The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Oh yeah man, I'm not saying listen to me over your doctors lol. But I didn't think I was giving you any praise, more just encouragement.
If you want to look at it as praise though, it's still for something you have definitely done, something you have handled better than others, but more importantly it is something you have done to improve your life. You deserve praise for that, because it is literally the hardest thing a depressed person can do. For it was said: it is easier for a depressed person to jam a camel up their dickhole than to decide they are going to do anything to stop being depressed.
The biggest issue with that level of scrupulosity though, is that it gives you a reason to give up when you fail. You fail and you think to yourself "of course I failed, I'm a failure, I fuck up everything and never do anything right even though I have it so much better than others, I shouldn't have tried in the first place."
If you are in a place where any praise feels like a lie and just makes you hate yourself more I apologise (and I did mean it as encouragement), but it is something you are going to have to get used to now you are on your way out. Whatever happens, don't let it become an excuse.
Thanks a ton man. They say that a crackhead would rather spend 20 years in misery than 3 weeks in hell and maybe something similar can be said for those with depression. A lot of it is genetic but I am responsible for a lot of my issues, I just do not know. At this point I do not know what will help.
But I have only failed all my life.
Yeah, actions lead to actions, excuses lead to excuses, each have their own momentum.
What you are doing will help. Genetics is why I don't think you should use privilege as a metric for success. From the outside, it can pretty objectively be said you have it better than some, and worse than others. You weren't born to addicts, or in a mud hut in Africa, so you have it better than them, for sure. From an outside view. But you don't get to live outside yourself, and on that plane we are all equal. We all have to live the lives we have, and they are exactly as hard and easy as they are. The idea that someone else in your position could have done better is false - they didn't have the same genes as you, or the same parents, or the same traumatic and triumphant experiences. If they did, they would have done exactly the same as you - otherwise they weren't in the same position.
My biggest objection to thinking like this is that it sounds like cope. What a philosophy, you have absolved yourself of all your fuck ups, and of any need to take responsibility for your actions and their consequences. That is not what I'm saying, but if it's cope it's cope in the same way striving for objective journalism is cope. It doesn't matter if it is possible or not, the world is better off when we act as if it is true. I'd say you don't want to absolve yourself of anything, because we learn from mistakes, but we both know you aren't going to do that anyway, and anyone who doesn't isn't paying attention.
I have about a dozen other objections to that worldview too, most of which boil down to 'that's not how truth works' and 'you have to admit that you failed to learn from your mistakes', which are both true and beside the point. You do not have a problem with acknowledging your mistakes. You have trouble seeing your successes. But if you can't learn from your mistakes without acknowledging them, the flipside holds true too. You are doing yourself a disservice by discounting your successes, minor though they may be. I know I'm just repeating myself, but thinking you only fail becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. You have succeeded in something most people fail at, so even if that's your first success, it is still a success - think of it as the first of many. You probably shouldn't go out and get a plaque made celebrating it, but you should feel pride in it, and even though you are still going to fail countless times, you are going to succeed too.
Sorry it took me so long to reply, I have written and rewritten this post a dozen times this past week, and hating everything I wrote. I hate what I have written here too, but at least I have narrowed it to specifically the things I believe helped me when I was in a similar position. I don't know if they will help you, but I do know I am better off believing them than when I didn't.
I appreciate it quite a lot. I see dating and other things as thing I used to suck at but always thought that I would excel in, that it was inevitable and I just needed some time.
You are correct in your assessment, I never honestly did think about this in such a way. I do feel a tad lost given I need to get a job and do a bunch of stuff, it gets overwhelming and I end up not doing as much as I need.
How did it help you exactly and how long did it take you to not feel bad or fix your life?
It took about a year before it started being automatic, but once I got over that hump it became so much easier. Because once you get past that it becomes about motivation, and you strengthen your motivation significantly through the increases in confidence and resolve you gain in the process. It's not just an impossible slog for that year though, you should start seeing some of the benefits of doing it consciously in about a month - I thought I saw the benefits after two weeks, but I'll say a month because it is not easy distinguishing hopeful thinking from wishful thinking. I like your addiction analogy, the process is similar in a lot of ways - it feels miserable and is quite difficult to quit smoking at first, but it does get easier, and while you will still find yourself getting cravings/depressive thoughts even years later, you are much better equipped to manage them.
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