I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
I know it’s a joke and a meme, but this is legit making me feel pretty bad about myself. In no small part because I’m a hell of a lot older than 19. These don’t all match up, but the ones that do… hit hard.
Sorry it wasn’t my intention. I just came across this and it made me :desolate:
can you please delete this. im looking in the mirror and i dont like what i see
My therapist has me trying to ground myself in physical space again and it’s made me remember why I’m like this in the first place. Lots of work to do for that to be comfy again
I’d done deep breathing before as well as the 5 4 3 2 1 sensory thing for anxiety. But it somehow never occurred to me that this could involve paying attention to more ambient bodily sensations or my emotional state. In other words, paying attention to my environment and paying attention to myself were separate activities, which is the opposite of grounding.
So right now I’m just making a habit out of noticing when I’m stuck in my head and paying attention to my surroundings as well as how I’m existing in those surroundings. This was something I did as a kid but willed myself to stop doing because “if I’m not paying attention, the solution isn’t to look around the room at stuff. It’s to concentrate harder.” Turns out looking around the room was a grounding technique I’d picked up on my own and was shamed out of because you could see my eyes wandering and people thought I wasn’t listening.
And the results so far are that even mild clutter makes me feel out of control and dirty and that I spend most of my time in a slightly heightened state of anxiety, which I’ve trained myself to ignore and numb, mostly through media consumption. In other words…. my contamination OCD made my environment unmanageable so now I’m addicted to social media as an avoidance tactic. I have some other rituals related to this as well, mostly about keeping very small areas where I’m required to regularly peel myself away from my phone excessively tidy.
Thank you for sharing and thanks for the advice.
I identify heavily with a lot of that, specifically the avoidance. I’ve been working on the mindfulness techniques you’re describing of noticing yourself in relation to your surroundings, but I’ve found it really difficult. My mind is so trained to recoil back into itself and dwell on those inner thoughts that when I’m trying to “be present” the racing thoughts just seem to intensify. Or if I am able to focus on my body and physical sensations, my brain just rapidly jumps from one to the next. But I’m still working on it and hoping it improves. It sucks that mindfulness at this point is stressful for me though, as of course that’s the polar opposite of the intention behind it.
Anyway, best wishes to you comrade.
I was like this when I was younger. It gets better. Form connections.
okay that was the first step. uhhhhhh go volunteer at your local library idk.
This is me all the way thru, except the girlfriends part. Don’t even bother with that anymore. The one that sucks the most is not being able to understand new things, even if they’re obvious as fuck. It takes me weeks sometimes to connect some of the dots to have a decent understanding of what it is I’m trying to understand. I’m envious as fuck of people who just seem to have a light go off in there head when they’re focused on trying to understand something new after a couple of hours.
And once I do understand something, I have to constantly reiterate it to myself. I can do that for months, and then not think about something for a few days, and suddenly all the links and eureka moments are gone until something triggers part of what I learned previously. And then you have to repeat the whole process again. It’s not as if I forget because of info overload either. Like I’ll be singularly focused on understanding something for months at a time, and then it’s just gone in a flash.
Just had to get this off my chest
Thank you for getting that off your chest because reading it made me feel less alone and well… almost validated. For me this phenomena happened seemingly quickly. I used to feel like I was one of those people you describe being envious of, or at least somewhat like that. Certainly better able to learn and retain information than I am now. I always attributed this big shift in my ability to learn and even think well to a certain event, but I’ve wondered if maybe it was misplaced blame, and something that was happening slowly anyway. So I can’t help but wonder if you always felt that way about your ability to learn, if it was something that degraded over time, or if something specific happened to you that caused this problem with learning and retention.
It just started happening gradually after I dropped out of HS and went through a rough several years, without getting into too much detail. I went and got my GED afterwards, went to college for a period of a couple years. Stopped going when I’d come back some days and be completely tapped out mentally. Never got my degree. My family has a history of depression and though I’ve never been formally diagnosed, I’ve battled some severe depression on and off over the years.
It’s also interesting because we lived in some run down apartments during my childhood, and there was chipped lead paint all around. Sometimes I wonder how much that impacted my development.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. If you don’t mind me asking, what changed for you?
Hey comrade. I appreciate your sharing of some difficult personal struggles. Congratulations on getting the GED despite the continuous battles with depression. Degree or not, that’s an accomplishment worth being proud of.
My family history, like yours has a lot of depression and other mental illness, and it’s hard to know how much of that is genetically inherited or simply the inheritance and perpetuation of being “lower class” (poor) in a capitalist reality. That last part includes environmental exposure to shit like lead too. That must be a hard weight to carry around, wondering if the place you lived in as a child is a root of the difficulties you face now.
As for me, I’ve always had really bad problems with anxiety and depression. Even as a kid I had severe panic attacks I was sent to various doctors for. Later on, did a lot of self medication of all kinds but found benzodiazepines (please no Jordan Peterson jokes) in particular to be a sure-fire way to kill anxiety and still be moderately functional. I relied on them heavily to be able to work. Eventually I knew I had to get off - it was getting bad. But I didn’t do it wisely and ended up going through some extreme withdrawal. Seizures, psychosis, suicide atttmpt, peripheral neuropathy in my arms and hands, lots of other shit. And ever since I feel like I’ve lost my ability to think clearly, to make memories properly and even worse, to really feel and experience life. Then again some of that was already gnawing at me before the withdrawal, so I don’t know if that’s what did it for sure or just one catalyst. I do know I’m not the person I used to be. I feel lesser. Broken. And I’m not sure if I should be “fighting” to regain myself, or just accept I’ve lost a lot of what made me me. Sorry, that sounds pathetically melodramatic, but… yeah.
Anyway, you have my empathy and solidarity. It’s not an easy thing, living a life shackled with depression. Especially in this late stage capitalist hellscape.
