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).
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Ok depressives, hop in.
For once on this forum, I'm really going through it in my personal life. Been a tough winter. Grandparents are dying in slow motion. Marriage is imploding. PTSD is acting up. Even broke down and went to the VA to see a therapist. That was back in January, they've scheduled me to see someone to evaluate whether I should talk to a therapist sometime in May. You know, normal bureaucracy.
I'm in my mid forties and my life is coming apart at the seams.
But lads, this is my year. One way or another, it's going to end better than it began. As bad as things are right now, I am entirely confident in my ability to turn it around.
To psych myself up a bit, I want to talk about my luckiest day. The real hinge point in my life. The reason I'm talking to all of you, or to anyone at all. A dummy-rigged IED just outside Iskandaria nearly twenty years ago.
Just wasn't injured badly enough. Hadn't planned on living. I was clawing my way up the ranks of the pointy bit of the US imperial project. The whole point was to get as high as possible before my luck ended and I bled out in some dingy alleyway or Afghan hillside. My luck though, was even better.
By a combination of the vast sums of money America spends on protecting its troops, and the inferior grade explosives used by the Iraqis, the rocket that should have killed me by any rights instead fizzled. I was left “disabled”, but not enough to feel sorry for myself about. Given the options, of course.
A lot changed that day. My career was over, and with it identity and status. I wasn't going to get to die. I was going to have to live, broken. And be a civilian. Took me a few years to get my head around it. The plan was always live fast, die young.
I had to change. Adapt. Re-orient. Re-motivate. Learn new skills. I spent twenty-five years becoming someone, and then I had to become someone else.
I gotta say, it's been excellent. Even with current troubles, I've had another twenty years with my grandparents, reconciled with my parents, seen my siblings grow up and grow families of their own. Met a great woman, and we had ten good years. I've been happier (and sadder) than I ever thought possible at twenty-five.
This is all bonus round for me. I should have died a long time ago. I've been hurt worse, I've rebuilt from less.
Yes, it sucks right now. Currently at “forcing myself to leave the house” stage, and started crying in public at my boot guy's place yesterday. It's gonna be a long year, but I'll get there.
Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something.
That's all pretty bad, and I'm sorry to hear about it.
How do you plan on turning this year around, considering all those things? What kinds of strategies are you looking at? In short, what is the list of problems you will face and what are your solutions for solving these?
Perhaps the solutions themselves don't even really matter, and it's just the will to solve them that matters, and you've definitely shown a resolve to move forward in this post.
This gets at the heart of something I've been thinking about lately. As much as this forum advocates for people to have kids, I wonder why anyone would think it a good idea to do so, considering this fact. You're right. Life is pain. So why bring more in? Especially from a non-religious perspective, as I have unfortunately lost my faith entirely.
Maybe I'll ask more about this later, but I kind of dislike the idea that I would be furthering the downer feeling of these threads.
It's a line from the film The Princess Bride, which I have shown to my two sons, albeit when they were younger. A fun movie. (You may already know this )
Having written that, I admit that the line does resonate as a bitter truth, but not in any sort of complete version. For some, I have little doubt that life is almost completely pain, unforgiving, constant, merciless. I would like to think even for those people there are moments of calm, or peace, even happiness--or, if I really push it, beauty, though that may be too optimistic. And certainly I have had years, particularly my teens, where everything seemed rotten inside, people seemed rotten, false, groups even worse, all the world a shithole, full of liars and thieves and brutality. And you do not need to look far to find people, even adults, who will nod in agreement to all that.
I'm not going to attempt to lay out the glory here or convince you of life's endless bounty. But having kids--even when I know someday one or both of them may have to watch me, as I watched my own father, die in a weakened, much diminished state--provides, or has the possibility of providing (it provides me, let's say that) a great deal of seemingly boundless joy--bundled of course with pain, frustration, anger, etc. Like life itself.
I actually missed the The Princess Bride reference! I have watched the movie, and I like it, but it was quite a while ago now.
I realize, reading what you say, that I already knew that life is a vast smorgasbord of emotions. I didn't realize until now that I was quite focused on the negatives of life for at least a month now. I think what made me understand was my reaction to @roche's comment ("but that's all effort, which seems impossible; I just want to live without doing anything"). Which is something I've experienced before, but it really crept up on me this time. I can concede my brain just isn't in the right state of mind to make any solid decisions on the kid thing.
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