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I am very greatful to have found this site, and hope that I can at least get some advice. I am a 28-year-old single mother with a 6-year-old daughter who has an autistic spectrum disorder. She is high functioning and I don\'t believe she is any more difficult raising than any other child, she is just different. I do daycare in my home for 2 toddlers, and my daughter gets SSI which goes towards our rent. Growing up and in school I did terribly. I could never concentrate and suspect I have lived my whole life with ADD. My parents did not advocate for my education or get me any type of help, and I became very used to failure. I slept with a lot of guys when I was a teenager, which I feel was a way to get attention. Today I do my very best to be a good mother to my daughter, I advocate for her at school, make sure she is learning the material, and I praise her non stop. I am highly moral, which i feel has saved me. I have a boyfriend of 2 years now, although I am not in love with him, and even though he is a hard worker at work, he is lazy in every other aspect, and the only thing we agree on is sex. I am miserable. I hate myself and my life. All I do is sleep, eat, occationally bath, have sex once a week, and do only what is absolutely nessisary for my survival. I have absolutely no friends, but that is nothing new. Socially I am a bit retarded. I don\'t know how to make or keep friends, how to talk to people, or if I am even interesting at all. I usually keep to myself. I have made a very good impression on some men back when I used to date, when I was thinner and the posibility of sex was there, but aside from potencial mates, I never make friends. I had one female friend that I was bonded to in my life, and that was when I was about 11-12. I love animals but the ones I have I am not a good owner to, and because of that they bring me more stress than joy. I wish I could say that I am recently depressed, but it has been this way all my life. I am messy, unmotivated, sad, and I just can\'t seem to get the energy to do anything. Sometimes I have these spurts of energy where I will clean house, or want to go out and sit in a cafe and read, or even go out to dinner or a movie with my boyfriend, but that hardly ever happens and it doesn\'t last. Most of all right before my period I am depressed for days, so low that I just want to sleep or die, but my daughter keeps me going. I hate every aspect of my life and myself, and breathing even seems hard. I just want to sleep and sleep. Sometimes I emagine how it would be if I did not have a child, and then I could just become an alcoholic and drink myself into an oblivion. Drinking and sex always made me momentarily okay, but I don\'t drink now that I have a child, and the fatter I get the less attractive I feel, and because I don\'t think my boyfrined could any longer find me attractive, having sex just doesn\'t seem that fun. When I was younger I was very attractive. It is possible that I felp my body was all I had to offer. Now I don\'t even have that. I just don\'t know what to do. Although I would not kill myself, every day I just feel like life is to hard to live, it\'s too hard to get up, it\'s too hard to pay my bills, check the mail, walk the dog, do the laundry, etc. Life is just too hard and I am just too sad, so sad, and I don\'t know what to do. I have no help from anyone, and no health insurance. My question, of course, is what in the world am I to do so that I can just feel like a human being? I don\'t feel human. I can\'t even believe that other people function the way they do, it just seems so foreign to me.

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