to tired old aussie(and my own reflections)

Hi, tired old aussie. I live in Australia too. What exactly are you suffering from? You mention “chronic pain”, what exactly cause this? How old are you?

I have had my toe-to-toe with existence(I am 28 right now)  and can attest to what every member of this forum has before:”life is struggle to nothing” . From the moment I woke up, I detested life. I knew I going to be here for a long, long time. I was a c-section baby with my back turned to the world, and went through intensive care after birth. The doctors had a pain getting me out as I latched onto the womb unwilling to enter. But the delivery nurse kept pulling me out, against my own will, so here I am. My extreme distaste for life made me utterly resistant  and this began a first impression with life I wasn’t fond of. I soon started school and hated it even more. My childhood was fun, but I always wanted more from life than It could offer me. I was everything the world told me not to be: I was creative and liked day-dreaming; the world was cranky, exact, and rigid. I was unimpressed by the world from an early age, and unhappy with it. I wanted to escape, and soon realised I am unable to. I think my mental illness, general battles with life, pain, depression, and fatigue, could all be solved by not conceiving me. I regret that day I was born every second.

For you at least, there are solutions to your problems for most cases on this forum. So before making harsh decisions, think carefully about options. Too bad here in Australia, Medicare is a failing bussiness; the Dental council and reps makes most of the profiteering from Dentistry, leaving both the Dentists and the patients unable to afford a good living and thus cut the profit un-eavenly and steal the rest. That is the Institutions for you. This to me means Dental/facial pain, crippling anxiety, depression, fatigue( what I have struggled for over 3 years now) due to neuralgia, cannot be dealt with successfully and the piling up from life becomes more worriesome as the stakes get higher…

It sounds like you 2 have a reality check like I had, looking at the cognitive dissonance of a “matrix” life planted you in. When you finally take the red pill, you do become depressed as life is akin to meaninglessness. When we were young, everything was planned out for us. I thought by myself 2 days ago about the space I had as a child. Your parents enrolled you into a school, slapped a “name” badge onto you, paid your bills, and you were a name with a face and something people would treat well just because you were small and “cute”. They told us “Santa Claus” is real, and so, the tooth fairy. Eventually you realised all those beautiful impediments that entailed life, was all a lie for the greater good to keep us in line, and munching us for a new generation of pawns, to slave our lives away to the Government. When you become depressed, they send you to the next-door-counsellor where “all your worries will be solved” and there is the 100 fold thousands of pharmaceuticals to try, or if that doesn’t work, let’s connect you to a few hundred volts, with a high current to shock you into a different dimension so your neural pathways can re-wire and you can feel better about yourself. And this comes with a well-known name too, the ECT’s.

.You are a number and become a hollow man like the infamous poem “Hollow men” by T.S. Elliot. He starts off, and I quote :”

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar”

What we are feeling is not just depression, it is nihilism, and the disgust of life so to speak. That is what your reality check phase is all about. Eventually your momentary sadness from a hard life starts to become an everyday experience, so much that it becomes the norm. What one man said the Auswitch syndrome was “to be in so much pain one finds it normal”. I find it hard to think of life anything else than a circus. Which is what I told a family member today. All you are doing is training to be an artiste on a small wire. You eventually NEED to become a skilled artiste, or you will fall and break every bone in your body. You are a performer so others can laugh and have a good time, because otherwise, you will not make it work, and the only game to play is to be the circus clown, or even worse, the lion tamer. So welcome to life I guess. That was what they prepared us for in the end. The Disney movies and tell-tale past time stories were just not true. And neither was that bear you slept with.

I think the hardest is waking up and realising there is no cosmic meaning. But again, you can still make the best of your time here as you choose. At least that is what I am doing. All the best.

-TOCP