what was the worst time in your life

like objectively my life is somewhat better than a few years ago, I have a job (if no benefits and a perpetual fear of when I will be fired from it) and a relationship that is fine at least currently. but there is still the crushing weight of personal and professional failure that there is no going back from. and every year it gets heavier. if my life were a sitcom it would have been canceled many seasons ago because it ran out of plot.

it's a wholly self-made hole anyway

none of us asked to be born into this species tbf

1980

like even tonight is a good example. I live in one of the biggest cities in the world but there are no plans for me, no events to go to like the ones my life was replete with before it all collapsed. basically I sit in a box for a few hours, sleep, go to work then go back into the box

spring 2002, fired and dumped, bad habits galore.

crazy that I still live in the same house. life is 1000% better.

Xp

Have you talked about this collapse elsewhere on ilx? Like on 77?

I don’t know what that means but if that is at my expense I’m sorry

there is a somewhat more private sub-board called "77" where ILXors sometimes work through more personal stuff, is what I believe that meant. it can be helpful for some folks.

Rolling "please add me to 77" thread

Xp

It means exactly what it says

Also what sleeve posted

Just curious

would rather not

2012 seems to be a theme. It was an increasingly fraught year personally, with an extended hangover into 2013. You'd never know it from here and social media, unless you knew where to look and what to look for. I'll leave it at that.

katherine I rolled my eyes when I read this at first but I submit it to you in all seriousness as offering potential tools to feel better. I wish I had this list when I was going through a rough patch.

https://medium.com/@benjaminhardy/8-things-every-person-should-do-before-8am-8a15cf575a46

(obviously I don't have time for all of that shit, but I found some of it useful)

this article was obviously written by a man because every woman with a day job is spending the hours before 8 am on hair, clothes, and makeup to be of an acceptable apprarance before work

*appearance

xxp tbh i rolled my eyes at the very url, but if it's helpful then that's cool

probably 1998, since that's the only time i actually walked down to a bridge. 2017 was pretty bad for more external reasons. i've mostly settled into a fog of vague dissatisfaction, but something good happened recently and i'm trying to adjust myself to it/not wreck it

1996-98 was probably the worst period of my entire life but I don’t really want to talk about it.

I recall 2003-2007 as being a very hazy stretch of living online, starting/quitting school, failing to keep jobs, and hating myself.

This year has been kinda rocky (it literally started with a car crash) but there have been some positive developments, especially with regards to my mental health. As corny as it sounds I’ve learned a lot about myself!

1996-98 was probably the worst period of my entire life but I don’t really want to talk about it.

1990-1994, basically when I should have been in and graduating from college, instead I was drunk or on acid or trying to kill myself all the time (and still in college, but sometimes dropping out). also some of the best times of my life, ironically, sometimes on the same days.

oh I guess I rebounded by about 1998 due to a more stable relationship and cutting out alcohol mostly and, oddly, having my dad die and therefore needing to get more serious about my life.

2006-2008 or so, the heartbroken alcoholic grocery thief years. now I'm only one of those things

the first 30 years or so, give or take some amazing and crucial things that I'd do all over again even with the awful baggage

You can mark it by the time I became Old Lunch (because I was incredibly fragile at the time and password bombed my old login in haste).

Briefly: within a span of months, my grandma died, I watched my dad die (unexpectedly), I still went on a previously-planned vacation after that one-two and learned that my roommate had died and subsequently lost my apartment (his mom owned the building), my girlfriend left me via an email sent in the middle of the night (still to this day don't know why, other than, y'know...it's me), I quit my toxic job because I needed one less thing to suck but then realized that I didn't have the emotional wherewithal to really look for another job and wound up selling all of my stuff, also realized too late that I'd lost access to psychiatric treatment at basically the worst possible time, and ultimately just couldn't handle any of it any more and wound up living with my mom out in the middle of nowhere with no money or job or transportation or access to any of the above. For a year-and-a-half, in my mid-thirties. Guess I finally have enough distance from it to actually acknowledge what happened in words that I share with other people. I suppose that is progress, perhaps even growth.

And then I finally got my sea legs back and returned to Chicago against all odds and almost immediately found myself dealing with kind of a crazy number of crazy people and occurrences (roommates of varying degrees of psychosis, a scam artist employer who wasn't so into paying her employees or running anything resembling a legitimate business, a friend who I realized was trying to recruit me into a cult) that I was, again, ill-prepared to handle. I'm kind of a homebody these days. There may still be some lingering, unacknowledged PTSD, but I'm basically fine now. Well, 'fine'. But basically fine.

Much love to y'all and kudos on the adversity you've overcome and that you will overcome if you haven't already. It's a rough row, but you gotta keep hoein'.

U better bet yr pickle im still hoein

when I feel the urge to ante up my pickle that's how I know it's time to fold and walk away

It’s such a hassle to fold yr pickle trü

earlier this year when the washington capitals won the stanley cup

― mookieproof, Wednesday, September 19, 2018 6:10 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry but lolled hard here

How long do u hold your pickle before u fold it, asking for a friend

2007, during which time somehow I didnt die of liver failure. I also dont want to talk about it though. I think I might have had some kind of weird manic episode for like 4 months.

sometimes holding your pickle actually reduces its pliability. putting it under some warm running water often helps.

Gonna wager not a whole lot of people want to talk about the worst time of their life on a public forum

Pickles be damned

🥒

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.