I know it's a joke and a meme, but this is legit making me feel pretty bad about myself. In no small part because I'm a hell of a lot older than 19. These don't all match up, but the ones that do... hit hard.
Sorry it wasn’t my intention. I just came across this and it made me :desolate:
Oh hey, you have nothing to apologize for. It's a good post and sparked some meaningful discussion too. I was just lamenting that it was... a difficult mirror to be looking into.
can you please delete this. im looking in the mirror and i dont like what i see
My therapist has me trying to ground myself in physical space again and it’s made me remember why I’m like this in the first place. Lots of work to do for that to be comfy again
I’d done deep breathing before as well as the 5 4 3 2 1 sensory thing for anxiety. But it somehow never occurred to me that this could involve paying attention to more ambient bodily sensations or my emotional state. In other words, paying attention to my environment and paying attention to myself were separate activities, which is the opposite of grounding.
So right now I’m just making a habit out of noticing when I’m stuck in my head and paying attention to my surroundings as well as how I’m existing in those surroundings. This was something I did as a kid but willed myself to stop doing because “if I’m not paying attention, the solution isn’t to look around the room at stuff. It’s to concentrate harder.” Turns out looking around the room was a grounding technique I’d picked up on my own and was shamed out of because you could see my eyes wandering and people thought I wasn’t listening.
And the results so far are that even mild clutter makes me feel out of control and dirty and that I spend most of my time in a slightly heightened state of anxiety, which I’ve trained myself to ignore and numb, mostly through media consumption. In other words…. my contamination OCD made my environment unmanageable so now I’m addicted to social media as an avoidance tactic. I have some other rituals related to this as well, mostly about keeping very small areas where I’m required to regularly peel myself away from my phone excessively tidy.
Thank you for sharing and thanks for the advice.
I identify heavily with a lot of that, specifically the avoidance. I've been working on the mindfulness techniques you're describing of noticing yourself in relation to your surroundings, but I've found it really difficult. My mind is so trained to recoil back into itself and dwell on those inner thoughts that when I'm trying to "be present" the racing thoughts just seem to intensify. Or if I am able to focus on my body and physical sensations, my brain just rapidly jumps from one to the next. But I'm still working on it and hoping it improves. It sucks that mindfulness at this point is stressful for me though, as of course that's the polar opposite of the intention behind it.
Anyway, best wishes to you comrade.
The larger project for me at the moment is to learn to process my emotions with a wider range of coping strategies than avoidance and overintellectualization. Right now I’m mostly numbing them and talking myself out of them, including ones that are valid and necessary to work through.
Medication and thought replacement helped the racing thoughts for me. A lot of recurring negative self talk can be rephrased in a way that short circuits the tendency to start spinning. Once you’ve identified your triggers for those thought spirals, playing around with different framings of a thought helps. A mild example for me is that “This person who I’m close to is mad at me” can become “I feel insecure that this person would not tell me if they were upset with me”. It’s not a reassurance, which would reinforce the obsessive tendency of the thought, and it’s not focusing on an unknowable fact (someone’s immediate feelings). And also sometimes, it’s just trial and error to see which thoughts do and don’t make you spin.
This is excellent advice. Would you say these are strategies you've developed with the guidance of a therapist or just work you've learned to do on your own? In my limited understanding, this sounds like CBT methodology (or even DBT?). Also, would you mind saying what medication has helped you with racing thoughts? Obviously no worries if not.
These are mostly things I’ve learned from therapy. I’d rather not talk meds because, as I understand it, I was prescribed it due to other issues I have being comorbid with OCD. I’ve gotten mixed reactions from various mental health professionals when I tell them what I’m on and why. So I don’t think it’s something I want to implicitly recommend, but I’m also not gonna chance it because it works and you don’t fuck with functional meds
Oh ok, I hear you. First of all, I'm glad to hear you've found something that works for you to an extent, both as far as therapy and medication. I'm still trying to find the right combination without much success. I'm actually on an opioid medication in part to help with the severe depression but I was not surprised when it started causing more problems than helping, so I'm trying to taper off of it now. While it did wonders during the honeymoon phase, I would strongly recommend against it for most others. Just sayin', I get it.
I was like this when I was younger. It gets better. Form connections.
okay that was the first step. uhhhhhh go volunteer at your local library idk.
my library was absorbed by my local police department and then privatized, what do I do?
This is me all the way thru, except the girlfriends part. Don't even bother with that anymore. The one that sucks the most is not being able to understand new things, even if they're obvious as fuck. It takes me weeks sometimes to connect some of the dots to have a decent understanding of what it is I'm trying to understand. I'm envious as fuck of people who just seem to have a light go off in there head when they're focused on trying to understand something new after a couple of hours.
And once I do understand something, I have to constantly reiterate it to myself. I can do that for months, and then not think about something for a few days, and suddenly all the links and eureka moments are gone until something triggers part of what I learned previously. And then you have to repeat the whole process again. It's not as if I forget because of info overload either. Like I'll be singularly focused on understanding something for months at a time, and then it's just gone in a flash.
Just had to get this off my chest
Thank you for getting that off your chest because reading it made me feel less alone and well... almost validated. For me this phenomena happened seemingly quickly. I used to feel like I was one of those people you describe being envious of, or at least somewhat like that. Certainly better able to learn and retain information than I am now. I always attributed this big shift in my ability to learn and even think well to a certain event, but I've wondered if maybe it was misplaced blame, and something that was happening slowly anyway. So I can't help but wonder if you always felt that way about your ability to learn, if it was something that degraded over time, or if something specific happened to you that caused this problem with learning and retention.
It just started happening gradually after I dropped out of HS and went through a rough several years, without getting into too much detail. I went and got my GED afterwards, went to college for a period of a couple years. Stopped going when I'd come back some days and be completely tapped out mentally. Never got my degree. My family has a history of depression and though I've never been formally diagnosed, I've battled some severe depression on and off over the years.
It's also interesting because we lived in some run down apartments during my childhood, and there was chipped lead paint all around. Sometimes I wonder how much that impacted my development.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. If you don't mind me asking, what changed for you?
Hey comrade. I appreciate your sharing of some difficult personal struggles. Congratulations on getting the GED despite the continuous battles with depression. Degree or not, that's an accomplishment worth being proud of.
My family history, like yours has a lot of depression and other mental illness, and it's hard to know how much of that is genetically inherited or simply the inheritance and perpetuation of being "lower class" (poor) in a capitalist reality. That last part includes environmental exposure to shit like lead too. That must be a hard weight to carry around, wondering if the place you lived in as a child is a root of the difficulties you face now.
As for me, I've always had really bad problems with anxiety and depression. Even as a kid I had severe panic attacks I was sent to various doctors for. Later on, did a lot of self medication of all kinds but found benzodiazepines (please no Jordan Peterson jokes) in particular to be a sure-fire way to kill anxiety and still be moderately functional. I relied on them heavily to be able to work. Eventually I knew I had to get off - it was getting bad. But I didn't do it wisely and ended up going through some extreme withdrawal. Seizures, psychosis, suicide atttmpt, peripheral neuropathy in my arms and hands, lots of other shit. And ever since I feel like I've lost my ability to think clearly, to make memories properly and even worse, to really feel and experience life. Then again some of that was already gnawing at me before the withdrawal, so I don't know if that's what did it for sure or just one catalyst. I do know I'm not the person I used to be. I feel lesser. Broken. And I'm not sure if I should be "fighting" to regain myself, or just accept I've lost a lot of what made me me. Sorry, that sounds pathetically melodramatic, but... yeah.
Anyway, you have my empathy and solidarity. It's not an easy thing, living a life shackled with depression. Especially in this late stage capitalist hellscape.
I don't think it's being melodramatic at all. Felt the lot of the same shit you've felt. I never took meds, but they absolutely devastated my family in ways that I didn't see the worth in taking them.
I don't know what your social circumstances are, but I hope you can find a good friend or two in life to just share experience and shoot the shit with. It's the only thing that keeps me going, and my friends are understanding of my situation, even through the highs and lows. It's really the only form of therapy I feel that works for me. Outside of that, I don't know if there are any 'real' solutions to this. Being stuck in this capitalist garbage heap makes it worse, and all you can do really is just maintain day to day. Some just slip and fall. When a family member of mine ended up going insane after a divorce, I was seriously considering suicide. Took some social interaction to climb out of that hole.
Honestly I hope your heart and mind settle down dawg. I really mean that shit. I don't know how or in what way, but I hope it does. I've had it bad, but I know others always have it worse. You have seizures and shit - I never experienced that, but I know people that have and I know how hard it is just to hold employment. If you ever feel the need to talk more, I'm always down.
Hey, thank you for your compassionate response. Yes, medication even when necessary and prescribed can be a double edged sword.
As for the importance (necessity, even) of having a good friend or two in life, oh man do I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately I really don't have that. Due to a combination of shame at my circumstances and extreme social anxiety, I've been pretty much friendless and isolated for years. I actually attribute a lot of my issues, including a good amount of the mental decline we've been talking about, to all that solitude. I sometimes think important parts of my brain responsible for socializing have atrophied, maybe literally. I've been considering for a while making a detailed post about it in c/mentalhealth, but never know where to start or what good it would ultimately do. I'm very glad to hear you have a good irl support network and that it has helped you as much as it has, especially out of a truly dark time. I agree that just having friendly people to be around is vastly more beneficial than even professional therapy - not that that can't be a big help to some people too. (Also, condolences about your family member.)
And just to be clear, I don't have seizures anymore. That was just something that happened when I was going through benzodiazepine withdrawal. However, I am still coping with the long term effects that those seizures and other aspects of the withdrawal had on me. But again, I don't know how much of my current fucked up state is due to that specifically or to... well, everything else. I know the peripheral neuropathy is from that for sure. Because we were talking about environmental toxin exposure, in your case lead, one thing that might be causing a lot of my issues, both physical and mental, could be mold toxin exposure. My psychiatrist (who I only get to have a phone consult with for 45 minutes once every 3 months) first suggested it and is confident that it's playing a role. If so, I'm stuck with it. But I don't want to ramble on too long about my personal woes, especially when like you said, so many others have things so so much worse. Not that it's ever a competition though - suffering sucks, period.
Thanks again for the kind message comrade. :heart-sickle:
I think you should definitely make that post. Take your time with it. I'm sure you're aware of how many people are affected by harmful substances in their living environment. Many of them aren't even able to reflect on it in the way that you and I are able to. I think that perspective might definitely be of some interest to others, including myself. But even if you don't, I think you should just write shit down anyways
Yeah I definitely think it is depression. I just don't like to speak about it much
I too identify with a distressing number of these, despite being much older than 19. Solidarity, everybody.
Rumination (like when cows chew grass and swallow it and then bring it back up to chew it again) is what my therapist calls some of these behaviors. Thinking the same thoughts over and over again and being extremely in your head, with no progress/goal.
ADHD inattentive type, at least for me before I got treatment.
Could also be an anxiety disorder or depression.
analysis paralysis
Seriously though, how does anyone ever decide anything?
I leave all major decisions to about an hour after I've taken my adderall.
I try to timebox how long I spend deciding to a unit smaller than what the time impact it will have on me. So like if it'll only affect me for an hour or two, like what to eat for lunch, I'll force myself to decide in 1-2min or else I default to the first item in the list. If it'll affect me for a day I make myself decide in an hour. A week, I get a day; a month I get a week; a year I get a month; and so on
I really wish my body/stomach was able to handle adderall. I might be too stupid for it to work regardless, because whenever I took it, I still couldn’t bring myself to do anything productive. I envy people who were able to make it work
I've found that once I stopped dulling my emotions, I actually had very strong and immediate opinions about everything. Obviously I ignore them if they don't always make sense, but it's nice to know they're there
I unironically roll dice to help choose things. If I have a strong reaction where I really don't like the option I rolled, I usually realize that I actually prefer something else and go with it, or just strike the bad option from the list and go again.
I for one welcome our fedposting pseudotherapists. I’ve never had someone care so deeply about what I said to take notes before. Makes me feel very special.
Try to connect to the world around you
That'd be great, it doesn't fucking want me though, it never did, and I'm coming to understand that nobody here does either.
unaware of surroundings, except when driving
if this dude wants to level up, he's gotta ride the bus. the more time you spend driving, the less you spend thinking
