Indiana. It makes me feel sad, too.

I’ll give a hopeful one:

Many years ago I was in a hopeless and hellish state. Unemployed, sleeping on a cot in my parents basement, my health failing me, and recently bankrupt.

I was suicidal but not to the point of having ideation. “You should just kill yourself” was a common refrain of my internal monologue.

Then I read something on reddit like “How long would you stay friends with someone who talks to you the way you talk to yourself?”

So I started on a serious effort to remove that from my thoughts. It was 2008, and Obama was running against McCain. I liked them both but was definitely in Obama’s camp.

I tried replacing “You should just kill yourself” with “You should just kill John McCain.”

And it worked! That shocked me out of that self hatred long enough to start to laugh it off.

A little time went by, I met someone, got a job. The someone convinced me to get surgery for my issues. (a hernia but I didn’t think fixing that would even help the overall stuff I was fighting)

We have been married almost a decade. Nine years in the house I got her when I got a better job. I work from home hanging out with all our animals.

Things CAN get better. There’s never a guarantee but it’s worthwhile to not give up. You can climb that mountain, dig that tunnel, whatever you need to make that journey through the darkness.

And I left a LOT of shit out of that story.

About two years ago I stared into the void. I didn’t have any real problems in life, but my job was boring as hell and my colleagues were always constantly negative, depressing and whined about everything, which affected my mindset after months upon months of that.

Freshly out of university, the job (which I couldn’t leave due to contacts) sucked out my every hope and dream of having a fulfilling career where I’d have an impact on the world. I felt so useless. To make matters worse I fell in love at that time.

One day I vaguely felt bad, got home, sat down and started crying like crazy. Life felt so meaningless. Not my life specifically, but life as a concept. I could change my life, but to what purpose? I sincerely felt regret for ever having been born and existence felt like a cruel joke, it was all vanity, pain, and at the end you die without even feeling the relief of it being over since you would be gone. It was a feeling of meaninglessness where even doing something about it was as meaningless as doing nothing.

The next day I had another crying session, didn’t eat anything the whole day as well. And in the evening I remembered how Seneca wrote that nothing bad happens to good people since those “bad” moments are the only time we get to show our virtues. Didn’t really fix the basic problem of meaninglessness, but it did reinvigorate me. Reading Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus” also got me to handle the absurd better. But the moment I got out of the whole ordeal altogether was about 8 months later when I realized that I was very much pushed to such a state by my colleagues, and that I yearned for some sort of warmth and comfort from others. But nobody has really ever shined for me, I realized that I had to be my own light and that I should not do things to earn other’s approval, but for me (this does not mean being selfish, according to Platonic and Aristotelian ethics, doing morally good deeds is for the benefit of the doer). I’ve been fine since then.

I was so broken in my early 20’s. I had been consistently struggling with college, did not understand myself, and just genuinely felt alone. It wasn’t until my 30’s and getting into a psychology class that I started piecing together that I have ADHD (officially diagnosed now), a sleep disorder that makes me tired unexpectedly and intensely, and just generally started to find who I was as a person. It took years of working with a psychiatrist and psychologist (therapist) to start unraveling years of negative self talk and also work through some religious trauma.

The one point I remember is I was thinking just how easy it would be to drive off a bridge…but I liked my car too much to do it. Those were rough times, but I made it through and haven’t been that low since.

Ohio.

Probably one of the times I got put in the hospital for wanting to kill myself

Depression is a bitch

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Even though I’ve been through bouts of manic depression I’d still say right now is the worst mental state for me at the moment. I’ve really surpassed the threshold where I want it to end but don’t want to really die, to just being apathetic.

When I got a boyfriend I was kicked out by my parents and forced to move to a state I didn’t want to go to during COVID, where we got kicked out by my boyfriends parents after a year. Only for my own parents to offer me a place to stay again, but at their second “retirement” house for 10 years. So I move to an even worse state away from all my family and friends for this opportunity, and only realized when I got here how bad this state is.

House is constantly falling apart with some parts so old it was a struggle to find anybody to fix it. I was forced to quit my decent paying job that I actually liked of 6+ years because (even though I transferred) I didn’t jive with anybody and absolutely could not stand the way the place was run. It was quit or suicide that’s how awful the job was. Which had me get another job making less money than the first job I ever held at Walmart over a decade ago. Only to face random discrimination, schedule cuts, and then silently being fired. And again, I was not clicking with anybody in this place. I realized I didn’t get along with almost any people here, the national pastime is drinking alcohol and I’ve yet to see a single person with remotely similar interests to me. Aside from my BF it’s been lonely.

This is all bad enough but then Christmas year 3 rolls around and my parents show up on Christmas and evict me. Yes evicted by my own parents on Christmas. They gave me 3 months to leave with no offer to let me come home, fully willing to let me just become homeless in South Carolina. I should mention my parents are extremely well off, getting new cars every year, going on vacations across the country, upgrading their house all the time. Meanwhile I’m almost disabled (chronic illness) and have been working my ass off with no prospects of ever making enough money to live comfortably.

In addition to all this the world is slowly cooking alive and the only people that can do anything just won’t because of profits. Donald Trump is somehow not only a free man but allowed to run for president. He’s a legitimate cult leader but our education is so bad, and the parasocial relationship is so strong very few people actually see it that way. Books are getting banned, women’s and trans rights are being stripped, gun violence in America is so bad I’ve become extremely paranoid and don’t wanna leave the house. The cost of everything is rising in the name of profits and the government just sits back and watches as a majority of Americans die, struggle to pay bills, and stay fed.

And nobody talks about this in real life for some reason, maybe it’s due to the volatile nature of Trump supporters so we all walk on eggshells, but I’ve yet to meet a single person outside of New York that had a brain on these issues. Most people seem to just live their lives and never really think about it. They worry about petty nonsense like how much they can’t stand Stacy in the other department or how much of a bitch their neighbor is. People treat these petty issues with military-like seriousness, seemingly oblivious to the world crumbling around them, and I just don’t get it. I wish I could be that happy and clueless that the biggest issue plaguing my life is what my coworker was doing last week. I don’t want every conversation I have to be about the depressing state of the world, but I’m also REALLY not worried about this petty stuff anymore. Talk to me about some real shit like the time you went hiking and fell 30 feet breaking your leg, that’s something I want to actually engage with.

I could go on forever but honestly this is already way too long. Hopefully we all make it.

Due to the way I was raised, I have a tendency to view my self worth as solely deriving from my actions.

It has had some benefits, like running into a burning building once I was out to get a family member out.

But it also has some downsides. It’s hard for me to view my own happiness or even life as having intrinsic value.

It’s especially bad if someone I love could concievably benefit from me not being around anymore.

Years of therapy have really helped though.

I think I got seasonal depression and my heart literally physically hurts anytime I’m particularly sad (no medical emergency). First time in my life I’ve felt lonely after enjoying solitude forever, tho I suppose I always hung out with friends a lot more often. Not the first time I’ve been uncertain and scared about the future. Tried to cry and can’t either. Somehow much worse than the deaths of my grandparents.

About 5 years ago, my Dad went into the hospital due to low oxygen levels (he had cancer), this was in the morning. I went to work and while I was working the customer had a massive stroke and died. This was while watching her grand kids. No one noticed until her daughter came home. The stress of all that combined with my Dad’s failing health brought me as close as I have ever come to a breakdown.

It was at the beginning of the pandemic when my dad died.

He was in the hospital, and i could sense he was dying, but no doctor would come to check. At the end of visiting hours i was escorted out with 3 police officers, only to get a phone call the next morning that he was, indeed, dying. I was so angry at everyone… i think ive never felt more “black” then that. I swear i could have killed anyone who got in my way for that first year after :(

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One day between two jobs I worked 20 hours straight in a row unexpectedly, including a night shift I was wholly unprepared for, and when my husband picked me up and we got home, it was so icy on the ground on the passenger side of the car that I asked him to carry one of my bags in because it was heavy and I was afraid I’d slip. He ripped it out of my hand, snarled “What are you fucking handicapped?”, and I called him a sociopath and went to bed, whereupon he woke me up four hours later “so I didn’t waste the entire day”.

Don’t ever get married, and don’t entangle your finances with someone else. You’ll never get free.