R22 thank you again for your concern. It’s R20, just reading this after coming back from a short bout of a nasty cold virus. I’ve had time to mull over your questions and comments, and it has made me think.
First let me apologise for my comment about elder lesbians being “angry bulls”. You’re right that they’ve had struggles I can’t imagine and that life has likely shaped their personalities that way. They’ve never been unkind to me directly or indirectly to my knowledge and that should be the metric I judged them on. Country habits. They do intimidate me, but I hope one day to at least find the courage to tell them to their face that I appreciate theirs.
As for your questions: I want to live and work as a writer/composer of lyrics - whether for stage, screen or my own personal projects I do not care. My goal is just to craft beautiful musical words and have people hear them, that’s it. I have always had a magnetic draw towards sung and spoken word and believe that is my path. Ideally I would also like to work with a small team of creators who are also friends, freelance, out of a small private place where I can have a dog and a girlfriend and drink whiskey in peace like any respecting lesbian wants. In five years (so, my early 30s) I’d love to be making enough money to live independent of my family and to choose projects/set my own hours, but I’m realistic enough to understand that might entail moving home a lot or renting a place. That said I would feel more secure owning property.
I was actually raised and schooled to be a humanities scholar and the expectation from my family is that I would lecture at universities and write academic books (my family are grasping middle class people, and I have the cliché smothering mother and neglectful/ignoring father). I attempted to follow the advised path for me and found it so unstimulating I almost failed out of University (hence I have a 2 year Theater Studies BA instead of a 4 year Classical History/Literature MA...). I wrote poems all the time until I hit 19. I became very depressed and overweight so I didn’t go to class or socialise at all in HS or college, meaning I can’t hit anyone up to crash on their couch as great as that idea is.
My brother lives with me and my parents but sometimes goes to stay in the next countywith his foreign gf in a small dorm. I could crash with them for a while but three’s kind of a crowd and it’s only a very temporary accommodation. The gf will probably stay with our family once she graduates. The nearest big cities to me are over an hour away by bus or train, with a couple of large towns closer by. I don’t drive (can’t pass the exam for some reason) so I rely on public transport, but as I live in England that isn’t too much of an issue.
Finally, as to the SA problems, I’ve just never really been a comfortable “joiner” or someone who liked having people around for close constant company. I had friends as a little kid and a young teen but only hung out with them to stop myself getting picked on even more by mean girls, like a buffer zone. I’ve never had an ‘after-school/work’ social life and I’ve never had friends who shared my interests. I post on several forums & besides DL to fulfil my social interaction needs, but I know I need and want more than that to be a complete human being. I was once given pills to regulate my moods in conjunction with birth control and it drove me suicidal, so I’m gonna have to pass on the tablets thanks. Therapy has also been a difficult fruitless experience for me, as even paying for psychologists to advise me has led to them calling me and my experiences “abnormal” or them telling me to “get out more” (they think I don’t know that?).
Overall I feel my problem is a disconnect between mind/intellect and the rest of my body/being. I know what my issues are and what I should do to resolve them objectively but my body & heart won’t follow through and do any of that.
Thanks for listening. This forum and the gay people on it have been a lifesaver to me for several years and have come through once more.