I'm sad

Hey Lamp, I'm sorry you're sad. Is there anything we can do?

my definition of "gibber" comes from that one wodehouse story (who knows which one) where jeeves says something polysyllabic and clinical and bertie says "YOU GIBBER, JEEVES"

some wodehouse would probably improve things.

emily no its ok im just kinda down on myself cuz some things arent really working out, lyfe is hardship, every little dissatisfaction is another irksome weight

Damn, I'm sad. Something just reminded me of someone I used to know. I'm not going to wallow, but I went from laughing out loud at Elvis singing "Sweet Caroline" to remembering something unrelated and tears just flowed.

Today at work I talked about butterflies emerging from cocoons to be eaten by birds, but I was kind of joking. Kittens get killed by pitbulls and that's how it works type talk.

Pissed off at the world and quite down earlier tonight. Wound up going to gym, listened to the latest Nerdist podcast and did like 35 mins on an elliptical at peak heartrate. Feel far better.

Also, saw a dude working out in a Flynn's Arcade tshirt from a Tron promo thing, another guy had a Dragon Age II strategy guide as reading material, and a third had a large tattoo of a tallbike on his abdomen.

lamp <3

Emily, how much drinking is "a little drinking" for you?

Crying is sometimes cathartic but also sometimes "fuck not this again" if it keeps happening enough, imo. I hope my faves emil.y's beers will be tear-free soon enough. Same w/all my sad friends.

lamp and em i have <3 for u both

http://staystrong.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Peter-Poland-tattoo.JPG

Crying can indeed be cathartic, but catharsis is just a necessary first step.

After a catharsis of sadness or fear, you need to re-evaluate the situation to find a way, or a plan, to leave the cause of your fear or sadness behind. It helps after a catharsis to feed your neural pathways of hope and happiness, even if all you can find to feed them are tiny scraps. Give them as much sustenance as you can! Look at the bright side, not because this breeds delusions, but because there really is a ray of brightness somewhere, if you scrounge around, and because looking at it is a relief and a lesson.

I express my sympathy too.

Three things made me cry today:
1. work
2. a quote from a blind man saying how music sustained him like food, that ended with "Music was made for blind people"
3. my sister-in-law posting a picture of an amazing flower saying it is "one more proof God exists"

So I think that I'm probably sad.

awww

<3

I cried buckets last night because I turned 40 and I really don't want to. I'm being so lame about it.

oh Trayce don't be sad <3

Remember that you're not alone Trayce, this change is going to be weird but you gotta lean into it- maybe talk to people who are 50? I just had a long talk with my father about aging and change and stuff and it was really helpful to hear from someone farther along

Thats a good idea tbh.

50 is much better, as long as you stay healthy.Less angsty by far for me.

I keep crying at songs and poems and articles, and have started sleeping badly and not tidying things up, and it feels like falling into sadness is this inexorable process that has already been started. can you ward if off by being careful, do you think?

only speaking from personal experience but, to some degree, yes. sadness wears a path in my brain where once things veer in that direction, it is very easy to just give in and slide down. it takes a lot of vigilance and will, but sometimes you can "divert" and force yourself not to succumb by reinforcing routines, seeking company, talking to a friend, little things like that can avoid the spiral... the hard part is deciding to, and actually doing it. but you can do it.

hang in there. unload here if you need to <3

Thinking of my fellow sad folks. Hope everyone feels a little better soon.

The mister has picked up some forms for me to register with a doctor. There's a possibility I have an undiagnosed thyroid problem which is tilting my brain further towards my pre-existing inclination to hate everything and everyone and most especially myself. All the women in my family have had either underactive or overactive thyroid so it's quite possible. However, I know from experience that just having the forms doesn't actually mean I'm going to go. It's pretty much reaching a stage where there are only two paths I can take, and I've already spoken on the other thread about one of those paths. It might finally be time to consider the medical one.

I also have a similar thing to Trayce, having just turned 30 and being in an absolute state of rejection towards this fact. I know it shouldn't really mean anything, but it totally does.

Well that's a start. If there's a real medical condition that can be remedied, basically without even having any undesirable side-effects, you might be looking at a much happier emil.y in the mirror sometime soon.

That is indeed a very good start Emily, I'm glad to hear the mister did this for you! Sounds like a keeper! :-) I hope he can help you with filling them out too (I know all too well about having the forms in not meaning you are going...)

But this is well worth researching as, if there is anything wrong with the thyroid, it can clear up at least something - however small a portion - of despair and anxiety maybe. Please take care!

Yeah emil.y, the medical angle definiately sounds like a step in the right direction and hopefully will help you in the long run. <3

Emily, if you have an extensive family history of thyroid problems the medical angle should have been the first thing you should have considered.

tremendously helpful insight there

And to think I spent all that time avoiding saying exactly the same thing.

Yep, pretty much as depressed as I've ever been over the last 24 hours. Looking for a nice warm hole to curl up in for the next two to inifinity hours.

I'm going to my bed at 7pm which is bad. Don't feel atrocious,just a bit low. Chin-up, sad ilxors.

Christine is right, I must say. I just avoid doctors as much as I possibly can. And also, it's pretty easy to be blinded by the sadness, especially when you know that it's actually rooted in rationality - life is a shitty horrible thing to be endured, you know, and when it starts to feel impossible to endure then the question 'why endure it' seems pretty sensible. But this time around I'm fairly convinced that there is something that can be done if I can only evade my neuroses for just a short time. It feels like a marathon from out of your worst chase nightmares, though.

em I really think of you so warmly and hopefully and I hope that you do get some relief via thyroid treatment, because you just seem so perplexed by your sadness and ill-feeling that I wonder if suddenly the whole world and your self will click and MAKE SENSE to you with a little chemical tweaking. In my own clumsy and not-really-knowing-you way, I wish that for you.

Now stop being a brave little martyr and get your ass to a doctor. Life is not about endurance, and to be 30 and to say with a straight face that it is means that you are either not taking in or not processing the millions of occasions for joy that are possible all the time. A damn shame.

the last couple of days I've been thankful for having a heavy cold, because it makes my constant drifting off into circular self-reflection when I'm with my friends less noticeable. (I hope.) A bunch of simmering bad feelings about my inadequacy in relationships and my unfulfilled desires for intimacy (physical and emotional, although I think most precisely the entwinement of the two?) have been super amplified and are now constantly on my mind, after a drunken chat with my ex (who is still pretty much my closest friend) about all the cool sex she's been having and all the no sex I've been having. Which was followed by her innocently sharing my bed when she couldn't get home. (I did a decent job of accumulating things you really shouldn't be doing with the simmering bad feelings I had, I know.) God this is such TMI TM-Emo material. But ey I feel the need to express it. So hey there fellow sad folks, let's all hug or some shit.

chat with my ex (who is still pretty much my closest friend)

i think this is something you should change asap.

that is hard to do, sometimes

it's hard to do almost all the time, but it's important.

mm maybe? But I don't think so, necessarily. It's been.. almost a year and a half since we broke up now, I'm confident the particularities of the feelings I had for her are gone. My issues are all me, and the contrasting paths we've taken just emphasised that a bit.

it really sounds like something you shouldn't be doing. It is very hard to make a clean break, but friendzoning or w/e you want to call it is even worse on the way out of a relationship

with the obvious admission that internet advice is usually generalised rubbish

Tbh ilxor advice is usually a couple steps above your average internet advice. Just don't ask Yahoo.

(I'm about to post... you might want to take back what you just said jon /via/ chi 2.0)
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Sadness is in the stars. I came to this thread because I was feeling sad and it turns out that tons of people are feeling sad today. Just a quick look at astrology.com and I read something like "your coworkers may need a boost of some kind today". This is going to pass

emil.y, your comment about a "pre-existing inclination to hate everything and everyone and most especially myself" made me think of a Kurt Cobain thing I watched the other day. About a Son was just audio clips of Kurt talking over video of random people and locations (no Nirvana video clips). Anyways he was saying the same thing as you and he is a really awesome dude. He said some things like "maybe we'll keep Nirvana together just to piss people off" - he especially hated journalists. He also admitted that Nirvana was just a way to vent and he really wanted to jump into other bands with a different persona. The way he coped with hatred was with drugs and being selective about his company - too bad he didn't get proper drugs though.

Maybe he's not the best person to mention but music is therapy and what not. I'm certainly in a better mood since I started typing this post (I'm listening to Deadboy & The Elephantmen).

One thing that he said during the interview was that he didn't think he was depressed (anymore since the last 5 years) or any different than other people in that regard. But people would say things like "what's wrong" when he was perfectly fine and this would piss him off. The same thing happens to me. It's like "god damnit dude, learn to read people better - you suck!".

But the sage advice from therapists regarding feelings is to be analytical about them. "Why are you feeling this way?". "What triggered you to think like that?". Apparently just noticing the feeling and analyzing it in non-emotional terms is a great way to squander the feeling.

would like to see a Yes Man style gimmicky lifestyle-change memoir in which someone runs all of their life decisions by the Yahoo Answers crew.

But guys I swear, at one point it probably was an issue and the BREAK IT OFF advice would've seemed like good advice then, but now it really isn't. I'm even good friends with her new girlfriend, with no conditions or 'but's about it. Yr advice is appreciated, however, even though I think it's wrong in this v particular case.

Anyway I now have the baffling and doubtlessly terrible urge to assuage my blues by watching Scenes from a Marriage. Back to try to type through my floods of tears in... THREE HOURS??

I don't think one needs to break it off with an ex as a rule. Exes can be really good, if not best, friends. Stranger things have happened. As long as it is not the source, not even a small contribution to the source of your problems, of why you are feeling sad. When it is, I think deep down you already know and feel it is. If so, try and be courageous and admit it. But if not, it's perfectly ok.

All the best Merdeyeux, keep it up!

(I'm not part of the Yahoo Answers crew tbh)

I am a bit tired of people admonishing others for remaining close friends with an ex. It *is* perfectly doable and perfectly ok, you know.

I usually just burn the bridge entirely. I figure if I am worth anything they notice.

They usually don't.

Trayce, that was basically my sentiment too. Exactly, actually.

written then scrapped way too many posts on this thread, but trayce otm with the caveat that this goes a lot better once both parties have seen other people since even if just briefly.

Co -sign on the friends with exes thing. My long term gf of 15 years is still my closest friend 10 years after we broke up, and I'm hers. We have a child, and had to keep in touch for that, and maybe to begin with it was duty more than pleasure, but said child is now a grown up and on the cusp of moving out of both homes, and we still talk most days and meet at least once a week. Not weird, no sexual tension, we can talk about other relationships.....

It can just be nice and relaxing, and at this stage, if we do fight about something, we know it'll sort itself out, and there's no *relationship* to jeopardise, so it's cool.

with the caveat that this goes a lot better once both parties have seen other people since even if just briefly

Oh yep this definitely helps, yes.

thanks guys, I'm pleased that my gut feeling and rational analysis isn't contrary to all laws of nature.

(Scenes from a Marriage wasn't nearly the cavalcade of misery I was expecting. Unflinching and intense, sure, but the slivers of joy and happiness seemed really real as a result. Step it up, Ingmar.)