FRYD

“Enter[ing] the dating pool” puts way too much pressure on the situation. I just go out looking to meet interesting people and make friends. Eventually I’ll meet someone where things feel different and we’ll both want to get to know each other more than most of the people we meet. That’s how I met my current partner four months ago.

That said, we did meet while going to events in our local kink scene. That’s a more unique environment where everyone understands that conversations have a high likelihood to be sexual and any kind of judgmental attitude is frowned upon by the community. It makes it way easier to be comfortable and confident in a conversation.

Dating apps are evil. I avoid them like the plague. Yeah it may feel “safer” to swipe through strangers on an app, but you’re really just trading your mental health (and whatever information the corpos collect) for the illusion of safety. Going out and putting yourself out there is hard and scary, but it gets easier over time and the results are much better.

I was in a similar situation a few years ago. I was in a psych ward and my caseworker wanted to send me to a shelter instead of going back to my family. At the time I worried that would just make everything worse, but I’ve been questioning whether I should’ve done it or not for a while since everything got worse anyway. Obviously I don’t know your whole situation, but sometimes people are just unstable and will get worse with your influence or not.

As for how to hide it, I don’t know exactly what kinda wording you could use to talk about things. You could just avoid getting into detail about what your family actually does and just focus on how they make you feel.

I rarely find myself in this scenario, but depending on the situation I’ll either nod along and wait to add any points I have or will cut them off with a question.

Everyone I know is struggling in life. It seems almost impossible to get anything good going. Take things one step at a time and try to find a good strategy for managing upkeep on whatever needs it. Focus on improving a single thing you can do in the short term. Outside of that, I’d strongly recommend getting a union job if you don’t have employment figured out yet. A stable income with good job security is much easier to plan around even if it seems like it isn’t enough money.