YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Hi everyone,
I'm in my second year of being self-employed. I realised that after 10 years of working in IT, I was never going to make it as a corporate, and I was finding it harder and harder to get my job done in the hen houses-er, working environments I was in. I thought I could slowly build it up, while still doing my job, but I got kicked out do to restructuring. That was back in March, and while I did save up some money, it's long gone(London's a pretty expensive place). After a really dark time in October, I've been getting some therapy, which has been really helpful and actually helping realise that what I have been feeling all this time, is well, depressed! I'm in this weird, uncomfortable place where I'm enjoying what I'm building and make, but it can't make money yet. The thought of going back an IT position makes me physically ill, as I know how that story ends. I'm looking at doing something different for a while, but I'm not sure about navigating fulltime work around my depression.
Sometimes it gets too much, and I feel so useless, that my brain will go into overdrive. This happened on Christmas Day. I though that for one day, I would just relax. By the evening, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of doom, and I spent the entire night researching jobs, emailing friends about other careers, and wondering how much work I could do and wether or not I was doing enough. Needless to say, my circumstances didn't change. It interesting to note that I've been practicing mindfulness over the last 6 months, and for some reason, I thought I wouldn't need to do it that day. I have been thinking a little bit more about my situation, and almost accepting that I have to work through it-there's no quick fix. But it still sucks when your brain goes off on a bender and leaves you to pick up the pieces.
So are there other self-employeds out there? How do you manage it with your mental illness? Have you picked up work to pay the bills and how does that work with depression? And while I'd like to use the word 'stop', 'stopping' your brain from flipping out doesn't seem realistic, so how do you 'minimise' the impact your brain flip-outs have on your work?

Dom


Dom

I cannot speak to the issue of self-employment. Paul talks about the challenges of his situation at the beginning of the show, now that he no longer has his TV show.

Lately I have realized the importance of forgiving yourself for back-sliding. Forgiving yourself is not just coddling yourself - it is also refusing to give yourself an excuse to stop always striving even for small gains, and refusing to give yourself an excuse for always striving even to hold onto small gains. When you refuse to forgive yourself, you reward the part of yourself that wants to completely give up.

Hi, Dom,

I'm a screenwriter. I worked regular office jobs for years before I had a career breakthrough a bit over 5 years ago. Since then, I've had dramatic ups and downs. I've never had a period wherein I didn't have a few irons in the fire, I'm always developing something, but the nature of freelance is that you're not always getting paid for what you're slaving over at the moment. For the past few months, I've been in the hole and wrestling with the idea of trying to find some other way of supporting myself. The sort of office jobs I used to do are not nearly as easy to find anymore, made worse by the fact that I haven't worked a regular job in quite a while. And yes, mentally I've been all over the place and the thought of going back to a soul-deadening 9-5 corporate environment seems overwhelming and demoralizing. I can imagine people saying/thinking, "Just suck it up and do what you have to do..." but I have got massive anxiety about the whole affair.

The panic is awful. Not productive. I can work myself up easily. Doesn't help me solve problems, definitely doesn't help me write. I feel like a lot of what I've been doing lately is trying to calm myself down and focus. I go to the gym regularly -- it helps to get myself out of the apartment and quell some of the negative thoughts. I've flirted with meditation and I know it could be a lot more helpful if I were more disciplined with it. In fact, in my current situation, I should be more panicked than I am. I'm just trying to give myself the breathing room to deal with my problems one at a time.

I used to dream of the day when I could write full-time and not keep a dead-end office job. In reality, the isolation can cause its own problems, and worsen others. I try to get out, I try to see friends, sometimes I force myself. It's challenging to get through some days. Lately, my mantra is, "I will find a way to make this work..."

And yes, mentally I've been all over the place and the thought of going back to a soul-deadening 9-5 corporate environment seems overwhelming and demoralizing. I can imagine people saying/thinking, "Just suck it up and do what you have to do..." but I have got massive anxiety about the whole affair.

I know exactly what you mean. I freaks me out when that comes up as an idea. I know it shouldn't, but when someone suggested I look for a job back where I used to work, I wanted to suggest that bathing my eyeballs in boiling oil would be better. For me, I feel like I've failed as corporate, and I know the story should I go back, I don't need to relive it.

The panic is awful. Not productive. I can work myself up easily. Doesn't help me solve problems, definitely doesn't help me write. I feel like a lot of what I've been doing lately is trying to calm myself down and focus. I go to the gym regularly -- it helps to get myself out of the apartment and quell some of the negative thoughts. I've flirted with meditation and I know it could be a lot more helpful if I were more disciplined with it. In fact, in my current situation, I should be more panicked than I am. I'm just trying to give myself the breathing room to deal with my problems one at a time.

I used to dream of the day when I could write full-time and not keep a dead-end office job. In reality, the isolation can cause its own problems, and worsen others. I try to get out, I try to see friends, sometimes I force myself. It's challenging to get through some days. Lately, my mantra is, "I will find a way to make this work..."

I think now is the right time for me to read this. I'm becoming aware that partly the reason for my frustration is that I'm wanting to intellectualize this process. I want to know what I should be doing, shouldn't be doing, who I should be talking to, and basically asking for directions. Slowly, and painfully I'm learning this is not that kind of exercise-it's something to experience. ( I was listening to a few back episodes and Jimmy Dore nailed this on the head) I'm also aware that the two thoughts that have run my life recently has been 'If you can't do it right, don't bother', and 'Well, you should have thought/done/said that already'. Those wonderful thoughts not only paralyse any change in thought or approach, but has in a way made me lazy in what I do. I somehow feel, even with a feeling approaching arrogance, that things 'should happen' in a certain way, or that something 'should be' easy, and I'm still working on the capacity to accept that things can and will be difficult, there's no guide or cliff notes to the right answer, and I don't control outcomes.

My therapist has been helping me realise that while change is hard, I've gotta work through it, and I like what you said about focusing. I feel like at times I'm clutching at stuff because I'm looking for something/someone to 'fix' my problem, and what I could spend the energy doing is cultivating and mastering my skills, and staying in contact with my friends. I'm not getting the help I think I need because I already have it, I need to develop it, if that makes sense.

Dom

Glad you're still here, Dom. I'm late to the party. Focus is difficult and I fail, fail, fail. For days. For weeks. But another day begins and I try not to waste too much time with self-flagellation, accept what I've had to do to make it through and endeavor to do better. The self-employed life can be heartbreaking.

Yeah-I wonder if guidance counselors talked more at self employment, would it seem less of a weird and solitary path?

justdom, unfortunately part of school is social control, so they are disincentivized to talk about self-determination and self-employment and personal finances and self-improvement. Maybe just good-old-fashioned networking, and look for non-turkeys who are not threatened to talk plainly about mental-health, the same way they should not feel threatened to talk plainly about physical-health. But I bet I am not actually being helpful, I know it is hard to connect in a real way with people.

I admire anyone who has the courage and skill to be self-employed. I'm not sure if I have what it takes, although I fantasize sometimes about "betting on myself."

Manuel_moe_g, that's a good point.

When I was younger, there's a section of the young adult library that had a series called 'coping with...', and it ranged on topics from stigmatism to depression, and most points in between. I felt that if I read them them-and I think I read all of them-I'd somehow be able to handle most things in life. I'm looking at my current situation now, and there's part of me that wants to find a guide called 'Here's how to work when you're depressed', or 'How to earn a living uncorporately'. A couple of nights ago I was googling 'life with an unusual career', thinking that I'm just one answer, page, or app away from figuring out everything. what's simultaneously frustrating and scary is knowing that I have to let this way go. This research skill doesn't work for things like this, and I'm having to what dystopika said earlier about taking care of myself and focusing. For someone that loves to figure things out and have a solution, and have a guide for stuff, this is about the hardest thing I've done.

justdom wrote:A couple of nights ago I was googling 'life with an unusual career', thinking that I'm just one answer, page, or app away from figuring out everything.

I have been there too.

Now I give myself a break, and think "I may be just one answer away from making the most of the next 10 minutes!"

Also, all these insights and techniques are *very* sensitive to the situation and the order that you apply them. I read things that I think will really turn things around 180 degrees, and then sadly have them fade away, and much later I can use only a little part from them. But that is OK. I was talking to my psychiatrist, and he was talking about people being overly rigid in their plans. That definitely is my bad habit, so I am working to move forward with a "good-enough" plan that I can modify on the fly.