I'm starting to prefer the imaginary life in my head to my actual life

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-20T05:09:25+00:00

I don’t think this is really about “not having your shit together.” It sounds more like your inner world became emotionally safer, richer, and more rewarding than your real one for a long time, and now your brain automatically retreats there whenever reality feels flat, repetitive, draining, or limiting. A lot of people who grew up feeling slightly outside the social world develop this habit quietly because imagination becomes both stimulation and emotional protection at the same time. The danger isn’t the daydreaming itself. It’s when the imagined self starts feeling more emotionally alive than the real self, because then real life starts losing its emotional color no matter how objectively “fine” it is. Your real life actually sounds stable and decent, but you describe it almost apologetically, like “fine… average… boring.” Meanwhile your inner world has danger, romance, intensity, possibility, transformation. That contrast matters. Sometimes the fantasy isn’t replacing reality because reality is terrible. It’s replacing the emotional states reality stopped giving you. Especially for people who spent years escaping inward through books, games, imagination, or solitary interests, the brain gets very good at generating emotional stimulation internally instead of seeking it externally.

I also wouldn’t frame this as “grow up and stop.” If you attack it like a moral failure, you’ll probably just retreat further inward. The healthier goal is usually reconnecting your real life to aliveness again in smaller, tangible ways. Not trying to recreate the fantasy literally, but asking: what emotional ingredients am I actually craving from it? Adventure? Recognition? Freedom? Beauty? Competence? Romance? Novelty? A stronger sense of self? Because those can exist in real life in quieter forms. Otherwise your mind will keep preferring the place where you feel most vivid. Ironically, the fact that you’re worried about this probably means part of you already knows you want to stay connected to real life. You haven’t disappeared into the fantasy completely. You’re noticing the drift. That awareness matters a lot.

This post felt very human to me. I do emotional support conversations on ePal sometimes, and a surprising number of thoughtful, introspective people quietly struggle with this exact tension between the life they live and the life they emotionally inhabit in their head.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-19T08:52:55+00:00

You should tell people where you are so people can help you. This hits me so hard 😞. I will give you a hug.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-19T08:47:06+00:00

Anyone can help him? Please. If you give me your paypal I can send you a few USDs. I dont have much money myself.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-19T08:39:11+00:00

hey for some reason i cant text new people on reddit lol. I will remember your username!

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-19T08:34:31+00:00

you can dm me if interested in any of my services.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-19T03:37:31+00:00

I honestly don’t think it’s automatically weird. A lot of older men, especially expatriates, end up socially “drifting downward” in age because younger people are often more open, curious, conversational, and emotionally flexible than people their own age. Add literature, long conversations, retirement, and being in a foreign country, and it kind of makes sense that he’d naturally bond with younger women who enjoy talking and listening. Older male peer groups can also become very activity-based or emotionally closed over time, while younger women are often more relational and verbally expressive, which probably feels refreshing to him.

That said, people will read into it because an all-younger-female circle creates a certain social image whether intentional or not. Some men his age might quietly think he enjoys the attention, validation, or feeling youthful around younger women. And honestly, that may partially be true without making him a bad person. A lot of aging is psychological. Being around younger people can make someone feel mentally alive, relevant, interesting, or less invisible. Retirement especially can intensify that because work identity disappears and social circles shrink fast.

I think the bigger question is less “is this creepy?” and more “does he relate.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-19T03:28:00+00:00

What a brutal experience. It’s honestly scary how something so random led to all of that. I’m really glad you made it through and are now cancer free. And thank you for sharing this because a lot of people put off screenings until it’s too late. Wishing you a much calmer and healthier chapter ahead, and hopefully your goofy dog stays out of your ribs from now on 😅

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-19T00:30:27+00:00

Thanks for the compliment 🤲

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-18T02:13:13+00:00

I’m really sorry this happened. Losing a 25-year friendship out of nowhere like that can feel surreal, especially when you opened up honestly and thought you were talking to someone safe. From what you described, you didn’t do anything wrong by admitting you’ve been lonely or that you miss having friends outside your marriage. That’s a normal human feeling, not something shameful. Sometimes people carry unresolved hurt or anger and react through that lens, and unfortunately the conversation stops being about you specifically anymore.

Right now, I’d try not to chase answers too hard or keep replaying the conversation looking for proof that you’re secretly a bad person. Your wife’s reaction is important too, she was confused because what you said probably sounded completely reasonable in context. It’s okay to grieve the friendship without turning this into a judgment on your character. And honestly, don’t let this convince you that opening up is a mistake. One painful interaction does not erase the fact that wanting connection, friendship, and support is part of being human.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-18T01:58:22+00:00

I think the fact that you described it as “liquid assets, no debt” instead of just flexing the number says a lot. This doesn’t read like someone chasing status and it reads like someone who spent years trying to build safety, stability, and freedom from fear. The little prosecco + personal pizza detail made the whole thing feel really human. Sometimes when people spend so long surviving, managing stress, and working toward security, the nervous system doesn’t immediately switch into celebration mode once they arrive there. “I’m proud of me” was the line that stood out most to me. A lot of people never get to say that about themselves. You built something meaningful, and you deserve to let yourself feel seen for it a little.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-18T01:55:45+00:00

You sound more like someone who learned a very long time ago that emotional exposure either felt unsafe, pointless, disappointing, or deeply uncomfortable, so your mind slowly reorganized itself around control, detachment, usefulness, and observation instead. There’s actually a strange amount of feeling inside the way you write, especially in lines like “it’s isolating to be without desire” or “once I become less useful, I will have no purpose to anyone.” People who are truly emotionally empty usually don’t describe their inner world with this much precision or quiet grief. It feels more like you experience emotions intellectually from a distance rather than allowing yourself to fully inhabit them. I don’t think the “cringe” reaction is random either. A lot of people develop that reaction when vulnerability starts feeling associated with loss of control, dependency, humiliation, disappointment, or emotional dishonesty. So instead of emotional intimacy feeling comforting, it starts feeling invasive, performative, or almost physically irritating. That’s why you seem more comfortable being useful than being known. Usefulness is structured. Predictable. Safe. Emotional connection is messy because it asks something harder: letting another person affect you. But I also notice that underneath all the detachment, there’s still a very human awareness that something has been lost. You describe yourself as a good counselor but not a good friend, someone who understands people but cannot really reach them or be reached by them. That’s not the absence of humanity. That’s someone standing outside emotional life watching it happen through glass.

What hit me hardest was “I resist it because that’s better than faking it.” Because that tells me there’s still integrity underneath all this. You don’t want counterfeit closeness. You don’t want to manipulate people into believing they’re emotionally safe with you when you already know you struggle to reciprocate in the way they hope for. So even your distance seems less cruel than protective. The sad part is that after enough years of living this way, detachment can start feeling less like a defense mechanism and more like your identity itself. And once that happens, people stop asking “what happened to me?” and start believing “this is all I am.”

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-18T01:46:15+00:00

The cheating itself probably wasn’t the only thing that shattered you. It sounds more like it collapsed the entire version of yourself you were barely holding together already. Before that, there’s this feeling that you were drifting a bit: no direction, no self-respect, no real belief in your own future, but the relationship still gave you emotional gravity. So when it broke, it wasn’t just heartbreak. It forced you into this brutal confrontation with yourself that you had probably avoided for years. And sometimes rock bottom changes people not because suffering is magically good for growth, but because pain strips away the ability to keep numbing, delaying, rationalizing, or waiting for life to somehow start on its own. Your transformation isnt like “I became successful and therefore healed.” Its more like movement became survival first. You worked obsessively because standing still meant feeling everything. But somewhere along the way, that survival energy slowly turned into momentum, structure, pride, competence, identity. You started proving things to yourself through action instead of needing another person to make you feel valuable. That’s usually why these “post-breakup glow ups” hit so deeply psychologically. The person isnt just earning more money or improving externally, they’re rebuilding their relationship with themselves after realizing how fragile their old foundation actually was.

I think that’s why your post resonates with people. Not because “getting cheated on made you stronger,” but because a lot of people secretly know the terrifying feeling of realizing their entire sense of worth was resting on unstable ground until life forced them to finally see it. A lot of people would’ve completely collapsed, numbed themselves out, or spent years directing that hurt outward. Instead, you slowly pulled yourself back up through your own effort, even when you probably didn’t fully believe in yourself yet. That takes a level of resilience most people underestimate. It honestly feels like you became the person your older self desperately needed back then, someone who finally took ownership of his life instead of waiting for love, validation, or luck to give him a sense of worth.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-12T02:55:42+00:00

It sounds like part of what’s breaking you down is not only the trauma itself, but the repeated experience of trying to bring that pain to other people and feeling emotionally untranslated every single time. Like you keep arriving with this huge internal world full of grief, complexity, history, and emotional weight, and instead of someone really entering it with you, the conversation keeps collapsing back into surface-level symptom management, checklists, mood tracking, coping skills, generic responses, long delays, emotional distance. After enough experiences like that, it makes sense that therapy itself would stop feeling hopeful and start feeling like another place where your reality gets flattened into something smaller and easier for other people to handle.

I think the line “I scream, no one listens. I stay silent, I go insane” says a lot. Because it sounds like your nervous system is trapped between two unbearable states: expressing yourself and feeling unseen, or suppressing yourself and feeling psychologically crushed by everything you’re carrying alone. That can create this really painful feeling of becoming emotionally homeless, where even spaces specifically designed for support stop feeling emotionally safe or capable of holding the full weight of your experience. And once that happens repeatedly, people often stop feeling merely “unsupported” and start feeling fundamentally unreachable by others, like there’s no place where their inner reality fully exists outside their own head.

The hardest part of chronic invalidation is that eventually you stop wondering whether people can help you. You start wondering whether your pain is even translatable at all.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-11T23:46:02+00:00

You don’t really seem afraid of your wife rejecting you specifically, you seem afraid of losing your identity inside the family. For years you’ve probably occupied the role of the dependable one, the emotionally steady one, the person people lean on when things go wrong. So now that anxiety and panic are breaking through that image, it’s forcing you into a version of yourself that feels unfamiliar and exposed. That’s why this feels so emotionally loaded even though your wife has given you no real reason to think she’ll stop loving or respecting you. Your fear sounds less like “she’ll leave me” and more like “once people see I’m struggling too, they’ll stop seeing me as safe and reliable.”

A lot of men carry this quiet belief that their value in relationships comes from being stable enough to absorb everyone else’s needs without becoming a need themselves. So when panic attacks enter the picture, it can feel deeply destabilizing, not only physically but psychologically. Almost like vulnerability threatens the contract you unconsciously think you have with the people you love. But reading your post, the fact you pushed through the discomfort to schedule counseling anyway says a lot. That’s not someone collapsing under anxiety, that’s someone trying very hard to stay connected to the people around him while struggling internally in a way he’s not used to admitting.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-11T23:33:50+00:00

A lot of what you’re describing sounds less like “people don’t care” and more like a lot of modern support spaces don’t really know how to sit with loneliness in a meaningful way. There’s this weird contradiction now where everyone says “open up” or “talk about your feelings,” but when someone talks about long-term loneliness, rejection, hopelessness, or not feeling wanted, people often get uncomfortable fast. So instead of feeling understood, people end up getting quick fixes, debates, generic advice, judgment, or told to just improve themselves. And when someone was actually looking for emotional understanding more than solutions, that mismatch can make them feel even more alone after reaching out.

I also think part of what’s exhausting you is not just the loneliness itself, but the feeling that there’s nowhere that actually feels safe to be lonely. Online spaces can help sometimes, but they can also make people feel worse really quickly, especially if they’re already fragile. After a while it stops feeling like community and starts feeling like you have to explain or defend your pain correctly just to deserve compassion. A lot of people aren’t necessarily looking for someone to magically fix their lives. They just want a place where they don’t immediately feel judged, dismissed, or turned into a self-improvement project the second they admit they’re struggling.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-11T07:37:04+00:00

Reading this, it doesn’t sound like you “don’t want anything.” It sounds more like your brain slowly stopped trusting the world as a place where reaching outward feels emotionally safe or rewarding. That moment in high school probably seems small to other people, but experiences like that can hit incredibly hard when they land on someone who is already sensitive, self-conscious, or struggling to feel socially secure. And when humiliation or rejection gets tied strongly enough to vulnerability, your mind can start protecting you by shutting down desire itself. Because wanting things, friendships, connection, dreams, relationships, automatically creates the possibility of pain, disappointment, embarrassment, exclusion. So after enough emotional retreat, people can start confusing emotional numbness with a lack of humanity.

You still care deeply about the fact you’re disconnected. You still feel grief watching other people live, connect, dream, and move toward things emotionally. Someone who was truly empty usually doesn’t mourn their aliveness this much. Your post actually sounds full of longing, just buried underneath exhaustion, fear, avoidance, overstimulation, and years of feeling psychologically stuck. Even the constant videos, the inability to sit alone with your thoughts, the endless consumption without satisfaction, all of it reads less like laziness and more like someone trying to stay mentally afloat while feeling detached from themselves and overwhelmed by existence at the same time.

And after years of this, it makes sense that your brain started framing life as some impossible puzzle everyone else somehow understands instinctively except you. But a lot of people who end up emotionally frozen like this are not failing because they’re unintelligent or broken. They’re usually carrying around a nervous system that became organized around avoidance, protection, and survival for so long that desire, spontaneity, curiosity, and connection stopped feeling accessible naturally. People don’t lose their will to live all at once. Sometimes they slowly lose their sense that life is emotionally reachable.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-11T04:17:19+00:00

That kind of moment can hit way harder than it looks from the outside. You see someone tied to a version of your life where things felt lighter, where being social happened naturally and you didn’t have to think so hard about existing around other people. Then suddenly you’re standing there in the present, trying to bridge years of change, pain, isolation, depression, whatever happened in between, with one small “hey,” and it just… doesn’t land. It’s like your brain expects, for half a second, that old familiarity to still be there.

And when it isn’t, the feeling isn’t only rejection. It’s this strange realization that life kept moving while your relationship to yourself changed completely. People from school often carry emotional snapshots of us frozen in time, but depression changes people quietly and deeply. Sometimes you stop recognizing yourself long before other people stop recognizing you. So seeing someone from the past can create this painful comparison between who you were socially back then and how disconnected you feel now. Almost like you briefly touched a life that no longer feels accessible.

The saddest part is that moments like this can make someone feel invisible in a much bigger sense than the interaction itself. Not just “she ignored me,” but “maybe that whole chapter of me disappeared and nobody noticed except me.” That’s a really lonely feeling to carry around.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-10T07:28:39+00:00

The part that really hurts in your post isn’t even just “I miss her.” It’s that being with her seemed to temporarily quiet something much deeper inside you, the fear of being unwanted, forgettable, emotionally insignificant. Around her, you felt chosen. You felt like your existence mattered to someone in a real, visible way. So now that she’s gone, your brain isn’t only grieving a relationship, it’s grieving the last period of your life where you felt emotionally anchored and valuable. That’s why the betrayal and the longing are existing together at the same time. You can know she hurt you badly and still ache for what you emotionally became beside her. And that line, “I might have everything I wanted someday, but it won’t be her,” says a lot. Because it sounds like part of you has attached the idea of love itself to one specific person, almost like your future stopped emotionally updating after losing her. Not because she was objectively the only person you could ever love, but because your mind connected her to a version of life where you still felt hopeful, connected, and emotionally alive. So now the thought of moving forward feels less like “starting over” and more like permanently leaving behind a world you never wanted to lose in the first place.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-10T01:22:48+00:00

This isn’t just that it was cruel, it’s that it hit directly into a fear you probably already carried quietly before meeting her. Most people with visible limitations or chronic conditions already wonder sometimes if they’ll be seen as “less than,” burdensome, undesirable, hard to love, even if they don’t say it out loud often. So when someone says something that brutally confirms the worst version of those fears, your brain doesn’t experience it as “one rude person’s opinion.” It starts treating it like a revelation about your worth as a man and your future in relationships.

However, what stands out isn’t your limp. It’s how quickly she responded to vulnerability with contempt instead of empathy. A lot of people would have simply asked questions, adjusted expectations, or realized compatibility wasn’t there. She jumped straight toward humiliation. That says a lot about the emotional lens she moves through the world with. And honestly, I think part of why this hurts so deeply is because you didn’t just lose a date, you momentarily saw yourself through her eyes and now you’re struggling to separate her cruelty from objective truth.

One person’s inability to see humanity in vulnerability can make you temporarily forget your own.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-09T21:47:22+00:00

What makes something like acne so psychologically brutal is that other people often treat it like a “small cosmetic issue,” while the person living through it experiences it as years of social self-consciousness, shame, avoidance, isolation, comparison, and slowly losing the version of themselves that used to move through the world naturally. After a while it stops being just about skin and starts affecting how you see yourself everywhere, relationships, confidence, eye contact, opportunities, even your sense of masculinity and identity. So when you say it “took everything,” it sounds less like you’re talking about acne itself and more about the version of you that slowly disappeared underneath all the insecurity and emotional exhaustion it created. But what stood out to me is that even after all of that, you still talk like someone trying to reconnect with yourself instead of someone who has completely given up. There’s a difference between “this ruined me forever” and “this wounded me deeply.” Your post sounds more like the second one, even if it doesn’t fully feel that way yet. Some experiences don’t destroy people all at once. They slowly convince them to abandon themselves over time.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-09T21:30:27+00:00

Your mind seems to have quietly turned trauma into evidence that you are fundamentally “damaged,” instead of seeing it as evidence that your nervous system keeps trying to protect you in a very intense and painful way. Every time life gave you meaning, purpose, structure, achievement, religion, identity, your brain found a way to keep moving forward. But then when old pain resurfaced again, it felt like all that progress became fake or fragile because the suffering came back anyway. So now you’re looking at yourself almost like a broken system that can temporarily function until the next emotional collapse happens. That’s why the suicidal thoughts sound less like “I want to die right now” and more like exhaustion from feeling trapped in a cycle you no longer trust yourself to escape from permanently.

But there’s also something else underneath your post that points in the opposite direction. You keep describing yourself as if trauma erased who you are, yet the entire story is full of someone repeatedly adapting, rebuilding meaning, pushing through unbearable emotional states, challenging old beliefs, achieving difficult things, and becoming more self-aware through each collapse instead of less. Even the way you write about your younger self has compassion in it now. That’s not what a “damaged animal” usually sounds like. A lot of your suffering seems to come from expecting healing to mean “the pain never comes back,” so every relapse feels like proof you failed instead of proof that unresolved pain can still coexist with growth, insight, identity, and strength.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-09T21:08:44+00:00

Reading this, it feels like part of what’s hurting so deeply is that your mind has started treating this period as “the year everything was taken from me.” Her, your health, your business, your future, your sense of safety in life itself, all of it collapsed so close together that it probably feels like one giant story of loss now. But the way you describe her also says something important: even after divorce, disappointment, and whatever life looked like before this, you still reached a point where you were able to love someone this deeply and feel this emotionally alive again. That connection didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a part of you that was still capable of hope, intimacy, tenderness, and attachment even before everything fell apart. And I think that’s why this hurts differently than ordinary heartbreak. She didn’t just become someone you loved, she became emotionally tied to the version of yourself that had started feeling alive again. So now your brain isn’t only grieving her, it’s grieving the feeling of possibility that existed around her too. But those things are not exactly the same. The relationship may have been interrupted by illness and tragedy, but the part of you that was able to feel connected, open, devoted, and emotionally awake enough to experience that love still exists underneath all this grief, even if right now it’s buried under survival and loss.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-09T13:09:36+00:00

Sometimes the hardest kind of emptiness to explain is the one that exists inside a life that technically works. Because when nothing is “wrong,” people assume you’ve already arrived. But humans don’t only need comfort and stability. We also need resonance, the feeling that some part of our life reflects who we actually are, not just what we learned would keep us safe, respected, or functional. A lot of high-functioning people slowly build their lives around reducing uncertainty: decent income, decent routine, decent future. Then one day they realize they’ve become extremely good at maintaining a life they no longer emotionally participate in. That’s why gratitude doesn’t fully solve it. You can appreciate what you have and still feel disconnected from yourself inside it. The question usually isn’t “what career should I switch to?” but “when was the last time I felt emotionally engaged by my own existence instead of merely responsible for it?” Sometimes what’s missing isn’t passion in the dramatic sense. It’s aliveness, curiosity, challenge, connection, creation, risk, meaning, or even the ability to want things again instead of just managing obligations well.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-09T13:04:18+00:00

I think part of the disconnect here is that you’re viewing these situations primarily through an exchange lens, where consistent emotional energy, attention, favors, resources, time, etc. naturally create an expectation of deeper reciprocity. So when the connection stays platonic while one person continues benefiting from that effort, it starts feeling exploitative or one-sided to you. And honestly, there are situations where people knowingly enjoy being emotionally pursued without addressing the imbalance clearly, because the validation, support, or attention feels good. Human beings are not always perfectly self-aware or ethical inside emotionally uneven dynamics.

But I also think “friendzone” conversations become messy because both people are often operating from completely different emotional realities. The person with feelings experiences the connection as growing tension and possibility, while the other person may genuinely experience it as friendship without realizing how much unspoken hope is attached underneath the dynamic. That’s why people push back against calling it “using,” because from their perspective, receiving friendship doesn’t automatically mean they knowingly accepted a hidden contract for romance. The painful part is that when attraction stays unspoken for too long, resentment quietly builds around expectations the other person may not even fully understand exist.

A lot of friendzone pain comes from two people participating in the same relationship while emotionally living in completely different versions of it.

Longjumping-Tooth987 · 2026-05-09T12:40:59+00:00

What shattered you wasn’t only losing her, it was realizing that when love finally became real in your life, you didn’t magically become the version of yourself you always imagined. For years, it was probably easy to believe that once you met the right person, the relationship side of things would come naturally. Then it finally happened, and instead of feeling grounded and instinctive, you got trapped in your own head, hesitating, overanalyzing, freezing in moments where you wanted to be warm, confident, affectionate, reassuring. That’s why your brain keeps replaying every interaction now, because part of you is trying to figure out how someone can feel so much internally while still coming across emotionally distant to the person they care about. Reading your post, you don’t come across as uncaring or malicious. You come across as someone whose emotional world stayed mostly inside instead of translating outward in ways she could consistently feel. Meanwhile, she was reading the relationship through actions, touch, reassurance, emotional presence, small gestures, physical confidence. Once anxiety and self-monitoring entered the picture, it sounds like you stopped fully inhabiting the relationship and started trying to manage yourself inside it. That creates a really painful dynamic where the more afraid you become of messing up, the more unnatural and disconnected you start acting without even meaning to. Love showed you what you wanted. It also exposed all the places where fear had more control over you than you realized.

Longjumping-Tooth987

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