A sort of Epiphany as a 'Toy Collector'

When I was young I didn't have any friends, not one, including cousins. Early on my family was fairly stable, not rich, but slightly above average. I think this made nearly every other kid in the neighborhood despise me even when I made numerous attempts to include everyone in what I was doing and share everything I had (which resulted in a lot of things getting stolen). The earliest memories I have involve a group of three guys, two of them my cousins, making a point to jump me all through headstart and kindergarten. My parents were the type of people that always thought there was someone in the trees waiting to abduct me (or some idiotic older kids waiting to surround me, and yes, it happened a few times) so I couldn't really go outside except on rare occasions or when people were around. Aside from doing that they also bought me whatever figures I wanted and eventually a Super Nintendo so...a large portion of my life was dedicated to "me" time. Even when I moved to a better school outside of town there was still something off, I was still reserved and made very few attempts to reach out (first few years of rejection and hate had their affect) and always waited to get home and get back to my stuff. I remember there were a lot of deaths in the family when I was young including a cousin I lived next to (that hated me) who I loved visiting. I remember his parents giving his old figures to me as a gift. My dad's father left the family when my dad was 14 and when I was a factor he rarely visited but made more of an attempt so he could be with his grandkids. He would always give me almost $100 worth of figures in an attempt to get on my good side (I remember getting a lot of SBC Irwin figures in one trip, Toonami DBZ was right in the middle of the Namek Saga and somehow I wound up with a SS3 Goku and had no idea what to do with it). Unsolicited life story aside, it goes without saying that I loved figures (and games).

When I graduated high school my parents were in major debt and I couldn't go to college. For a while I gave up on life for numerous reasons and at some point I started selling things in my closet foolishly thinking I could raise enough money to escape. I came across the DBZ stuff, looked on eBay to get an idea of how much I could get, saw a Jakks SS Gogeta I had never seen before and absolutely had to have and now here I am four years later questioning all my decisions. I've learned how deep my parents are in debt (over $22,000, give or take, and that's just the amount I've seen, for all I know it could be higher) and I like to think I can fix that, I like to think I can raise the money to pull them out of it so we can start moving up again. I can't and they've given up. I've finally dug myself out of the pit of depression I was in but I'm still not really going anywhere AND I'm STILL buying figures that I don't need and...I don't know. Nothing really changed over time, I still have very few friends (except for the people that consider me a friend here and I absolutely love having that) which means I have no social life to speak of or any reason to go out and waste money on other frivolous pursuits...hitting bars, going to clubs, driving around and taking in the sights, going to stores to find random stuff to buy, vacations, other boring things that people do to burn time and money...I have no reason to do any of that. That said I feel it is and has been perfectly fine that I've dedicated so much time to collecting figures. I could have kept doing what I was doing in high school, I could be taking whatever pills I can get my hands on, smoking, and drinking today and living like a leech until I move to a harder drug or die young...and once again, all that in mind, I start to think it's perfectly natural for me to just be a collector since collecting gives me a little happiness in a world that offers me very little...and at the same time something tells me it isn't. It's like...something insists on telling me that all the things I've decided are meaningless actually DO have meaning and if I don't do them or find some real friends quick I may never feel good again, I may always be stuck somewhere between neutral, angry, and depressed...but I STILL can't sell anything. Once I get my hands on something I start to think "well...maybe later" or "maybe something crazy will happen and I'll get all the money I need and I'll regret selling all this"...I don't know, I can't figure it out no matter how much I obsess over it.