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This isn't fun, more wellness, but I am going to abuse the immense power invested in me by virtue of being an admin and post here anyway.
How do I become more independent?
I speak in a very general sense. For an Indian kid, your life is set out on rails by your parents till high school, at which point your intelligence and diligence will determine what career you land, your college further constraining your options, until you end up in a life that proceeds with getting promoted, married, kids, and then dead.
But I am a homebody. It reflects on how deeply I hate the circumstances of my life that I am willing to throw so much away to leave it all behind. My parents, who I couldn't ask more of (other than having gotten my ADHD treated when I had begged them to), my dogs, my comfortable house and ailing grandpa, with whom every year apart is a non-negligible chance I'll never see him again.
But I lack drive. Curiosity? Yes. Intelligence? A quite decent level of it, if not world shattering. But so far my life has been railroaded along, with my only real choices being to either study hard or not, at least till the end of med school. I did take charge once, brushed myself into shape, proved, both to the GMC and to myself that I am a competent doctor. Or at least I did that as the first of many more times to come.
And now I feel adrfit. I can't go the country I wish to dwell in more than my own, that forms the earliest childhood memories of mine (unless I join the other illegal immigrants headed to El Salvador), I am forced to confront a mediocre life in a country that is in visible decline, hoping it beats the comforts of home (and the horrors of postgraduate training here).
I see people doing things out of sheer tenacity and drive, whereas I've mostly done things because I had to, or because I find the default path unbearable.
I don't want to live alone. It seems overwhelming. I don't want a job that saps me of all my energy and interest in doing anything else, let alone doing that while giving yet more exams.
I feel, for the lack of a better word, broken. I was moderately depressed, a feeling kept at bay through overwork and stimulant consumption in the hopes I'd achieve a brighter future, but they're dimming the lights as I speak. Shutting doors ahead of me as soon as I stepped through the ones behind.
If you think the stimulants help with that? A little, I guess. I wouldn't have made it through med school or all the exams since without them. But it doesn't solve the problem I see of being entirely unmoored, and I am not quite ready to resign myself to this life. Ritalin does not make what I've spoken of seem any less daunting. And the anti-depressants didn't work in the first place, and I tried a bunch of them.
I want the energy to explore alternatives. I want a job that pays well and treats me like I'm a skilled professional. I want to run a house without feeling overwhelmed and letting it go to rot. I want to be a father, and a good one, an even better one than my dad was to me, because he sacrificed his life outside medicine to give me the option of choice later.
If anyone has any advice, please share. My tether, while not quite fraying, gets ever tauter. I want executive function god fucking dammit, and nothing has helped. I just want something to look forward to, a route to a world where I can be, if not happy, content.
I'm in a fairly similar boat. I honestly feel like I have so little drive, desire, or passion for anything. The only thing I care about in my life I'm terrible at.
I would say I am quite good at my passions, but they don't happen to be particularly lucrative ones. Most people don't make a notable amount of money from writing, even online.
It is a shit state to be in, the world is very much built by driven type As, we're squeezing by.
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