It’s stressing me the fuck out. It’s all I can think about right now and I’ve been dissociating all day because I just can’t handle feeling this trapped. About a year ago my mental health took a sharp dive, I worked myself till I couldn’t function anymore and lost my job. I should’ve know better than to move back in with my mum, but I was too burnt out I guess, and I couldn’t fathom continuing to work to support myself, I wasn’t in my right mind clearly.

Anyway, came back here and within a month all the usual bullshit was happening again, Covid flared up and I was prevented from leaving the house entirely or else I’d be kicked out with nowhere else to go. In 8 months I left the house exactly 3 times. Twice to get vaccinated (didn’t get out of mums car at all though, she made the doctor come out to us), and once to go to the post office to sell something I sold on eBay in an attempt to try accumulate enough money to move out again (didn’t make that mistake again, she had a panic attack over it, so it wasn’t worth the effort). 

Then, back in March my sister, who was living on her own, and who I was considering moving in with, got hit by a bus and died. Mum apparently didn’t care about covid after that, and I’ve been free to go back to the gym and stuff again now.

But I’m still stuck here. My mental health is in a fucking awful place, I can’t get a grip. I have zero friends, zero family I can trust, I don’t have a single person in the world, not even a fucking acquaintance. Not one. I can’t work because people are a huge trigger for me, I just dissociate, and if I can’t dissociate because I have to deal with the public or something, I’m forced to hold up a mask until I’m alone and I can, until eventually I lose my grip entirely and cease to function at all unless I’m drunk or high or am cutting myself and pressing on the wounds to stay alert.

And it would be one thing if it was just that I didn’t want to live with my mum because I don’t trust she won’t pull some awful shit at any moment once she’s stopped doing this nihilistic grieving thing, but it’s even worse than that. She and her husband are having a house built that’s set to be done within the next month or so, and when it is she’s gonna let this rental place go and move in there, and I’m gonna have no choice but to go with her. 

And the issue is, it’s back where I grew up, where I have tons of people I don’t wanna run into (it’s a small town too, so I almost certainly will run into someone eventually), and I have a ton of bad memories there. So does she. I don’t know why in a million years she’d wanna go back there, she’s the one who moved us away in the first place because she was having paranoid delusions people there were trying to kill us. I just can’t relive that. I can’t fucking do it all over again, I feel like I’m going insane. I don’t know why she built a fucking house there, out of everywhere in the world. And now I’m getting dragged back there too.

I’m pretty far from happy here, but I like my life here well enough. I don’t want to leave. I’ve been looking for rental properties but the housing market is absolutely fucked, rentals are twice what they were the last time I moved out, and they barely even come up, there’s been a total of 2 listings in my suburb for the past month now. And when they do come up, people keep offering over the listed price, which I already can’t afford, so I just get outbid. I was trying to save up to maybe offer to pay a bunch of weeks in advance, but I stupidly put all my money in stocks hoping to have as much to bargain with as possible, and now that the market is dropping, I’ve lost a huge chunk of it. 

I just feel so fucking trapped. I’m 23 and I don’t even have my license yet, which also severely limits the properties I can apply for. I just don’t have enough money to get out of this situation, but mentally I can’t afford to get dragged back to my hometown either. I can barely work at the best of times, and these are very fucking far from the best of times. And on top of that, I’m being told by my therapist I’ll probably fail to make any progress with healing until I can escape my mum, but I can’t get a job or money to do that until I make enough progress in therapy to hold one down. It’s a fucking catch-22. I’m just fucking trapped and I don’t know how to get out.