what was the worst time in your life

college socially & educationally was theoretically one of the best times of my life...but simultaneously my family at home was a war zone, my dad was depressed but as yet undiagnosed, pretending to go to work & just driving around all day; my mum was on the edge of sanity fighting (verbally & physically) with my sister & my dad; my sister was in crisis & being slutshamed by her own mother at every turn. Mum used me as her defacto shrink via phone because she was too “proud” to admit that she’d lost control.. and she really leaned into it, and i was too codependent to know any better so i tried to help her with all of my 19 years of wisdom or whatever.
so constantly, through that whole time, when shit blew up, i blamed myself for not being home, for not giving better advice to my mum. oh and i drank a fuckload. i didnt talk about it to many friends because i knew they wouldnt understand.

i was mostly just this guilt-ridden ball of anger the whole time & my interior life fucking sucked. I would give anything to be PRESENT for my late-teen/early 20’s, instead of being preoccupied with my family’s problems & crying all the time when i drank.

that being said i’m not a huge fan of the past 5 years of my life either but i’ll manage.

Dmac TT sounds like you and i went through similar dislocation/disadvantage hell growing up. thank god for drugs

Re: the 77 board. The link above is to a thread that has been locked since 2009. Is there a more recent version?

(I started to post something here but then recalled an incident where I posted some candid stuff to the depression thread a year or so back and then later felt uncomfortable about it. A more private forum would def be preferable.)

Request Access to 77 Borad

I would bear in mind not to trust even it 100% though, you never know whos watching imo.

first go at higher education (95-01) and present (nov 16→)

summer 1997, lived with drug addicts and my ‘job’ was to drive escorts to dudes’ houses and hang out and wait

i haven't had a full-time job in about a decade, which includes time being unemployed and underemployed even with multiple jobs, but the worst was definitely when i was trying to make rent with nothing but work-from-home online piecework, taskwork, mechanical turking, etc. etc. - absolutely dire. i got through it with repeated financial assistant from multiple friends, and eventually by getting enough proper jobs that i could afford to forgo the other sources of income.

-nce*

Love to J

I don't have any real memories of ~2004-2007, just a depressive haze. I'd quit drinking and doing any drugs the year before, so not a fun lost weekend situation. I dropped out of college (again) at the beginning, let all my relationships drift away and just kind of floated for the second Bush Administration.

Love to alomar

A few years ago, someone was on the verge of offering me a job I VERY much wanted, and raised my hopes about it not once, but on at least three separate occasions - this got as far as them putting the offer in an email, before withdrawing it at the last minute. I'm not an especially depressive person, but this absolutely floored me - the raising of my hopes, and the rejection of me as a person that was implicit in their backtracking - and it took me a long, long time to get over it. I now don't get my hopes up about anything, and do my best to avoid thinking about possibilities or prospects. I'm not sure if this is a 'good' coping mechanism, but it does seem to wear away the misery to a dull, mostly forgotten ache.

probably right now tbh. i am having a hard time

^

man I got emotional reading Shakey's old thread of misery. my worst time was exactly like his but I was afraid to share with anybody, afraid the life I'd built in music was over, afraid I'd never sleep again, afraid I'd have to drink myself to sleep every night for the rest of my night since I build up immunity to sleeping pills inside of a day or two, afraid I'd be in misery for the rest of my life. everybody in my crew knew about it & suffered through it with me as I cancelled gigs we all needed to pay rent and spent my waking hours in tears all day fearing I'd let everybody & myself down, ruined everything.

this was 2008 for me. I see footage of myself from that year, doing a great job of pretending to all the people that I'm not wishing for death all the time. it's intense, and instructive. it took a long time but I got better.

its not for me to direct nor dictate the thread at all but it would be great imo if those of us willing to post about past and gone hard times could see their way to giving any thoughts on what changed, externally or internally, what if anything you took from it, or anything else of that vein (fgti started a thread mental health/suicide ideation in this manner once and i thought it was great)

obv if ppl can't do that then its all personal stuff (im declining for a start) its just that i didnt launch the thread trying to depress anybody!

ill go again: a few short years ago i had a very rough two years after a promotion into management into a pretty tough role over a lot of unhappy people.

i lost nights of sleep over task and personal-conflict related stress and constantly doubted myself on every level, while returning to a house plagued with rats and habitual fly strikes where the local kids were smashing up my car and our windows every few weeks.

i genuinely felt çursed, straight-up hexed

we moved- further from town, much smaller, but quiet and clean. i transferred jobs to a much less fufilling/challenging job that hasnt given me a panic attack yet.

i killed the rat before we left tho.

these seem like absolute nbd, no-brainer things but at that time - a full two years- those simple and obvious steps for some reason seemed completely beyond my power to do (no idea why but can only suggest general overwhelment) and i remind myself of that when the small stuff comes up now, change is easy when things are shit. its a good mantra for me, but hey the things i might need reminding of wont be the things everyone needs reminding of idk. #uselesslessons

After a long stretch of not particularly wanting to live, I pondered whether I wanted to want to live, and found that I didn't particularly want that either. And so I just kept stepping it back: did I want to want to want to live? Did I want to want to want to want? And at some point (can't recall quite how many wants) I discovered a little tiny flickering spark within me that was all kinda 'yeah, okay, maybe, I dunno, whatever'. But it was there. And so I just kept asking myself those questions every day and trying to figure out how to get a little closer to actual want, trying to remember why I might want to want. Partly, it was about truly making peace with things like impermanence, and the fact that sometimes the rug will get pulled all the fucking way out from under me and I still have to figure out how to pick myself up and move on because that's what we have to do. And that last part was important, recognizing that I'm not alone in this experience. That this is part of life. I think I'm a stronger, maybe slightly better person for having persevered through some straight-up bullshit. In some ways, at least.

the entire problem for me is that the hard time are permanent. there is no going back or fixing things.

When my first daughter was born and she had to go into the NICU because they were worried she might not make it.
She did!

IMO the most pernicious thing about these bleak stretches is how acclimated your mind can become to the bleakness, the extent to which your perception becomes limited by your immediate circumstance. But even David After Dentist can tell you that, while it may feel in the moment like it's forever, it's not actually forever.

Also, though, while it's true that you can't go back, and it's sometimes true that you can't fix things, new roads can open and new things can be built. This is coming from someone who saw nothing but an impassible wall for the longest time, and who can look back and acknowledge now that the wall was not only not impassible but not actually ever even real.

Nothing’s permanent, not even life xp

Old Lunch otm. Whatever you’re facing now will fade away, or at least change significantly. Might be replaced with something far worse but still.

I mean, no? plenty of things are permanent. suppose you're Howard Dean or Jeb Bush and want to be president, and were indeed on track to become president. but now that almost certainly isn't going to happen. your state of not being president is permanent. now imagine the thing that would make you happy and fulfilled in life, that you've sunk your entire life into, is being president. you now have an enormous failure to live with, and that sense of failure is permanent.

i can think of a few periods.

1) like silby, the summer after my first year of college, i was 20. i felt extremely depressed and listless coming back home. i was leaving relationship drama at college, drinking a lot, and struggling to reintegrate into my parent's house. it was the only period of my life when i smoked cigarettes. thankfully it was pretty brief. i took a mid-summer trip to LA to visit a friend and he brought me along to the ashtanga yoga studio he belonged to, where i learned that method of yoga and began practicing it regularly. it felt great to get some sunshine, stop smoking, and do this vigorous athletic yoga practice. i came back home after that trip and enjoyed some of the most carefree weeks that i can remember.

2) within the first few months of my marriage, i was 26. some things relating to sexuality, and longstanding fear and difficulty in being open & honest about them, caused serious stress in my marriage as we were forced to talk about stuff that i had never talked about with anyone before. every day i just felt like i wanted to disappear. i also started graduate school, we moved to a new city that felt hostile and cold, and i hated my job working in a basement library with no windows. i started going to therapy for the first time in life, joined a men's group to talk about sexuality in a safe environment, and eventually worked toward a new position at that university to get out of the basement library and into the main library. the six years i spent in therapy proved to be some of the most rewarding work i've ever done in my life. as i finished grad school, the stress of that dissipated and i landed a killer job at a different university that eventually formed the foundation of my career.

3) right now, i'm 35. apart from #2, i can't ever remember struggling this much. we moved to my home city two years ago, and i regret daily the decision to leave my previous job. i have two special needs kids whom i love profoundly but are completely exhausting. we bought a house last year and are now in the worst financial shape we have ever been in. i got into two car accidents within a month earlier this year. i was diagnosed with ADHD, and while the medication treatment has been a breakthrough in my confidence and ability to accomplish things, in many ways it is highlighting how underutilized i am in my current job and how badly i want to get out. i am making enormous efforts to speak up, push the senior admins to be more transparent and equitable, and improve the shitty organizational culture we have here, and as a result i'm taking on way more leadership opportunities than i ever have and i am so emotionally drained by how demanding this work is, and how small and fleeting the moments of positive change feel. the thought "i feel like i am dying" floats into my head several times a day. i am sleep-deprived, waking up at 5:30am in darkness to try to fit in some yoga before i drive my kid 45 minutes across town so he can go to the school that is best for his special needs. my other son has meltdowns literally every single meal, and many in between, in ways that increasingly signal OCD and major sensory challenges rather than typical toddler tantrum behavior. my wife and are making major strides in our relationship and in communication but only as permitted within the tiny amount of space left over after we deal with all the other stress in our lives. i'm anxious, depressed, stressed. i need a change.

so i'm looking for a way to move out of this period. the regular things that should help me - yoga, cycling, nature, friendships, a creative practice - for the past year i've been sustaining one, creating about 80-90 works of art, which has been deeply rewarding - all that helps for sure but increasingly seem more like necessities for survival rather than avenues for elevation out of whatever i am in right now.

February 2013-present, still ongoing but not as bad now and reason to believe things will take a further reduction in badness in the next few months if I can just keep biting down on this frayed rope really hard.

Would be happy to share in more detail (lol you don't say, jon?) but only if thread is deindexed or on 77.

katherine, fellow nyclxor with chronic depression in the marrow and a flair for losing here - genuine offer, if you ever want to hang out and commisserate, the email attached to my ilx acct works and is checked by me daily. Totally totally get your last post. Have something similar.

treeshie, same offer. Would hang again!

Dec of last year til July of this year.

In Feb of 2017, for the first time in my completely fuXored life, I was sober and making very good money and had no debt and things were going swimmingly. I decided to make a good thing better buy adding some chemical enhancement, and within a couple of months it was just drugs all day (to the tune of hundreds of dollars a day) and I abandoned work completely and within about 7 months I was completely broke. That was not the bad part though. That was kinda fun.

I have friends and family, but they no longer harbor me as I have been at this for decades now. I was now forced to live in free or very low cost, crowded, institutional-type environments, which is something I've dealt with many times before, but given how I thought I had left all this behind forever, it just about killed me. I lost almost all will to live, suffered extreme depression, found very little joy or relief in any activity or relationship, it was awful.

Things are much better now and I have much more time to shitpost to ilx.

Is there a companion thread on 77 to this one?

To all of you who I barely know, or don't know, or have never met, aside from "here", the only positive thing I have to offer is: you are not crazy. Everything is wrong right now. It is not specific-to-you. "Online" is no place for discourse, and yet it is the source of all our discourse. Every single time I sit and talk with friends about "my life" it feels so normal and not-insane.

All of my problems have stemmed from "being online too much", and sharing too much of my life with people, and at the same time, with even this post, here we are.

for what it's worth very few of my problems stem from "being online too much," and I owe whatever scraps of career or social life I have to being online. if it all were to disappear tomorrow I would have no life, no friends, and no career

being bullied at school between the ages of about 13 and 15. it was maybe just two years but it felt like a lifetime. people who were supposed to be my friends just slowly making my life a living hell, turning people against me, making me feel like the outcast of the school

xp what has brought this misery onto you, would you say?

My second and third years of grad school were pretty bad. I couldn't write anything, couldn't get my grading done, kept deferring comp exams. I had a falling out with my best friend. I was constantly worrying about whether I would lose my student visa. I got accused of cheating by a professor (my own opinion is that this was completely baseless and quite irresponsible on the professor's part - at any rate, nothing came of it except a lot of anxiety, while the professor had probably forgotten that he had done it by the next week). One of my parents received a cancer diagnosis; this was after a long period in which they were severely depressed and drinking heavily.

Somehow, at that time, I didn't quite realize that I was depressed. I knew about depression, had seen it in my own family, but didn't make the connection that this had anything to do with how I was feeling. I took everything as evidence of my own objective worthlessness. I had no sense that this was a mental health issue for which there might be solutions.

I don't remember a precise end to that period. The outlines are fuzzy. I moved back home, got away from school, worked at different things, and had other crises. I'm doing better now, but I don't really know why.

Whatever you’re going through might get worse tho. Just try to smile if you can and love. After almost dying a week ago I think if you can still laugh and enjoy things - life isn’t so bad

Sounds cheesy but you’re all worth it

Also Katherine your posts are solid here. Glad to have you around

I came up with a fairly extreme solution to handling my family drama & that was moving as far away as possible. I had other very good, positive reasons for leaving (mr veg for one)... but subconsciously just the idea of “getting away” was a big factor in my leaving as well.

the biggest family issues mostly sorted themselves out over time -that that all mostly happened without me was a good object lesson. i learned that guilt is just pointless wasted energy & their problems arent necessarily mine.

i was left with some residual issues later on, in that everyone else had moved on & i still had a lot of unresolved anger & resentment... that eventually took some therapy to properly deal with.

i think the biggest thing I learned from that is that it’s important to take your own temperature when dealing with other people’s problems. being a helper is fine, but not when it’s a compulsion. if you’re doing it for the wrong reasons or it’s making you sick/stressed/miserable, step back. taking care of yourself doesnt mean you love anyone any less.

Great post veg

i followed katherine's twitterbot thing which somehow (read: stalking) led me to her tumblr which is really, really good

What percentage of ilxors have struggled with mental illness and how does that compare to the general population?

The second half of 2011. Going through a protracted breakup, realizing social anxiety was trapping me in a job I hated, losing friendships. I remember driving to work so many times and feeling worthless that I didn't have the resolve to run my car into a tree and end it: a fucked up thought in a few ways. Probably some of this is chronicled in the depression thread. Little joys like watching Jackass got me through the months, until I was basically forced into therapy by my ex and saw some light from there

xpost 100%, and 1:1

general population otm

it would be great imo if those of us willing to post about past and gone hard times could see their way to giving any thoughts on what changed, externally or internally, what if anything you took from it

In my case, my own very personal views on what I took from it for the future:

- Take action to move the situation forward. The worst thing for me is helpless and hopeless paralysis of not feeling strong enough to do anything.I feel so much better if I can identify some action that might help and then do it.
- Trying to find some benefit from the situation on my own terms, for example, learning resilience skills.
- Finding outside help. I was referred to a series of 4 workshops on managing stress and worry. I didn't actually use the techniques much in the end, but it was really beneficial meeting people who were similarly troubled and feeling less alone and that there is support available.

I get a lot day to day from reading Buddhism in terms of calming me down and restoring balance. But it doesn't 'work' in a psychological emergency.

Probably January 2017 to March 2018. My dog died, and I got heartbroken when I was suffering self esteem issues and feeling at a complete dead-end professionally.

I was completely unmotivated at work, being used for menial & repetitive tasks by my direct manager and struggling to find the energy to make it through the day. Any creative problem solving was killed off (literally just a "well we've always done it this way without problem so follow that" attitude).

I'll admit my work in this period was highly inconsistent but given my first couple years in the role with increased responsibilities and great feedback, I now think that my main manager felt threatened and she was avoiding giving me work where I could thrive. She actually stated in a performance review that I would be remaining behind her in the pecking order until her retirement in a few years time. With hindsight seems completely out of order as it was the partner's decision to make and given good performance a promotion should have been open to me earlier.

In the final year working for her that manager would constantly criticise small aspects of my grammar and language usage - every email or report would come back with minor changes or inconsequential structural revisions. This was despite me following the defined style guides, looking at online resources for assurance and using partner emails as templates. At the worst point she had me convinced I actually had some sort of major grammatical disability and I was left overthinking every email (in a role where I was expected to reply quickly). I had got through high school, an undergraduate degree, a postgraduate degree, professional qualification exam essays and the first two years at work performing at a high level with no issue in this regard ever being pointed out and ridiculously I had been worn down into believing I was unable to communicate adequately in English. It took me a while to realise the emails being reviewed by other managers and partners didn't come back with the same comments. And more technical emails which would require secondary partner review would often come back reversing the changes my manager had made me make, reverting it to the original form. Still there was no effective way to communicate this upwards without an all out confrontation, nor any real opportunity to move into another team, and I just felt like screaming daily.

However I was at the point where I had just accepted all of the above was fine because romantically I had recently found someone I loved and could be open with for the first time in years. And I was truly happy outside of the hours 9am-5pm Monday to Friday - well apart from the dread of returning to work.

Unfortunately my girlfriend was also very insular and this led me to reduce my wider social life and my contact with my best friends (who were also in more serious relationships) really decreased. Then a few months further further down the line my gf started talking about her ex more and more, and I began to realise I was just a rebound and my self confidence took a massive nose dive. I've always struggled with weight issues and I "blamed" her renewed interest in her ex on this. Then my dog died which really affected my mood further and she wasn't supportive in any way. When she then cut things completely between us I didn't really have a network of friends to fall back on. And I'm suddenly realising that I've kind of wasted a year of my professional life and it feels like it's going to be impossible to get out from under this manager without a change of job which I didn't have the confidence to apply for. So my life just seems to be collapsing. Fuck.

My brilliant short-term solution to all of this was to drown myself in vodka (or if I was feeling particularly classy aperol and Tennents) nightly and at the worst stage I lost a couple months to just a haze of semi functional drinking. My dietary habits were also horrendous to cope with the booze. Something unexplainable also began to happen in this period and whenever I thought, or indeed still think about my now ex-girlfriend I will experience severe aches in my left palm between my middle and ring finger. Like can't get to sleep at night throbbing. Obviously drank more to deal with that instead of going to the doctor or a therapist.

My flatmate at the time was incredibly supportive (i had actually moved in with him half a year earlier from living alone as he needed a roommate after his divorce) and inspired me to direct my efforts into various hobbies to distract me from it all and to stop the boozing on work nights at least.

Some of these activities were particularly odd looking back - extremely silly finger paintings of cows, chilli pepper eating contests, or an ongoing contest for who could make the weirdest ice cream flavour that that still tastes good (cognac and vegemite was the clear winner). I think we used the absurd as a coping mechanism.

My flatmate was going through a similar funk professionally and in our time off work together we would obsessively watch films together in organised patterns (for example we would binge watch an entire actors filmography chronologically and rank them). This was helpful in the short term (my booze dependence in effect became film dependence) and has actually inspired a continued appreciation for film in me. However, in hindsight watching all Jodorowsky's films back to back in a day wouldn't be good for most people's mental health, let alone mine. Literally all I was doing was obsessively watching movies in my spare time and in ranking them I think I got a small sense of achievement that made it worth it . As my flatmate started dating and exercising again I became a near total recluse. He did still continue to help me a lot by still lending his ear, trying to get me socially active again, and even cooking healthier meals for me but I still wasn't happy. He ended up moving in with his new girlfriend and I found another friend to live with for a bit, where I was just kind of miserable and lonely for months and months. I feel bad for that guy that invited me as I think he expected the "old" me and instead got pissed-off cave hermit raving Roger Ebert without any of the talent.

The turn around only really happened when my grandmother died. Driving back from the funeral my mother expressed worries about my grandfather, now four hours removed from his nearest family member, living alone. And something in me just snapped and I thought "bloody hell why don't I just move there and live with, or at least near him for a bit. It can't be any worse than my current situation. Everything here reminds me of her".

Bizarrely the very next week as I was preparing my CV, a recruiter called out the blue offering a role in the location where my grandfather lives that seemed to fit my skill set. A phone interview and face to face interview later and I have the job and I'm handing my notice in. And the weight seemed to lift from my shoulders ( interestingly my old flatmate also found a more fulfilling job at the exact same time).

Post move my life is super different. The job has actually turned out perfect for me, I'm around five months in, my first appraisal was great, and I'm really enjoying the work.

I see a lot of my grandfather and I think we both enjoy that a lot, mainly eating regular meals together. I'm on holiday atm and I'm surprised at how much I miss our thrice weekly games of snooker.

I've also been walking a lot (often 3 hours a day), exploring my new surroundings, reading a lot of "flâneur" and travel literature. My diet has also massively changed, very low carb during the day which seems to boost my energy. I'm actually over three stone lighter than I was at my worst ( 16st to 12st12).

I even have had the confidence to properly get back on the dating scene via tinder and, after number of mediocre dates, I'm about two months into a new v lovely and exciting relationship.

The only real negative since I've moved is I haven't really developed a friendship group here (though my colleagues are very nice they aren't really into the same things). Going to gigs alone isn't something I've done with regularity for years and the wait, without conversation, between stage times seem just horribly long now. Could just be grumpy older man syndrome. I def need to get involved in some local groups/ the music scene or something here. Funnily I've actually been better at keeping in touch with my old social group and family now that I'm away and I'm missing them more - but semi frequent trips back up can address that.

And that's a bit of a ramble but v cathartic to an extent as I hadn't really thought it all out, so thanks Deems.

I feel so much better if I can identify some action that might help and then do it.

Yes. Naps.

really good posts thanks!

right now is a pretty good contender for the worst time in my life