[moonkid]

I am not sure which part of the forum would be best to post this, which is why I'm going for the most general section.
Furthermore I'd like to apologise in advance for spelling errors or weird phrasing, as I'm not a native speaker.

I want to try something that I have never done before: writing down every major thing that has happened in my life, everything that I think has had an impact on me and has contributed to the way I am today. I tend to push things aside, rarely talk about past experiences, and I realise that I am unable to gauge the impact certain things must have had on me.
I think, if I can understand these things better, I might understand myself better.

I was born in 1994, four weeks premature (I'm mentioning this because I've read that premature birth may be a factor in developing depression). I exist because my parents didn't try hard enough on the contraception department. My parents got married shortly before my birth, because it seemed like the next logical step.
The first years of my life were alright, although in hindsight I realised that there were some problems.
The constellation of my family was rather traditional: my father worked and took care of things, my mother stayed home and raised me. The problematic aspects of this were that a) my father worked the whole day and didn't spend much time with me, and b) my parents had very different views on how to raise a child.
I grew up rather isolated before I started elementary school. I was not allowed to go to kindergarten, so I did not have much social contact with other children before the age of six.
Another thing that I was not aware at such an early age is the fact that my mother struggled with alcoholism back then. Looking back, knowing that she was struggling with this, I can recall a few memories of when I was very young and my mother was acting strangely in a way that I couldn't understand and which I now attribute to her drinking.
My mother joined Alcoholics Anonymous when I was four or five, and stayed sober for years.
My life was ok and normal for the following years. My relationship with my father wasn't that good because he was a lot stricter than my mother, worked a lot, was short-tempered and came home from work late. Elementary school went well for me, I was quiet but I had friends and my grades were good.

Things began to go bad when I was eight. The summarised version of that time is that my parents started having arguments a lot and then my mother fell into a deep depression after having a miscarriage (which I didn't know about until years later), she started an affair with a man she met online and left with me to live with that man.
Surprisingly for me that wasn't much of a big deal. My relationship with my father had never been close, I found it exciting to move to another place and my mother's boyfriend treated me well.
It only took one year before things got really bad. My mother and that guy broke up and my mother's depression got out of control. She started drinking again. She often left me alone at night. I heard her cry every night. She was drinking every night. One night I woke up because there were people in the flat. My mother had tried to commit suicide by slitting her wrists but had then called an ambulance. My mother was taken to the hospital. A friend of my mother's picked me up and I stayed with that family for two months.
My father then tried to get custody over me. I was handed back and forth between my parents, relatives and foster care for several months. In the end my parents agreed on me living with my mother but spending the weekends at my father's place.

The following years were mostly marked by my mother's depression and drinking, me being left alone, me being critisised and shouted at by my father, bullied at school, having to take my own responsibility while trying to pretend that things are fine. When I was with my mother she was kind and loving but extremely depressed and often drunk and erratic and self-destructive. When I was with my father he tried his best but constantly critisised me, put me down, constantly insulting my mother and speaking badly about her. He occasionally lost his temper, scared me, shouted at me, on a few occasions he was physically abusive towards me. My mother tried to fight her loneliness by going out with men, often bringing them home. I recall many evenings where she was sitting with some guy, talking and getting drunk and having sex. I heard her getting raped by a man once. I pretended I didn't hear. I pretended I wasn't there. We didn't talk about it. I was maybe 13 at that time.
I developed crippling social anxiety around that time. I talked very little, avoided social interactions, was very quiet at school and only had one or two friends.
I also realised that there was something not entirely right with the way I experienced things: I wasn't able to properly define my emotions and some key emotions (like anger or happiness) were completely missing. I wasn't able to experience those. I started self-harming at age fourteen because it made me feel something.

Over the years I tried to become more self-confident, realised it was easier for me to befriend girls than other guys. Even tried dating for some time before I accepted that I am not capable in developing romantic feelings for anyone and that I am not sexually interested in girls. My father is more or less homophobic, so that realisation didn't make things easier for me. My first sexual experiences with another guy were not exactly voluntary. That ****ed me up aswell and I became very skittish and defensive for some time.
I developed some issues with food, not serious ones, but I alternated between binging and restricting and did weird things like hiding food, spitting out food and counting calories.
I honestly can't say much more about that time or the following years. I finished school, went to university and moved out of my mother's place.

I'm 22 now, about to finish my degree, and I have honestly no idea how I am. I generally don't care about anything, I have no ambition, no motivation, no real interest. I don't know if this is laziness or some sort of dissociation. I simply don't care, which leads to a lot of problems because I don't do the things that I am supposed to do, don't really work for the future and just generally not giving a damn about life.

I don't know if I have a problem and I don't know if the things that I experienced were bad enough to cause issues. All I really know is that I don't care and that I rarely experience anything emotional.

I want to understand why I am the way I am and whether my problems are just character flaws or caused by negative experiences.

I wanted to write a lot more, a lot more details, but I don't think I can do that right now.

[TishaBuv]

You've certainly had some bad experiences. You must feel something because you cared enough to write this here.

You are doing well, getting education.

I think you have taken a first step in exploring some important feelings.