>>7802707I don't know which tone to take with you, anon. I seem to have lived your life -- My mother was a drunk escort, multiple potential fathers with their own drug problems -- Step parents for a season -- always expected to be a failure etc etc. I'm in my 40s now. Decided in my 20s that if sucide was a consideration because no one wanted me no matter how hard I tried that I'd live life how I wanted since it was mine anyway.
I'm a successful (by my definition) business owner and land lord. I don't have a dad bod but am aesthitcally pleasing, and I can do what i want when I want after years of saying that's what I'm going to do. Does that change anything with other people? Nope. I was alienated by the friends I did have because my success in their eyes was an affront to their choice to live life their own way.
You sound like a man confronted with a potential for growth but so in need of validation from the place you're growing from that you'll be paralyzed to move. To externally focused on the reactions and acceptance of others.
Make YOU want you. That will be enough. Take no excuse to divert. Walk through your life achieving your goals without apology or regret. Just do so with the intent to negatively impact others as little as possible. Do this and you'll live your life out of the world you're in, into a world of contemporaries. Eventually you'll grow from them as well for a multitude of reasons, but you'll learn that life isn't static nor is it about roots and learning to live with the hand you're dealt. It's about choise and making sure that everything in your life as well as the way you live it is as much a choice you don't regret as possible.