AphelionSep 21, 2023
I wonder if other ND people out there had the same weird experience I did where they...just couldn't imagine a future for themselves when they were young. Not as bleak as 'I don't want to have a future' or as insipid as 'I don't know what I want to be when I grow up'. Just like...no existing patterns or models or examples of how to live a life seemed applicable, so your future was just impossible to picture?
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@a_aphelion
Kinda maybe? I think I just have difficulty thinking about future scenarios except in practical/logical terms so I could never imagine where life could take me?

Very young, I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. But that was a "I want to learn more about dinosaurs" and absolutely not a "This is a career I can picture for myself." This has never changed.

Cassie asks if I think we'll be together forever, and I say "probably?", and that's because I just can't picture breaking up.

It sounds like you're more talking about there not being set examples of the things you might have wanted to do. But maybe there's some overlap here with my... lack of imagination?

Sep 21, 2023 at 7:59pmWeb
Show threadTealSep 22, 2023

@ambly @a_aphelion so there is a psychological phenomenon of "sense of a foreshortened future" which I definitely had. Without any specific plans or reason just expecting that I would not make it long into adulthood because ?? that's just the way things are?

But also I did not have any roadmaps around me. The most successful adults I knew personally were sporadically employed tradies, a bank teller, a friend's mum who got enough of a workers comp payout from working the Coles checkouts that they could put down a deposit on a small town house. Noone in my family had a full time job until I was in highschool. None of them had finished highschool.