u/StickApprehensive831

My parent has dementia caused by cancer, numerous tumours in the brain, full brain radiation, multiple brain surgeries. She's been declining for years and we've known explicitly where she will end up. I've been working with social workers who have decades of experience in the cities private care and we were trying to get her into memory care -- which she needed as is but also because once you're in these nicer, private memory care facilities in the city you're grandfathered in and will be allowed to stay until end-of-life.

Her abusive partner and brother, who worked together to try and force her to change her will after each brain surgery, refused. "She needs to be with normal people" they kept saying. Normal people while she thinks she's 40 years younger than she is, her middle aged children are tweens, and she doesn't know where she lives. We had her in essentially an assisted living facility and every person there could only talk to me about how different she is, how bad her memory is, asking what happened to her. After a year we finally got one of her numerous doctors to explicitly agree with us that she needed memory care. I feel for the doctors, it's not their fight, but they've been hinting that it was best the entire time but refused to come out and say it because "it's not their department."

I put in the request. She's rejected. It's too late. Her behaviours have gotten too extreme. Her illness has progressed too far. She needs Long Term Care. LTC where I live has waitlists with thousands of people so thankfully the same doctor is not waiting around this time and is working with us to try and get her emergency approval. The employee for the government organization is explicitly working with us to move her to the top of the list due to the stages of her dementia as an emergency factor. We need to finalize a list of top 5. I've been researching for years since this was an inevitability, and considering how long the waitlist is even having applied a year ago it could have taken 5-10 years to get in (Her partner and brother had refused because "you're trying to move her in immedately" no matter how many times people told them she couldn't be moved in for years, and even if she got in and was still too healthy for them we could push it back. Didn't matter).

We get an email today: "We want to tour the facilities to decide." I don't know how many weeks or months this will take. The LTC manager who's helping us has a very short time frame they can work in. This should have been known years ago, like I worked to do. Waiting hurts her as her behaviours and sundowning run rampant and she suffers.

The worst part is she could have been in a beautiful private facility with abundant care. She could have been there until the end of her life, in comfortable, exceedingly well-staffed place. The place I was fighting to get her in. But because of two abusive people who had a say she cannot. She's factually getting worse care because of people who refused to accept reality, who would tell people that I'm trying to abuse her by forcing her into places she doesn't belong (somehow someone who spends half of every day of her life asking where she is "doesn't belong in memory care and belongs with normal people"). And these same people try and argue that I'm the abusive one. They tell my extended family that she's doing amazing, that she doesn't have cancer or dementia. There was literally a signed note written by them that lead with that when they tried to refuse her doctors requests to send her to palliative care. And because my extended family don't live in the same city and talk to her at most for 5 minutes over the phone once a month, they believe her and act like I'm imprisoning her.

The world is a horrible place. Caregiving is a horrible thing.

I posted a bit ago about caregiving exacerbating my AvPD/depression/anxiety over the last four years and not contacting my friends over the last two. I know my friends and acquaintances owe me nothing and me disappearing is being a bad friend, but people from my closest friends to my acquaintances not messaging me back is killing me. I can't stop thinking about it.

I'm nearly 40. I've lost so many friends over my life, I don't see hope in ever being able to keep friends. I don't see myself ever making friends again. But this hurts so bad. Every time I pick up the phone I feel immense hurt at still not getting a message. My phone being near me is an albatross around my neck, it exists to remind me no one is looking to talk to me.

I saw on social media a friend opened a sandwich shop near me. I want to not be such a coward and go and say hello and apologize for disappearing. Apologize for being a bad friend. Hope he can forgive me for being so dysfunctional. At the very least, congratulate him. But I need to leave people alone when they rightfully want nothing to do with me. He doesn't deserve having to put up with me appearing and disappearing forever. There's also the pathetic truth that I'm scared of being turned away.

I can't stop thinking of everything I've lost in our relationships. The things we did together will never be done again. Even the loss of the friends-of-a-friends who I would hang out with, with them. So much lost and friends I hurt because typing "Hello I hope you're well" is too fucking hard for me.

My time with my psychiatrist has come to an end. She's going on maternity leave, but also didn't think she could help me anymore. I've been fully upfront with wanting to die by assisted suicide and being done with life. I've never been more depressed, alone, burned out, and just... Done. Before she ended she submitted me for a referral to an inpatient for mood disorders and rehabs, one that has good reviews.

There's a semi-private and private option. Both have group therapy, but the semi-private is almost entirely group therapy. I was initially considering it, but my experiences have been horrible in trying to talk to people who weren't mental health specialists about AvPD. People who care about me can't get past the "just do it" aspect. They don't understand the intense, unconscious fear and avoidance. The inability to actually make the choice that do it when faced with extreme avoidance. I don't want to be stuck in a hospital for two months with a group of strangers with full life experiences who can't understand how difficult it is just to text -- especially when you know you won't get a response from that text. I don't even belong in mental hospitals.

I don't have a single normal human life experience.

I don't have any good memories of elementary school, no friends. I never went to camps. No adventures playing outside. No young love, no experimentation. I never had friends in high school. Never went to parties. No extracurriculars, no sports, just hid at home. Didn't go to prom. Never bothered getting my yearbook, why would I? Once again, no young love and no relationships. I went to university but didn't exist outside of class. No dorm/residence experiences, still no partying, no hook ups, no relationships short or long term, no real friendships just people I'd sit next to in class and ask how they did on the exam. No traveling, no meeting strangers, no bars or clubbing, no frat parties or all nighters for fun or for studying. No actual career. Friends have fully gone away, they don't respond.

I'm nearing middle age. I haven't had a single normal human experience, and it's too late to do so. It's all passed me by. I cannot wait until I cease to exist and the knowledge of my emptiness stops haunting me.

I finally reached back out. It's been a long time. Over a year, I've been caregiving for a parent that exacerbated my AvPD, depression, anxiety, etc. Just no contact for over a year. I treated friends terribly, effectively just ghosted them. I messaged them with explanations that I've been caregiving nearly 24/7 and when I'm hope I just crash and apologizing, but I've of course heard nothing. The worst thing is when I messaged people I saw a person I'd recently met had sent me a message asking if I was okay because he hadn't seen me in a while, and I'd completely missed it. I feel horrible for having ignored him. I feel horrible because I've yet again managed to ruin friendships and end up alone.

If I keep on living this is the cycle that will rule my life. I will meet people, begin to get close, avoid without a conscious thought, and lose people because I treated them terribly. I am destined to be alone.

I don't go on reddit much, but I just opened reddit and was met with one of those "am I the asshole" posts from a week or two ago. The person laid out legitimate grievances with a family member about them doing nothing and staying inside and the impact it had on their homelife but the thing is that it read to me as extremely analogous to someone with AvPD. Of course, I don't know for sure, but so much of how the person was described resonated with me.

I read the comments. Thousands and thousands of posts with thousands and thousands of upvotes talking about how horrible the person is, how they're a loser and a bum, how they're pathetic, how they're a manchild. It was heartbreaking. It's insight into how I'm perceived and what people would actually say about me.

Seeing people from high school and university, my age and younger, having wives and kids and full, successful careers. Traveling, having fun, living whole lives in between us last talking and me being frozen. Each day is harder and more painful than the last.