Depression and what it's really like

I'm just so fucking sad and I wish I wasn't sad anymore and it just will not stop no matter what I do. I exercise, I've taken the right drugs, I've had more therapists than I can count, I have a job, I'm a white man in America, with more comforts than 99% of humans could ever imagine and I would give anything if I could push that button. My sadness does not have a reason. I could have a trillion dollars and never experience a rainy or cold day and have the perfect partner and this would still be me. This is who I am. If you asked all the people I've known, the majority of them would name depression as my #1 personality trait. Self-hatred aside, even if they say it with compassion and charity, I've been told and learned so many times that this is true. At this point, after more than ten years, it's bigger than anything else, both to me and to everyone else. Every relationship that has ended has ended because of it, and every relationship that hasn't has been defined by their tolerance and sympathy for it. Before kind, before intelligent, before anything, I'm depressed. How am I supposed to be okay with being this person?

Fuck. Weekends are the worst.

It's easy for friends and romantic partners to confuse an illness with a personality trait. I do it myself, people will say "Oh how is ____ doing" and often it is "he is going through a bad time with his depression" instead of "we had an awesome night out last time we saw each other". But most of the time, both internally and externally, I don't define my friends w/depression that way. I'm not saying "your friends don't actually believe that" but I do get the sense that you're allowing yourself to be defined by a sickness, and in my experience, a lot of people don't do that with their depressed friends.

otm, people in my experience rarely make the distinction between temporary sadness/disappointment and true depression

finally started reading david burns' feeling good pretty seriously, and it's really enlightening. i'm 10/10 in cognitive distortions, and two of them i figured out on my own a while back, which only confirms his rightness to me. definitely recommended for anyone struggling with this stuff. like, it makes the whole thing make sense. i even felt pretty OK this weekend! first time in years.

ughhhh at this

jfc i want to thank ilx and specifically k3vin k for making me feel completely unwelcome here and 100% worse about myself than i already did. the trolls win again.

you're not unwelcome here in my book jon

jon the IA thread would be an empty shell without you <3
totally welcome imo

Jon, ILX is a jungle, and I'm only an occasional visitor, but I don't see that you are unwelcome, and I think you're overestimating the extent to which other people get their feelings taken care of around here. Sure, there are some cliques, but heaps of us are not in any. I won't tell you not to feel bad about yourself because that never works. You probably have some idea of how much of your distress right now is actually because of ILX and how much is other things. I hope the other things get better such that you can cope with ILX bullshit again. Hugs.

i've been avoiding that thread for awhile now, trying not to be so neg about things in general. i'm just really frustrated by ilx right now and just, i don't even know how to address it. i feel really unwelcome here and certain ilxors are piling on me out of nowhere today because they know i'm an easy target. fair enough. but rather than blow up to them today, i politely asked for it to stop. but the response i've recevied so far has overwhelmingly pointed to the idea that people would rather watch people continue to pile on me and hoping to see how far over the edge they push me.

its just frustrating to see that, for the most part, the mods around here not only turn a blind eye to bullying but sometimes actively encourage it.

no it hasn't jon, ppl wished that you wouldn't get so riled up but the main response here and prob in the other thread has not been negative towards you.

like i don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand. it may seem like "hilarious" zings to the bullys, but it bothers me. a lot. i've politely requested it to stop. not one person has spoken up to say, "yeah, it should stop". everyone is instead telling me to "lighten up" or not get "riled up".

i mean, its crystal fucking clear that when i asked for it to stop and the only response from anyone is "lol lighten up" that i'm not respected, liked or valued as a poster.

don't leave!

talk to the people you like talking to, don't talk to the ones you don't. or, if it's beyond hard to deal with, give yourself some time away. Internet always feels WAY more important and immediate than it is when you're up to your eyeballs in it. A lot of this shit is meaningless when you step back. It's just swallowing your pride and accepting that you don't actually *have* to defend yourself. It's just blips and bloops and a bunch of crazy excitable nerds itt.

it is true that the mods have not done anything about it, but one person apologised to you in that thread and said he would not do it again?

people aren't as against you as you think!

well jon the other inference to draw is that ppl are makin their own decision that a hyperbolic taunt so ridiculous simply cannot be taken seriously, it's so bombastic that it's inherently funny. Not because it annoys you, but tbh your reaction is commensurately overblown, but because it's ludicrous. I think that's totally different to ppl not supporting you in calling for the joke's censorship because the dislike you or enjoy your annoyance.

i mean, this month has been a pretty glaring example of what i'm talking about. Mordy realnames aero in a real dickish move. aero asks for Mordy to be tempbanned. boom, its done immediately. k3vin again pops up out of nowhere to pull bullshit with me, i kindly request it to be put to an end, and all i get is "lighten up". double fucking standards much? fwiw, i think aero was 100% in the right with his request.

Mordy realnames aero in a real dickish move

fwiw, that wasn't mordy

but, yeah, i don't need to clog up this thread with it. i'm sorry for bringing it in here, i've just got no one to talk to about this and i'm feeling really helpless and floundering today.

sorry aero for dragging your situation into this, i know its not the same.

fwiw the two things are nothing alike

its not the same, no. but there are similarities in that an ilxor did something that he explicitly requested to not happen, as did i.

if it makes you feel any better, most of ilx ignores k3v

eh, if you're feeling helpless and floundering, this is a pretty good thread to vent about it, even if it's coming out in ilx fight form.

one request was reasonable, tbh. Jon i like you plenty, but have you not considered that the reason ppl are 'meh' on this is because it's not worth the big deal yr making of it? The majority isn't always wrong man.

again, i don't think my situation is the same as aero's. all i'm saying is, super popular ilxor gets attacked by another poster in a real dickish way and the ilx hivemind instantly turns against that person, resulting in a tempban. an ilxor that is everyone's favorite target requests several times that another poster stops attacking him and it gets ignored.

it doesn't matter that "everyone" else thinks its "meh". i've made it abundantly clear that what k3vin does bothers me in a real and significant way. shouldn't that be enough?

an ilxor that is everyone's favorite target

you are not everyone's favourite target! most people on ilx probably, like me, have very little sense of who you are.

i mean, come on, you're not frogbs.

i'm addressing your assumption that 'everyone isn't supporting me' is because of you. It's not! They just disagree with you on this, so they're ....not agreeing with you. There aren't hordes of silently resentful ilxors hissing at you from the sidelines, they're mainly thinking 'hmmm....strange reaction' on their way to post about beef curtains or w/e

hell even frogbs had a bunch of defenders when some ppl wanted to ban him. i've not got even that. i just really fucking am revolted by how transparent it is that so many posters here feel they've got the right to determine what someone else has the right to be bothered by or not.

it doesn't matter that "everyone" else thinks its "meh". i've made it abundantly clear that what k3vin does bothers me in a real and significant way. shouldn't that be enough?

Yes, it should. It really, really should. I mean that 100% sincerely, no snark, no irony, no guile. It should be enough. But it's not.

You're at a place I was at about 5-6 years ago. Got massively taken down on ILX, left for two weeks, excised and buried the part of me that was super-hurt... came back diminished and harder-hearted. I don't think the person who carved me up has ever realized that they did it. Hurts like a motherfucker.

you guys. you're

jon, dude: I feel like you're allowing yourself to stay *way* too honed on on the details ....and anyone else itt who's trying to explain 'how it is' isn't going to help either

this is just ourobourosing the situation and jon I think the conversation as it's going now is just adding more of what was making you feel helpless.

the details aren't important, at least not in this thread. it's how you feel, and trying to either deal with that feeling and put it somewhere else, or just talk and have us listen and try to be as supportive as we can so that you don't feel quite *as* helpless as you are right now.

if you're not comfortable talking it out, feeling-wise, then you don't have to right now. but everyone else just needs to step back from all the minutiae and let the guy feel helpless in a bloody depression thread.

talk to the people you like talking to, don't talk to the ones you don't. or, if it's beyond hard to deal with, give yourself some time away.

The sagest of sage advice.

here's the thing. a big part of me would love to have another place to turn, another message board or somewhere else to hang out for awhile to shake the way ilx makes me feel. but i literally 100% don't post anywhere else. i don't have another community. i'm having a rough go of things irl right now for a variety of reasons, so i'd love a place to hang out and not think about those irl things. but right now ilx is not being that thing, it's making me feel even worse. i'd love to close the tab and go hang out where i'm appreciated, but, y'know, i'm just not fortunate enough to have anywhere else.

(fwiw as an aside, i am talking to someone about my irl things, so no need to suggest that)

You can stick to this thread. People tend to be very respectful and even-handed here if nowhere else.

totally. this thread is a good place for you. you're appreciated here. and there are plenty of other cool, talky threads where everyone is cool and not mean. sometimes it's just seeing the forest for the treees etc cliche blah blah

and hey, there's always my tree thread <3 if an ilx beef gets out of hand on the beef thread come here to look at trees

and if shit gets mean, you don't have to stay to defend the castle. just 'remove bookmark from thread' and on you go.

and there's sub-boards too. like my I Love NFL board became a good place for me to get to know some key ilxors at a time when I felt like I wsa about ready to leave. and then you see ilx threads tehy're on and you go play there.

there's ways of coping. it's harder when you're trying to cope with *all* of it. that's impossible and panic-inducing :)

I found ILTMI very safe. Emotionally. Deeply unsafe in other ways of course, but at least nobody judges you there...

well, i don't know. its obviously just me because k3vin's trolling is so "hilarious" and its so much fun for everyone to kick me further down and down. just wish one person really gave fuck one about me beyond "i don't know you, but you aren't bad i guess". just kinda of amazing that i've been posting here for, i believe, 8 years and i still feel like such an outsider.

beyond the four or five tryin to make you feel better (whether you agree with them or not) for the past hour itt?

you gotta not focus on the bad guys. there's some of us who like you, like dmac says. kev's not here now is he? that's all that really matters.

everyone's so kicked back and jaded that when someone reacts, or overreacts, or whatever, that some ppl find that amusing, and like to feed the flames and at that point pretty much everyone else is trolling.

maybe it would help to figure out what sets you off, either topics or specific posters and just give those a wide berth til you're up for it. no-one's going to be captain save a jon...I mean, no one's ever really been captain save a Veg (to be fair I try to avoid those situations in the first place because I'm a huge baby and easily wounded). You have to save yourself. You have to be your own counsel.

and if it's a pattern you find yourself in frequently, then ppl just start to characterize you in that way, and wait for it to happen. you become that guy. even if you're railing against it. you know?

so i'm already "that guy" then and its too late?

Ofc it's not too late.

Creating a new account and not doing anything to link it to your old one in ppl's minds might be the easiest, most effective help for you that doesn't require anyone else's cooperation.

lol awesome. better to just give this place up then. lol. going to go hang out on 4chan now i guess. bye guys.

you can always, always change it. you can change it right now. eliminate the negative, focus on the positve for a while, at least as far as ilx is concerned. put up a few no-go zones, go back through your recent posts even and find the threads where you have had just chill, good interactions, and hang with those.

Because clearly some ppl do find it hilarious and will not stop clowning you no matter what and it's not going to get them permabanned or anything, so, focus on solutions that you can implement on your own.

boxall not otm.