I’m done. I can’t do it anymore. I’m so exhausted of undoing decades of trauma that ruins the good in my life. I’m tired of being my worst enemy, of not having financial stability or anyone to fall back on. I’m just a burden all around and I do not want to go to a psych ward to have even more trauma. I can’t have my dream life, I love someone I love deeply, and I just rot and sink into this bed everyday.
I want to leave NYC so bad but it’s so difficult and I think I’m realizing I don’t like my field.
2 years ago I studied abroad in Spain and I was an entirely different person. I was happier, healthier, more confident, and such an avid learner. I loved going to university there, I made some of the best friends of my life that I still have, and I ended up meeting and amazing Scottish guy who became my boyfriend.
I fucked it all up when I came back to NYC :/. I got burnt out again, I felt constantly irritated and annoyed by my family (CPTSD), and I was just exhausted by the cost of living & constantly struggle to compete with people in the job market once I graduated.
I feel so sad. I wish I could go back so badly. I am latina so I can go back with my dual citizenship and get residency in 2 years, but I would need to be on a digital nomad visa or a sponsored work visa which is incredibly hard considering the country has a 10% unemployment rate right now. I do speak spanish, but I don’t work in tech and I have a degree in communications.. I work in marketing for 2 universities and i’m a research assistant working in higher ed policy.
I thought I wanted to do education policy for long because I have so much experience in it and grew up low-income so it was an important aspect of my life. But overtime, I think I realized I don’t care about research and I romanticized the job more than anything. My jobs are super simple and honestly it feels like I do nothing all day but make a few canva posts and talk shit with coworkers. Yeah the pay is good I mean i’m saving up but I lost myself here .
I stopped being creative, I turned meaner, I stoped going out, I shelled in. I lost my boyfriend because he says i’m not the same person he met anymore since my trauma reactivated due to my family’s mental health problems and the toxicity their dynamic would spread, I feel so incredibly upset about this.
I wish I had been better and he could’ve stayed with me, I could’ve gotten my grad degree in Scotland and have moved in with him. He did lie with his parents though since hes20 and 22, and he has no highschool or college degree, he lives life by his own terms and just enjoys going to the gym hanging with friends and playing sports. He wants to be a coach, but they don’t make a lot or enough to sponsor visas so I just felt lost and confused being with him like I didn’t know what I was waiting for because he wouldn’t make an effort to look into helping me move or consider backup options for his future since he was laid back.
I still regret it and wish I could’ve waited. I will have 15K saved up by the time I want to enter university in 2027 but Idk wtf i’m doing. It feels really unrealistic. It feels like my best shot was being with my ex and relying on him at least for housing while I figured out the rest but I was so afraid of depending on a man like my mom did even though he was a really good boyfriend that I pushed him away stupidly.
I feel like an idiot. Like my life is over. I feel so depressed here that I honestly think it will kill me soon if I don’t get out but I can’t really do much is what I feel. I don’t have a financial safety net and i’m afraid of messing my life up as a first gen latina. Idk what to do. Idk if I give up on this dream and just conform to capitalism and New York. I genuinely don’t know where else to go because I have no family anywhere else really and no one to rely on because my moms retiring in ecuador and my dads actually homeless right now.
I don’t know what to do :(
2 years ago I studied abroad in Spain and I was an entirely different person. I was happier, healthier, more confident, and such an avid learner. I loved going to university there, I made some of the best friends of my life that I still have, and I ended up meeting and amazing Scottish guy who became my boyfriend.
I fucked it all up when I came back to NYC :/. I got burnt out again, I felt constantly irritated and annoyed by my family (CPTSD), and I was just exhausted by the cost of living & constantly struggle to compete with people in the job market once I graduated.
I feel so sad. I wish I could go back so badly. I am latina so I can go back with my dual citizenship and get residency in 2 years, but I would need to be on a digital nomad visa or a sponsored work visa which is incredibly hard considering the country has a 10% unemployment rate right now. I do speak spanish, but I don’t work in tech and I have a degree in communications.. I work in marketing for 2 universities and i’m a research assistant working in higher ed policy.
I thought I wanted to do education policy for long because I have so much experience in it and grew up low-income so it was an important aspect of my life. But overtime, I think I realized I don’t care about research and I romanticized the job more than anything. My jobs are super simple and honestly it feels like I do nothing all day but make a few canva posts and talk shit with coworkers. Yeah the pay is good I mean i’m saving up but I lost myself here .
I stopped being creative, I turned meaner, I stoped going out, I shelled in. I lost my boyfriend because he says i’m not the same person he met anymore since my trauma reactivated due to my family’s mental health problems and the toxicity their dynamic would spread, I feel so incredibly upset about this.
I wish I had been better and he could’ve stayed with me, I could’ve gotten my grad degree in Scotland and have moved in with him. He did lie with his parents though since hes20 and 22, and he has no highschool or college degree, he lives life by his own terms and just enjoys going to the gym hanging with friends and playing sports. He wants to be a coach, but they don’t make a lot or enough to sponsor visas so I just felt lost and confused being with him like I didn’t know what I was waiting for because he wouldn’t make an effort to look into helping me move or consider backup options for his future since he was laid back.
I still regret it and wish I could’ve waited. I will have 15K saved up by the time I want to enter university in 2027 but Idk wtf i’m doing. It feels really unrealistic. It feels like my best shot was being with my ex and relying on him at least for housing while I figured out the rest but I was so afraid of depending on a man like my mom did even though he was a really good boyfriend that I pushed him away stupidly.
I feel like an idiot. Like my life is over. I feel so depressed here that I honestly think it will kill me soon if I don’t get out but I can’t really do much is what I feel. I don’t have a financial safety net and i’m afraid of messing my life up as a first gen latina. Idk what to do. Idk if I give up on this dream and just conform to capitalism and New York. I genuinely don’t know where else to go because I have no family anywhere else really and no one to rely on because my moms retiring in ecuador and my dads actually homeless right now.
I don’t know what to do :(
TW/ Suicide, alcoholism
Ex met me 2 years ago while I was studying abroad, I was very different. I had gotten pneumonia and it was my first time ever living alone + I was thousands of miles away from my family.
I’m usually very shy and depressive, I was diagnosed with chronic depression as a child and I have CPTSD. When I was abroad, I turned into the best version of myself. I think the necessity of having to feel better because my life literally depended on it changed me for the best. I locked in and made myself the healthiest most delicious meals i’ve ever made for myself, I would consistently eat when in the US i’d frequently have starvation blocks and disorganized eating, I assembled a weekly self-care plan to ensure I wasn’t neglecting myself and made sure to include drawing, journaling, creative writing, sports, physical self-care nights etc. I never did that here.
i was overall way more optimistic and confident, I would sometimes breakdown and I would try to reflect on trauma during this time to hopefully figure out some of my problems but I was still somewhat male centered so a lot of my journal was about the guys I would met unfortunately but it felt like I was on the right path of being more comfortable with myself alone and healing. I grew up in an abusive household and have been going through violence and traumatic events since I was 7 so I have a lot going on. I struggle to process a lot of events because even though I am 22, I work 3 jobs at the moment and I’m constantly thinking 3 years ahead and burn myself out but I’m afraid of failure so I try to plan for everything and feel like a perfectionist though I have ADHD and anything short of my expectations feels like failure. I’m also burnt out so honestly i’m not even doing the best at these jobs.
Anyway my ex met me during this time and I was great. I was really healthy, loving, very active, and confident. He loved if, he loved me intensely. He was the same, he was. very carefree live in the moment kind of person which. I loved because I felt like maybe it could balance out my need to grind and could remind me to take a step back and relax. We had some problems but they kind of started turning into triggers and we started building resentment towards each other.
Well… overtime when I came back home and could no longer avoid my family, I was thrown back into a 1.5 hour commute to my college twice a day, my dads health declined and he had multiple hospitalizations & 1 attempt, he lost his home, my mom got worsening health issues and would be mean to me again out of jealousy (she had a lot of immigrant trauma too and sometimes feels resentful towards me because I don’t live such a pressured life like she did at my age), and I slowly shrunk down and absorbed some of the toxicity around me.
I started getting mean and resentful towards my own ex, he would continue to live the life I once had, he is 20 but he only pays 1 bill at home, works 2x a week, and doesn’t go to college and didn’t finish high school he wants to be a martial arts coach whenever he crosses that bridge with no rush. I was now back into survival mode working hard to avoid the path my parents took lading them towards financial instability and emotional chaos, I was burning myself out, not processing any of these major traumatic events like my dad having a breakdown telling me his plans to end his life with a knife, seeing his hanging belt on the shower head when we took him to be admitted into a psych ward, I would visit my ex sometimes because he lives in the EU and it would be an escape but whenever ai came back, I would get triggered and it’s like I would disassociate and split.
It tired him out. I couldn’t figure out what was happening or how to help, he felt like I could no longer appreciate his easy going nature and I felt like he wasn’t safe enough to rely on because he doesn’t do future planning like me. I feel resllly bad but I think I keep escaping my reality but I can’t do that any longer. I do want to get my masters abroad in a year but I do also feel like if I don’t ever face my trauma head on and address it no matter where I’ll go i’ll just be running from it but ever fully over it. I don’t think it’s healthy and even though I felt great abroad, coming back made me feel like I wasn’t actually healing but avoiding it maybe.
I know some people say you can’t heal where you were broken but for me i’m tired of being home and feeling awful like I can’t do anything in life or like I hate my home in NYC because it’s literally not even that bad, my 3 jobs aren’t even bad either they’re actually extremely easygoing and accommodating. But I still feel this way and I feel like if I never address it, this will follow me in one way or another for the rest of my life. It just hurts being told he misses the old me rather than the real me though because this is my reality even as much as I wis it weren’t and I had a carefree life with no struggle or emphasis on financial stability.
Today 2 months post-breakup I still cry and have nightmares, but I’ve been doing 2 CPTSD workbooks, journaling, reading (CPTSD memoirs), and just had my first EMDR session yesterday. This doesn’t feel like enough though, I’m afraid if he carries the pain I have him for a while. He told me he’s afraid of feeling like he’s not enough for the next person and I’m crushed because that’s how I feel about myself and I projected that onto him.
Maybe he’s not financially ambitious, maybe he’s avoidant, maybe he struggles to plan and doesn’t want a traditional path, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t worthy as a lover. He’s very sensitive and caring with a big heart, he always helps those in need and I unfortunately waited for him to change and my trauma convinced me he would leave one day and realize i’m too much that I made it come true. I feel so sad for him. He started getting angrier and he started to ghost me throughout the relationship and tell me less about his life which triggered my abandonment issues. It was just a mess… this summer he did keep me inside though and it really hurt he was very jealous and I wonder if I did that. Anyway yeah, how do you move past the pain?
Hii I’m a young latina woman struggling through the pains of generational trauma. I’m 22 and I recently realized I inherited my father’s anger and hurt someone I deeply loved. I desperately want to change but it feels because I hurt someone I’m already deep gone, I don’t want to believe this, and I’m looking for books where people explore change, going from rock bottom to success, etc.
For example I really love A Dream Called Home by Reyna Grande because she has similar trauma to me and seeing her get everything she wanted in the end and a partner who’s committed to learning about her culture and help her unlearn toxic cycles is inspiring.
I really want more books like this, because my ex partner was a white man and he also struggled to understand my past which made me feel like I wasn’t normal and I’m bearing a lot of shame because of it. I love latin american literature so anything in that sector would be greatly appreciated, or anything about POC experience in general.
I also loveeeeeee cultural anthropology so anything related to politics systems affecting Latin American culture today, or colonialism etc is very interesting too! I just want to dig deeper into my trauma and understand generational trauma. Thank you <3
22F feeling really bad. I feel exhausted and like I can’t perform at work, feel like a burden on my family for being so depressed. I feel like i’m at my wits end and need help, therapist was awful and I ended that.
I really want to go to a mental hospital I think. Just somewhere where I’m not expected to perform executives and where I can just talk and get EMDR or something ASAP. I just don’t feel safe with myself right now.
All the mental hospitals I’ve looked at have 2.9 stars or less though and it’s been scaring me. Especially as a woman, I don’t want to get any worse trauma from these places but I also done want to end up dead if I wait. I don’t know what to do :( thank you.
I hurt my ex and he left. I feel broken