I find myself constitutionally incapable of making the best of things. No matter how many times I remind myself to focus on doing what I can to improve things, a part of my mind will inevitably fixate on the one thing that is actually impossible for me, that I cannot change. And it’s the only thing that feels meaningful. And the weight of the regret, longing, sadness, it drags me down. And I have to ignore that. Ignore that the one thing that I really want in life is beyond my grasp. Ignore the sadness, longing, regret, despair. And try and function, try and seem like a normal person. Try and think of something to say, other than “All this is pointless.”
In order to kill myself, I would need an extended period of prolonged resolve. Months. And I’m barely capable of 24 hours. I have to be prepared to completely devastate my (increasingly elderly and infirm) parents, my sister with her toddler, to turn their lives upside down and plunge them into despair. I have to be able to overcome my instinctive terror of death, my lingering attachments to ideas of a worthwhile life, along with my fears of something worse beyond death (judgement, punishment, isolation.)
And realistically, it’s just not going to happen. I’m not going to do it. So all I can do is try to make the best of whatever life remains to me. Try to cause myself less suffering. I just can’t figure out how to actually do that. Again and again, I end up trapped in my own misery. A deep part of me wants to be miserable. And I don’t have the self-control to stop it.
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there’s some cross purposes there though, if I’m not mistaken, trying to be something your not vs trying to make the best of what you are. Talk turkey, you and I are never going to be “normal”, that ship sailed a long time ago. So, trying for that, futility incarnate.
What does making the best of it look like I wonder? It’s something I’m still seeking. It isn’t where I am. I’m still struggling, still stand out like a red rubber nose on a ballet dancer. but I figure broken people like us, gather other broken people, form a little broken community, shun the healthy who don’t have to try so hard to fit, figure our own way. How’s that for “making the best?” That’s my idea, anyway.
or maybe I’m just a looney idealist. It’s probably that. I keep reaching for a future that in my heart I doubt just as much as anyone else can be. But it might. That might has kept me grasping for a long time.
It’s not so much trying to “be normal” as trying to blend in and go under the radar. In my case, some of my thoughts and feelings are dangerous to express to others, so I have to at least try to keep an even keel. Aside from just the shame/embarrassment of having a breakdown in public, I don’t want people asking “why?”, because the answers get unpalatable pretty fast.
For me, aside from improving my health, my living situation, my social skills and links, I think “making the best of it” would mostly be causing myself less suffering over things I can’t change. Because it’s totally pointless, and I know that, rationally. But I can’t seem to stop myself. Something around me triggers that part of me, and I just get sucked into this maudlin fixation on the impossible, and how pointless that makes everything else.
I like the idea of broken people helping each other out, and I think it can work for some friendships where people are broken in complimentary ways, but I think when you try to scale it up to community level, it generally becomes untenable. Unless people are only broken in somewhat limited ways. For society to function, you need people able to function socially, get on with each other etc. If everyone’s constantly triggering each other and no one’s getting shit done, things quickly fall apart.
Personally, I’m not sure I fit any better into a community of misfits than a community of normies. Possibly a community made up entirely of socially awkward, massively oversensistive avoidants. Though even there, I’m sure I’d rub some up the wrong way.
@husk- you and I are like two ppl who each fell into a deep dark lonely pit, and instead of trying all we can to climb out, we’re like fuck it, and sit down and mope. we look up and realize it’s damn near improbable (tho not impossible), so we don’t have the will to even try.
what we need is someone throwing us a rope and help us up, but that rope person isn’t coming. i mean, maybe there’s a 1% chance someone would, but it’s not likely.
it’s like ppl who win the lottery and the ppl who never play the lottery. why play the lotto when statistically you won’t ever win and just waste your money? but if we don’t try, we will never win. and those who DO try, maybe they don’t win the powerball, but maybe win thousands, which is still better than not playing like us.
well my metaphors prolly suck, but it’s something like that.
i’ve got no fight left in me, same for you probably.
Yeah, though I suppose in my case it’s more like I spent years digging the pit rather than falling into it, and at some point just found it was too deep to get back out. End result is much the same I guess.
For me, I don’t think there’s a rope long enough. I’ve had all the help and support anyone could reasonably give. Nobody could save me from myself, even if someone wanted to.
I don’t think I’m ever going to “win”, but if I had the consistent resolve, I could probably make things significantly less shitty.
But yeah, I don’t have enough fight in me. I’m just so tired and sad all the time. What little willpower I have goes towards work and essential chores. There’s not much left for improvements. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try and take another step. Or next week. Or next month. Right now, I’m just too tired (and drunk/drowsy from sleeping pills.)
i suppose in my case, no one has ever extended a rope down to me, or at the least, a long enough rope.
exactly. in my case, what little energy i have is spent on maintaining essential daily tasks and chores (shower, cleaning, getting food, etc) that i literally have no energy left for anything else. sure in my case i have my health issues, but also being sad and depressed and feeling little hope also leaves someone completely depleted of all energy and reserves. the end result is that we are in the same place, just have enough energy to keep the broken down train going, but not enough energy or drive to fix the damn train.
yes, i am so so so tired. life is so fucking exhausting…
how can we improve our lives when we have physically and mentally zero energy to get up and do stuff to improve it? like mentally, we are both very intelligent ppl- we know we are headed further south if we do nothing- but doing SOMEthing requires oomph and drive and willpower and hope that we do not have.
what do we do then? our brains know it’s just going to get worse and we’ll stay in misery.
I suppose mentally, we need a sense of meaning to provide the necessary drive to improve our lives. I think that’s the biggest thing I struggle with.
I wake up each day feeling awful, filled with hate, anger and resentment. Like I just want everyone else to die. But I don’t really. I just want to not feel like this anymore. My mind is stuck in a loop of torturing itself. And I think death is the only way to end it. But I’m too scared.
And I don’t have enough meaning in my life to make facing this seem worthwhile. The things my mind does to itself. I feel so lonely, hopeless, and bad inside. And I’ve felt this way for so long, with no hope of it changing.
And I don’t want to mess up the lives of my family by ending it. But they’re not enough to motivate me to pull myself together. I’m a bit part in their lives. Maybe I see them once every couple of weeks. And it’s not like I could ever tell them what’s really going on for me. They barely know who I really am now.
And for me that’s the problem – I can’t ever risk letting anyone really know me. So I have no one in my life. I don’t exist to the rest of the world. I’m not part of it. I don’t matter.
So most of the time, I feel no sense of meaning. I think generally, meaning comes from the way you relate to others. Either through personal friendships and relationships, or from a more general concern for humanity (altruism etc.) And I think I lack the capacity for personal relationships, as well as enough selflessness to strongly care about humanity in general.
“we need a sense of meaning to provide the necessary drive to improve our lives.”
>Yes, but where do we get meaning?
I’ve lost my meaning, my drive, my oomph, bc i’ve realized that everything we’ve ever been taught has been a lie (meritocracy, history, financial structure, etc).
I no longer have the joy and hope and enthusiasm bc humans have failed me over and over, and I do not trust nor believe in humans. Sure, there’s a “few” good ppl still out there, but they’re meaningless if I do not encounter them and they’re not in my lives, only bad ppl (selfish self-serving ppl, which is pretty much everyone).
i don’t see anything getting any better, unless i change my outlook on life, and that’s not something you can really will yourself to change. you views and thoughts generally don’t change, unless something really good or really bad changes your view of life. and unfortunately, life has taught me that life is shit, and that most ppl are also shit.
so what then? i can’t “will” myself to believe humans are wonderful and amazing and blah blah.
i can’t will myself to believe life is hunky dory unless you’re healthy and have enough money. when you’re poor and disabled, which almost always go hand in hand, life is hard and cruel and unfair. and i was born not disabled so this makes life in MORE cruel and unfair, that THIS was done TO me.
anyhow, idk how to proceed fwd in life. i know being bitter and angry doesn’t further my life, yet how do I NOT be bitter and angry given everything that was done to me? i mean, it’s not like i can chance my feelings anyway. i can’t lie to myself and say “this world is great!” and there’s amazing ppl out there!” “so go out and meet some!! “and grab life by the horns!”
idk, moping and being isolated doesn’t help either but i just have no enthusiasm for life nor humans anymore.
Sooo… I know we’ve disagreed on this before, and I’m not going to be able to persuade you one inch, but anyway… I think you’re dividing people too simplistically into “good”, “trustworthy”, and “bad”, “selfish” etc.
Totally acknowledge that you’ve been mistreated to a disproportionate extent by the people in your life, and that it makes sense for that to colour the way you view people. I get that it’s very difficult for you to trust anyone, and it’s true that you can never really know a person with 100% certainty. In theory, even the nicest, sweetest, most spotlessly clean individual could be a serial killer.
I wouldn’t say you should “believe in humans” in some kind of idealistic sense. Most people are self-interested to some extent, because that’s required for survival. I would distinguish between this and people who are entirely selfish, or who give no care whatsoever to the feelings of others. Again, it’s more of a spectrum than a “good/bad” binary. On one end you have genuinely saintly altruists, and on the other sociopaths and narcissists. But most people are somewhere in between. Most people have moral lines which they won’t cross.
I would say that most people won’t go out of their way to fuck you over, unless they’re in desperate circumstances. But they also won’t go out of their way to help or protect you, unless they feel strong enough to do it without exposing themselves to risk.
But there’s very few people who’ve never done a good deed, or never put themselves out in a small way to help somebody else. There’s also very few people who’ve never been needlessly cruel to another person, or haven’t attempted to benefit in small ways at someone else’s expense.
So I’d say that humans can be “wonderful and amazing”, but also awful and cruel. And sometimes you could use all those different words for the same individual, sometimes over the course of one day.
Not going to disagree that life can be cruel and unfair.
I wouldn’t say don’t be bitter and angry. I’m bitter and angry, and I have far less justification than you. Perhaps a start would just be acknowledging that that’s not all there is to life. Your negative experience, though of course significant, is not definitional. Life can be terrible, but it can also be great. People can be awful, but also amazing. Not saying you should let your guard down, or assume the best of people, or naively launch yourself into the arms of others. Just perhaps accept the theoretical possibility that people might surprise you. Even “bad” people.
I’m a “bad” person. I’ve done terrible things. I’ve also gone out of my way to safely release captured field mice into the wild, because I’m way too soft-hearted to hurt a creature like that. I didn’t have to do that. There was no material benefit to me. No one would’ve known either way. But I did it because I cared. And I’m an objectively bad person.
But hey, I’m socially avoidant, so emotionally, everyone reads as “threat” to me. I also have no enthusiasm whatsoever for anything that involves meeting people. It’s just that intellectually, I know that’s not a balanced view of the world. Some people are threatening, in certain situations. And I get that that’s significantly multiplied if you’re female, and disabled, but it basically still holds true. Most people don’t give enough of a fuck to help or harm you most of the time, unless they have a specific reason to.