Empathy and Advice Welcomed I'm super sad

[LumberJack]

Yeah, so I didn't want to really post this in the suicidal feelings thread, because I'm not really suicidal.

I am, however, feeling a lot of feelings and I don't know what to do about it. The feelings are uncomfortable. I don't think I've felt anything pleasant except for the occasional laugh at a YT comedian in the past 2 weeks, but I keep trying. Oh the other thing is when someone appreciates my humor on SF. It's not frequent that this happens, so I love it when it does. I've been getting feedback since childhood about my sense of humor. When it's good it's very good. I could bring down a whole school room, teacher included. But, when I miss, hoo boy. I have to hear about those ones, too.

With the feelings, I've posted elsewhere that I've been trying to welcome the feelings instead of stuff them down or push them away or do whatever violence to myself I must to JUST GET RID OF THEM. My most well-worn style is to stuff them, until the pressure builds and builds like a pressure cooker with no moisture, until an explosion. That happened to me at work one time and I scared some of the people nearby, like they didn't know if I was going postal or what. This is not a lovely conversation to have with one's immediate supervisor.

I'm normally mild-mannered but I do have a set of pipes, meaning that when I'm passionate, whether it's joy or fury, I definitely make myself heard.

Maybe I've gotten in over my head. Let too many little fires go for long enough that they merge into one big fire. Whether that's correct or not, it's still very true that I can hardly move from my bed to the kitchen without sighing and thinking, "what's the use?" Man, if we could just exit without a method at all, but just stop putting effort into staying alive, that would suit me fine. Of course, it would probably suit a lot of people, and the world would be very different today. Many of the most sensitive and perceptive among us would take this route, making an adverse selection event take place within the population.

 

[Wrick Malcof]

Hey LumberJack. I just wanna add my ears and voice to what you’ve described here. You probably know better than I do that trying to get rid of them never yields well, and your attempt to welcome them is a good start.

If you ever take the chance to read some of my own posts, I’m sure you might hear some of your own words in my voice. Especially that desire to exit without method.

I want to help you with letting them in so you can let them out. Can you detail these feelings a little more for me? What do you think brought them about? Are they feelings you have about yourself, or are they about your circumstances?

 

[seabird]

I'm sorry you're deeply sad @LumberJack. As you know, that's true for me sometimes.

I was musing about something similar this morning. I tend to automatically stuff feelings before they can even register or be labeled. And then I was wondering how much of the pressure that builds - in myself - is from not only these orphaned feelings but intrusive thoughts as well, which get tagged to be stuffed in there, in a jumbled combination.

 

[LumberJack]

Can you detail these feelings a little more for me? What do you think brought them about? Are they feelings you have about yourself, or are they about your circumstances?

They are both. Primarily there is the circumstance of my being jobless, but also unable to look for jobs, like just flat-out disabled because I'm too depressed to compose a cover letter or tune my resume to a given job posting. This is highly stressful and even humiliating.

Second is grief. I lost someone very close to me about 10 years ago, and the anniversary of his death is coming up. I'm trying to manage it proactively because I know it's coming. It's every year I get weird and don't know what's going on until my therapist reminds me that this is what happens with me around this one anniversary.

Third is just the state of the world. I'm not talking about solely the US, but I think the US was the first rock dropped in the pond that sent ugly ripples out across all other countries. I think elaborating on this would belong in the current events sub-forum. Suffice to say I'm seeing things happening that I never would have imagined possible before 2015. People are hurting, including me. I don't see any way out of this at present, which leaves me entirely pessimistic about things getting better before they get a lot worse.
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Focusing on the reasons doesn't really help, though. I need to be able to work with the emotional depression regardless of the "why." In fact, I have found it counterproductive for me to understand the cause of a problem because it's usually not something I can change. Solving the question of why takes a lot of time and ultimately gets me no closer to finding a way through the problem itself.

 

[Wrick Malcof]

It’s such a cyclical torture isn’t it? To have depression sap your motivation, and to then have your sapped motivation depress and humiliate you even more. It’s the cycle that remains my greatest barrier to this day.

I can’t begin to imagine how such a powerful loss compounds onto that. I can tell this was a powerful loss for you. One that has reverberated for a long time. I’m truly sorry for your loss friend.

I think you’ve touched on something really important there at the end. There’s a depressing counterproductive essence that we get from understanding the woes of the world and our daily lives. Of course, it doesn’t lessen the impact at all. But it gets in the way of making the decision to act regardless of how pointless it is. The state of things in 2026 has become more than enough to distract and concern us almost perpetually.

As you’ve said you have a therapist, I’m not going to try and do their job. But I do want to encourage you to take the “why’s” out of the equation. Getting something done not because you have to or because it’s important. Just something on the list that you can do because you’re capable. Even the simplest thing.

I think that if such behaviour can become a habit, at the very least you’ll be doing right by yourself in a world where nobody seems to do right by anybody. Because you deserve to be looked out for no matter what. Even if you’re the only one looking out for you

 

[LumberJack]

Getting something done not because you have to or because it’s important. Just something on the list that you can do because you’re capable. Even the simplest thing.

I like this idea. It sounds like something I might come up with, if I wasn't wound so tightly. I'm not my normal self. I mean, essentially yes, I'm still the same eccentric, high IQ with no emotional acuity, but also creative, goofy, and helpful, person. However, what's not normal about me is that not having a job has upended my entire self-concept because the whole meaning of my life since I decided not to KMS has been to contribute to society through work. Victor Frankl, author of "Man's Search for Meaning," says that there are three basic avenues from which one may derive a sense of meaningfulness: Love, as in caring for another person, work, as in doing something significant, and, if all else fails, we can still choose how we respond to unavoidable suffering. Victor Frankl's life had more unavoidable suffering than any one person, or even any one hundred people, should be expected to bear. Given this, I believe it's possible, even though I don't understand.

Love was my path for about 15 years. Death comes to all of us, but we don't know when. I think my partner's death blindsided both of us. Him, because he wanted to get better and help other people with cancer, and me because I had no concept of who I was without him. Before I met him, I was extremely traumatized and making a general wreck of my life, but through our relationship he helped me "grow up." Funnily, I still feel like a man-child, but that's another topic.

Given that love is so risky, I plowed myself into work. Now that's gone, too. I believe I can return but some invisible obstacle is suffocating me since I tried to start a job campaign.

Human freedom would seem to be the last avenue for me. Your earlier message, though, points to a 4th option. Maybe I don't need to solve the entire problem of life, the universe, and everything. I've learned that approaching a given goal calls for me to be not too tight, but also not too loose. Problem with that is that when I am rudderless, no amount of tightness feels like enough. So I tighten the goddam string until it's an octave sharp and just snaps.

 

[Wrick Malcof]

I think you absolutely can get back to your purpose in work. Believing that you can is no vast leap for me. Your capability and intelligence is woven into your very speech patterns. While it may take time, you have no reason to fear failure to tread the path of purpose once more. The end of one step always precedes the beginning of another


I like how you used the word rudderless. Because it evokes in my mind an image of my own experience. I learned that the current of life carries all vessels. Whether we can steer or not we are going somewhere. The important part are the decisions we make wherever we end up. Not the places we think we’ve taken ourselves.

The thing that infuriates and liberates me about the human condition is that understanding never precedes success. If you are going to find your purpose again it won’t be because you figured it out. It’ll be because you fell into it. At least that’s what I think

 

[LumberJack]

I’m doing some tiny things to gradually stretch how far I can get before my brain goes to white static. An example is that I coded a power shell script to cycle through the image files in a folder and rename them with a base name and an auto incremented number at the end.

Spoiler: techy talk

This is no small task, at least in OS-level scripting. Power shell is basically the DOS command prompt’s much larger and stronger big brother. I had to store a couple values in variables, search out the files in a folder, and filter out the pics without touching the other files. Then I returned the count of files to the next step as the number of iterations in the loop process. From there the loop runs and I now have file names like beach_vacation_05.jpg as opposed to IMG_6327.jpg.

Ok, that was actually more like hobbyist tinkering than something I could impress a manager with in a technical interview. However, I did sort of dust off my neural connections and I started to see how much I still know vs where to focus review efforts.

 

[LumberJack]

Meh. Forgot the whole reason I am posting on this thread. My sadness is highly variable, depending on whether anything else is taking up my thought process. Solving a problem, cutting fruit, doing mental math in my head, and I’m fine. Doing dishes, walking around or outside my apartment, trying to prioritize my to do list, and life is 99% unbearable. Unfortunately for you, gentle reader, sharing my missives on SF is an effective distraction, so I am spending an unreasonable amount of time posting here.

 

[seabird]

Nicely, neatly done on the script. Could use that for my unorganized thousands of pictures...

It's probably due to my visual oriented brain, but sometimes I manage to see my own behaviour as cumulus nimbus or radiation fog, or stratus clouds, etc., forming from various scripts.

 

[LumberJack]

The thing that infuriates and liberates me about the human condition is that understanding never precedes success. If you are going to find your purpose again it won’t be because you figured it out. It’ll be because you fell into it. At least that’s what I think

Well said. Right now I’m going to volunteer more with the horses. Also the people who work or intern there, but it’s mostly for the horses. I don’t know if it’s able to be something I could derive purpose from. I do know how I feel when I get to be around the equines, and that feeling is good enough.

 

[LumberJack]

Nicely, neatly done on the script. Could use that for my unorganized thousands of pictures...

It's probably due to my visual oriented brain, but sometimes I manage to see my own behaviour as cumulus nimbus or radiation fog, or stratus clouds, etc., forming from various scripts.

Reading this brought to my attention that I have not paid attention to the sky for months. I used to be very attuned to the sky and would sometimes schedule a day to watch the sunrise or sunset. Also the strand of Buddhism that I stumbled into has very strong metaphors about the sky and the sun, moon, and weather.

It also sort of points out that we humans are part of the biosphere, no matter how industrialized and urbanized we become. The teaching around this calls out that culture is a matter of consensus and ceremony- which is why we have so many different cultures. There is no one right way to build a society. However, if we take for granted that our reality is just that, as opposed to a system that is entirely made up, then we can get uptight and end up fighting wars over the squiggly lines on maps.

 

[LumberJack]

I slept a little more than 12 hours from last night into this afternoon (got up around 12:30 PM). I feel a little better. I'm in a dilemma about what to do. I still feel tired, but I have been pretty much resting for the past 2-3 days. At what length of time does "resting up" turn into depressive, "can't get out of bed" symptoms?

I have 2 sort of sayings that suggest I should push myself to get productive:

• "Motivation follows action," which means that we will never feel like doing something until after we get started. I have found this to be true in my life after testing it out.
• "Action is the antidote to despair" which I think is more about civic action, but IDK - maybe I will feel less powerless over my life if I stop focusing on "letting go" of the past that is bothering me and instead focus on how I can improve my situation going forward.

I know this is not the first time I've written about something like this. I am going thru ups and downs and have a tendency to repeat myself even in the best of times.

 

[seabird]

Forgive me in advance @LumberJack and this is relevant to me as well: over-thinking action a little goofy.