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
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.
stop celebrating or acknowledging your birthday. works for me, at least half the time i don’t notice when it was.
Sorry. I started exercising from a self-help book and learned to cook and do house repairs from books.
That’s fine, and it’s good that you developed healthy habits.
Self help books are, though, a thoroughly atomized liberal response to what are social ills. It takes something that is a collective problem, and places the onus entirely on an individual to solve it for themselves. That’s fine or whatever, but so long as collective problems are met with individual solutions the problem never goes away, discrete individuals just get acclimated to the problem. This is not socially healthy.
I hope that explains the response a bit
Why should conservatives, fascists, etc. be the only ones allowed individual self-improvement? This shaming attitude towards self-improvement on the left, towards people who are literally just trying to do their best in a fucked system, is baffling.
I think collective, social action is most important, but I’m not going to engage in it when I’m suicidally unhappy because I’m aligning with the system in sabotaging my own health.
Just because the right has bootstraps doesn’t mean we have to ban the concept of individuals working on themselves. I understand that the social affects the individual experience but we gotta have some nuance.
Irrelevant because self-help books are garbage. “Self-improvement” is simple so all relevant advice is boring. Find a therapist if you can afford it. Cook for yourself more and eat healthy. Go to a gym, do a sport, or just go for long walks. Meet up with friends at least once per week. Get a hobby. Enjoy some form of media produced by your culture, like books, games, films, or shows. All of this subject to the constraint of time and money.
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
@oktherebuddy nailed it. It’s really about perspective. You know there are good times out there, you’ve had em. You gotta buckle down and weather the storm and do the stuff you need to do to get through it. It doesn’t make now not suck, but you don’t get quite as mired in it if you can look to the future and see a bright spot ahead.
