I posted in the new member forum and was suggested to come here. My problem is I basically feel like most of my life is a failure. I look back on my life and it is one bad decision, one bad choice, one bad action after another. I feel like I am on the outside of life looking in. I have never fit in, I have tried to fit in but mostly barely function in society. I am not sure how much I can write here. If I put down everything it would be a novel and I hate to take up others time with my problems.

Thanks for the reply and your support. I suppose I should give more info so I will add a little at a time... IF I wrote the whole sad story it would be a novel and I think I said somewhere.

It basically started from birth when I was adopted and put in an orphanage and spent most of the first year of my life in an orphanage. An orphanage in the very early 1950’s was not a nice place. My adopted mother used to brag that as a baby I never laughed or smiled or cried, and I could stare down adults. She could take me places and sit me in a corner and I would stay there till she came for me. As she put it, “I wasn’t like all those other little heathens running around and making noise. I was an only child so I grew up with an over controlling over protective mother who ran everything and ordered my dad and me around all the time. She wouldn’t let me do anything that might hurt me like sports, etc.

I grew up not making any decisions for myself or being allowed to think for myself. She picked my clothes, fussed at me about the few kids that I hung out with. By ‘hung out’ I mean I just hung around the edges uninvited and occasionally they would let me in their group.

I went on two dates my entire High School years. One was a Sadie Hawkins dance so the girl asked me. My Senior Year I finally got up guts enough to ask a girl to the prom. It was a miserable mistake. I feel sorry for her. I was basically scared to death of girls and my mother didn’t help, she basically told me that girls were evil and only wanted sex from me.


One of my biggest problems is I do not feel emotions. I am basically numb inside. One shrink I went to thought I had RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder) another thought I had Aspergers. (I do have a grandson with Aspergers and someone told me it can be passed down.) So if and when I do find a girl and start going out with her, the first few weeks or a month or so I can fool her but sooner or later she sees through my act. I had one former woman tell me that she thought her ex husband was the coldest, unemotional bastard she had ever seen until she met me. I made him look caring and feeling. Not something to boost an ego. I learned to fake emotions by watching TV, movies, reading books, and watching people.