depression until it got to a breaking point where my mother sent me to see a psychiatrist for a year because I vomited from anxiety of something as basic as going to get my haircut. I slowly worked through my anxiety issues and eventually was able to leave the house again without turning into a train wreck, then came my mothers new boyfriend. Things seemed fine at first but then he'd just snap at me some days and call me things like "worthless", "lazy" and "not a real man" (because I didn't like drinking or going to pubs) so this did wonders for my already low self esteem, my mother would defend me but in the end she'd still keep him around.

To quickly sum up the next few years I ended up going to Uni and walking straight out of Uni into a job, I moved out of home and now I sit alone in an apartment every night wishing I could just find a woman I can relate to or connect with. Every year I lose hope that I'll ever find that someone and I'm starting to seriously question if I'll even make it to 30, I took Tuesday off as an example because I couldn't get myself out of bed.

Can anyone tell me why I'm failing at life so badly?

[Gerby]

Just a small update for anyone still lurking around the forums that was curious how things were going for me.

Essentially I haven't really been feeling any better and it made me talk to someone (my best friend) about what I was going through and he convinced me to go see a doctor. After seeing the GP I was put onto antidepressants straight away and I've been on those for a week now with no noticeable side effects so far which is good. My current plan is to continue on these for another week then visit my GP again and figure out where to go from there, I'm also going to try to force myself to go to some kind of meet up in a week or two when hopefully the antidepressants have had enough time to really kick in.

[Gerby]

You sound exactly like my own mother, I know she feels the same as you do and its why I never talk to her about any of this and always palm everything off as being OK. I know she tries her best and I love her for that so I don't want to make her life any harder than it already is.

[Moonstruck]

You're a champion Gerby!.........take care now....