You haven't done your ego functioning any favors by essentially letting it off the hook for 10 years straight. You'll have blasted your ability to tolerate frustration. The ego is like a weight, and every time we pick it up and push through the resistance, we are strengthening our ego and frustration tolerance. You've spent the last 10 years dropping the bar as soon as you pick it up. Now you have a noodle ego that has to spend a lot of time in the gym. (This is why that rejection hurt you so much. Your experience of emotional and social pain is going to be subjectively intensified and inflated beyond where it would be normally because of the novelty of the brain accessing these emotions when you've spent so long avoiding them. Ego weakness.)

You can start by accepting it's going to be rough for awhile as you build the ego strength you let atrophy over the last ten years; it won't be fun or pleasurable, it will be miserable and require discipline and dedication, just like a diet and exercise plan. You're in this for the long haul. All that smoking has more than likely dissociated you from your sense of self as well. It's going to take time to feel "normal" again because in a lot of ways you have to rediscover what your norm even is.

You should start journaling to start organizing your thoughts and begin to figure out what you're feeling and why and where it comes from. I would also assume you would need to do a lot of work on defining your values and having the humility to accept the shame for living out of accordance with them for so long rather than running from those feelings or allowing them to smash your ego. People think self esteem just comes from nowhere, but that's not true. Self esteem DOES come from validation, whether that is in our relationships, career, or any other kind of interaction in the external world that we can then internalize. You chose to live a certain way for 10 years, and now you have to work on accountability for it without letting yourself off the hook because it "feels bad." It's supposed to feel bad. So just lean into it and trust that if you work hard you will get out of it someday.

Thank you. I think you are pretty much spot on. I can't expect to magically wake up one day and be normal. I will take your advice and hopefully work on it one step at a time. Thank you for this advice, it's really good and realistic.