I have struggled with depression and anxiety all of my life. I’ve had the feeling that things were going to end with crushing dissapoinment and tears. I have been able to get past that and stumble through life because there has always been some goal to reach toward. Finishing high school, college, moving out of parents, finding a significant other, getting a good job, etc.
There was always an underlying assumption that once x happens my real life will begin, and I will rise above my hang-ups. If I’m being honest that has been true sometimes, but in many important ways it hasn’t happened. I am still full of anxiety, self-doubt, self-loathing, laziness, immaturity, shyness, an inability to focus or pay attention to details, and more. I can’t keep up, time moves too fast.
I’ve made it far enough in life that I do have an ok job but with every year it becomes clear that I am not respected and my work and opinions are not valued. I have a partner who in many ways improved my life. But after 5 years I think she is holding me back as a person. She is an alcoholic and has many problems of her own. I spend more time worrying about her and making sure she doesn’t get upset than I do focusing on improving myself.
Now I’m about to turn 40 and the realization that this is it is speeding at me like a train. This really is who I am. I’m probably never going to be able to change. I really am not a particularly good person, in every possible way. I am a dissapoinment and failure to myself and everyone who knows me more than a few minutes.
I’m not suicidal but I think about it every day. What will probably happen is the strain will get so bad that I’ll either have a stroke or snap and leave my job and partner and become homeless or something. I can barely face my family and friends because I am so ashamed. I just don’t know what will prevent some inevitable terrible end for me. Every day I struggle to complete tasks and interact with others under the crushing knowledge that I am a failure and a fuck up.
Anyways. Back to work.
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Turning 39 here. Don’t want to just say something typical and good vibes oriented (although that is my natural reaction, or at least it was… saw it pointed out elsewhere that it’s annoying).
Now as I write this I’m not sure what to say. A ton resonated with me. I really hope you figure out something that has eluded us both. At the very least, your post is something I think I understand.
Thank you
There was always an underlying assumption that once x happens my real life will begin, and I will rise above my hang-ups.
I think most of us* think this way, and have to un-learn this, since it’s flawed thinking.
We “rise above our hangups”, by continually working to be better people. We never fully accomplish this - just like physical exercise never ends, so too do emotional, mental, and spiritual exercise.
*When I say “most of us”, I mean practically everyone has to unlearn this at some point.
Therapy. If you’re not doing it, start. CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy will likely help a lot, given the phrasing you use (such as above). If nothing else, go find a layman’s intro to CBT, such as “Your Erroneous Zones” by Wayne Dyer (a few bucks on Amazon, it’s from about 1976). I think you’ll see yourself in the first few pages.
As a bit of perspective - many thinkers over the eons have posited that our lives can be viewed in phases, and that we all more or less experience similar patterns throughout life (childhood, teens, young adult, etc, etc).
I’m not saying you can make this go away, just that the only thing any of us can do is continually work on such things.
But please get therapy - a doc will have better insight as to what can help you best.
Thank you for replying.
I agree with what you said about life being a learning experience we don’t master. My choice of wording was poor, because I never thought that my problems would magically go away after achieving x. More like, I expected to have overcome or learned to deal with my hang-ups by the time I got to x. I’m a grown ass man with the dysfunctional mind of a 13 year old.
I downloaded a copy of that book you recommend. I’ll give it a read.
Brother I feel this.
I’m between jobs at the moment and realizing I’m in another dying industry (software qa) after being a customer service agent which was after my network administration which was after my classical performance career. Everything I’ve found myself in has either been nepotized or outsourced and frankly I honestly miss the monotony of meetings and bullshit. It’s arduous in the moment but they served good markers in time in hindsight. I made the mistake of mistaking the friendly faces for friendships.
If it’s anything it took me like 8 years of vaping to realize I needed to quit. When I met my wife I didn’t want her to suffer the cloud life bullshit and she was my absolute rock. Idk if you ever had the talk about doing it for something but even if it’s for your pet I’m hoping you have something to put a pin on to support that endeavor.
Nobody has answers and I certainly the least but I’m glad you’re here.
Change the rules.
Within the current rules, you already know it is rigged for you to lose, right?
Therefore, CHANGE the rules, please.
Grab leverage that “moves the fulcrums”, & make that into a survival-habit.
The book “Corps Business: the 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines” is a book I recommend to all new parents.
I loaned it to a hippie-mom friend, & she wished she’d read it years ago.
Mom loved it.
Please invest-in & read that book, & ask your wife to read it too.
It wasn’t written by a Marine, Freedman, a senior Forbes editor called up the USMC & asked them if they’d mind if he observed them & wrote on it… they, being Marines, realized they could learn something, so the assigned people to keep him alive, & let him do his thing…
Kegan & Lahey ( researchers ) wrote “Immunity to Change”, which is on our unconscious-mind’s fighting off of adapting, of protecting dysfunction.
It isn’t a joyus evening romp through literature, but it is important as hell & I’d force high-school kids to read it, if I could. NOT knowing the stuff in that book costs our lives, our populations, immensely.
Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright’s research I haven’t read. Their condensed-version of it “Tribal Leadership” I have read, & strongly recommend ( I’d require all high-school kids read this one, too! )
It is on the 5 culture-LEVELS, or social-process-levels.
They’re mistakenly calling them stages, but stages is like caterpillar/butterfly: they’re irreversible, whereas culture-process is levels, & one can get bashed down again, after being in a higher one…
Please read these books, & get everyone in your circle to read them, if you can, because the set of you are more powerful than you-the-individual are.
I had to do it alone: nobody’s going to be close to me, ever, & that’s fine: suits my life, might as well adapt to my life’s nature, eh?
( :
Please read Schneider’s book “Lead Right For Your Company’s TYPE”, & understand the 4 quadrants of work, & how much of the problems in workplaces is a result of not understanding this simple & fundamental thing!
Make a 2x2 Matrix:
Top is Potential ( Schneider does it upside-down, which I can’t understand why… Pie-in-the-sky is up, the solid/concrete is on the bottom. Period. )
Bottom is Actuality
Left-side is People
Right-side is Tasks.
Top-Left is NurturingEnriching quadrant, with kindergarten, infirmaries, learning, spiritual-retreats, etc, all in that quadrant…
Top-right is DrivenDiscovery ( these names are mine, not his, btw ), where Science, Invention, etc, all live He calls it Best-in-class
Bottom-Left is ConsensusCollaborating, so consulting, mediation, urban-planning, etc… all live in this quadrant…
Bottom-Right is ControlPredictability, so manufacturing, etc, all go in here.
The reason this is so liberating, is that it clarifies which parts of one’s job are in what modes, which parts of one’s home & life are in which modes, & then one can be in the right gear for that something, see?
It reduces one’s exhaustion when one has clearer understanding…
William J. Walsh’s book “Nutrient Power” I found helpful, & have replicated both his pyrrol-disorder ( PTSD-RAGEs, in me ) treatment ( combining arachidonic-acid-precursor, which is evening primrose oil, the p5p B-vitamin, & zinc ), and that treatment gave me the only experience in my entire life of not having to fight-every-second against amygdala-highjack/PTSD-RAGE’s highjacking me, so there was a kind of happiness that was complete, & the only reason I’m not doing the full treatment now, is because I want to earn, through my meditations, the origin/root of curing me…
I’ve also replicated his treatment for undermethylated-DNA disorder, but he never explained that one properly either ( he forgot to explain the evening-primrose-oil IS the arachidonic-acid precursor, & he never mentioned that SAM-e has to be enteric-coated, & has to be taken with clear water, about 40mins before breakfast, to get it past one’s stomach, for it to work: as soon as the nausea hits, then you can eat )…
the SAM-e took 3 months to work, when I did it with Methionine, it took 4 months, & was weaker ( so I should have been taking more, obviously ).
4 times tested the pyrrol-disorder treatment, 2 times tested the SAM-e undermethylated-DNA treatment ( yes, depression is one of the undermethylation disorder effects, other people get depression as a result of overmethylation of their DNA, that treatment is folate & niacinimide, iirc )… & 2 times I tested the Methionine treatment, they work consistently, when done correctly.
I’m autistic. All autistics are undermethylated-DNA.
If I really needed to “take the edge off”, to de-stress, I’d take methionine, until I was less brittle.
It works.
Anyways, he identifies what he learned with his 30,000 patient database, & 2 of the 3 major causes of problems, I replicated his treatments for, repeatedly, & they worked.
For depression, there is another key to treating it, I’ve learned:
bright light, like outside, in the daytime ( downtown in big cities can be dark, due to the skyscrapers, so that can’t work, obviously. SAD-treatment lights work using the exact same mechanism as getting out in daytime-sunshine does: you HAVE TO cross YOUR light-threshold, & when you do, it’s like being kicked in the brain with a measure of happiness. Put MUCH brighter lighting in your home, & see if it works, but aim for complete-spectrum, enough so the colors aren’t all fucked, the way poor CRI lamps make things… you want minimum 85CRI: mix warm-white & daylight lamps, & see how much it takes to cross YOUR light-threshold, to get your brain switching into the living mode… For me it’s a ridiculous amount of light, but it works,.
Living in a light-box is better than being needlessly under continuous depression, right?
Oh, put lights on a timer, to use them as your alarm-clock: it works better.
: )
I hope something in this helps, I don’t want depression winning, OK?
Please invest in changing the rules, & in winning against it.
Even if only somewhat, even if only for the rest of your life ( instead of some symbolic “infinite victory” that our unconscious-mind seems to fixate on )…
Move the fulcrums…
Neither inertia, nor “the system”, cares about your reality/life, you have to make it moving/happening, see?
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, Hoomin…
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