Grief over a life I’ll never have
I’m 24F with mild autism, severe learning disabilities, and severe ADHD. Lately I’ve been dealing with grief and depression over a life I’ll probably never have. What triggered this is finding out that one of my peers recently got engaged and several others are currently in relationships, as well as getting settled into pretty good careers that I would never realistically be capable of doing.
Ever since I was a kid, I knew that I always wanted to get married and have kids when I grew up. I still want that now, but I just don’t know realistically how that’s going to happen. Even though I still live at home with my parents, I can do basic cooking, cleaning, and laundry myself, but can’t budget properly most likely due to severe math difficulties/executive dysfunction, can’t fill out complex forms without help due to poor reading comprehension, can’t drive due to extremely slow processing speed and severe visual spatial impairment, (although I can take the bus but it takes me a very long time to learn new routes), and finding and keeping jobs that I can handle has been one of my greatest challenges in the last few years.
Considering my age and the fact that I’ve been trying to work on the things I struggle with or can’t do for the last 5-6 years with little to no progress, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve reached my ceiling as far as my independence/capability goes. Maybe someday if I’m lucky I can possibly find someone who will marry me, but as far as kids I don’t see how I’ll be able to handle the demands of parenting considering I’ll always need help with certain things myself and the fact that I’ll probably be stuck in shitty minimum wage jobs that won’t even allow me to afford kids. Also, maybe it sounds a bit cruel but seeing that neurodivergence seems to be heavily genetic, I wouldn’t want to pass down my disability to my kids anyways.
Sorry about my long rant but it’s been weighing on my chest lately and I guess I needed to get it off. Has anyone else gone through something similar or can relate? If so, how do you deal with these feelings and accept the life you have without letting grief and depression consume you?