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.
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.
