@striker comments on "Wellness Wednesday for September 24, 2025

Wellness Wednesday for September 24, 2025

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:

Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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.
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.
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).

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striker 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

I read it all, oats, and I empathize greatly. A few things:

Reading the dates, I'm probably ~20 years older than you, so I'm likely closer in age to your father than you
Common ground. My parents also split acrimoniously at approximately the same age (I was 13/14) and the tone, if not the detail, of your experiences mirrors a lot of what I experienced. It's horrible, and it leaves a lasting mark. I was lucky enough to meet my wife when I was in mid-20s, and we're together since (married 17+ years, two kids), and while we wouldn't overtly describe ourselves as conservative, we live 100% a conservative relationship and life by most measures.
On experiences of depression / self-worth. I've never been suicidal so your life went much further than mine in this regard, but I understand some of what you went through. Depression (major depressive disorder, call it whatever) recurred in my life every year for 20+ years. The story I tell myself is that it related to the family break-up (which took me from overnight from idyllic countryside life of quietude/solitude/animals+birds/farm-life to urban living / single parent / rougher friends who'd kick out lamp-posts, underage drink from cans in fields, get chases from the cops for fun etc.) We had no money instantly, and our mother worked 12-hour shifts in a grocer's to make ends meet. My dad contributed something, but I don't believe this ever came generously/willingly, and one year (1994) he took off with friends for a 2-3 week holiday a few thousand miles away while that year my mother needed help from a poverty charity to pay for Christmas. So I told myself a story that crap life and zero expectations and no self-worth went back to this time, but it was probably influenced by other factors too, most notably genetics: one strand of my family (my mother's) is blighted by depression, all the women are or have been in some form of treatment, all the men suffered in silence and never ever spoke about it, just "took to the bed" in a black mood for days or weeks at a time. [My mother also spent a few months in and out of mental institutions before the marriage broke up. I don't know if her severe mental health problems had a big causal effect on the bad marriage, or whether the bad marriage had a big causal effect on the severe mental health problems. Either way, she was on the mend a few years after the break-up and is quite healthy and stoic still, as she nears 80 and is still very active, only retired from work this year -- the same grocer's shop she worked those 12-hour shifts in 30+ years ago.
On curing / overcoming depression / self-worth problems. I will preface these by saying it's still work in progress, I have no complacency about this, but reality is that for the last 8/9 years I have been free of depression. This has coincided with a few factors. (a) I stopped working jobs I found I couldn't do. My daily energy pattern is completely unsuited to 9-to-5 jobs I was working. Afternoons from 2.30 to 4.30pm are always the rock-bottom of the 24 hours for me, so basically every day of my Monday-to-Friday working life was ending on a major downer. I've been self-employed for all but four months of the last 9 years approximately. That four-month stint, I took a job in 2023, and was immediately reminded, and with great force, why I couldn't work those regular jobs. (b) I got physically healthy. I'm not ripped, but I went from very overweight (my weight was between 16-18 stones, or 225 to 250 lbs) to correct weight in about 3-4 months, and managed to keep it off ever since. This wasn't easy - I got some help from a nutritionist, who took me off all gluten and dairy for a month or so, and I immediately had a clarity of thought and lack of brain-fog that I don't think I had felt in 20+ years. I eased back onto all foods several months later, but the habit and mindset changed forever. Yes, I still fall off the wagon from time to time, but I eat much less sugar, much less junk food and drink much less alcohol than I needed when I was coping. Around this time I also started running too. Very slowly at first (5kms in the local park, lumbering around slowly in a walk-jog), but I immediately loved having run. I didn't look forward to running, and I didn't like the actual running, but the afterglow was real and made it worth it. After a couple of years that changed, and I hit the trifecta of all three. That was about 5-6 years ago, and now I couldn't imagine life without running. I'm doing my third marathon in a few weeks, and if I avoid injuries, I'm on track to go around 45-60 minutes quicker than my first.
On finding a mate, my recurring rule of thumb is that we're mammals, and therefore any relationship that is too focused on mind (intellect etc.) is destined to have a greater chance of unhappiness. The body is powerful, so anything where your body gets moved is good. Other people have mentioned dancing, and I'd agree with that -- I did a community fundraiser through my sports club a number of years ago, and I danced tango with a partner in front of 750 people in a big hall. We trained for that a couple of nights a week for 6-8 weeks and it was among the best few months of my life. It was seriously enlivening. (Tango is sexy as hell, but the others who did foxtrot, etc all had a great time too...) Also I think it might have been you on another thread where we chatted about tennis? Any sport or activity that gets your body moving, and has room for social stuff around it, is great. Just make sure to get out of your mind (literally, not alcoholically or chemically!) and into your body as often as you can.
Well done on how far you've come. Things were shitty when you were coming up, as they were for me and tens or hundreds of millions of others. Those shitty times helped to make you who you are today. Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms: "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." That line - "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places" - I think that line, and reading good fiction and good poetry in general, got me through a lot of dark days.
Religion / faith We were raised Catholic on sufferance, and I haven't been practising for many years. But my belief in God never went away. I don't think it's a humanoid God, and I'm not sure there's a He looking down on me and guiding me or protecting me, but I do feel a very strong positive connection to some form of divinity (universe, cosmos, nature ... Napoleon Hill called it "infinite intelligence", which I liked). This divinity is always present, I just need to tap into it. I also believe this divinity sits at the origin / bedrock of all "religious experiences", on which organized religion was eventually built. So yes, I have faith, but it's a strange and chaotic form of faith, but it's mine. The only thing I halfway regret about this is I never have anyone to talk to about it.

Good luck with everything.

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