Indiana. It makes me feel sad, too.

I’ll give a hopeful one:

Many years ago I was in a hopeless and hellish state. Unemployed, sleeping on a cot in my parents basement, my health failing me, and recently bankrupt.

I was suicidal but not to the point of having ideation. “You should just kill yourself” was a common refrain of my internal monologue.

Then I read something on reddit like “How long would you stay friends with someone who talks to you the way you talk to yourself?”

So I started on a serious effort to remove that from my thoughts. It was 2008, and Obama was running against McCain. I liked them both but was definitely in Obama’s camp.

I tried replacing “You should just kill yourself” with “You should just kill John McCain.”

And it worked! That shocked me out of that self hatred long enough to start to laugh it off.

A little time went by, I met someone, got a job. The someone convinced me to get surgery for my issues. (a hernia but I didn’t think fixing that would even help the overall stuff I was fighting)

We have been married almost a decade. Nine years in the house I got her when I got a better job. I work from home hanging out with all our animals.

Things CAN get better. There’s never a guarantee but it’s worthwhile to not give up. You can climb that mountain, dig that tunnel, whatever you need to make that journey through the darkness.

And I left a LOT of shit out of that story.

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Due to the way I was raised, I have a tendency to view my self worth as solely deriving from my actions.

It has had some benefits, like running into a burning building once I was out to get a family member out.

But it also has some downsides. It’s hard for me to view my own happiness or even life as having intrinsic value.

It’s especially bad if someone I love could concievably benefit from me not being around anymore.

Years of therapy have really helped though.

Ohio.

Probably one of the times I got put in the hospital for wanting to kill myself

Depression is a bitch

I think I got seasonal depression and my heart literally physically hurts anytime I’m particularly sad (no medical emergency). First time in my life I’ve felt lonely after enjoying solitude forever, tho I suppose I always hung out with friends a lot more often. Not the first time I’ve been uncertain and scared about the future. Tried to cry and can’t either. Somehow much worse than the deaths of my grandparents.

One day between two jobs I worked 20 hours straight in a row unexpectedly, including a night shift I was wholly unprepared for, and when my husband picked me up and we got home, it was so icy on the ground on the passenger side of the car that I asked him to carry one of my bags in because it was heavy and I was afraid I’d slip. He ripped it out of my hand, snarled “What are you fucking handicapped?”, and I called him a sociopath and went to bed, whereupon he woke me up four hours later “so I didn’t waste the entire day”.

Don’t ever get married, and don’t entangle your finances with someone else. You’ll never get free.

I lived with my grandparents from grade 6 until i moved out after highschool, because we didnt have anywhere else to live. Family was always my grandmothers first priority. As she would say, “im the eldest. its my responsibilty. (to take care of our family)”

10 years later the girl was living with decided she wasnt happy and ended the relationship. I was saving up to propose to her what would have been 3 months after this happened. I went into debt for us because she couldnt hold a job for more than a month after we moved in together. She was paying for a 2 bedroom apartment by herself before we moved in together. I did then and still dont make enough to really to support me on my own let alone provide for both of us, being poor still sucks. But thats not the worst yet

So i moved back home because to my grandmother, she is the eldest and its her responsibilty to make sure family is okay.

She developed alzheimers on fixed income. I am not trained for caregiving but as she could no longer be by herself i passed on a lot of opportunities because i felt i needed to be there for her in her time of need like she was there for me(and the rest of us) when we needed a place to live. After my grandfather passed away my gran told me she would rather die in her own home if she could.

It got HARD. I was not able to stop working when covid happened. I worked everyday scared shitless that i was going to bring covid home and get her killed from it. I had to sit with her and comfort her when she was slipping away and she could realize its happening. In those moments all i knew how to do was just BE there for her. And somedays i had to do this on repeat every hour all day long if she wasnt sleeping.

If one of my brothers wasnt with me through this i dont know what i would have done or how i would have got through some days.

In september i had to call 911 because she couldnt lie down without howling in pain. She was in the hospital for a week (extremely short staffed and lengthy delays for anything to get done)

She was home for a bried period before it started happening again.

She never got to go home again. Her house was put up for sale and my brother and i were forced to move out. Over the next month i had more than one completely broken down cant think straight moments.

Her oldest son threw me and my brother into the street and ignored every thing we said like we were garbage.

My uncle the closest thing to a father i ever had. And his response and reward for looking after his mother as we watched her slip slowly into madness was to throw us into the street like garbage.

I still cant bring myself to go visit her for fear he might show up while im there. And its killing me daily that i cant be there for her. I just cant.

Im fucked

I was in a terrible mental state for around 3 years and it has changed me the future is still difficult to think about, but I am starting to feel true happiness in the present.

In 2020 I was an attorney in a family law firm and was in a long term relationship. However, that year my health was failing, I was getting migraines that acted like strokes. My body would become so weak it was essentially paralyzed, I couldn’t think or speak, and the migraine hangover would last for most of the following day. Meaning that I would be terribly slow, in pain, and couldn’t speak without stuttering or forgetting words. It felt like I was constantly changing meds and going to the doctors to get some relief.

Well that long term relationship was also fraying and to be honest was abusive. I knew this, but I NEEDED to stay because there were 3 kids who I had poured my heart and soul in for the prior 6 years. I did anything to appease their mother. She however, was being worn down by my migraines as she would often have to stop what she was doing to drive me home from work.

In July of 2020 she broke up with me while we were in the process of buying a new house ( all in my name) that would be big enough for us and our polyamours family. I couldn’t get out of the sale. I was so tired and in pain and worried about losing the kids.

I was laid off from my job a week after moving into the house. I was promised by my ex that I would be able to see the kids and be a daily part of their lives. That lasted maybe 2 months before she decided they could no longer have any form of contact with me. Their dad let me see them about 4 more times for the next year before cutting me off completely. My son and I would play games online and talk to each other on discord for hours… till his mom found out and he was forced to befriend me on all platforms. The girls I would talk to on a mobile game, their father knew… but once I had my last visit they were forced to stop. I got maybe 2 more messages from one of my kids before I lost all contact.

I wanted to die. I had no plans, but if I could have died from lack of wanting to live… it would have happened. I cried a lot and slept even more. I eventually got a new wfh job, but it was and is mind-numbing. My body could no longer handle any stress without essentially going catatonic. I couldn’t move around as much and do all of the things I needed to do without it leading to pain and I was living in this huge house meant for my family, by myself.

I started dating my partner who I had broked up with in Feb of 2020 because both of our mental health was terrible and I couldn’t handle it. She helped me stay alive. I know I was not easy to deal with as a new symptom of the migraines became extreme mood swings. Prior to being hit I would get mean, just plain mean and angry. Then after the migraine I would swing into a deep depression.

Well I started to get a hold of the migraines. I switched from regular talk therapy to EMDR therapy. ( I have CPTS from childhood events) I started to feel ok, but then my insurance stopped paying for one migraine med and I needed to switch. This is where I got the closest to dieing from lack of wanting to live. Suddenly, I started to notice my background thoughts were constantly saying " I don’t want to live", I was irritable, and could rarely get myself to eat.

I messed up at my job and made it so that I didn’t get a new project for months, completely running through my reserves. I barely ate to the point that I was shaking all the time from fatigue and I was sleeping for 20 hrs straight. It took weeks, but I got my meds changed. Unfortunately it wasn’t in time to save my finances and I was quickly in the red.

However, this is where things began to look up. I made the decision to sell the house and move in with my partner. We had planned for them to move in with me the next year, but there was no way either of us would be up for taking care of the house even if I could float to that point.

I got the house sold within a few months which was great because I had already missed a few months of mortgage, didn’t pay my phone long enough for service to be cut and to lose the # when I was able to pay again, hadn’t paid utilities in months… really I couldn’t afford even the fee to change my address with the post office.

After a year of living with my partner, I feel so much better and almost “normal”. Thinking about the future still hurts, I miss my kids so much. I feel terrible about not trying all the ways to get in touch with them, while also wishing desperately that they forget about me so that they don’t miss me.

I’m still frustrated with my body, the fact I went through 7 years of higher education and I can’t physically handle litigating or another high stress environment that is the legal field. However, now it’s just frustration and no longer a deep-seated hate that consumes my mind.

Life kinda sucks enough on its own so let’s try not to compound it with our actions towards each other.

My current state.

I’m going through a divorce and living in my mom’s guest bedroom.

The only thing keeping me going is the dream of my very own apartment. I’ve got quite a few shitty months ahead of me before that happens. I’m losing my house, my wife, my stepkid, and my three favorite cats in the world. I hate this, but it has to happen.

Agony. Just steady agony like physical pain but something greater than that. It takes up the physical and mental space. So there’s no room for regular living or functioning.

I had a twitter account for awhile.

I went to Idaho for a while.