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Wellness Wednesday for May 13, 2026

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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I've been mulling over this comment since I read it shortly after you posted yesterday. Like others, I have the impression that within your comment is a need, a plaintive statement of dissatisfaction, though most of what you write here suggests the opposite (that you're happy, though you immediately qualify the term.) Yet you do now wish and long have wished to not exist:

I've wanted to be dead (not the same as wanted to commit suicide, I've never tried that) since I was about eleven, but here it is decades and decades later and I'm still here.

Why? Not why are you still here but why would you wish to not be?

I didn't answer immediately because I'm certainly not a trained counselor or psychiatrist but I felt like I wanted to probe deeper into your motivations in posting this comment. I'm probably just as weird (to use your term) as anyone on here but with a more normie veneer. I too have little problem being alone most of the time. I've spent vast swaths of my life alone, and not in the "we're all really alone" sense but in the no one else anywhere near me sense. I'm not a stranger to it. But it can be a great weight. It's like anything, fine for as long as it's fine, but too much of it and you're asking for trouble. You sense this, though you're not giving voice to it.

Why? Not why are you still here but why would you wish to not be?

I couldn't understand it. At the time I just felt tired. Tired of everything. Didn't want to continue existing.

I also had bouts of whatever the opposite of solipsism is; that is, I used to feel I was not, in fact, a real person really existing. My reason could talk me down with "but if you're not here, what is this entity experiencing the sensation of not being real?" but what most convinced me was tricking myself with "well that's my mother, and I believe she has an independent, real, existence, so if she's my mother and she's real, I have to be real, too, because she couldn't be my mother if I wasn't real".

Very odd feeling. Never done drugs so I have no idea if the reports of ego death or whatever are similar.

Depersonalization though you've probably researched the phenomenon yourself. Again, interesting. Does this come and go even now or is it just a memory of how you used to be?

Haven't had it in a long, long time and this is memory of how it used to be. It was a very odd experience, and puzzling; if I wasn't real, then who or what was this "I" experiencing this?

Generally it was "hey guys, am I a sociopath?" and the response so far seems to be "yeah of course, you weirdo" "okay, thanks for the clarification!" 😁

Because as I say, I'm reading and hearing all this "loneliness epidemic" stuff, even to the extent of participating in a work webinar about social isolation and suicide (cheerful topic) and while the speaker was going on about "and this and this and this means people are isolated and that means increased risk of that bad outcome and that bad outcome and that", I was internally going "but I don't feel like that, I don't have this and this and this but I don't miss it or want it?"

Very interesting. You're not quite what I would have predicted or imagined, and I'm not terrible at predicting/imagining, though of course I'm not Kreskin. You don't seem insane or sociopathic to me, except when you do, but then that's just Woman TM. Vive la difference. You got Sloot in here derailing the conversation so that's a point on the board for you. I'm sorry if my interest seemed untoward, but I am forever trying to print faces on the masks/usernames here.

Oh no problem, I am absolutely terrible at name remembering (I can remember faces, you should hear me go "oh! that's so-and-so, you know, that person from back when we did the thing! is her name Margaret? Jane? something like that?" about people I worked with for eight years but have not seen for a whole six months) so I can't match up usernames to people on here. I just go "hey isn't this that same numbskull who said that dumb thing about peppercorns?" and launch into the fray even if it's not, in fact, the same person.