Since I've been posting here these past few days, I should probably introduce myself. Let's see, where to begin, where to begin...

I'm 37. I was born and raised in the southern US, with all the emotional baggage that entails from growing up in that era. My parents had a messy divorce when I was about 11 or 12, and I ended up being passed back and forth between them, becuase neither wanted me. I have a brother who's about 10-12 years older than me, and I would have been the third-youngest of five siblings, had the other three not been stillborn (they were all, I was told, born strangled by their umbilical cords).

You'll note that many of the details are "about"s...for whatever reason, much of my childhood memories are either fuzzy or simply not there. I do remember bits and pieces, but I'd rather forget them. For example: My mother's tendency to want to beat me with metal clothes hangers (but never visibly, that wouldn't do. We were upper middle-class, you see, and being seen in Neiman-Marcus or at the country club with welts and bruises just Wasn't Done.) Or my mother's bitter feud with her mother, my maternal grandmother, the only grandparent I ever knew -- and probably the only member of my family who I ever unconditionally loved. She died in a house fire in Atlanta. We were told this by my mother's brother two years after it happened. She used to love lilacs, and I'd pick them for her from our yard. I spent the rest of the time in the willow tree out back, or in my room reading, building things out of cardboard boxes and Legos, or playing with my action figures. I was a fat child, so I never really had many friends, and going outside to play was more an exercise in humiliation and sadism than enjoyment.

My father was an extreme alcoholic, and he is who I ended up living with. He ended up remarrying a woman who had what could only be described as some form of undiagnosed mental illness, as she would go on periodic rages, complete with various weapons, with me as the target. My father's drinking got to the point that she had control of most of the family finances, and she had him committed. As soon as he was out of the house, she called the police and had me evicted at the age of 16.

My father felt guilty about that, and offered to pay for my schooling, so I got accepted to, then readily flunked out of, two fairly decent schools. I spent some time doing a lot of drugs and eating very little, until I joined the Army, and ended up in what was then West Germany, in a combat unit (I was the only person I knew who went through basic training and ended up gaining, not losing, weight).

I wasn't very happy in the military...I'd wanted a job doing something with computers, but I didn't want to commit that long. I'd started cutting several years earlier, and I started getting severely depressed. My sergeant noticed, and I got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and was given an honorable discharge (thankfully, this was a month before my unit was activated for the first Gulf War. Mine was one of the first units called up).

So, not knowing what else to do, and having been screwed out of my GI Bill money, I took out a ton of student loans, and ended up getting a B.S. in experimental cognitive psychology, then my Master's degree in the same field. I dropped out of my Ph.D work when I discovered that 1) nobody I knew was getting work in the field and universities that had positions opening up due to retirement or death were closing those positions rather than re-hiring, and 2) my dissertation proved that the founder of the very small field I'd decided to study had faked the results in his seminal works.

Since I'd made money throughout college doing computer work, I started doing it full-time. I'd met and had been living with a woman during grad school, and we moved out to California together. She was also on medication and in therapy for various disorders (whee!), though we seldom had problems between us regarding each others' illnesses. After almost 10 years together, and after having bought a home (in Silicon Valley, that means "after having bought a $500k condo"), we decided to get married. In hindsight, I think we were both hoping it would save a relationship that had been in toruble for several years, because we decided to get divorced three months later.

The paperwork is being officially filed this week, though we've been separated physically since February, and have sold the home.

I spent a lot of time trying to make as much money as possible, and ended up as a CxO of a well-known consulting firm here in California, making a nice six-figure salary. That ended shortly after 9/11, which put the final nail in the coffin of the tech market crash. That made me re-evaluate my career choices, and I ended up taking a $100k paycut to work for a very cool nonprofit I can't name but everyone's heard of, and there's been at least one movie made about it. That ended when management started getting silly and I initiated a labor dispute over overtime pay.

After that, I realized I was burned out on my chosen profession, and decided to try a career change. It went well for a while, then fizzled out. So I spent some time as an independent consultant, until I landed my current job, which is another career change, working for someone who invented a crucial part of the Internet.

I make enough to live comfortably, pay my bills, have a few toys, and generally live a life many people would envy if they heard it described.

Yet I'm miserable. Nothing from my childhood or early adulthood is resolved, I'm emotionally stunted, socially distant, physically blah, and on occasion just downright irritating.

I mentioned in a post elsewhere on this site that I almost succeeded in killing myself late last year, was involuntarily committed, and have been in and out of therapy and on various medications for the past several years to treat whatever the diagnosis-du-jour happens to be.

All I know is that I'm deeply unhappy most of the time, when I'm not unhappy I'm very driven (e.g., spending sprees, sexual urges, etc. etc. etc.), I have some rather irrational fears (e.g., taking unfamiliar routes to places, or going unfamiliar places at all, being among strangers, meeting strangers, etc.), some annoying habits (checking for my keys about 8 times, for example), and various other things that all add up to any of a number of possible diagnoses in the DSM-IV (is it still IV? It was III, then IIIR, while I was in school).

Thanks for the introduction Sifr.
I know we have already met on the boards, but welcome aboard anyway.

agreed - nice to meet you officially:)

same here. Nice to understand who you are better. I hope you stick around until some things are resolved.