Depression and what it's really like

i have really bad depressive tendencies, as documented somewhat on this thread. another bad part of switching was that i really started to question my self-worth, even though i was doing a good job at the low stress job, like a lot worse than when i was sucking at the higher-stress job. and the loss of social capital was a bummer too.

like i thought when i switched it would free up all of this mental energy that i could devote to other things. nope. instead my mental energy just went into stressing out about how i'd disappointed everybody, wondering how anybody would ever take me seriously again, wondering how much of a hit my career had taken, etc. the problem wasn't my job, the problem was / is my depression.

I quit a high stress job i got right after college, i quit after four days. I'm pretty sure I had a nervous breakdown, it had been a rough year.

I spent the next few years working supermarket shifts and just happy to not be stressed about work. Even after getting a regular hours office job on the same money I was still delighted not to have any responsibility or decisions or any of that grown-up shit that (I'd convinced myself by that stage) other people had somehow been groomed and prepared for and somehow, somewhere picked up the certainty and steeliness of resolve that the corporate world seems to require but that I never managed to find when I needed it.

After a few years of satisfying and totally indulging my fears in this way and thereby avoiding that churning panic, I worked my way slowly into competency in enough areas that I didn't feel fraudulent in a professional environment anymore. Somewhere after that I started to think I could maybe chance my arm at further study and promotion and did both, though both terrified me at times. External forces included yeah a desire for status/income that I wasn't going to get at the level I was comfortable at, and eh ms.mac likes me fine but I'm not sure she sees herself settling long, long term with a typist. Internal force was that I knew I was settling within myself for the sake of comfort and I'd eventually witnessed enough around me to realise that there is a lot of front and bluffing going on out there, and that I'd at least be smart enough among it all to do no more harm than the next fella, and with maybe a smidgen more good intent.

TLDR/moral: I think it's common, tlg sympathising above suggests as much. Struggling through it is an available path, I'd imagine lots do. Ducking out and finding your own platform over as long as is needed to do do might be another way, it was for me. Either way, or by any other way you find, needn't mean that you're dropping out forever, just until yknow it works for you. And even if it does, eh fuckit its only work and you're a good guy. With a very photogenic dog. Luck.

One thing tho- talk to the kindest person available at work and let them know you're feeling overwhelmed. Just that. If you're the first ever and get flung out, then relief should be your reaction. But if theyve channels and processes to help in this p common situation it might be a big help- it is for me in my new gig.

i may well be mistaken but i feel like some recent posters here are or have been teachers? teaching is super fucking hard even without depression; imagining it with fills me with dread and awe. that's not to say that one should or should not do it, of course, but feeling overwhelmed is certainly not a personal failure

and maybe visiting the teachers thread would help

i am not a teacher teacher but a college teacher, and several years out from my phd i have a lower level of stress from teaching as such but always generate some out of myself anyway and my own sense of how much i should be doing. i have a stubborn mental block that keeps me from just doing whatever bullshit syllabus one should do for any given course, so whenever i have to do something new, which has been more or less constant in my off-on spates of actual work availability in the past several years, i feel like i have to do something all mine from the ground up, make a plan, choose readings, adapt them and the assignments to my way of doing things, etc. then i spend the whole semester wading through a swamp to try to stay ahead / not behind of the thing. sometimes the quality of my work has suffered. especially when depressed the most. but even when it hasn't i have generally made it way too hard on myself, even if that's not something i know how to fix. after seeing natural improvements in my work with time and repetition, i've supposed that i've just experienced normal growing pains at the beginning of what is a big career transition for anyone, from student to teacher. there's a reason most teachers find something they can work with in a classroom and stick with it for 20 years, after all. but doing this amid bad conditions (no jobs, low pay, etc.) saps my ability to believe that things will improve, or at least my caring about whether they could. turns out receiving fair pay and respect and having security makes you look toward the future with hope!

this past semester i did another round of online-only courses for a nearby state school i've visited and know some faculty at, but am not really 'at'; and a surprise fill-in at a school in town that had every classic 'liberal arts school' feature you could think of. i had already been hella bummed about teaching online since the entire endeavor seems to be a completely thoughtless one on the school's part, and only marginally 'teaching' at my current level of ability to magic a college course into existence for disinterested vocational program majors via a monstrous learning management system. but getting a quick burst of personal contact and in-room teaching experience with the other group simultaneously reminded me of how automatically rewarding the job could be while also making me feel even more isolated, since i literally had no place on campus - i would sit out on the patio of the library after class and contemplate for thirty minutes or so before running home to do the other work on the ol computer - and with time kept having more and more confirmed my feeling that i was just totally alone in both jobs at once. that's something every higher-ed academic recognizes full well, i'd expect, even primary school teachers despite all the bureaucratic nightmares, since the core of the job is you in a room with the students. and in general people who gravitate toward higher ed like it that way anyway; we don't have people telling us how or what to teach or really knowing much of anything about how we conduct ourselves in our work. but the whole point of the whole idea of a campus and collegiality is that in certain ways you're not alone, or don't have to be - there is always someone else there, around, to support you as need be - to be the person you say hi to, to reside in the office you pop in to to ask a question, to remind you that it all went fine last time around and you're going to do it again so your private little anxieties about your disaster of a course or your stack of papers to grade will naturally be mitigated by the social world you live in. so doing all the work for two different schools/departments while feeling zero social involvement in either one… it's not good.

as i recall treezy was looking into or doing teachingish work. even if not, i guess, i would recommend looking at the social validation/engagement you are currently receiving. if perhaps you have been cut off from it or you are not allowing yourself as much of it as you could, maybe time to head on back over to the main office or faculty lounge or wherever, or ask some folks for a meetup.

at my level, teachers exhibit a predictable pattern: they're all around < 1 week before the semester starts, then they gradually vanish into their own worlds as they try to shoulder their burdens w/o getting crushed by them and also to secret away some time for themselves near the end of the semester as they start to realize that their jobs are consuming their lives. then after the break they do it again.

treesh, if quitting a well-paid job will both allow you to fulfill your basic obligation to support yourself (if possible) and seems necessary to preserve your mental health, then bite the bullet and seek a lower stress job regardless of the well-meant advice you get from relatives and friends. They don't have to live in your skin.

The difficulty in making such deeply life-altering decisions in your stage of life is that given your lack of life experience it is easy to mistake a failure of nerve for an existential crisis. My POV would be to stick with it long enough to know there is no satisfactory path to improving your situation and that remaining in place is clearly undermining your physical or mental health in significant ways. When you're certain of this, bail out and don't look back. Then, even if you don't know the way forward, you clearly understand the wholly unacceptable cost of stasis.

one version of what it's really like: hiding from yourself in bed all day, drinking to facilitate naps and make excuses, waking up in enough time to appear normal to other people, repeating

open the curtains

man this time of year blows for so many people. wish we could fast-forward a month or two and skip all the pits of despair.

open the k-hole

at least there's always new drug slang to learn.

open the wordhole

opening of holes can be dangerous, but generally good advice unless new tissue is trying to form there

Not that I'm encouraging anyone to contemplate suicide, but personal experience leads me to think there's some truth to the research that indicates suicidal ideation is like a safety valve--by THINKING about it and then putting off doing it at least for now, you can get through another awful day

This is my experience. I've never been sure that it's healthy, but my bouts of darkness and contemplation of suicide have never seemed like something that could be 'helped' by the regular channels of therapy and medication. (In part, a result, maybe of never having health insurance until recently - the concept of therapists and medication is foreign. I'm not entirely sure how to deal with physical medical issues, much less mental.)

At the bleakest moments, I THINK about and sometimes dwell on suicide but it drives an internal... anger, I guess. The anger isn't self-loathing so much as a desire to do better, sort of a monologue/narration about being a fuck-up. The future seems impossible and miserable, I see no way out and no positive endpoint, so I can just end it all right now - but is that really want I want?

treeship if you are a first-year high school or middle school teacher...you are right on schedule with those feelings. (probably elementary, too; i just don't know much about that.) it sucks, and i am sorry. try to forgive yourself for the things you can't get done--it's an impossible job, especially the first year. people told me to do this my first year and i thought they were crazy, but they were right--blow off your grading sometimes to sleep/cook yourself a nourishing meal/read comic books. you are not bad at handling responsibility. there are too many high-stakes responsibilities for even the most responsible person to fulfill.

my first year i fantasized about working as a supermarket cashier. i also fantasized about getting hit by a bus. not badly enough to be killed, but badly enough for an extended hospital stay so i could have some time to catch up on my grading. it's so hard. be kind to yourself.

are you sleeping? i barely slept my first year and by May i was batshit/burned out. if it's about being "good" at your job (no one's good their first year), sleep is the single biggest predictor of whether i'm lucid and engaging. bigger than the amount of time spent planning, bigger than how well i know the text or how much i love it.

Hey all,

Thanks for the supportive comments. So yeah, I am a first year teacher and I am teaching English to sixth graders. My original plan was to teach high school but I took this job because it was the first offer I received. I have a long commute which has cut into my sleeping (I wake up at 5!) but usually I get at least 5 1/2 to 6 hours. Grading everything on time hasn't happened, and I feel bad about that, but I also feel bad about the fact that I can't get my students' behavior under control. I don't want to reveal too much about the specifics of my school here, but this has been a challenging year for the whole staff so I don't really feel alone in this struggle. Still, I don't know if I can take being yelled at by kids that much longer. I feel guilty that I can't meet all of their learning needs and I am so burned out I feel like I can barely get out of bed, much less do this superhuman job. Many teachers get through this rough patch and come out stronger, better teachers but I am thinking I won't be one of them. I don't really have the desire to do that right now, I just want to go read a book. I feel guilty most of the time which is the biggest trigger for my depression. Definitely planning on leaving this school and maybe the profession in June but don't know if I can last that long.

I went into teaching because I love English as an academic subject and also had previous experience working at schools that showed me I had an affinity for working with kids. But I do not have an affinity for managing stress or, it turns out, classrooms. I think my place might be somewhere simpler with lower stakes.

it made me feel really valiadted that the American Psychological Association made a pamphlet like 'look friends and loved ones of teachers, teacher stress is fucking REAL'

https://www.apa.org/ed/schools/cpse/teacher-stress-brochure.pdf

I am a seventh grade English tear in my fourth year and I had a mental breakdown in front of the school my second year. My kids figured out how to get my to cry every day, and they did. It was bad. I almost quit. Here's some stuff that helped me:

- my job had an EAP that gave me free counseling and a free 24 hour hotline and that helped
- i found a good primary care doctor (recc'ed by another kind teacher who struggles w/mental health ish) who respects teachers and patiently helped figure out a good med combo (this took 1.5 years to NAIL but trying some meds helped)
- stop grading so much ~ NOT all the work they do needs to be graded!!! it is impossible! this one really did me in in tandem with having some very poorly behaved kids -- i have a bunch of things i do to reduce grading, webmail me if you wanna talk
- i wrote a blog post on how to not burn out and it's kind of cliche advice but maybe it will help?

being a middle school teacher is insanely hard!!! mad respect to you! hopefully you get some time to hibernate/decompress over winter break...and please do webmail me if you wanna talk, i am a good listening ear if nothing else

oh yeah and class mgmt is a tricky one, it took me a long time to learn that one too, and like hs says sleep helps, also antidepressants helped me
like before them i would hear some dumb bs a kid says: 'you're boring' and i would think, 'it is true, i am boring, and also, i am a morally bad person...etc etc' depression talk
and after antidepressants it was like 'be respectful' and like 'eh whatever go suck an egg, kid' inside
class mgmt is learnable but it the irony is: it DOES take energy to do right...yet it SAPS you of EVEN MORE energy if you don't do it right

i like this guy's site, it helped me out a lot
http://www.smartclassroommanagement.com/category/classroom-management-strategies/difficult-students/

or if you just wanna QUIT, figure out WHEN is a good time to do it ~~ part of why i did not quit was my district fines you $2000 if you quit midyear, might wanna see if that's gonna be a problem
if that hadn't been the case i'd probably be working in a call center again

My kids figured out how to get my to cry every day, and they did.

Children that age should be killed. Well, not all of them. Just one or two, as an example to the others.

children are the worst

tbh I just needed to get a thicker skin

and pills pills pills

they fine you??!!!??

i'm thinkin YOU should be fining THEM if their job is not doable for a whole year

anyway if you are feeling shitty shitty shitty another option is to take fmla time until you've got the old mental health settled
you can't take care of others if you're not in good shape yourself

ah me, treesh! it sounds like the situation you are in was created by elements far beyond your control and it has knocked you sideways very hard and disoriented your sense of self and your relation to the world.

now that you have (I would hope) a brief winter break, maybe you can get a bit of distance on the situation and begin to reevaluate your position. the sooner you redefine success in your job down to an achievable goal based on what you can control, the sooner you will regain your footing.

one thing I would jettison immediately is any idea that you are failing to meet the standards of your employers, no matter what you are told those standards are or where you stand in relation to meeting them. if you just survive the year and are willing to walk into that classroom each day and make some effort to teach, that will be good enough.

sixth graders are just old enough to develop a sense that society's rules of behavior are a paper tiger and your power to enforce the rules is extremely limited. They are still immature enough to think that the ideal situation is being able to immediately do whatever their current impulse tells them to do. dealing with that requires cunning and a somewhat detached and strategic approach, which you've been too harried and pummeled to supply.

hammering them indiscriminately will only give them a common enemy and legitimize a classroom leader who is not you. you have to read your students, find natural allies, isolate resistance, and discover ways to bend their existing motives to your ends. it may be too late to recover this year's class, but you can experiment.

you may have thought of all this already and 'failed'. but dammit, treesh, don't make yourself out as a failure, just because you aren't able to keep that many plates spinning at once without any falling and breaking. plate spinning takes energy, dedication and practice and you weren't allowed the luxury of learning with just a few plates to start out. that mess at your feet was foreordained by circumstance. try to regain your focus and aim for more limited results. at the end of every day give yourself big points for being there and staying present.

you can do this, but only if you redefine "this" in achievable terms.

p.s. we love you.

Hi everyone—

I swallowed a bottle of trazodone tablets a while back. This got me into the emergency room and then the psych hospital for two weeks. Would not recommend this as a good way to spend the christmas holiday. I wish a lot of things had gone differently over the past year, but surviving this is not one of them. There's too much yet to do to just leave undone at this point.

Back at home and playing guitar a lot. Wish I had my old setup (or could afford a new amp), but I'm just happy to be able to play these days.

And besides, the day I got home from the hospital, I got a call back on my job application at Guitar Center. Hopefully that pans out.

Here's to a better 2016.

Wish you the best of luck and a positive focal point to concentrate on for the next year.

hope the job comes through; if it doesn't, something better will.

Glad to still have you around. Wishing you strength and peace.

man, that really sucks, austin :/ i'm sorry you had to go through that

There's too much yet to do to just leave undone at this point.

― Austin, Tuesday, January 5, 2016 2:56 AM (10 hours ago)

this is really well put

every good wish to you now and into the future

Thanks everyone =)

Ugggggggghhhhhhhhhh

i don't even care about being happy or anything, i just don't want to feel like this all the time. it's a cold ass world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tmhfwz8w5o

big love to Austin, brimstead, and everyone here. I'm always humbled when I read this thread and see the support people give each other.

I'm just about four days into a valley, and it had been a while.

I think so often for me it begins with an emotion that not only hurts, but that I feel ashamed to harbor, like regret, or worse still, envy. And they just stick with me, triggering all sorts of other feelings, and before you know it I'm having trouble keeping my thoughts straight. I want to be left alone but then my mind won't let me be alone. It gnaws at me like a brutal, senseless rodent.

good night for now

so fucking tired of this. tired of "tips" and "tricks" and "wisdom" and other assorted garbage.

people ain't worth jack shit

totally sober here.

no need to respond, i just had to let something out

in the same place right now

i'm sick of being forced to ask for advice from well-adjusted assholes who've floated through life on a happy fucking extrovert bubble and to denounce myself and have them tell me my viewpoint is not valid.

^^^

Had a really bad spate about two weeks ago that frightened me. Have been nearly but not quite baseline since (good enough). But damn all of a sudden there is so much suicide. My friend's brother in law killed himself on Wednesday, one of my comix peers killed himself on Thursday, and then you guys probably saw the bump of the suicide thread on here today. The psychosphere is just so bad right now. What is happening?

seriously, fuck people, fuck america, i just want to be left alone until i die, which i hope comes sooner than later.

when the sheer absolute absurdity of life isn't liberating it's horrifying

maybe tomorrow i'll wake up and feel different. i was starting to feel better before i went to bed last night and then i wake up again covered in cobwebs of mind dirt.