Really fucking depressed and angry.

Whether it is good or bad, talk about it here.
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manuel_moe_g
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Re: Really fucking depressed and angry.

Post by manuel_moe_g »

Hello weary. You feel a freedom to express yourself on this forum, so there is always the option (not suggesting you take the option now) there is always the option of printing out your posts and reading them out loud to your wife. But don't worry about that now.

Just recently in my EMDR therapy I worked on saying to myself "I am enough" when dealing with unreasonable people in taxing situations. That was my trigger, the underlying pretext that I wasn't enough during interactions with unreasonable people.

You are enough because if you walk away from everything, you still will contain the thread of care from the past to the present to the future. Only you can carry this thread of care, any substitution even with somebody who on paper has more capability and more energy would drop the thread of individual care. You are the personification of care, and you are the only one who can carry the thread correctly for your individuality and personality. You are enough because you care enough, and care in the right way, that you were made to care.

So the hard part is being the person who cares as you do, but still enmeshed in your current situation and responsibilities and relationships. OK, so your voice that says "I am enough" to all the people and things in your life is a very very very quiet voice. But practicing saying "I am enough. I am enough. I am enough." in your head will help you to let your voice get a little louder.

If this seems like a word salad, I can break it down further.
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weary
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Re: Really fucking depressed and angry.

Post by weary »

So the hard part is being the person who cares as you do, but still enmeshed in your current situation and responsibilities and relationships. OK, so your voice that says "I am enough" to all the people and things in your life is a very very very quiet voice. But practicing saying "I am enough. I am enough. I am enough." in your head will help you to let your voice get a little louder.
But I am not enough. I am not enough for my wife. I am not enough for my employers. I am not enough for anyone.

And they are not enough for me.

The dream is over. All the dreams are over. It's too late. It's all downhill from here. My career is having the last breath choked out of it, and I will have to rip my life to shreds just to keep it on life support. My marriage will never recover, but I can't fix it or end it because I need to attend to my career to stave off financial ruin. So I need to continue to endure the impossible pressure of my marriage and add to it the impossible pressure of a job search while wallowing in the failure of everything that I have done as an adult being shoved in my face all at once.

It doesn't matter the parts of my job that I have done a really excellent job at... it's all or nothing, sink or swim, and so I now am branded FAILURE for the rest of my life and will never be able to recover from that. Doors are closing for good. So I will have to settle for whatever I can salvage of my career. And it will soon be too late to even contemplate having kids biologically, if that door isn't already totally closed, and even if my wife started putting 100% of her effort into getting her shit together today, it would probably be six months to a year before we could even start trying... and that would be in the midst of a job search and potential relocation to who the fuck knows where. So basically, that door is closing. So career goals. Dead. Relationship goals. Dead. Day to day stress and unpleasantness - constant. The past 20 years of my life career wise - all for nothing. The past 15 years of my life relationship wise - all for nothing. Just pain. And shame. And guilt.
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manuel_moe_g
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Re: Really fucking depressed and angry.

Post by manuel_moe_g »

Dreams suck. Because they don't take into account present capabilities and situations. If me in my youth saw my situation now...

I am not enough to give counsel to you, because you are the expert on your situation. So I will just blather about what I have been thinking about.

Being realistic about my present situation - thinking negatively but realistically. Being realistic about where I can be in a few months with work - thinking positively but realistically. Doubling-down on internal locus of control.

Some dreams are cruel and debilitate us. They give no guidance in the here and now to maximize how we move forward.

After I had my mental break, I could concentrate on staying alive and maximizing moving forward, without having to ask permission from others or get acceptance from others. My ego died and I could stop beating myself up with dreams that were ultimately hurtful.
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weary
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Re: Really fucking depressed and angry.

Post by weary »

Being realistic about my present situation - thinking negatively but realistically. Being realistic about where I can be in a few months with work - thinking positively but realistically. Doubling-down on internal locus of control.
Being realistic? I am going to lose my job. It is going to be very difficult to find another one, and it is inevitably going to require moving to wherever I can possibly find a job. It will probably be sliding farther and farther down in my field, from tenure track faculty member at a university to probably an adjunct or lecturer or who the hell knows what. Maybe Wal-Mart. The research part of my career is basically over. My wife is fucking crazy. She is deeply depressed, anxious, not able to function. All of the empathy and compassion and assistance I can muster isn't enough for her and is fucking killing me. And so we will have to tear ourselves away from home such as it is, lose friends, therapists, whatever and start the fuck over again. And it will be worse. Economic suffering is likely. I am never going to have a normal life. Never going to have any stability. My wife is never going to be able to be a real equal partner that I can depend on.

Think positively but realistically? Well, maybe I will end up with a job that won't suck as much as my current job has. But the realistic part says that I will be lucky to take whatever fucking job I can find in my field, no matter what kind of shithole institution in whatever shithole city. If they will hire me, I will have to take it, because it is unlikely I will be able to attract even one job offer, let alone have a choice, unless I accept the fact that I am a failure and just change directions, in which case I will never have financial and job security anyway, and no satisfaction whatsoever, so what the fuck would the point be?

And internal locus of control? That's a good one. There is only one thing that I can control, and that is my emotions. My anger. My sadness. My frustration. Sadly, even my joy. And how do I control them, you might ask? By shoving them the fuck down as deep as I can, because I do not have the tools or the time or the ability to deal with them when they get overwhelming. And they are overwhelming all the time. So that's how I cope. Until it gets too much and I can't even do that anymore. Like now. If other people would handle their own shit for a while, maybe I would be able to deal with my issues and not shove them down, but that's certainly not going to happen now. Things are only going to get worse before they get better. Or more realistically, they will just get worse and never get better.
fifthsonata
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Re: Really fucking depressed and angry.

Post by fifthsonata »

I'll be frank and say it doesn't seem like you're feeling receptive to advice and are terrified of change. I may not understand your situation, but I understand those feelings. In situations like this, sometimes words aren't the most effective things, but rather, the actions of those around us - so what I will say is that if I knew you in real life, I'd offer you my couch for a few days.

Be wary of the cats, though - I have one who has really taken to sleeping on crotches. Literally. I mean she gets all up in there.
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manuel_moe_g
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Re: Really fucking depressed and angry.

Post by manuel_moe_g »

I was "lucky" in that in my mental break I knew my #1 priority was to stay alive because I had suicidal ideation. So every other concern could fly out the window. Since I had a single goal - stay alive from month to month - it was easy to form a strategy and my ego didn't have a say at all. But I wouldn't wish that crap I went through on anyone. You deserve better than that.

From the outside it would see walking away from your wife and the elements of your career that are unrewarding would be in order, but only you are the expert of your own situation. 18 months as a single guy working at Wal-Mart sounds like a chance to decompress, and sounds like a relief from devices of torture in your current situation, but I am ignorant of the true nature of what is in your heart and your life experience.

At the very least, you owe yourself to mourn promises in life that were made to you but not kept. Sometimes I worry that you don't even cut yourself enough slack to properly mourn. In youth people would say a lot of things about how to achieve "satisfaction" but they were full of shit. Nobody speaks out realistically about the desperation in life. weary, you were not served well in life and you deserve better.

I don't know if emotions can be controlled - they are like our senses of taste or smell or sight - if I had to eat a spoonful of shit I could not control how it would taste or smell or look-like. Emotions are like that, I think. Emotions just give information in the moment that we can choose to act upon or not act upon and we can choose how we respond with different actions available to us.

If my reply caused you distress I apologize. Of course, I am just an unqualified commenter and only you are the expert of your own situation. But I do know you deserve better and you deserve to mourn promises made to you that were broken and you deserve your feelings to be validated and you deserve release from the pressure-cooker you are in. Please take care, we here are cheering for you and for your greatest today and tomorrow.
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weary
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Re: Really fucking depressed and angry.

Post by weary »

Manuel_moe, I'm sorry for the over the top reaction to your post. Your post didn't cause me distress, my life (and my brain's feeble attempt to make sense of it) is causing me distress. I have a lot of anger, a lot of sadness, and a whole hell of a lot of fear. Fifthsonata, you hit the nail on the head. I don't want people telling me it will all be ok... It always reminds me of when Homer Simpson had to learn good parenting skills, and had to comfort Bart, and did so by saying "there, there. Shut up boy." It is also hard to hear advice from people telling me to do things that I am already doing to the best of my ability or have tried and they haven't worked.
At the very least, you owe yourself to mourn promises in life that were made to you but not kept. Sometimes I worry that you don't even cut yourself enough slack to properly mourn.
I think the problem is that in order to mourn the loss of something, I had to admit defeat. I have to give up. I have to convince myself that it's lost. And that is so painful to do I am crying just as I am typing this. When a loved one dies there is no choice but to accept it. There is no way they are coming back. Hope makes it hard to mourn. It is conflicting information to me, on one hand, don't give up! On the other hand, don't cling too hard to the way you want things to be or the way you think things should be! Don't be stubborn and stay in a bad situation too long! But don't be impulsive and flighty and make rash decisions! That sort of thing.

And sometimes it's painful because you have to live with the ghosts or remains of your loss or your failure day in and day out staring you in the face, mocking you and humiliating you.

My wife and I had a nice evening together last night for a few hours. It was a pleasant oasis In a shitstorm hurricane. Sometimes I think she actually likes it when my stress is being caused by something other than her behavior, because she feels off the hook and she can move into a comforting role because she doesn't feel guilty or defensive. But outside if that oasis, the shitstorms rage on, and things can't get fixed from within that oasis. It is just a place to hide. But I can't hide from all of it. And I can't hide forever.

And I am just so fucking exhausted and sick of it all. I have to go through the next humiliating stage of my tenure denial by writing a letter of appeal to the Provost and then having a meeting about it Monday. And then if that fails, file a grievance with the union. But none of that is going to change how I feel. Change that I have failed and I want be able to recover from this. I'm getting too old for all this. I don't want to start over at a new place or even a whole new career. I can't end my marriage and hope to find and cultivate a new relationship in which I will get me needs met. I'm too broken, too burned out, too tired, too worthless .
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manuel_moe_g
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Re: Really fucking depressed and angry.

Post by manuel_moe_g »

No worries, weary. Actually I am happy because you are asserting your feelings. It kills me that you feel so stifled in your life that you cannot assert your feelings, which is a basic part of being human. You never have to apologize to me about asserting your feelings! :D :D :D

The important thing is that it will _not_ be OK. One part of life is that often we are lied to about what we can reasonably expect - and I hate that part of life, for myself and for others. Weary, you have a right to mourn what was promised and never delivered.

I was lied to about my intelligence because I was a "gifted" child, and I was told the lie that if I just worked "hard enough" I would reasonably expect great success. The problem is that I should have been focused on developing myself around my mental illnesses of depression, anxiety, and Aspergers. Growth by working through my limitations, not trying to get through life maximizing my results from a fixed amount of intelligence, high though it may be, based on IQ tests that I have zero faith in at this point of my life. But my parents and my early adult influences had no clue how to tell me to pursue growth around the limitations of my mental illnesses, which sucked, because that is exactly what I needed to hear. So now I mourn the time lost and the opportunities and experiences I missed out on. I am 43 and I have to work through this crap every damn day. The only good thing is that I can give truthful and sincere testimony about going through it all.

Some types of hope for some things is harmful, and some types of hope for some other things is helpful. A hope in something that makes you feel so stifled that you cannot see how wrong it was for her to use your private journal against you - well that is a lousy-ass hope, I must say. If your hope in something tears you apart and makes you feel stifled and makes you feel so confined that a jail cell would be a relief, well that is a lousy-ass thing to have hope in.
weary wrote:And sometimes it's painful because you have to live with the ghosts or remains of your loss or your failure day in and day out staring you in the face, mocking you and humiliating you.
Wow, this is deep, weary. You hit the nail on the head with those exact words.
weary wrote:I'm getting too old for all this. I don't want to start over at a new place or even a whole new career. I can't end my marriage and hope to find and cultivate a new relationship in which I will get me needs met. I'm too broken, too burned out, too tired, too worthless .
I am glad you are validating the depth of your own feelings. But you deserve better, you should know that. I hate that they have set things up so that they can string you along and make you jump when they want you to jump.

Please never stop being honest and never stop with this penetrating writing you are doing. I really am cheering for you.
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