When did it all go wrong...

A lot of assumptions are being made about someone you know next to nothing about… like everyone I’ve had my fair share of suffering, I just don’t think it’s a sign it’s ‘all gone wrong’, more so than it what it is and I chose to be happy and positive regardless.

Calzino it seems it’s in your best interest to ignore me or something.

it’s just a really tactless thing to post after people kind poured their hearts out in two long personal posts

I hope this thread was helpful and cathartic to people and not painful. I made it after a few beers, frustrated with the circularity of my recent psychoanalysis appointments. It was kind of a wry joke. Didn’t expect people to post seriously on it.

it was helpful for me at least.

helpful for me too. it's not for everyone, but i think it's a good to talk about what went wrong, and to see what (some) others deal with. seeing so many people here deal with illness and tragedy in their own lives, for years here, helps prepare me for the inevitable crap that i will deal with. i remember telling my therapist about that a few years ago, actually, that i felt like i was depressed and falling apart even _before_ something really awful happened like a death or illness. back then, my goal was to get to a stable state and try to avoid thinking about and dreading the inevitable terrible things that will happen.

don't know where i'm going with that. it's good to talk about problems, i think.

I've almost posted itt about a half dozen times before but I keep coming back around to the thing where I've thought it all went wrong at least a half dozen times in my life and then things kinda turned around (even if not quite a full return to the pre-'all went wrong' state). I'm not sure if we get to know when and if it all goes wrong. Maybe sometimes, like if I opened my eyes one morning and I was just a head floating in a vat or something. That seems like something you don't come back from. Otherwise who really knows when you're on an inexorable downward slide.

That said, I definitely tend to live like I'm awaiting an endless number of other shoes to drop, forever bracing for the next clobbering from life. Maybe I should stop that. Maybe if I just say 'maybe I should stop that' enough times I'll just stop that. I think that's how it works.

It can be awful to anticipate terrible events, sometimes one gets relief by causing those terrible events.

To bring some sunshine here though.
Last year it finally went all right.

Married (happily)
Bought a our first home
Reduced work to to four days a week

The sunshines gotta rub off at some point tho I guess?

― hrep (H.P), Monday, 19 July 2021 04:35 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

someone's new here!!!

it's good to talk about problems, i think.

The US Army, being what it is, decided back in the late 1990s when new mental health therapies were proliferating like mushrooms after rain, that it needed to commission a study to determine which kinds of mental health and wellness therapies were most successful and which were either ineffective or less effective, so it could figure out where to spend its bags full of money. After several years it issued a report that concluded that almost every kind of therapy seemed to be moderately successful, with none of them standing out as the statistically 'correct' approach, and the real benefit seemed to be derived from the patient feeling like they were getting good attention and sympathetic help in dealing with their problems.

Their definition of 'moderately successful' may have been somewhat skewed...

Therapies that makes people want to get back in the battlefield with the motivation to kill people - clearly successful
Therapies that enable people to revaluate their lives and that tend to lead to them dropping out of the military - clearly a failure!

I don't think the study was confined to active duty soldiers, but included the multitudes of discharged veterans.

After several years it issued a report that concluded that almost every kind of therapy seemed to be moderately successful, with none of them standing out as the statistically 'correct' approach, and the real benefit seemed to be derived from the patient feeling like they were getting good attention and sympathetic help in dealing with their problems.

Maybe sometimes, like if I opened my eyes one morning and I was just a head floating in a vat or something. That seems like something you don't come back from.

That could just as easily be something to aspire to, though. I mean, as long as my head had wi-fi — and Amazon Prime, so I could get hats delivered.

Yes but is the delivery drone equipped to place a hat atop my tank?

I reiterate my contention that theres nothing at all wrong with what VHS said and ppl are projecting onto it

ok

It all went wrong that time I said something on ilx that I thought was straightforward and fairly innocuous, but that some other ilxors strongly objected to.

it went wrong for me when the Eastern front fell. Up until then, I was confident that I could win a two-front war. but afterward, clearly at least one of those fronts had fallen, and I had lost the confidence of my troops

(x post)

Was it this one - Is there life on other planets? ?

Martin's not able to respond ow, so let's pass that one by.

Having just returned from a weeklong multi-generational family gathering in a big remote farmhouse, I am equipped with multiple possible answers to this question: It all went wrong when my mother felt compelled by social pressures and her own lack of confidence to marry my father (they're still married, 55 years on, but my mom makes relentlessly clear that it wasn't her idea); or maybe when my dad's parents were remote and judgmental toward their children; or possibly when my grandfather's father abandoned the family when my grandfather was very young, leading to him growing up with a bunch of resentment and hurt that he passed onto his own kids.

Were earlier generations still around to make their case, I'm sure we could push the original sins back much farther. (And to be clear, I love my family, I mostly have good relationships with them, and I think they all mean well, most of the time.) But it made me aware all over again that learning to let go of past pain and injuries is often the only way to deal with them, because you can't solve or fix them after the fact even if everyone involved is still alive. And also of course that "letting go" is tremendously difficult work, and something you generally have to do over and over and over.

otmfm

Yeah, that's otm for me too.

And made me think of Larkin's Winter Palace:

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints.

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

possibly when I had teh racist couple next door move in.

Possibly when I had started cutting things at the start of the year but only finished 2 shirts and got halfway through a 3rd.

POssibly when I never got into a cleaning routine and now its too hot to start one.

Probably never getting into an exercise routine.

Probably sitting in the sun over the weekend without thinking of sunscreen.