Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

I think there are two possible ways to go from here. Either find a meaningful job, but how long will it last?

Or you come to terms with the fact that your job is only meant to facilitate your life, work/life balance in other words, and just keep doing it just well enough to continue living your best life on your own time.

I'm leaning towards option B.

I've been in pretty bad shape off and on for the past five years now. Never to the point of psychosis, but to the point of hospitalization for chest pains caused by panic attacks, persistent hemipelegic migraine, essential tremors, gastrointestinal issues, rapid fluctuations of weight - my whole body was shutting down and giving up. It started with a really traumatic work assignment in 2018 that I'd describe as pushing on a string - the harder I worked on it the more resources got pulled from the project such that my efforts had zero positive impact. I basically worked myself off the cliff trying to chase down an impossible target. It only took 6 months to reach the point of complete breakdown. I was working on slowly recovering from that when the pandemic hit, and that kind of just shattered the final bit of strength I had. Since then it has been a long and halting process of recovery, and I don't think I'll ever be quite as capable as I was before my episode. I've definitely noticed that things which came effortlessly before are still a struggle even now. Very slowly I have started to be more able to go beyond the bare minimum of purely reactive survival. This is the longest time I've been "lucid" since 2018, but it still feels extremely fragile and tenuous.

Medications helped a bit, lifestyle changes helped a bit, therapy wasn't super helpful for me (but I know that it can be very helpful for some people, I don't want to discourage anyone from giving it a shot). Eventually just enough time and distance have started to allow healing. The hardest thing for me is that I have essentially lost a half decade of my life. My memory of the past several years is extremely patchy, my career progression has been zilch, I've lost track of friends and missed out on relationships. I feel like I'm still in my 20s but I am in my mid 30s now. In a lot of ways I regard who I was over those years as kind of a totally different person, like I was in and out of a coma and I've just started to wake up over the past several months. I'm grateful for whatever part of me held my life together through those years, but they're a kind of stranger to me. Whole years of my life I can maybe remember where I was for a handful of holidays, and that only because there are pictures of me and that helps track down the threads of memory that remain.

> Don't be a curmudgeon.

don't tell other people to cheer up. that's always a dick move.

also "we all need to" is a blatant lie. only those who have not inherrited "need" to.

we wouldnt have to if we organized better. if we valued each life equally.

but we are not. and we do not. we are strangers, your life means squat to me, and mine means even less to you.

you have no idea where im coming from. and therefore no right to ask me to stop being a curmudgeon.

best regards,

a curmudgeon

"Step One. Assume that whatever distress you might be experiencing has been triggered and is related to the childhood past.

Step Two. Connect that distress to its roots in the traumatic past by fast-forwarding through your childhood history and noticing where the feelings and body sensations you notice right now best fit. [“Fast-forward” means no more than 20–30 seconds! Focusing on or thinking about the past for more than that short time risks activating the trauma responses.]

Step Three. Identify the internalized old belief that developed as a result of that experience. [Ask yourself: “What would any human being come to believe about themselves in that situation?” Or think about the negative beliefs that most trouble you day to day and identify them as related to the past, not to you personally.]

Step Four. Find a way to challenge that old belief so that you can begin to develop new beliefs that better fit your life today. [You are already challenging those beliefs the moment you label them as “old.” That is the first sub-step. The next sub-step is to create a new possible belief, such as “I had to believe this in order to survive” or “This belief helped me to survive because it made me more ________.”] It is not necessary to come up with a new positive belief or to expect yourself to believe it. It is only necessary to challenge the old beliefs.

Without repeated practice of new reactions and new beliefs, the same responses that helped you survive will continue to be triggered over and over again. It appears that the brain and body are slower to let go of responses associated with survival under threat, and the only way to combat that phenomenon is to keep practicing the new responses until they become increasingly automatic."

-- Janina Fisher: Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma

OP should get checked for schizophrenia.