Have had a rough life and need to vent. I do not know how to cope anymore

I feel like my life has been one trauma after another. My father was very physically abusive to my mother and I. I have never developed that father daughter bond that I hear is so important. I also have PTSD from it, although that has improved :). At 15 I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. Just recently I have been diagnosed with OCD. I have tried so many medications throughout my life, but the side effects has been so terrible for me. I wish greatly that I could find a proper medication to help me. My grandmother who helped raise me was very religious. I remember her taking me out on the corner of the street to hold up signs to protest certain things... Growing up I always felt dirty. Like god was disappointed in me. I grew up with the fire and brimstone Christianity, which was pretty hard on the self esteem (I am no long religious). At 15 I was raped by my best friends brother. This boy started to tell the school he had slept with me. Instead of reporting it, I told everyone he was lying and making up stories. I knew that know one would believe the truth, and I just wanted it to go away. But my best friend didn't believe me when I said, "We never had sex." So she started to bully me. She stole my journal out of my locker and had another girl beat me up in the hallway. The end of my junior year I left home. I had no place to go so I lived in my car or with boys. Taking showers in the school locker room or the gym. I would finish class and then go straight to work. I didn't get to go to prom, because I couldn't afford a dress or get time off. I feel cheated. I was so extremely poor my entire life I never got to do anything. I enrolled in nursing school right after I graduated, because I wanted to do the "right thing in life". It was a crappy little community college, because even though I got good grades I still couldn't afford to go to a University. But still I was so excited. Unfortunately, nurses eat their young. I'm a perfect target. I'm short, shy and quiet. My nursing teacher singled me out. I got good grades, but she called me into her office one day and asked me if I had a learning disorder. She told me I could do better then B's and I should be ashamed of myself for not working harder. At the hospital she berated me so badly in front of one of my patients, the patient refused to let my teacher back in her room. In my last semester of nursing school I brought some complaints I had to the nursing director. The next day the director had a meeting with my class to discus the problems of the program. She told everyone that had problems with teachers or the school were pathetic and weak. She then brought my name up in front of the class. I broke down in front of everyone, but I held my ground and told her the problems were not with me. A few months last after graduating I become one of the only women to pass boards on the first try :) But I feel completely cheated of the "college experience". Instead of hanging out with friends I was working and studying again. I was in a nursing home telling a family that their mother died at the age of 22.  I just wish I had more good memories between all the hardships. I've tried so hard to better myself and not be a victim by going to school and not falling into drugs to ease the pain. But I am so angry. A part of me feels like I'm just waiting for the next bad thing to happen to me in my life. 

What are ya - a f**kwit magnet?! ;-) "Happy people are nice people / Nice people are happy people. Miserable people are nasty people / Nasty people are miserable people." Simple, very true, life rule. Those people were miserable.... jealous... guilty... confused, bothered, unable to cope with their own problems and challenges or keep bouncing back like you so patently could, and as a result left feeling inadequate stood up against you (back to jealous).... What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Cliched, but true. So how strong and powerful do you think that whole rollercoaster ride (in, frankly, record time, rather than spaced out like other people's misfortunes and victimisation experiences tend to) has left you? We're talking Arnie proportions by now, surely? Good memories are all well and good, but people don't grow all that much when subjected to non-stop sunshine with very little rain. They tend to be a bit dry, stymied and stunted and having to learn to cope with hardship without the prior requisite strength and bouncing-back practise already under their belts (unlike you). Yours has been a more tropical first life phase (and note even cloudy, rainy or thunderous days contain enough 'sunshine' for growth and greater height and strength to effect). I'd have thought, considering you've had such a non-stop, overloaded in-tray, that (according to the usual way these things go) you were now right on cue for an equally lengthy period of sunshine. Switching analogies: if life is a rollercoaster (and it is), and you've just spent years on a largely downwards, at times scary and disturbing, loop-the-looping trajectory, the next part of the track will inevitably be anywhere between upwards and level. Look at the clue held in the fact your mind finally has THE ROOM AND TIME to be 'waiting' for anything. Doesn't that tell you something? It tells me you're nervous BECAUSE things have gone uncharacteristically quiet. Unusually quiet, in this, your context, ist gut. :-) Inarguable proof: [1] You were one of the only women to pass boards on first ever try. [2] You were capable of handling what normally even most adult-professionals can't cope with, namely, dealing with the deceased's family. (So that's a "Gotcha!" ;-)) Anyway, even if something negative *does* happen at any point, I'd have thought with YOUR mental muscles following so much 'gymwork', whatever it is will be taken fairly in your stride, considering it won't - CAN'T - feel very impactful in comparison to everything that's gone before. Stands to reason, yes? So, really, why worry? But, still... actions (sustained peace and quiet enough to even anticipate and worry to begin with) speak louder. I realise it's difficult to see all that's happened to you so non-stop one after the other in a positive light. But that's only because you haven't quite hit the point where the pay-cheques and dividends start flying in (bar that exam result), as in, What goes around comes around. They will. Said sudden and protracted, 'uncomfortable' and 'discombobulating' stillness says so. As for the years-long, pent-up anger that's now insisting on barging its way out of 'the wrong holes'... They say that in space, nobody can hear you scream. Well, in this space, they damn well can. Scream away. Get it all out of your system. As long as you use asterisks in any expletives, you have my full permission to go into full detail and/or really let rip with a positive tirade...for example, telling (here) each, in turn, of these miserable (- literally) little f**kwits you encountered exactly what you think of them and what you'd like to do to them, given half the chance, as befitting punishment or taste of own medicine (poison, more like!). And then once you've done that to the point of purged, you can begin the next, end phases of the whole grieving process, namely, pitying them combined with being however much disdainful of them, after which comes Acceptance. I mean, for but one example, think about just how unhappy one would have to be to so readily turn on one's best friend like that? Have YOU ever felt so miserable, angry, frustrated, resentful and envious that you couldn't prevent yourself from taking it out, let alone to that serious degree, on someone else, basically acting that nastily, even to someone you'd known or spent meaningful time with or over whom you had power and responsibility? I'm betting, NO. What 'flavour' OCD have you got, by the way? PS: The University of Life (experience thus savvyness, strength and wisdom) beats the human-made version (theory only) hands-down any day! Or as my dear ol' dad used to say, 'No experience is bad experience'.

...Forgot to mention: the fact you're ready to vent is the other major sign that your mind recognises you've hit the long calm/safe period after the long storm. It's the psych version of when you're carrying a tray of expensive crystalware and a bee or wasp stings you. You don't make a sound or react in any way. CAN'T AFFORD TO. Not until you've succeeded in setting the tray down. ...and then and ONLY then is when you go, "Aaaaaaaaargh!" and start flailing about. Like you say, you now just need to vent it all out. After all, what did human beings do prior to modern medicines being available? "Mind over matter. (...I don't mind and they don't effing matter.)" ;-)