@RainbowzebraI can understand how working with children would be such a mixed emotion for you. I have a picture of biological brother and myself together when we met for the first time a couple of years ago. After that first meeting, i stopped getting any contact back from him which is so painful. I look at that photo every day and it is still the best memory of my life and now one of the most painful. I thought about taking it down, but as much as that pain is there, I don't want to forget the good memory as that means such a lot to me. So yeah... sometimes things in out lives can be a source of great joy and great pain, but I think the joy part is worth it, for me anyway.
It was the pain of being alone for so long that drove me to do something just about 13 years ago that I wouldn't have even done the day before, or wouldn't even do again! That was putting a profile up on a online dating site. I knew I would never contact anyone, but figured putting a profile up... well someone might see it and like it. almost 3 years late I was about to give up after so little success. I figured I my current subscription was about to expire in a week and that was going to be it for me. Then I got a message from a woman and we are still together 10 years late. I know! It amazes me as well!
The point of my story is sometime our pain can get to such a level we do things we would, in any other circumstance, consider impossible to do. So maybe harnessing your pain in this way may help to force you to do something equally impossible for you. Even something a bit easier, like getting your citizenship. Any change you can make, even a small one, may snowball into something much larger and hopefully happier for you.
You don't need to explain to me about how difficult it is to trust people and be open and honest with them. Anyone how experiences this know exactly how difficult and isolating it is. I'm not sure there ever is "a right moment" other than when you need it to be. But having said that, it's really so disheartening when you reach out to someone and don't hear back. That voice in my head will then start saying "I told you so! I told you to stop bothering people."
You're right, that trust is so hard tog et back once it has been destroyed for whatever reason in our lives. But I found reaching out to people I didn't know while 'hiding' (awful way to put it, but it made me feel safe) behind a keyboard was my first step in learning to reach out and talk to people about stuff. So I would suggest that you keep doing what ever feels safe for you now and hopefully you can slowly start to regain a little bit of that trust and start to be able to use that to trust people closest to you like I eventually (kind of) managed to do. I started 14 years ago, and it's still a massive work in progress but as I mentioned before, even quite quickly in the process it lead to at least one massively positive change in my life. Hopefully you can find a way to do something similar. Reaching out here like you've done, reminds me a lot of my first online attempts all those years ago.
