Ask HN: How did you get yourself out of a rut?

Even successful people let failures define them and get depressed. Set acheivable goals and celebrate those, trying to do hard things is a constant struggle and is mostly failures for me, you need to see progress. Even if you do not think small things are worth being thankful for it actually helps to train yourself to see positive things.

First time was late teen years and early 20s. I experienced some sort of mental illness issue that hasn't recurred since and I never even attempted to get treated or diagnosed. I saw something similar watching the Temple Grandin biopic years later, but it involved shaking fits and banging my head against furniture in my dorm room. I dropped out of college in my first semester and did not immediately try to go back, only registering for classes at community college to keep my dad's health insurance coverage, then dropping them, until the school suspended me and I moved onto another one, being lucky I suppose to live in LA County with a car and having access to endless community college systems.

Within two years, I was working at Disneyland as a show performer when the enterainment division at parks had layoffs. At the very same time, I'd gone so off the rails in personal life that I'd married a woman I met in a writing class on our first date, and she proved to be unpredictable and unstable and destroyed our apartment, so I got evicted at the same time. I was too ashamed to even talk to my parents and lived on the street for a few weeks.

Getting out of that one was just a long, slow climb. I divorced and met a woman on the Internet and moved across the country to be with her. We only stayed together a year, but it was a very positive experience. I lived with her mother, a gracious, lovely person who otherwise lived alone, an Italian immigrant who is still the best cook I've ever lived with and instilled in me in a love of food and cooking that endures to this day. Her father was great to me as well, taking me through rotations of meeting different friends of his in various career fields to get an idea of what they all did, to think of what I might want to do with my own life. I eventually moved back home and just got serious. Went to yet another community college, but this time actually took the classes, spending nearly every minute not in class studying in the library, then worked a graveyard shift job detailing restrooms at Knott's Berry Farm, another amusement park. It wasn't a great life and I still slept in my car pretty frequently, but I was young enough to endure this and I did until I could transfer and eventually graduate and have a real adult life.

The second time was in my late 30s. I experienced severe spinal degeneration and years of treatment made it no better. I herniated discs all the time doing mundane everyday tasks, things like standing up to get out of a car, putting dishes in a dishwasher, attempting to put pants on. Eventually, one day I was getting dressed after showering in the morning and started spasming. This was not like any other spasm I've ever had and I've had them since I was 16. I fell onto the floor, and then every 30 seconds or so, felt like someone had attached jumper cables to my lumbar spine. My entire body seized up each time like every muscle cramped simultaneously. This went on for nearly three days. I've never wanted to shoot myself so badly and even owned a handgun, but I couldn't move to get to it. I didn't go to the ER because I would not have been able to get into a car and didn't want to spend on an ambulance.

Finally, when it subsided, I got a steroid shot that let me move somewhat normally. I'd been working remotely for a boutique hedge fund building machine learning models, but as a contractor, so had no disability or PTO or anything and simply couldn't work. Once I was able to move again, I got a referral from one of my wife's contacts at her job and found a reasonable job pretty quickly, and serendipitously, it required a security clearance but they were willing to sponsor it. This was lucky because that takes a while and I was going to need spine surgery and would be missing some time right off the bat, but they didn't care and started me anyway, granting the leave even though FMLA doesn't require it until you've been with the same employer for 12 months.

The surgery did not go well. I sprung a cerebrospinal fluid leak afterward and experienced severe nausea and disorientation. I couldn't eat anything but saltine crackers and lost 20 pounds within two months, and was not even close to overweight so this was not a happy loss. It seemed to go away on its own, but instead of going away, it was instead leaking into a cyst, which eventually swelled to first size, hurting so badly I could not let anything touch that part of my back. When I got in for an MRI, they were so panicked by what they saw that the spine surgeon cleared his prior appointments and I got surgery 8 hours later.

I recovered okay from that one, but by this time, years of this stuff happening had taken its toll. My discs were almost non-existent at L4/L5 and L5/S1, so narrow that my vertebrae were sometimes bone on bone and the osteoarthritis and sciatica from that was sometimes unbearable. Both my legs went numb at times and I constantly felt like I was walking on pinpricks or being electrocuted in my feet. I had to have my 3rd spine surgery in the span of 16 months at that point, this one they called the "mother of all spine surgeries." A multilevel anterior lumbar interbody fusion, in which they cut open the front first and cut out your spinal discs through you guts, replacing them with metal spacers, then sew that back up and go in through the back to attach screws and rods and saw off a piece of your hip to seed a bone graft that eventually turns your lumbar spine into one long solid bone that grows in and around permanent titanium hardware.

The span of time over which this all happened, nearly two years, was far and away the worst time of my life. I couldn't always walk, and when I did, required a cane at best, a walker at worst. I needed assitance rails installed into my bathroom, replaced my regular bed with a hospital bed. I stopped wearing regular clothes because they were too hard to put on. Sweats and slippers were about the best I could do. I needed an assistive device to put socks on because I couldn't easily touch my own feet. My wife was often emptying bedpans and bottles for me when I couldn't leave the bed.

But I did recover. Once I could walk, I did, often a lot, hours a day. I knew I was going to need to be stronger to better support my shit joints as I aged, and started with resistance bands at first because that was all I could do. Progress has been slow and frequently interrupted by nagging annoying injuries and joint swelling, but progress has been had. Today, I lift six days a week for close to an hour per session, some combination of barbells, dumbbells, and a cable machine. I run nearly every day, though it took me five years before I was brave enough to even try because, at first, one attempt to just run across the street felt like someone was hitting me with a sledgehammer at every footfall. If you don't catch me limping up the stairs or needing to grab the bedside table to get out of bed, an average person on the street would think I'm perfectly fine. I'm in my mid-40s now but look like an underwear model. I've never been fat, but the need to be so diligent and disciplined just to get through a normal day, plus my continued love of cooking my own food, has translated well into very careful food logging and diet tracking, which has enabled me to become extremely lean while also building noticeable muscle now that I've been lifting for years without a break.

I did so well at the new job years back that I moved around frequently to troubled hotspots, given special assignments, promoted rapidly. Luckily, this happened during the famous zero-interest free-spending VC years, so recruiters were calling all the time, and even though I was never going to move to Silicon Valley or New York (I've lived in Texas now for nearly 15 years), I was able to find remote work that resulted in a tripling of my first post-surgery salary, at a company that has no office and was all-remote before Covid even hit, so there is no return to office crap going on. This leaves me able to work out and cook rather than spending my "free" time commuting or dazing onto social media when I get bored at work but can't leave the desk.

All in all, I think I can see a few common themes in how I recovered from bad times. Developing better habits and sticking with them for many years, being patient and persistent. It takes time to build anything. Another is the kindness and generosity of others. I may have been streetbound forever or dead if not for some girl from New Jersey and her family that saw something in me and took me in. I'd have for sure killed myself during the spine problems if not for the support of my wife, not to mention we needed her second engineer's salary to get by when I couldn't work. We've never lived such that we need two salaries, but it's awfully nice to have a fallback when one goes away for a while. My company didn't need to give me medical leave before I was FMLA eligible and they could have not hired me at all knowing I had already scheduled a major spine surgery. If you asked for advice on whether to even disclose that on Hacker News, I can guarantee almost everyone would tell you to lie, but I did not and it worked out.

Ultimately, we live in communities for a reason and I don't know if you can do this alone.

This, of course, all depends on what level of rut you mean here. Maybe if it's general malaise, then testosterone, meditation, or digital detox is all you need. Lucky if it's that easy.