Dispite his posts, he seems to care about me but shows it in a way I do not fully understand.

"Tough Love", you know? :-)

I wanted to remind you about what you promised (AFAICR) last winter (or fall?), after Mike Huber (I think it was) told you that you had to stop *thinking* about all the old shit you've been through -- like, "that's history, let it go" -- and how in order to do that, you first had to stop *talking* about it all the time; how that would only remind you of it, so you *couldn't* very well stop thinking about it.

That was when you switched .sigs a couple of times in rapid succession, and (again, IIRC) adopted your current one. But then, recently, you began whining -- sorry, but there's no other word for it -- again, recently, in the *bodies* of your posts above that .sig. That's what I wanted to shock you out of... And here's hoping it worked! (And yes, frankly, I *could* have been even "meaner" -- quite a lot so -- so that "threat" about posting worse was actually quite serious. Let's hope I won't have to revive it, mmmkay?)

Lastly, to be perfectly honest, I didn't post that *only* for your sake, but also for my own: I was, quite frankly, genuinely tired of reading your seemingly incessant whines in pretty much each and every thread. Sure, to me it may have been just a minor everyday annoyance, not the psychological self-undermining it was to you... But, hey, there's a *lot* of us reading these fora, and only one of you having your specific problems. Bit unfair burdening all of us with your remembered troubles, when we all knew all about them already, wasn't it? So to that extent, it was *genuine* "mean-spirited egotism" on my part...

But, hey, if that was a part of helping you decide to go for even menial retail jobs ("video rewinding", IIRC?) -- which, if I'm judging the collective mood of IWeThey correctly, most of us here seem to think is your best option right now -- then hooray for mean-spirited egotism, right?

He gets things out of my posts that I didn't know were there.

<humble> Yah, well, it's just a gift I have...</humble> ;^>

Well, no, seriously: Maybe they weren't even there at all, I could have been reading more into it than there really was... Then again, maybe not. The main thing is, it got *you* thinking about your situation in ways you apparently hadn't before -- so *something* (hopefully!) good came of it, anyway.

I'm trying to be positive about it, but this is hard to do.

We know it is... But keep working on it!