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

I carry around what feels like 9 years of wasted time and am constantly reminded of what felt like suffering throughout that time. What it mostly consisted of was isolation. I have enough insight and buried anger to continue to be stressed out, but I would rather share it than have it stay in me. What I would describe as being inside of a large pit and having no direct contact with the space around me, I felt doomed to spend the rest of my life that way and carried that reality everywhere. I don't know what that was or is.

Yeah, I sometimes have a sense of loss because of how much of my youth was spent in isolation, and it makes me angry and resentful. To balance out my thinking, I still honor that real sense of loss, but I also celebrate that I have the will and the technique and the history of effectiveness in battling my depression and my social anxiety. I can be knocked off the horse, and I know I can get up, because I have done it before.

Please take care, all the best, we here are all cheering for your greatest today and tomorrow!

I feel too stubborn to admit any success I have made, maybe because it is small. Or I am afraid that if I give myself away I will be taken advantage of. I have gotten enough of a sense of consciousness coming back that it is increasingly more difficult to relax. I want that balance of personality and intelligence that has lost its presence. I don't want to have to plead to get what I deserve. I good analogy would be the movie Numb, up to the point where Matthew Perry's relationship with his therapist starts to untangle. That is a great movie worth renting if you have not seen it. I wish I could assess my own childhood trauma and needs so I did not have to feel like I am moving in slow motion towards a goal. I fucking hate myself and want a good therapist.

My life now is all about very slow improvement. I hate it, but it is literally the only thing that gives me hope, because I have lost hope in something entering my life and saving me.

I am often resentful about having to settle for very slow improvement, but I remind myself that resentment is dangerous for me, because it can trigger depression and back-sliding into a much worse place.

I hear what both of you are saying and it really hits home.

One thing to keep in mind is that improvement is not necessarily a linear process - just because it takes a long time to get from point A to point B doesn't mean that the rate of improvement will always be that slow. Sometimes after a long time of gradual improvement all of a sudden you can turn a corner and something (even if it starts as something small) really starts going well, and you can bootstrap all sorts of things off of that. I try to remind myself of that, even though I don't always believe it.