Last year I was employed at a decent paying job with good benefits, doing work that mattered. Now I'm seven months unemployed, out of benefits and still getting ghosted by employers. Most everything else has remained the same (no friends, uncertainty with my gender and how I want to live my life, stuck living with my mom) except that I started seeing a therapist ~10 months ago who I really like.
It just feels really, really bad. I'm assuming other people have had this experience in their life already (I am both fairly young and a late bloomer in most respects), so I guess I'm asking how you dealt with it and how things got better, assuming they did :aware:
you can also commiserate with me if you like
thanks gamers
This is an appallingly cliche boomer thing to say but life has ups and downs. When you're young the ups and downs happen on the scale of moments or days or perhaps weeks. As you age you can get large chunks of a year of ups or downs. Even older these can stretch to multiple years. For me I'm at around periods of 8 months or so of downs interspersed with ups. If this is your first time hitting a long down it can really seem terminal, this is how it will always be, etc. This is rarely the case as long as you have your health. So I can't say anything other than yes it sucks, I feel it completely, life isn't a monotonic upward progression toward anything. But after a few of these cycles you start not to care about each one too much. It still sucks when you're in the trough though.
It's funny I was complaining to my therapist about my mom acting like things are destined get better (meanwhile tons of people see things get worse and never get better WRT housing, income, freedoms, and I'm not cosmically special compared to them), but we ended up arriving at "maybe things will get better" which is more my speed
I can commiserate! The last year has been really tough for me as well. Lots of my recent struggles have come from a lot my unresolved internal contradictions. Being in a minor crisis had heightened a lot of those tensions and forced me to work on resolving them. So even though this year has been an objective decrease in my quality of life, I was able/forced to work on some of the key issues that have been hounding me for years.
It might be best to focus on the few positive internal changes you were able to make this year as building the foundation for the rest of your life than it is to focus on the difficult portions. You said you finally found a good therapist, so I imagine you are making positive progress in some spheres of your life! Congratulations on that, a good therapist is a rare thing.
Yeah I feel very lucky that I got a good therapist. Otherwise I would be even more cooked
Hey RION I don't really have an answer and I'm not sure if this is wrong to do (read the room lol) but I do want to say happy birthday
stop celebrating or acknowledging your birthday. works for me, at least half the time i don't notice when it was.
Let this radicalize you against your enemies and inspire you to find new ways to defeat them. Which in this context means you got plenty of free time to work with local orgs and that networking might lead to something. Or it might not. However you will be getting out at least.
I know I probably should, I just have a hard time doing anything of import when I have this big question mark in my life
I’m in the same boat, so to speak. Recently had a life altering injury that put me out of a job and on month 6 of the search. And my birthday’s just around the corner too!
I hope your birthday went well, and if it hasn’t happened yet I hope you make time for yourself to do something you want without any expectations.
In regards to the mental aspect, I’m really proud you’ve found the courage for therapy, and engaging with it so that it can be helpful. I need to make that decision myself.
Don’t forget to silence the inner naysayer every so often. You’re allowed to enjoy things that don’t make you a better work slave, and now’s your chance to find those things that you enjoy.
For me, things are getting better, albeit slowly. I’ve had to remind myself that mentally it’s like preparing for a race; not every run is going to be your best time. And some days it will rain and be shitty and feel like nothing got accomplished, but you still went out there and did the things you were scared of/didn’t feel like you could do. Patience and perseverance, my friend.
Stay home and wallow in sadness for the day. As a treat, it helps to do that sometimes to get that black bile out of your system.
@oktherebuddy nailed it. It's really about perspective. You know there are good times out there, you've had em. You gotta buckle down and weather the storm and do the stuff you need to do to get through it. It doesn't make now not suck, but you don't get quite as mired in it if you can look to the future and see a bright spot ahead.
If I, as a secret
FBICIA agent at Langley posting on a Ukranian hater/train enjoyer forum, can offer anything, it's perhaps a different perspective for your mental. There's a lot about improving your situation that is fun, revitalizing, and rewarding without feeling punitive and grindy. Perhaps you can think about how much room there is to explore and expand in life. Like, if my problem was feeling meek and insecure around others and took a BJJ class, it's not like I'm resigned to having to be roughed up, it'd be like "Wow, I didn't realize how fun it would be to treat rough housing as an art!"Besides, constant growth is for capitalists and even a capitalist knows the money line is all jagged and weird as it climbs to infinity in pursuit of providing value to shareholders. There's nothing you need to keep in mind in life besides trying your best to get the things you want and loving as hard as you can in every moment. The rest will take care of itself even if you never give it another thought again. I would SHARE a moment by HOLDING you
I ate a lot of shit my entire life and my life only gotten better recently. Mostly through timing, luck and also a little bit of force of will. To my credit, none of the good things would have happened if I wasn't a broken desperate person in the first place.
My life got better in COVID doing the shittiest jobs I'll ever fucking have hopefully. I was lucky to be in a position where I could just talk to people about getting hired somewhere.
I also grinded to make myself hireable, I had two jobs during this period, I didn't want to do that forever so the grindset was valuable to me. I dont think it is past stability and grindset types who make it their personality are more than worthless people.
As a person who goes through this every year... I have learned to just wait for next year. Things'll be a bit worse than that they were before.
I don't know if my brain completely broke or I just got too tired to be as stressed out as I used to get but I've gotten surprisingly... calm at the reality of my situation.
So I think I got to the point of "accept it, feel bad for a bit and then move on."
And happy/adequate/barely tolerable (whichever is appropriate) b-day fellow hexbearino.
Sorry. I started exercising from a self-help book and learned to cook and do house repairs from books.
That's fine, and it's good that you developed healthy habits.
Self help books are, though, a thoroughly atomized liberal response to what are social ills. It takes something that is a collective problem, and places the onus entirely on an individual to solve it for themselves. That's fine or whatever, but so long as collective problems are met with individual solutions the problem never goes away, discrete individuals just get acclimated to the problem. This is not socially healthy.
I hope that explains the response a bit
No, it doesn't. Not everyone has a family/social network in place to help them achieve their goals. Moreover, creating a united front depends on having people with the skills/willingness to attempt new things with new people. If you want collective action you need people who are secure enough to try new things. Back in the day the IWW promoted 'self help' programs like teaching kids to paint, sing, or orate. They offered adult classes, too.
You're telling people not to use the books, and don't offer any alternative.
A "learn to cook" book isn't a self help book. It's a cook book.
A "house-repairs" book isn't a self help book. It's a DIY book.
You are either misunderstanding the topic, or are being deliberately obtuse. Self help books transpose problems caused by capitalism into a problem with the individual and then tell the individual they need to change who they are and take part in hustle culture and understand that their motivational problems to grind grind grind caused by worker-alienation are actually problems with them as a human being that they need to change. Self help diverts attention away from the source of problems that capitalism is causing, aiming to treat the symptoms of these problems as a diversion away from recognising the cause.
What's an example of a self-help book, then? My examples would include "The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous," "Atomic Habits" (by James Clear) and "Getting Things Done" (by David Allen). They just contain useful info that makes life easier, is my perspective.
Not exactly, it’s got some of that kind of baggage but it’s more about bringing together a bunch of people who all have the same problem to support each other and heal. I’m not a big fan of it, but it has helped millions of people recover from alcoholism.
It's a kkkristian cult, nothing the kkkristians do can be trusted
Oh I see. Yeah it makes sense that you don't like this discourse since you want people to buy your grifter book. lmao
No, I was giving some context as to why someone might react to the suggestion of self-help books with hostility, and why a comment recommending a self help book in the thread might be removed by mods for "cringe."
So, we're at the point where talking about books is potentially offensive to people?
Do you have a torrent link? I have literally never paid for a book in my entire life and I don't plan on doing so now.
Why should conservatives, fascists, etc. be the only ones allowed individual self-improvement? This shaming attitude towards self-improvement on the left, towards people who are literally just trying to do their best in a fucked system, is baffling.
I think collective, social action is most important, but I'm not going to engage in it when I'm suicidally unhappy because I'm aligning with the system in sabotaging my own health.
Just because the right has bootstraps doesn't mean we have to ban the concept of individuals working on themselves. I understand that the social affects the individual experience but we gotta have some nuance.
Irrelevant because self-help books are garbage. "Self-improvement" is simple so all relevant advice is boring. Find a therapist if you can afford it. Cook for yourself more and eat healthy. Go to a gym, do a sport, or just go for long walks. Meet up with friends at least once per week. Get a hobby. Enjoy some form of media produced by your culture, like books, games, films, or shows. All of this subject to the constraint of time and money.
Agreed about the time and money constraints. All the stuff mentioned is easier if you have money. But, especially when you don't have money, this stuff isn't really "simple." Habit and behavior change is very difficult, especially if you have adhd or other mental health situation.
People sneer at Jordan Peterson and Co. (and rightfully so) but his popularity is indicative of people really wanting some kind of framework to organize themselves into improving their life in like, the next month. (And not 2 years from now when your union gets concessions from your boss, or legislation passes, or someone overthrows the government). Everyone knows what to do ("common sense") but not how to go about actually getting it done.
Certainly not a replacement for social change lol, but we all just want to make it to next week somehow.
