That's pretty much what my life feels like at this point. Kind of a slow downward spiral really since like a few years ago.
But the hole is pretty deep now and getting deeper.
This time it's been a culmination of different things. My mother coming down with cancer, me nothing feeling anything at all even though I think I should be feeling something. I used to get broken up over the thought of my parents dying some day, but now I don't feel anything at all. It feels like I should be upset, and it also feels as though I should be upset that I'm not upset about it. Sigh...
Another thing to chalk off would be a brush with nihilism, talk about a deep hole. I understand the paradox of the whole thing, but sadly that has done little to assuage my experience with it. It started off small and then exploded into a void. Everything feels pointless now, no reason to bother about anything. Although it's a mixed blessing I suppose, it came around the time I found out about the cancer. Talk about a wall (or maybe that's just to make me feel better about not feeling anything to begin with). I've tried everything to deal with it: writing my thoughts down, distracting my brain, meditation, even hanging out with friends. But it just hangs in the corner of my mind like a persistent plague ready to sucker punch me. My attempts feel like a drug addict, needing more and more to stem the dark tide. Everything I used to love has lost luster, I feel disconnected from the world, I care not about what happens to me. Waking up is like raising the dead. I just want to sleep, because staying awake and dealing with this is such an effort. I'm seriously considering suicide at this point, because every day I lose a reason to stick around.
Truly this must be what it feels like to be dead. TO compound the problem, I can't help but see the humans as just motes in the vastness of space. Completely insignificant. All their efforts, dreams, values, morals, rules; they mean nothing outside the planet. Thinking about it just makes me feel further disconnected from humans, lately it's like I'm looking at them through a microscope. I wonder....why? Why do they cling so tightly to these things they have created and believe to have value outside the world? If I had to describe it, the human world feels fake to me. I guess like an illusion one might say. They seem so small.
Sorry if this seems scattered, but I just needed to get this all down before I forget again. That seems to be happening a lot. I've tried talking to my therapist about this but he's just not equipped to deal with this sort of thing, and neither am I obviously. I figured I would try my luck here. It's not like there is much left to lose. At this point I'll grab whatever thread I can.
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I welcome you.....to the pure world I have forged.
Ok, before anything else: 1 (800) 273-8255. This is the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
I've tried talking to my therapist about this but he's just not equipped to deal with this sort of thing, and neither am I obviously.
Well, first of all, I'm glad you actually are going to a therapist, because it shows you are willing to go get help.
That being said, what now? A person having mental health issues is precisely what a therapist is supposed to be equipped to deal with. If he's not, then you need to stop seeing him and go find a real therapist who is capable of helping you with what you are dealing with. I would imagine the above number might be able to get you to a referral to someone who might be so qualified.
Sorry about your mom, man. Hope things brighten for you soon.
A person having mental health issues is precisely what a therapist is supposed to be equipped to deal with. If he's not, then you need to stop seeing him and go find a real therapist who is capable of helping you with what you are dealing with.
Follow Highroller's advice and talk to someone, and find yourself a new therapist. I know you well enough now to know you need to talk to a professional.
Truly this must be what it feels like to be dead. TO compound the problem, I can't help but see the humans as just motes in the vastness of space. Completely insignificant. All their efforts, dreams, values, morals, rules; they mean nothing outside the planet. Thinking about it just makes me feel further disconnected from humans, lately it's like I'm looking at them through a microscope. I wonder....why? Why do they cling so tightly to these things they have created and believe to have value outside the world? If I had to describe it, the human world feels fake to me. I guess like an illusion one might say. They seem so small.
So I can't really speak to the other things you've talked about as I'm not really good with compassion towards strangers. However this^, yeah this I can help you with.
Here's the thing. It's all true. On the grand scale, hell even on one so small as a planetary scale you, me, your mom and her cancer, my mom and her bipolar, we're all insignificant specks of nothingness. I mean the universe is, for all we know infinite, so we are literally equivalent to nothing. I mean look at the moon and really think about how big it is. What could you, and your life and your decisions possibly do that could effect something so large? You'd think this would be a painful thing to understand, and for me for a while it was hard to deal with. But I'm the thinking sort. I believe that a wise man can live a thousand years in the time others might live a day. So in my constant thinking and searching for wisdom I had a realization. It's relative. It's all about your frame of reference. If the thought of your cosmic insignificance is depressing you should change your reference frame to something smaller. Your mom, regardless of how you feel or your lack thereof about her cancer, loves you yes? That's important. You're important to her. And that is huge. We humans are tiny, squishy little things with no way to protect ourselves from the ravages of the wild world around us. We survive by coming together and bonding with each other. Everyone has someone that they hold as highly important. If you went and killed yourself over these things would the world end? Would the universe collapse upon itself? No, of course not don't be silly. But I can guarantee that if your mother loves you she would die from heartbreak. Point is the cosmos may not care about you or me or anyone else but someone cares about you. And that's important. You aren't dead yet so there's something to keep going for. If that something is eat, sleep, and procreate as your genes program you to do then so be it but it's better than nothing. It could be you just have to keep going to find something to keep you going. It's out there. There's not a human being out there, no matter how depressed, that can't find something to keep going for if they try. Just keep trying.
Except even at the cosmic scale, we are significant.
Think about it, picture the universe in all of its enormity.
How many of you are there? Just one. In the history of time there has never been another you, nor will there be another one again afterward.
So any argument that you are not significant is therefore factually false. What does significant mean? "Sufficiently great or important to be worthy of attention; noteworthy."
What could be more noteworthy than something that is truly unique?
The thing is neither you or I can be sure I am unique. Or that there has never been one like me or that there ever will be. In fact in universe there is likely to be someone who is a copy of me.
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I welcome you.....to the pure world I have forged.
There is no therapist around better than the one I have, that's the problem. Also they aren't equipped to deal with the rational reasons for suicide. All they say is life is worth living for but they don't say why.
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I welcome you.....to the pure world I have forged.
There is no therapist around better than the one I have, that's the problem
Your therapist is someone whom you describe as, "I've tried talking to my therapist about this but he's just not equipped to deal with this sort of thing," in which "this sort of thing" meaning you being suicidal.
If he is not equipped to deal with a suicidal person, then you cannot possibly say that there is no therapist better than the one you have. You find the one that works.
Also they aren't equipped to deal with the rational reasons for suicide.
I don't believe you have anything approaching a rational reason for committing suicide. Hint: The topic you're talking about is your mother's cancer, and how depressed you were around/because of the time you found out about that, right? So is being depressed because you had a horrible tragedy happen to you rational? No, it's emotional, isn't it?
All they say is life is worth living for but they don't say why.
Well, yeah, because it's your job to find why.
Dude, let me point something out to you: in the past year, you've started seven threads in this forum. That means almost one out of every eleven posts you've made on this forum are just the OPs of threads you've started in Real Life Advice. All of these threads are variation on the same thing: displaying your need for help. You acknowledge on some level that you are very lost and confused, and are reaching out for assistance. You have been told repeatedly that you need to seek professional help.
Now, to your credit, you seem to actually be getting professional help. That's fantastic. Not everyone on this forum would have actually done it.
So obviously, you want to live. If you're actively seeking help and advice, you clearly want to live. That's just basic observation of your actions.
So since you clearly want to live, based on plenty of observable evidence, you can abandon this nonsense of dying and start actually working towards living, because now you know which direction you want to go in.
The problem is that you don't seem to want to do that. I don't know what that is. I do know making a major change in your life is hard, and I'm sorry for all the ***** in your life that has laid even further obstacles in your own way, but the thing is, dude, you know you want to go that way. I can guarantee you don't want to spend another year of paddling in a circle around the Real Life Advice thread.
There's a wonderful life out there for you, but you have to go out and work for it. Maybe this therapist isn't working out, in which case find another. But recognize that no therapist in this world can make you want to live. You have to find the desire to live in yourself, and we know it's there, so what remains is you doing what you need to do to go out and live. And the biggest challenge is to stop blocking yourself from doing that.
Most people talk about depression as if it's feeling sad all the time, but in fact, it often manifests as either a feeling of hopelessness or apathy. The truth is, you have a reason to feel this way. Some people go through this kind of hardship with grief, crying, or even anger, screaming. Others simply shut down. Your brain doesn't quite know how to process what's going on, so it shuts parts of itself off. It's a defense mechanism. Your subconscious doesn't want to think about the pain. It doesn't want to think about the meaning of it all; to give life some grand reason knowing that she might die. It's not an abnormal response; you're not going crazy.
That said, you have to talk through what you're feeling - specifically, what you're not feeling. Continue seeing the therapist. It always feels like it's not going anywhere at first. If you still feel this way a couple months down the road, try a different one. Therapists, just like all other professionals, aren't all equal. However, they do all seem to do nothing at first. It always takes time.
This post stood out to me, so I thought I'd take a look.
I've been fighting an uphill battle with depression for most of my life, though I haven't been taking medication for about ten years. I definitely need it, but because of a complex history of mental health issues and sub-par therapy, I've grown to develop this schema that accepting this kind of help is a sign of weakness and my brain seems to do whatever it takes to not appear weak. I'm not sure exactly how that started, but those feelings have been with me for a very long time.
Depression has because a normal thing for me, to the point that I can compartmentalize it. I think of it like a black hole in the pit of my chest. I can deprive it of energy, and I can even be happy for a time, but it's only a matter of time before that black hole starts devouring things around it. The void leaks out and I spiral down. I've always managed to crawl back out, somehow, but I worry that there will be a time when I won't be able to. It's not even serious things like a parent dying that does this, just fairly banal setbacks towards life goals, or not getting the things I want out of life because it feels like I'm treading water a lot of the time. I'm afraid that if I lost someone I cared about, it would be too much. Hell, if it's not tmi, my fiance had an abortion a couple of years ago that I still blame myself for, even when she has told me she doesn't blame me. That one still gets its hooks into me from time to time.
So, now I'm seeing a therapist, and I'm working towards medication. I'm fighting the compulsive feelings of weakness because I know that I actually need these things. It's impacted my ability to work and put other people in danger. Not even being actually suicidal in college gave me that epiphany. I think knowing that other people could get hurt because I'm spiraling is what convinced me to seek help. It feels wrong to drag innocent people down with me. So no, I don't know exactly what it means to be happy for any length of time. I don't know what satisfaction with my life looks like or how serenity feels. But I'd like to find out.
Purpose and meaning is so subjective that nobody can just tell you what it means. The answer I give you will never amount to the answer you find in yourself. I won't try to tell you how or why you should live. I'll just tell you that this emptiness you feel inside, this void? You're not the only one in the world who fights it. Hell, you're not even the only one in this forum who fights it. As highroller said, the fact that you're seeking help at all tells me part of you desperately wants to live. Cling to that, because it's better than nothing, and who knows, maybe through the therapy and drugs, you'll find something you can care about again. I'm certainly trying.
After some time in a mental hospital I have managed to come out a bit saner for it. I had time to think, to be alone with my thoughts. I figured I may just as well live, there's a lot of questions that about the world.
Carl Sagan's, A Demon Haunted World, helped me deal with a few of my worries. I also dipped into a few of Jung's works, although those come off as a bit abrasive, but they gave me something to think about.
SO I can say I'm different now, not suicidal but different.
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I welcome you.....to the pure world I have forged.
After some time in a mental hospital I have managed to come out a bit saner for it. I had time to think, to be alone with my thoughts. I figured I may just as well live, there's a lot of questions that about the world.
Hey! There you go! Improvement.
SO I can say I'm different now, not suicidal but different.
Different is good. It's often the indication that you are growing as a person.
But the hole is pretty deep now and getting deeper.
This time it's been a culmination of different things. My mother coming down with cancer, me nothing feeling anything at all even though I think I should be feeling something. I used to get broken up over the thought of my parents dying some day, but now I don't feel anything at all. It feels like I should be upset, and it also feels as though I should be upset that I'm not upset about it. Sigh...
Another thing to chalk off would be a brush with nihilism, talk about a deep hole. I understand the paradox of the whole thing, but sadly that has done little to assuage my experience with it. It started off small and then exploded into a void. Everything feels pointless now, no reason to bother about anything. Although it's a mixed blessing I suppose, it came around the time I found out about the cancer. Talk about a wall (or maybe that's just to make me feel better about not feeling anything to begin with). I've tried everything to deal with it: writing my thoughts down, distracting my brain, meditation, even hanging out with friends. But it just hangs in the corner of my mind like a persistent plague ready to sucker punch me. My attempts feel like a drug addict, needing more and more to stem the dark tide. Everything I used to love has lost luster, I feel disconnected from the world, I care not about what happens to me. Waking up is like raising the dead. I just want to sleep, because staying awake and dealing with this is such an effort. I'm seriously considering suicide at this point, because every day I lose a reason to stick around.
Truly this must be what it feels like to be dead. TO compound the problem, I can't help but see the humans as just motes in the vastness of space. Completely insignificant. All their efforts, dreams, values, morals, rules; they mean nothing outside the planet. Thinking about it just makes me feel further disconnected from humans, lately it's like I'm looking at them through a microscope. I wonder....why? Why do they cling so tightly to these things they have created and believe to have value outside the world? If I had to describe it, the human world feels fake to me. I guess like an illusion one might say. They seem so small.
Sorry if this seems scattered, but I just needed to get this all down before I forget again. That seems to be happening a lot. I've tried talking to my therapist about this but he's just not equipped to deal with this sort of thing, and neither am I obviously. I figured I would try my luck here. It's not like there is much left to lose. At this point I'll grab whatever thread I can.
Well, first of all, I'm glad you actually are going to a therapist, because it shows you are willing to go get help.
That being said, what now? A person having mental health issues is precisely what a therapist is supposed to be equipped to deal with. If he's not, then you need to stop seeing him and go find a real therapist who is capable of helping you with what you are dealing with. I would imagine the above number might be able to get you to a referral to someone who might be so qualified.
Sorry about your mom, man. Hope things brighten for you soon.
Sorry to hear about your mother.
Follow Highroller's advice and talk to someone, and find yourself a new therapist. I know you well enough now to know you need to talk to a professional.
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So I can't really speak to the other things you've talked about as I'm not really good with compassion towards strangers. However this^, yeah this I can help you with.
Here's the thing. It's all true. On the grand scale, hell even on one so small as a planetary scale you, me, your mom and her cancer, my mom and her bipolar, we're all insignificant specks of nothingness. I mean the universe is, for all we know infinite, so we are literally equivalent to nothing. I mean look at the moon and really think about how big it is. What could you, and your life and your decisions possibly do that could effect something so large? You'd think this would be a painful thing to understand, and for me for a while it was hard to deal with. But I'm the thinking sort. I believe that a wise man can live a thousand years in the time others might live a day. So in my constant thinking and searching for wisdom I had a realization. It's relative. It's all about your frame of reference. If the thought of your cosmic insignificance is depressing you should change your reference frame to something smaller. Your mom, regardless of how you feel or your lack thereof about her cancer, loves you yes? That's important. You're important to her. And that is huge. We humans are tiny, squishy little things with no way to protect ourselves from the ravages of the wild world around us. We survive by coming together and bonding with each other. Everyone has someone that they hold as highly important. If you went and killed yourself over these things would the world end? Would the universe collapse upon itself? No, of course not don't be silly. But I can guarantee that if your mother loves you she would die from heartbreak. Point is the cosmos may not care about you or me or anyone else but someone cares about you. And that's important. You aren't dead yet so there's something to keep going for. If that something is eat, sleep, and procreate as your genes program you to do then so be it but it's better than nothing. It could be you just have to keep going to find something to keep you going. It's out there. There's not a human being out there, no matter how depressed, that can't find something to keep going for if they try. Just keep trying.
Think about it, picture the universe in all of its enormity.
How many of you are there? Just one. In the history of time there has never been another you, nor will there be another one again afterward.
So any argument that you are not significant is therefore factually false. What does significant mean? "Sufficiently great or important to be worthy of attention; noteworthy."
What could be more noteworthy than something that is truly unique?
It's also reading things like this.
If he is not equipped to deal with a suicidal person, then you cannot possibly say that there is no therapist better than the one you have. You find the one that works.
I don't believe you have anything approaching a rational reason for committing suicide. Hint: The topic you're talking about is your mother's cancer, and how depressed you were around/because of the time you found out about that, right? So is being depressed because you had a horrible tragedy happen to you rational? No, it's emotional, isn't it?
Well, yeah, because it's your job to find why.
Dude, let me point something out to you: in the past year, you've started seven threads in this forum. That means almost one out of every eleven posts you've made on this forum are just the OPs of threads you've started in Real Life Advice. All of these threads are variation on the same thing: displaying your need for help. You acknowledge on some level that you are very lost and confused, and are reaching out for assistance. You have been told repeatedly that you need to seek professional help.
Now, to your credit, you seem to actually be getting professional help. That's fantastic. Not everyone on this forum would have actually done it.
So obviously, you want to live. If you're actively seeking help and advice, you clearly want to live. That's just basic observation of your actions.
So since you clearly want to live, based on plenty of observable evidence, you can abandon this nonsense of dying and start actually working towards living, because now you know which direction you want to go in.
The problem is that you don't seem to want to do that. I don't know what that is. I do know making a major change in your life is hard, and I'm sorry for all the ***** in your life that has laid even further obstacles in your own way, but the thing is, dude, you know you want to go that way. I can guarantee you don't want to spend another year of paddling in a circle around the Real Life Advice thread.
There's a wonderful life out there for you, but you have to go out and work for it. Maybe this therapist isn't working out, in which case find another. But recognize that no therapist in this world can make you want to live. You have to find the desire to live in yourself, and we know it's there, so what remains is you doing what you need to do to go out and live. And the biggest challenge is to stop blocking yourself from doing that.
That said, you have to talk through what you're feeling - specifically, what you're not feeling. Continue seeing the therapist. It always feels like it's not going anywhere at first. If you still feel this way a couple months down the road, try a different one. Therapists, just like all other professionals, aren't all equal. However, they do all seem to do nothing at first. It always takes time.
No longer staff here.
I've been fighting an uphill battle with depression for most of my life, though I haven't been taking medication for about ten years. I definitely need it, but because of a complex history of mental health issues and sub-par therapy, I've grown to develop this schema that accepting this kind of help is a sign of weakness and my brain seems to do whatever it takes to not appear weak. I'm not sure exactly how that started, but those feelings have been with me for a very long time.
Depression has because a normal thing for me, to the point that I can compartmentalize it. I think of it like a black hole in the pit of my chest. I can deprive it of energy, and I can even be happy for a time, but it's only a matter of time before that black hole starts devouring things around it. The void leaks out and I spiral down. I've always managed to crawl back out, somehow, but I worry that there will be a time when I won't be able to. It's not even serious things like a parent dying that does this, just fairly banal setbacks towards life goals, or not getting the things I want out of life because it feels like I'm treading water a lot of the time. I'm afraid that if I lost someone I cared about, it would be too much. Hell, if it's not tmi, my fiance had an abortion a couple of years ago that I still blame myself for, even when she has told me she doesn't blame me. That one still gets its hooks into me from time to time.
So, now I'm seeing a therapist, and I'm working towards medication. I'm fighting the compulsive feelings of weakness because I know that I actually need these things. It's impacted my ability to work and put other people in danger. Not even being actually suicidal in college gave me that epiphany. I think knowing that other people could get hurt because I'm spiraling is what convinced me to seek help. It feels wrong to drag innocent people down with me. So no, I don't know exactly what it means to be happy for any length of time. I don't know what satisfaction with my life looks like or how serenity feels. But I'd like to find out.
Purpose and meaning is so subjective that nobody can just tell you what it means. The answer I give you will never amount to the answer you find in yourself. I won't try to tell you how or why you should live. I'll just tell you that this emptiness you feel inside, this void? You're not the only one in the world who fights it. Hell, you're not even the only one in this forum who fights it. As highroller said, the fact that you're seeking help at all tells me part of you desperately wants to live. Cling to that, because it's better than nothing, and who knows, maybe through the therapy and drugs, you'll find something you can care about again. I'm certainly trying.
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Annul is really good in EDH
Carl Sagan's, A Demon Haunted World, helped me deal with a few of my worries. I also dipped into a few of Jung's works, although those come off as a bit abrasive, but they gave me something to think about.
SO I can say I'm different now, not suicidal but different.
Different is good. It's often the indication that you are growing as a person.