Regression

[TheSchwartz]

In the past week or so, I felt a serious and real change in my attitude towards my life, and an apparent disappearance of a sense of apathy I had been carrying for as long as I could remember. I have spent this time being more productive than I literally have ever been, and it made me feel so good, and happy for once. But today, I woke up, and it was all back to the same. I once again am stuck back with all these incredibly negative feelings, and I have no idea why. My situation has not changed at all since yesterday, yet my mental state and my hope have bottomed out again. I guess I don't even have a question, and I am sorry for having so little information to go on, but I just don't know what to do. I felt for sure that I could finally maintain a sense of hope and worth, that definitely this time it wouldn't slither and fade away into the darkness. But I was wrong, and here I am, in the same negative mental state as always, without a sense of what went wrong, or why I am back to where I was. I guess I am just desperate for a connection somewhere. Thanks for your time and feedback.

[SamtheSinger]

Just saw this. I'm at work on my cell which is awkward to comment on, but I didn't want to just leave you without a response.

 

I'll write more when I get home to my computer, but just know that you're not alone :-)

[TheSchwartz]

Thank you very much, and I'll take that to mean that I am not alone

[SamtheSinger]

I just saw that! I fixed it, so sorry! What a typo!

[PGP]

I just want to say that you are not alone also. I have had some deep periods of depression and numbness in my life and I can empathise fully with what you have described. For me, I experienced something very similar to this. I would feel numb and alone for periods. Like I was floating with no anchor and no purpose through blackness and pain. I would have to make a tremendous effort to rev myself up to rationalising that there was the possibility of hope. That if I did certain things that the train would get back on the rails and I could feel like everyone else seemed to feel. 

In my own case, it is only with retrospect that I can see that I was feeling and experiencing in a quite rational way. This is the only way I can describe it. It was a horrible, awful circumstance I was in in my teens and early twenties with death, destruction, alienation, humiliation and manipulation from those closest. Looking back, I can only say that there would have been something wrong with me if I wasn't depressed. The fact that I felt such pain and isolation meant that I had conception that so much was wrong. I think of it as they say in V for Vendetta: the very last inch. It is the very last inch of decency and resolve and resistance that kept me going. 

Listening to FDR, for me, I have looked at my past and been able to treat myself with empathy and compassion when before there was only brutal self-attack and shame. I am actually crying as I write this. To have it explained in detail what is right and what is wrong has given me a great sense of peace. It is from within this peace that I have been able to make judgement. To make judgement and experience the anger that I should have felt in the past. Instead of sadness I should have been angry. But anger was not allowed. If I was angry, I would have been just like my father, I would not have been  a victim and an object to manipulate. I would have been bad, I would have been an aggressive man and a threat. 

I should have been angry. I should have told the truth and smashed the crystal prison of lies that had been built. 

With my anger now, I am glad. I am glad and thankful that I have been given this chance in this time and place to know these things. That althoug htime has been lost, it could have been much worse and I might never have found out at all. 

Your life is so precious and unique and the clock is ticking. 

I'd like to write more but I have to leave it at that for now.

Peace out.

[SamtheSinger]

I agree, I have seen so many dark places. I've been suicidal more than once in my life, and I can empathize with how heavy it feels to try and walk through a day when you're depressed. I remember how it felt to be mad that I was upset, piling on yet another layer of self loathing because I was already loathing myself. I felt hollow in a way that was just lonely. I was re-inflicting upon myself all of the abuse that I had experienced as a child. I had been trained well with all those years of experience that "I was to blame, life sucked because I was in it, and I should feel like crap because of it." 

 

I don't know what has happened in your life, but people don't just get depressed like this for no reason, look deep within yourself, find a therapist to help you process, and allow yourself to connect with whatever repressed emotions are lying inside you. Just like PGP talked about, you need to connect with that anger inside of you. You need to go through that to heal. It won't always be there, you'll move through it, but until you can see where the depression comes from it's going to keep running you. 

 

Regardless of how you feel, you are able to do this. Maybe this weeklong window was only there to show you how much better it could be without the weight of depression bogging you down. There are so many people that feel the same way as you, and the honest truth is that the ones who seek answers in their life are the only ones who get to stop feeling this way.

[TheSchwartz]

I guess I am first and foremost thinking of a quote that I heard Stefan say in one of the call in shows "sadness is the coward's anger" as that did and continues to resonate within me. I am having trouble even recognizing whom my anger should lie with. After my mother passed away, my brother and I were living together in our childhood house, and shortly after, we both started leaning towards libertarianism. I remember how much I clung to him, how desperately I felt the need for someone to 'copy'. I would basically take the same interests and likings as him, having no real personality or life of my own.

 

During this time period, we would periodically have incredible shouting matches over the tiniest thing (usually a video game). I realize now how much that is due to both of our underlying emotional issues, and the fact that they remain unresolved to a large degree. After talking about it with him, and in retrospect, I understand now how much he using words and other manipulations to win these 'arguments' at any cost. As a result, I have developed a lot of mental health issues, mostly because of his internalized voice inside of my hide.

 

I believe the beginning of the worsening of my depression happened when we finally had the shouting match that ended in a conversation where he finally revealed how manipulative he had been being. Since then (maybe 2 or 3 months ago?) I have been feeling relief that is almost palpable, at least towards my brother. We have both come to a new level in our relationship, where we both no longer yell at each other, and we resolve conflicts with each other quickly and fairly (conflicts aren't very often either). I still am confused about him, as even though he is no longer abusive, and our relationship is better than ever, I often feel like his ambitions to better himself are not as high as mine, for whatever ambition is worth when you are in such a depressed state as I. Sometimes I feel like our ambitions are just going in different directions instead, like he is trying to improve in different areas than I am to start with.

 

Before 2 weeks, ago, I knew that the only other 2 people in my life (my two aunts) were both statist, but I was cutting them slack because I thought they actually cared about me, and were truly interested in my well being. About  1 1/2 to 2 weeks ago, I was feeling so absolutely depressed, that I finally decided to go and talk to them about it (as truthfully as I could, like I hadn't done before). It was and even more revealing conversation than the one where I had the revelation about my brother being manipulative. They fully revealed how incredibly little they respect or care for me, and how irrational they are. As I was talking to them about my father in my childhood, they were repeatedly excusing him for the neglect and abuse (what little I can remember) that he showed me. They got even worse when I was relating what my brother had told me what he remembered about his childhood. Eventually, the conversation led to peaceful parenting, and the immorality of government, when they went into full defense mode. My brother and I have tried to talk to them about these subjects before and repeatedly, and I suppose this was one last desperate attempt to see if they could be brought around. I had been getting increasingly angry at them for the excuses they were making for my father and spanking or abuse in general, but it was at this point that my perspective shifted, and I fully understood they would never be brought around. For the past year, I have been running a gunsmithing business with one of the aunts and my brother, and we recently made the decision to put the business on hold due to lack of revenue. I will soon be able to remove both of these unrepentant statists from my life, and I will be all the better for it.

 

I truly wish I could say that the phrase "you are not alone" had any effect on me, but it never has from anyone, online or in person. No matter how much I intellectually understand that there are so terribly many people that have similar and sometimes nearly identical experiences to mine, I still feel alone. Maybe that has something to do with my near constant state of isolation I have been in basically since my father died when I was 9. I too have often viciously self-attacked myself, although I have been trying to learn to be gentler. Even though I rarely attack myself anymore, I also rarely, if ever, have positive feelings about myself either. I find myself crying often crying as well, usually a self-pitying cry. I feel like there are some legitimate emotions behind this sadness that makes me cry, but it always ends up with thoughts of hopelessness, uselessness, and pointlessness swirling around my head instead of anything constructive that could help me understand the sadness. I too feel a sense of hollowness, that might stem from the fact that I have been leading an even more isolated life than my mother modeled for me.

 

Thank you PGP and Sam for sharing your experiences with me. I suppose there is the consolation that even though I feel like my life up to this point has basically been wasted, I have come to the realization that I need to change before I wake up one morning when I am 50 and realize that the majority of my life had been wasted instead of only the first part. I am sorry if this just seems like a huge jumbled wall of text, I still have much difficulty connecting with myself, or others. During this past week, I did some tentative searching for a therapist, and that just made me feel awkward, and weak. Awkward because I sat there thinking about how anxious I would be to even talk to any of these people, and weak because I feel now like I was using the excuse of "them not being for me" purely based on their photos and nothing else. There is also the factor of me being broke that has helped to deter me from seeking a therapist.