I "worked so hard" in therapy, for decades on and off, and had little choice but to continue the process and the "search" and the unraveling on my own after my last T terminated me (she didn't have the "emotional resources" to continue with me = I was too much for her ) and have been getting close to being able to accept and tolerate the core feeling that "Nobody notices, cares, wants or understands me" as a basic state. I have had all kinds of defenses and tactics, including achievement and people-pleasing at different points in my life, to compensate for that, and to get other people to approve of me even when I can't.

It sounds from your signature line like you might have experienced something like that? -- that I did not really count to anybody else, and to live in a world like that - is not worth it. As you said, I've been this way since I was a little girl -- not that I was that aware of it, I was doing the compensating things, because survival impulses kept me going, I guess. And little to no awareness of the sorrow. I still have trouble with that one. Can one mourn in loneliness, without other people around? Seems to me like, no, I can't, I just numb out.

Fortunately, I do have some other people in my life -- including here -- although I can't feel them well (yet). But I do feel a dilemma of that's how I have been -- AND maybe there's another way to be -- sometimes. Like, feet in two different worlds, sometimes.

Maybe in that other world there is happiness and things worth living for? I don't know, don't know if it's possible to get there, either. Just gotta keep on going, won't know if I don't try. Not to say that's easy sometimes. But, like you, I decided a while back I wasn't going to take action on the alternative.