Thanks, I'm making calls to ask about insurance and hopefully make an appointment today.

I see what you mean about AvPD and DPD seeming to be mutually exclusive, but in my case I think having both would best explain my situation. For the most part I am an island, like you say. I haven't had any real close friends since high school. But ever since I had my first boyfriend at age 13, I've rarely been single. It's almost like, for me, my SO takes the place of all the other people I could want a relationship with. It's too hard to make friends, but romance has always come fairly easily to me. Confessing attraction or being the one to make the first move is very hard, and I rarely do it. But if someone expresses interest in me, then I feel the fear of rejection lift. That person becomes the one person I tell everything to, who I don't have to worry about accepting me, because they already have. As long as I can keep up whatever drew them to me -- and this isn't hard because after the initial plunge, courtship is the one time I don't feel pressured to put on a mask -- then I'm golden. My boyfriend of almost 5 years is also my best friend, and even back in high school I think I was closer with my boyfriends than most people, who would tell more to their best friends than their boyfriend or girlfriend. A relationship equals stability and security to me. Maybe I learned this from my parents, who got remarried a total of five times between them after they divorced when I was 3. Single life has never seemed an option to me. And when I was a kid, my parents encouraged me to depend on them. They actually spelled it out, saying my only responsibilities were to get good grades and keep my room clean, and as long as I did those, they would take care of the rest.
I've always been dependent on someone. After I graduated high school, I was receiving monthly SSI benefits from my father's death, and had a couple thousand from his life insurance in a secure account. I wasn't in any hurry to get a job, and was still living with my mom and stepdad. After a physical altercation with my stepdad (initiated by me, this was a very unstable time in my life) my mom sent me to visit my grandparents in Minnesota for a month. I ended up meeting a boy and staying for three years, for all of which I lived with either a family member or my boyfriend's mother. I had a job briefly at Kmart, which I left when I started dating a superior. That relationship turned out to be short-lived, because although he offered to support me, I realized I just wasn't physically attracted to him. After that ended I didn't get another job, and I'm ashamed to say that at the time, I felt no shame in living off the hospitality of others, not even using my SSI for groceries. It's unfathomable to me now, but at the time it just felt natural to be taken care of, I felt like people should always take care of me.

I'm much more independent now, thanks in large part to my current boyfriend, who wouldn't stand for what he sees as laziness. Which I guess it is. But I still have deep-rooted dependency issues I think. I feel like I wouldn't know what to do if he left me. First of all I don't make enough money to pay for an apartment here in Denver. Maybe a studio, but even that would leave me only a couple hundred a month for food and other bills. Our fortunes are financially tied together, but it's more than that. He's basically the center of my world, the anchor that keeps me from trying to go in every direction at once. I've also learned that I make bad decisions. I either think something to death and do nothing, or I think not at all and act on instinct, and do the wrong thing. So I feel dependent on him to make decisions, in a way. Anything involving money that's more than buying lunch, I ask him first. Anything at work (we work together) that I'm not sure how I should deal with, I ask him. I just don't know how to be alone, and I feel like I don't know enough about adult life, things like how insurance or mortgage works, how to do my taxes, all that complicated stuff that adults do. My mom did my taxes for a few years, since then I haven't done them at all. I know I should, but there's a ton of other things I should be doing too, and lately I'm just trying too hard to keep myself together mentally to worry about the rest. I guess I always somehow thought that my mental difficulties meant that I should be taken care of by someone. Only in recent years have I started to see the difference between me, and someone like our roommate, who's a schizophrenic who can't remember to take her meds or keep appointments, and would never have even thought of applying for disability benefits until we suggested it. I have some of the same issues as her, but I've come to realize that I'm probably capable of being self-sufficient, and maybe she isn't. I'm just too afraid.