Depression and what it's really like

Yeah the single most effective therapist I've ever had actually gave me concrete instructions on how to step forward--"here's what I want you to try this week." All the others would let me talk out the hour, nod, and show me the door. I didn't even realize the degree to which it was a problem until I recognized the contrast.

The thing I regret is that the first guy did set me a task in the first session, but I sort of half chickened out and half didn't see the point (because he hadn't related his task to the problems I was upset about at all), and he immediately labelled me as uncooperative and didn't set any more tasks and for the rest of our sessions we played petty semantic games on the theme of "you clearly don't want to change because you didn't do that one task, so let's not even bother"

though I mean I was 22 at the time and I guess every 22y/o feels like they are being labelled and pettily one-upped all the time and I probably did get kind of petulant so, you know, decade later, maybe I can finally tackle things properly now

It has to make sense to you as well, it can't be all action without talking through the plan either. Frankly, that guy sounds awful. Any therapist that assigns you a task without being able to convince you why you should do it and THEN gets mad that you didn't do it is doing a bad job. That's like shit I expect parents to do, and god knows how many of our problems stem from our parents to begin with. :)

i thought one of the big rules of talk therapy was to avoid judging?

i mean from the therapist side

Yeah the single most effective therapist I've ever had actually gave me concrete instructions on how to step forward--"here's what I want you to try this week." All the others would let me talk out the hour, nod, and show me the door. I didn't even realize the degree to which it was a problem until I recognized the contrast.

― hoospanic GANGSTER musician (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Friday, May 3, 2013 12:02 PM (8 hours ago)

otm. had a great session w my therapist this afternoon, and came away with three concrete steps to take this week. i do a lot of talking, but she's really good at pointing out the weak links and rationalizations in my thinking, helping me see that the demons are a lot smaller and more manageable than they seem when shrouded in denial.

It's now official and paid for and everything: I am going to be that sad, creepy old college student! Hooray/I want to die! That is, assuming I can get anywhere after two summer terms at community college, get financial aid, find some way to support myself after quitting the job that's been consuming ten hours of every day and most of my will to live for the last four years, etc.

I am going to be that sad, creepy old college student!

honestly, this has got to stop. you need to stop telling that to yourself, stop calling yourself that, etc.
all of my students are working adults and i don't find a single one of them sad or creepy. just let it go for your own good -- getting through school is hard enough without constant negative self-talk!!

actually, for accuracy's sake, not all of them are working, but they're all "nontraditional students"
some of them have kids in college, in fact!

also, congrats!!

Going back to school is always awesome!

congrats, TT, that's awesome.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part-two.html

<3

I know there's nothing wrong with being a non-traditional student, but how am I supposed to accept that I lost my entire young adulthood first to freakishly severe social anxiety and b) to full-time work? I mean, I'm happy that I'm going to finally make some progress toward STARTING to atudy at a real, non-bullshit college as opposed to the open admission, glorified job training programs that have been my only option until now, but I've spent the last decade deferring the important social part of being young and I'm turning fucking thirty in just a few months without experiencing any of it and now I've deferred it so long I never will

And this . I can only open up enough to even express myself if I'm completely irresponsibly drunk, and there's nothing I or anybody else can do anymore to make it right

How are you supposed to accept xyz? I'm not sure. That's a really complicated question! I'm just saying that fixating on that part of this process is not doing you any favors. It's your right to fixate on whatever you want, but if you want things to improve (and it seems like you do) it seems pretty essential to stop being so hard on yourself about the past.

today i told my roommate i was going to class, then i laid silently on the floor for three hours, then i climbed out my bedroom window and walked around the house and came in the front door and said class was "pretty good"

:{ at least you still have some pretense to dignity.

me, i'd just sit on the couch in a stained t-shirt drinking beer and watching steve harvey's family fued 'til flies were buzzing around me.

http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/files/2010/11/Steve-Harvey.jpg

yeah i think like half of my emotional stress now is caused by pretending i don't have any. my dignity tho is only in my roommate's eyes, not mine or god's or the guy shuffling past the house while i climbed out who obviously has much worse problems than i do

fwiw i have v. much enjoyed your comments on russian history, among others

dignity is for suckers

thanks mookieproof! that specifically is kind of a relief.

For all the good posting here will do me, I should probably go shout at a brick wall instead (and, hey, maybe I'll give this a go at lunch), but sometimes I need some sort of outlet between therapy sessions, for lack of anyone else to talk to about these things. Despite being pretty happy with most aspects of my life right now, I'm just finding myself crushed more and more under the weight of not having any people in my life I can really consider good friends. It's like I have a great orbit of my immediate family and then a really periphery orbit of people that are basically acquaintances, people I get along with well when I see them but that I don't think either them or I would really consider us "friends". It's that big gaping space in-between those two orbits that is weighing me down.

It doesn't help that I read a couple articles a few weeks ago about how difficult it is to make friends after 35 and I pretty much hit all of the demographic ticks that allegedly make it even harder (male, relatively set in a career, being a parent). I'm just slowly coming to the conclusion that I will never again have anything resembling a close friend and I find that incredibly depressing. Its just become pretty clear that if, especially as a male, you don't have a really solid group of friends after college, you're basically pretty much screwed.

I had a whole bunch more random bullshit typed out here, but it made me sound even more pathetic, so I'll just leave it at that.

Hey jon. Is it possible/easy for you to check out activities locally you'd be interested in? I realise having young kids limits you t timewise etc, but doing something, anything, in a group gives at least a common start.

Telephone thing- i've applied to go back to college today, and i'm 7% older than you. Lots of ppl dont make the best of college first time round, and most of them wont have had reasons as valid as yours. In any case, you can only start from today with it- im hoping having a bit more life experience, and knowing what i want now and why i want it, make up for at least a couple of the intervening years.

Luck all.

I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to find some sort of activity to do, but I'm striking out left and right. The vast majority of groups I've researched in my area are aimed, from what I can tell, at retirees, because they all meet right in the middle of the work day. The only things I've found that seem to line-up with my age group are either sports groups (which I'm absolute shit at and wouldn't enjoy) or singles groups (obviously not). The options for working people who aren't interested in sports are pretty much non-existant.

Lots of ppl dont make the best of college first time round

Arguably the only way to know how to get the most out of university is to have gone there once, messed it up (like me), and gone back a second time after a few years (which I haven't done, but maybe given the right circumstances, like having money).

good to hear about you guys going back to college, i'm still mustering up the courage to go back after dropping out a decade ago

Ha jon, i was hoping you dug a sport. ps being shit at it doesnt matter, but obv not enjoying it is not much good to you.

I like sports! Just am really terrible at them. I've joined a few leagues in the past that were supposed to be "just for fun", but inevitably someone takes it way too seriously and the fun just immediately evaporates.

Sucks, in the movies one hype montage would sort it out but irl getting really good at sports takes at least idk a week

Okay for real lol, I needed that this morning.

what are things you do like to do? Do you find it easy or hard to introduce yourself and/or talk to new people?

you go to music shows semi-regularly iirc, maybe you can volunteer at a non-profit or co-op music venue or festival?

I'm pretty good at introducing myself and I like to think I'm pretty good at making new acquaintances. I mean, I usually handle myself pretty well in new social situations and am pretty good at talking to new people. That's not really my problem, it's finding people I connect with on a somewhat deeper level that will lead to, "hey we should hang out and do X some time". In the past 3 or 4 years I've managed to meet a few people that I bonded with pretty quickly, but they all fizzled out after that intial meeting (one moved across the country, another flaked out on my, a third was always "too busy"). I just need to fin a situation where I can make more of those type of connections, because my week-to-week life has really limited chances.

volunteer work or some sort of class, maybe? those are things that people our age tend to do to make new friends, expand the scope of their lives beyond the job/family axis.

I just volunteered with a local community theater and really hit it off with a couple of people there, so I would second volunteer opportunities. Part of the problem with making friends after school is that outside of work, it's hard to get enough exposure to individual people that those deeper levels of connection form. (The other part is everyone is busier!)

it's difficult, man

Not much help, but I can relate, jon. I do a weekly evening class and I've met some nice people through it so I think that's a pretty good option but tbh I don't think I'm really about to take any of my acquaintances to the next level of "we should hang out, not at this class, and do something not related to the topic of this class".

That's partly because the ones I get on with best are a lot older than me, nearly my parents' age, and it feels odd, but apart from that tbh it's probably my failing rather than the class's, as I've never been good at that acquaintance->friendship conversion thing.

Regarding Vinnie's post, a coworker was telling me they volunteer as an usher at the local large-ish theatre, they've met a few friends that way and they get to see the plays (some of them touring plays with name actors) for free, so that's a potentially interesting perk if nothing else...

TT it's 12 years since I dropped out and I'm still too scared to go back, but I've got to say my uncle loved going to uni in his 30s. He missed out on it first time round as he married young, had a messy divorce a year or two later, had a string of dead-end jobs throughout his 20s, and was finally in his element as a mature student.

volunteer work or some sort of class, maybe?

I'm really trying to find one of these two things. Unfortunately the classes thing isn't working out, again any of the local community college courses I'd even remotely be interested in are during working hours.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part-two.html

<3

― j., Thursday, May 9, 2013 11:42 PM

This is brilliant, yes. I was given this link by someone else a couple of days ago, and I should have shared it here, so glad someone else did. I've actually showed it over the last couple of days to people I've been alienating recently to go "this is what my head is doing, if only I was articulate enough to express it in a non-scary way".

that is a great link!

the thing that really got me there was the making fake faces thing. makes you feel like a sociopath.

i think everyone does that to some extent, non-depressed people just don't feel like they have to do it all the time

yeah. i mean, everyone does that when they don't really care about something. the awful thing about doing it all the time is you're doing it to all your friends.

i think people do it even when they do care! well... okay maybe i am sociopath after all

I need some way of saving up strength/wellbeing for Saturday, as I'm best man at my brother's wedding, but been feeling pretty bad recently. Thinking some kind of jar. I'm bipolar with just over a year since I was last hospitalised, so I was probably the worst choice he could have made. I'm figuring faking it will be fine, I'm fine at that in normal situations, but does anyone have any advice for a high stress situation like this? Also, the wedding will be my last day drinking before starting meds aimed at sobriety (antabuse etc.), so trying to keep my drinking under control will be an issue too.

This is going to be a disaster (he did say he didn't care how terrible my speech is, he's going to have a good day and wants me there, but for some reason that doesn't alleviate the stress as much as I know it should).

This is the bit that I think hit closest:

it's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it's more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can't feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you're horribly bored and lonely, but since you've lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you're stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.

xpost, I dunno, I just plaster on the fakeness. Have an escape mechanism. Take up smoking to give you a reason to go outside (I go out for a fag and play a game or two of freecell on my phone) as soon as you're done with the speech (or invent a kilt malfunction to allow you to run straight off to the bathrooms or something). At my own wedding, I planted a couple of drinks at a couple of tables so that if someone engaged me in conversation I could excuse myself because I was over "there" and had a drink waiting for me. Lather rinse repeat).

Oh, I smoke, so hopefully that will help. Just trying to fit both my tobacco tin and a hip flask into my sporran :(

xp totally agreed, i really liked that bit

i mostly liked the frowny face w hat. good look.