Yeah, it’s like where do you start when you’ve spent so much time not living? I honestly don’t even know how to live. Perhaps that’s the most pointless thing of all, not having a purpose.
Babe, I feel the same way all the time but youve come so far already and i know all you want to do is go away .. But you have people who love and care about you, You might not see it but you, you may not have alot of people who show it but i care..
God creates everyone with a purpose. We all have value. Only those who outright reject His love and guidance are truly the walking dead with no meaning in their lives.
Have you accepted God as YOUR God and respect and believe in all He has done for you (like dying for your sins so that when you leave this world, you can experience what He has for those who are His people and have done that).
@Rocketman: As I understand it, survival is a process. As long as someone is surviving, he or she is alive. But the original poster seems to be asking why he should continue surviving if he has an alternative. You’re right, Rocket, that we’re not guaranteed a good time surviving. But if the time we’re having surviving becomes to us detestable enough, then we can choose to leave life. At least I’m reading the original poster’s comment as he doesn’t have a sufficient reason to keep surviving.
Wifeisgone: Bipolar is a disease that robs you of your purpose…you might say it’s a “Lots trial” kinda thing because loosing your purpose, is worse than loosing all that you own.
I realize its a terrible affliction, but those with it aren’t worth any less than a physically handicapped person. I dont think others should judge based on illness. Its wrong to do so, but we know others do all of the time. I dont have any type of long term mental illness, but nonetheless have experienced it with the trauma of what I just went through. I know depression, anxiety, and good and bad days.
I would tell everyone to realize they are all people, noone having any less value than another.
And I have experienced the “find out who your friends really are” too.
My experience showed me who cares and who just gives lip service.
I now realize most of my family doesn’t give a shit about either mom or I.
My wife leaving as she did also threw our entire finances to the point where we had to ask for food money. Only 1 aunt helped, despite having numerous cousins, other family who all knew.
In fact, only 2 of my entire family even bothered to ask how either one of us was doing as a whole.
Something I won’t forget too easily.
On the good side of things, it showed me how God still watches out for those who call upon His name and trust in Him, because a lot of the good things that have happened have really been from “out of the way” if you know what I mean.
@Phantom: I really like that, P! “Losing your purpose is worse than losing all that you own.” Hope you won’t mind me using it (I’ll give you the credit…).
@PhantomShadow: “losing your purpose is worse than losing all that you own” <- i know it completely… once i lost my "purpose" (if you might call it like that, there were several honestly) i gave away and started selling almost everything i own because i realized those things never did anything for me besides taking up space or being a lousy distraction from my issues
@Wifeisgone: What you just shared about a person’s value being independent of his or her physical state, I’d like to agree with. I’d like the world to be that kind of place. It sounds like you’ve had a very tough run of things. Is it your spirituality that keeps you sane?
@EK2020: It used to be distracting myself on anything that would take my mind from the issues for a while (even if it was someting meaningless, like playing a videogame or listening to music). That way i could then see things a bit more calmed and look for solutions. I say used to be because i screwed pretty bad by doing that (overdid it and lost one of my last, if not the last motivation i had left, and i might say the most important one).
So now my coping strategy is thinking/researching/analizing if i can find something that motivates me enough to re-start my life (i’m on one of those situations where your life is on a dead spot and i’d practicly have to change everything i used to know in order to continue). I also do a bit of singing/playing guitar here and there when i just can’t think anymore.
@keief: I wish I knew you well enough to ask what your last motivation was, and how your distractions lost it for you. I’ve experienced something similar, several times (excuse the contradiction on “last”). I had a coach a few years back who’d share his world outlook with me while training me. He said most human beings get through life by means of their distractions–gambling, sex, alcohol, drugs, TV… I agree with him. And with what’s implicit in your post. Some people can balance the distractions with doing what they must to be productive enough to seem valuable. Some of us can’t…
One of the things about this site that amazes me is the same people who’re labeled “losers” everywhere else will come here and finally admit they are, and then a community chimes in that they’re not. That they’re valuable and cared for. That their negative self perception is the root of their problem, and they must decide to see themselves in a different light. OK.
I also empathize with your new coping strategy. I’ve been trying and trying for 8 years now. Obviously that I’m here you know how that’s going. Have you ever read a book or seen a movie in which a character recognizes she or he has made some really bad mistakes, but it’s too late to fix it? You read about, watch him/her spiral downward, unable to save himself/herself. That’s how I’ve been feeling for the last 4 years especially. So, and I mean this totally sincerely, if you’ve found a way to change everything you used to know so that you can continue–a way that’s worked for you, please share.
And I hope your music is a constructive distraction for you. I didn’t mean to write so much, but felt a connection to what you’d written–here and elsewhere.
@EK2020: In a way i feel that everyone here is in the same boat (coping with anger/pain/grief/regret… you know the drill) so i don’t mind sharing. I could easily say that my last motivation was the love of my life (and i might even be wrong at judging her being… IT, but so far she’s been the closest to it), but it’s not that simple (lol, it never is).
After losing my other reasons (dead end at career, and health issues disrupting my normal speaking… which is bad enough for a normal person, for a person who sings regularly is devastating) i just started getting depressed… it was a long period, and it affected all aspects on my life gradually… without giving much details, i ended up losing that special one because of it and realized it when it was already too late… too much damage done, with no chances to fix it given to me, funnily it happened right on time when i was starting to realize all the mistakes i have made and looking for ways to change. Can’t blame her as she also had issues of her own and most likely didn’t want any more problem sources. In the end i know she’s better off without me and that gives me a weird sense of happiness/peace at least.
In that period i just closed on myself in order to find answers and a solution (and there my distractions played a big part) but i also left everyone else out. To be honest i eventually wanted to marry this person, and wanted to live a “normal” life with her, and i never wanted that with anybody else before (and i’ve had several long serious relationships)… so in that way it felt like a big roundhouse kick back into the pit i was crawling out of.
And i still have my career and health problem (no doc has been able to diagnose it and i’ve been to several, and i do have a lot more health issues but i can cope with those on a daily basis). So i’m at a point where nobody depends on me, and i mean… NO ONE, no kids, 1 family member who cares, 2 friends that i barely see, and they could all live without me. No goals, no reasons… nothing. That also means, no reasons to cope with more failure, so you can see the predicament there.
I do believe that people will always have to cope with something, but they will do so if they have something else that balances out the “scale”, and that’s what i’m looking for (because i know i can recover what i’ve lost)… my biggest fear is damaging more people in the process and deluding myself into things just for the sake of not hurting the few people i care about (that never ends right).
I’ve consider several things, but all seems to point to the same thing: me leaving so far that nobody can find me (so i can start from zero), or just giving up… i just can’t see myself being able to reconstruct my life here (for several reasons). In the end i guess i just want to find some solution in which i won’t wake up 5 years from know wishing i would have just give up 5 years ago, lol. And sorry for the long post… funny how you say “i’ll sum it up” and it turns out to be even worse haha
@Keief: Thanks for the honesty and vulnerability. I’m risking sounding hypocritical in saying this, and I don’t know most of the details behind the end of your relationship, but abandoning people we care about because they’re not well has never sat well with me. Elsewhere I wrote that people should be free to do what they need to do. I have to agree that includes leaving relationships that no longer work for them. But I have to be totally honest in expressing how repulsed I feel when I hear/read about it. Many human beings become chronically depressed and even ultimately suicidal because of strings of abandonment throughout their lives. But someone dying from suicide to escape unendurable pain seems to me categorically different from someone choosing to leave a relationship because she/he has grown tired of a partner or doesn’t want to cope with the difficulties of her/his partner’s illness. I see the hypocrisy in my view, and I’m trying to deal with it… But I hope you sense in what I shared that I’m very, very sorry someone you cared for that much chose to leave you. It’s happened to me about 5 times in my life, and today I’m, well, not whole.
Why do you see your friends so infrequently? When you see them, do they offer you emotional support? Do they know what you’ve been going through? And, if you don’t mind sharing, why do you have only 2 friends? Are you among the rare people (at least from my observation) who distinguish between friends and acquaintances?
“No goals, no reasons, no nothing. That also means, no reasons to cope with more failure, so you can see the predicament there.” Yes a thousand times. I do see the predicament there. I’m also living the predicament. I’m right there with you.
When I was in school many years ago an acquaintance said to me, “You have three options to live if you can’t put the lid on an awareness of what life really is. You can become a hermit living alone in the middle of nowhere. Or you can be wholly consumed by spirituality/religion and deny the realness of the physical world. Or you can…leave.” In all three options, according to him, you’d have to leave the world, at least metaphorically.
I left my hometown to go to medical school in the middle of buttlick nowhere, a place absolutely opposite from everything I’d lived in up until then. And after graduating I traveled the US working in as many different places as I could. I thought I could “leave” by getting the heck away, starting over. For me it was a massive failure because wherever I went, two things always followed me: (1) fundamental human nature, & (2) my accumulated and unappeased hurts. People were always the same wherever I went, once I scratched the surface. It’s like dogs–they come in different appearance packages, and certainly to owners their dogs are special and unique, but the truth is that fundamentally dogs are dogs, sharing core behavioral tendencies. Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is that despite trying my DAMNEDEST, I couldn’t “leave” metaphorically. Now I’ve concluded the only way for me to leave is physically and permanently. And lest I suffer the barrage of unsolicited advice to seek medical intervention, I am a physician and already have access to some of the best medical intervention modern technology provides. Suffice it to say there’s a growing perspective in medicine that depression does not result from aberrant brain chemistry. Pharmaceuticals are not the panacea they might appear to be.
I know we don’t know each other, but I wish I could do something to make things right for you. And you should never apologize for the long post. If someone else doesn’t have the time to pay you the attention you deserve (and which, I’m sure from what I’ve noticed of you in other posts, you’d return), then it’s his/her loss, not yours. I don’t mean to tell you what to do, just respectfully sharing my perspective.
Oh, and you’re right. Every time I start a letter with something like, “I’ll be brief” or “to get to the point,” I wax on and on. Write anytime. And when you get the big record label deal, how ’bout throwing me a few free tickets to one of your concerts?!
So what is the point. We are going to die anyway. IN the end, nothing really matters. Worrying about family who will feel guilt or ask what they could have done doesn’t really matter cuz they will just end up dead too. None of what any of us do is going to change the universe. We are just specks on on piece of rock that in 10,000 years won’t exist.
Fools worry about the damage we do to the planet (global warming) but we will all be extinct one day and the planet will recover with some other life form on it. It isn’t depression to realize all this..it is being realistic.
21 comments
I feel the same way. I hope you find a purpose one day.
You are most def not allone…
http://suicideproject.org/2014/01/all-i-find-is-dispair/
Yeah, it’s like where do you start when you’ve spent so much time not living? I honestly don’t even know how to live. Perhaps that’s the most pointless thing of all, not having a purpose.
Babe, I feel the same way all the time but youve come so far already and i know all you want to do is go away .. But you have people who love and care about you, You might not see it but you, you may not have alot of people who show it but i care..
Have you considered trying Wifeisgones insane delusion? He says it provides meaning. Might work for you to ;D
God creates everyone with a purpose. We all have value. Only those who outright reject His love and guidance are truly the walking dead with no meaning in their lives.
Have you accepted God as YOUR God and respect and believe in all He has done for you (like dying for your sins so that when you leave this world, you can experience what He has for those who are His people and have done that).
denzel-david,
the point of living is to survive, although that doesn’t mean you’ll have a good time doing it.
@Rocketman: As I understand it, survival is a process. As long as someone is surviving, he or she is alive. But the original poster seems to be asking why he should continue surviving if he has an alternative. You’re right, Rocket, that we’re not guaranteed a good time surviving. But if the time we’re having surviving becomes to us detestable enough, then we can choose to leave life. At least I’m reading the original poster’s comment as he doesn’t have a sufficient reason to keep surviving.
Wifeisgone: Bipolar is a disease that robs you of your purpose…you might say it’s a “Lots trial” kinda thing because loosing your purpose, is worse than loosing all that you own.
I realize its a terrible affliction, but those with it aren’t worth any less than a physically handicapped person. I dont think others should judge based on illness. Its wrong to do so, but we know others do all of the time. I dont have any type of long term mental illness, but nonetheless have experienced it with the trauma of what I just went through. I know depression, anxiety, and good and bad days.
I would tell everyone to realize they are all people, noone having any less value than another.
And I have experienced the “find out who your friends really are” too.
My experience showed me who cares and who just gives lip service.
I now realize most of my family doesn’t give a shit about either mom or I.
My wife leaving as she did also threw our entire finances to the point where we had to ask for food money. Only 1 aunt helped, despite having numerous cousins, other family who all knew.
In fact, only 2 of my entire family even bothered to ask how either one of us was doing as a whole.
Something I won’t forget too easily.
On the good side of things, it showed me how God still watches out for those who call upon His name and trust in Him, because a lot of the good things that have happened have really been from “out of the way” if you know what I mean.
@Phantom: I really like that, P! “Losing your purpose is worse than losing all that you own.” Hope you won’t mind me using it (I’ll give you the credit…).
@PhantomShadow: “losing your purpose is worse than losing all that you own” <- i know it completely… once i lost my "purpose" (if you might call it like that, there were several honestly) i gave away and started selling almost everything i own because i realized those things never did anything for me besides taking up space or being a lousy distraction from my issues
@Wifeisgone: What you just shared about a person’s value being independent of his or her physical state, I’d like to agree with. I’d like the world to be that kind of place. It sounds like you’ve had a very tough run of things. Is it your spirituality that keeps you sane?
@keief: What’s your coping strategy?
@EK2020: It used to be distracting myself on anything that would take my mind from the issues for a while (even if it was someting meaningless, like playing a videogame or listening to music). That way i could then see things a bit more calmed and look for solutions. I say used to be because i screwed pretty bad by doing that (overdid it and lost one of my last, if not the last motivation i had left, and i might say the most important one).
So now my coping strategy is thinking/researching/analizing if i can find something that motivates me enough to re-start my life (i’m on one of those situations where your life is on a dead spot and i’d practicly have to change everything i used to know in order to continue). I also do a bit of singing/playing guitar here and there when i just can’t think anymore.
@keief: I wish I knew you well enough to ask what your last motivation was, and how your distractions lost it for you. I’ve experienced something similar, several times (excuse the contradiction on “last”). I had a coach a few years back who’d share his world outlook with me while training me. He said most human beings get through life by means of their distractions–gambling, sex, alcohol, drugs, TV… I agree with him. And with what’s implicit in your post. Some people can balance the distractions with doing what they must to be productive enough to seem valuable. Some of us can’t…
One of the things about this site that amazes me is the same people who’re labeled “losers” everywhere else will come here and finally admit they are, and then a community chimes in that they’re not. That they’re valuable and cared for. That their negative self perception is the root of their problem, and they must decide to see themselves in a different light. OK.
I also empathize with your new coping strategy. I’ve been trying and trying for 8 years now. Obviously that I’m here you know how that’s going. Have you ever read a book or seen a movie in which a character recognizes she or he has made some really bad mistakes, but it’s too late to fix it? You read about, watch him/her spiral downward, unable to save himself/herself. That’s how I’ve been feeling for the last 4 years especially. So, and I mean this totally sincerely, if you’ve found a way to change everything you used to know so that you can continue–a way that’s worked for you, please share.
And I hope your music is a constructive distraction for you. I didn’t mean to write so much, but felt a connection to what you’d written–here and elsewhere.
@EK2020: In a way i feel that everyone here is in the same boat (coping with anger/pain/grief/regret… you know the drill) so i don’t mind sharing. I could easily say that my last motivation was the love of my life (and i might even be wrong at judging her being… IT, but so far she’s been the closest to it), but it’s not that simple (lol, it never is).
After losing my other reasons (dead end at career, and health issues disrupting my normal speaking… which is bad enough for a normal person, for a person who sings regularly is devastating) i just started getting depressed… it was a long period, and it affected all aspects on my life gradually… without giving much details, i ended up losing that special one because of it and realized it when it was already too late… too much damage done, with no chances to fix it given to me, funnily it happened right on time when i was starting to realize all the mistakes i have made and looking for ways to change. Can’t blame her as she also had issues of her own and most likely didn’t want any more problem sources. In the end i know she’s better off without me and that gives me a weird sense of happiness/peace at least.
In that period i just closed on myself in order to find answers and a solution (and there my distractions played a big part) but i also left everyone else out. To be honest i eventually wanted to marry this person, and wanted to live a “normal” life with her, and i never wanted that with anybody else before (and i’ve had several long serious relationships)… so in that way it felt like a big roundhouse kick back into the pit i was crawling out of.
And i still have my career and health problem (no doc has been able to diagnose it and i’ve been to several, and i do have a lot more health issues but i can cope with those on a daily basis). So i’m at a point where nobody depends on me, and i mean… NO ONE, no kids, 1 family member who cares, 2 friends that i barely see, and they could all live without me. No goals, no reasons… nothing. That also means, no reasons to cope with more failure, so you can see the predicament there.
I do believe that people will always have to cope with something, but they will do so if they have something else that balances out the “scale”, and that’s what i’m looking for (because i know i can recover what i’ve lost)… my biggest fear is damaging more people in the process and deluding myself into things just for the sake of not hurting the few people i care about (that never ends right).
I’ve consider several things, but all seems to point to the same thing: me leaving so far that nobody can find me (so i can start from zero), or just giving up… i just can’t see myself being able to reconstruct my life here (for several reasons). In the end i guess i just want to find some solution in which i won’t wake up 5 years from know wishing i would have just give up 5 years ago, lol. And sorry for the long post… funny how you say “i’ll sum it up” and it turns out to be even worse haha
@Keief: Thanks for the honesty and vulnerability. I’m risking sounding hypocritical in saying this, and I don’t know most of the details behind the end of your relationship, but abandoning people we care about because they’re not well has never sat well with me. Elsewhere I wrote that people should be free to do what they need to do. I have to agree that includes leaving relationships that no longer work for them. But I have to be totally honest in expressing how repulsed I feel when I hear/read about it. Many human beings become chronically depressed and even ultimately suicidal because of strings of abandonment throughout their lives. But someone dying from suicide to escape unendurable pain seems to me categorically different from someone choosing to leave a relationship because she/he has grown tired of a partner or doesn’t want to cope with the difficulties of her/his partner’s illness. I see the hypocrisy in my view, and I’m trying to deal with it… But I hope you sense in what I shared that I’m very, very sorry someone you cared for that much chose to leave you. It’s happened to me about 5 times in my life, and today I’m, well, not whole.
Why do you see your friends so infrequently? When you see them, do they offer you emotional support? Do they know what you’ve been going through? And, if you don’t mind sharing, why do you have only 2 friends? Are you among the rare people (at least from my observation) who distinguish between friends and acquaintances?
“No goals, no reasons, no nothing. That also means, no reasons to cope with more failure, so you can see the predicament there.” Yes a thousand times. I do see the predicament there. I’m also living the predicament. I’m right there with you.
When I was in school many years ago an acquaintance said to me, “You have three options to live if you can’t put the lid on an awareness of what life really is. You can become a hermit living alone in the middle of nowhere. Or you can be wholly consumed by spirituality/religion and deny the realness of the physical world. Or you can…leave.” In all three options, according to him, you’d have to leave the world, at least metaphorically.
I left my hometown to go to medical school in the middle of buttlick nowhere, a place absolutely opposite from everything I’d lived in up until then. And after graduating I traveled the US working in as many different places as I could. I thought I could “leave” by getting the heck away, starting over. For me it was a massive failure because wherever I went, two things always followed me: (1) fundamental human nature, & (2) my accumulated and unappeased hurts. People were always the same wherever I went, once I scratched the surface. It’s like dogs–they come in different appearance packages, and certainly to owners their dogs are special and unique, but the truth is that fundamentally dogs are dogs, sharing core behavioral tendencies. Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is that despite trying my DAMNEDEST, I couldn’t “leave” metaphorically. Now I’ve concluded the only way for me to leave is physically and permanently. And lest I suffer the barrage of unsolicited advice to seek medical intervention, I am a physician and already have access to some of the best medical intervention modern technology provides. Suffice it to say there’s a growing perspective in medicine that depression does not result from aberrant brain chemistry. Pharmaceuticals are not the panacea they might appear to be.
I know we don’t know each other, but I wish I could do something to make things right for you. And you should never apologize for the long post. If someone else doesn’t have the time to pay you the attention you deserve (and which, I’m sure from what I’ve noticed of you in other posts, you’d return), then it’s his/her loss, not yours. I don’t mean to tell you what to do, just respectfully sharing my perspective.
Oh, and you’re right. Every time I start a letter with something like, “I’ll be brief” or “to get to the point,” I wax on and on. Write anytime. And when you get the big record label deal, how ’bout throwing me a few free tickets to one of your concerts?!
EK2020, feel free to use it 😉
So what is the point. We are going to die anyway. IN the end, nothing really matters. Worrying about family who will feel guilt or ask what they could have done doesn’t really matter cuz they will just end up dead too. None of what any of us do is going to change the universe. We are just specks on on piece of rock that in 10,000 years won’t exist.
Fools worry about the damage we do to the planet (global warming) but we will all be extinct one day and the planet will recover with some other life form on it. It isn’t depression to realize all this..it is being realistic.