what was the worst time in your life

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.

When my first daughter was born and she had to go into the NICU because they were worried she might not make it.
She did!

IMO the most pernicious thing about these bleak stretches is how acclimated your mind can become to the bleakness, the extent to which your perception becomes limited by your immediate circumstance. But even David After Dentist can tell you that, while it may feel in the moment like it's forever, it's not actually forever.

Also, though, while it's true that you can't go back, and it's sometimes true that you can't fix things, new roads can open and new things can be built. This is coming from someone who saw nothing but an impassible wall for the longest time, and who can look back and acknowledge now that the wall was not only not impassible but not actually ever even real.

Nothing’s permanent, not even life xp

Old Lunch otm. Whatever you’re facing now will fade away, or at least change significantly. Might be replaced with something far worse but still.

I mean, no? plenty of things are permanent. suppose you're Howard Dean or Jeb Bush and want to be president, and were indeed on track to become president. but now that almost certainly isn't going to happen. your state of not being president is permanent. now imagine the thing that would make you happy and fulfilled in life, that you've sunk your entire life into, is being president. you now have an enormous failure to live with, and that sense of failure is permanent.

i can think of a few periods.

1) like silby, the summer after my first year of college, i was 20. i felt extremely depressed and listless coming back home. i was leaving relationship drama at college, drinking a lot, and struggling to reintegrate into my parent's house. it was the only period of my life when i smoked cigarettes. thankfully it was pretty brief. i took a mid-summer trip to LA to visit a friend and he brought me along to the ashtanga yoga studio he belonged to, where i learned that method of yoga and began practicing it regularly. it felt great to get some sunshine, stop smoking, and do this vigorous athletic yoga practice. i came back home after that trip and enjoyed some of the most carefree weeks that i can remember.

2) within the first few months of my marriage, i was 26. some things relating to sexuality, and longstanding fear and difficulty in being open & honest about them, caused serious stress in my marriage as we were forced to talk about stuff that i had never talked about with anyone before. every day i just felt like i wanted to disappear. i also started graduate school, we moved to a new city that felt hostile and cold, and i hated my job working in a basement library with no windows. i started going to therapy for the first time in life, joined a men's group to talk about sexuality in a safe environment, and eventually worked toward a new position at that university to get out of the basement library and into the main library. the six years i spent in therapy proved to be some of the most rewarding work i've ever done in my life. as i finished grad school, the stress of that dissipated and i landed a killer job at a different university that eventually formed the foundation of my career.

3) right now, i'm 35. apart from #2, i can't ever remember struggling this much. we moved to my home city two years ago, and i regret daily the decision to leave my previous job. i have two special needs kids whom i love profoundly but are completely exhausting. we bought a house last year and are now in the worst financial shape we have ever been in. i got into two car accidents within a month earlier this year. i was diagnosed with ADHD, and while the medication treatment has been a breakthrough in my confidence and ability to accomplish things, in many ways it is highlighting how underutilized i am in my current job and how badly i want to get out. i am making enormous efforts to speak up, push the senior admins to be more transparent and equitable, and improve the shitty organizational culture we have here, and as a result i'm taking on way more leadership opportunities than i ever have and i am so emotionally drained by how demanding this work is, and how small and fleeting the moments of positive change feel. the thought "i feel like i am dying" floats into my head several times a day. i am sleep-deprived, waking up at 5:30am in darkness to try to fit in some yoga before i drive my kid 45 minutes across town so he can go to the school that is best for his special needs. my other son has meltdowns literally every single meal, and many in between, in ways that increasingly signal OCD and major sensory challenges rather than typical toddler tantrum behavior. my wife and are making major strides in our relationship and in communication but only as permitted within the tiny amount of space left over after we deal with all the other stress in our lives. i'm anxious, depressed, stressed. i need a change.

so i'm looking for a way to move out of this period. the regular things that should help me - yoga, cycling, nature, friendships, a creative practice - for the past year i've been sustaining one, creating about 80-90 works of art, which has been deeply rewarding - all that helps for sure but increasingly seem more like necessities for survival rather than avenues for elevation out of whatever i am in right now.

February 2013-present, still ongoing but not as bad now and reason to believe things will take a further reduction in badness in the next few months if I can just keep biting down on this frayed rope really hard.

Would be happy to share in more detail (lol you don't say, jon?) but only if thread is deindexed or on 77.

katherine, fellow nyclxor with chronic depression in the marrow and a flair for losing here - genuine offer, if you ever want to hang out and commisserate, the email attached to my ilx acct works and is checked by me daily. Totally totally get your last post. Have something similar.

treeshie, same offer. Would hang again!

Dec of last year til July of this year.

In Feb of 2017, for the first time in my completely fuXored life, I was sober and making very good money and had no debt and things were going swimmingly. I decided to make a good thing better buy adding some chemical enhancement, and within a couple of months it was just drugs all day (to the tune of hundreds of dollars a day) and I abandoned work completely and within about 7 months I was completely broke. That was not the bad part though. That was kinda fun.

I have friends and family, but they no longer harbor me as I have been at this for decades now. I was now forced to live in free or very low cost, crowded, institutional-type environments, which is something I've dealt with many times before, but given how I thought I had left all this behind forever, it just about killed me. I lost almost all will to live, suffered extreme depression, found very little joy or relief in any activity or relationship, it was awful.

Things are much better now and I have much more time to shitpost to ilx.

Is there a companion thread on 77 to this one?