41–50 of 239 posts
"Life is the series of choices we remember making. When something goes wrong it's easy to see it is as not a choice. There was too much stress. Your dog ate it. Your clients were assholes ... I now realize that to fix myself, I'm going to have to be myself; and to be myself, I'm going to face myself."
There's a common misconception that circumcision, for Christians, is a religious ritual or a religious requirement.
In fact, it's just the opposite. Many Christian denominations (e.g. Catholicism) specifically DISALLOW circumcision, if it's done for religious reasons.
I think you're wrong on one point: you constantly repeat how different and strange you are from everyone else. You're really not. As you mentioned at one point: you didn't want to go out and play, but the teacher forced you to do so. This is very common behavior, and teachers are forcing children every day to go out and play. Huge amount of people go through similar experiences to yours. Others start to lapse into an…
It's counterintuitive and devilish, but the most enticing material for identity-building seems to be one's suffering. It took me many years to learn about that, and boy was that process slow.
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I'm going to put this in all caps because you are not paying my day rate: YOU ARE AN ABUSE SURVIVOR. Find professional help (NOW) to starting approaching it and dealing with it. Find professional help (NOW) to help manage your mental disorder (depression) which carries an enormous and present risk of self-harm. Get whatever the fuck is wrong with your foot fixed, and start walking out the door on the regular. You app…
> ...now be the best person in other people's lives. ...Why? I've spent most of the last ten years trying to do just that. Do you know what it has gotten me? Let me tell you what it has gotten me: friends and family that never call unless they need something; an utterly depleted bank account; a complete lack of respect or even human regard from my peers; a pile of strife and struggle and pain and misery and not one s…
You know what sucks worse than trying to find competent professional medical attention in America? Blowing your head off with a gun and leaving your decomposing meat for someone to find and clean up. Those are the stakes here.
This author wrote a novella about watching his life reduce to nothing, then wrapped it in a wordpress, threw a vanity domain up, and submitted it to a hivemind. If it was about the quaint, quirky charms of a minimalist lifestyle then you special electronic snowflakes could give each other all the handjobs you want and nobody would mind.
But as this piece documents severe emotional trauma from a childhood marked by abandonment, drug abuse, emotional abuse, (and probably sexual/physical violence) it seems to -me- that he needs help, is looking for social oxygen, and is trying to figure his situation out.
It's not a pretty picture, and the more he rambles about how his sister won't let him eat ice cream the more confused he's going to be about the issues in his life and the fundamental plumbing in his head. Don't confuse depression with a lifestyle choice.
I think this is something that comes with age for almost everyone that perceives themselves as different. People in their younger years attempt to change how they are in order to make everyone like them. Later on in life, they realize that this is pointless and they're better off just being themselves and shedding the people who can't deal with that.
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Normally I wouldn't detract from someone's opinion of something I wrote by responding to summaries. I believe people should be allowed to judge for themselves whether opinions are accurate and when authors jump in defensively it's a slipper slope to derailing the conversation. However, your summary is factually misleading. You imply I was physically abused which I was not. Hopefully my article doesn't give that impre…
I'm going to put this in all caps because you are not paying my day rate: YOU ARE AN ABUSE SURVIVOR. Find professional help (NOW) to starting approaching it and dealing with it. Find professional help (NOW) to help manage your mental disorder (depression) which carries an enormous and present risk of self-harm. Get whatever the fuck is wrong with your foot fixed, and start walking out the door on the regular. You app…
He/she doesn't sound depressed - depressed people don't walk 5 miles a day and still want more
It's normal to be a hermit/anachorite/anything, countless people have done it over the centuries (under the pretense/justification of religion)
He/she doesn't really have a writing talent - in fact he/she doesn't seem well read.
Perhaps it would be best to enjoy their alone time, read tons of books. The will to start giving to this cruel world will develop after their teenage angst years when their weltschmerz starts to subside.
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I'm going to put this in all caps because you are not paying my day rate: YOU ARE AN ABUSE SURVIVOR. Find professional help (NOW) to starting approaching it and dealing with it. Find professional help (NOW) to help manage your mental disorder (depression) which carries an enormous and present risk of self-harm. Get whatever the fuck is wrong with your foot fixed, and start walking out the door on the regular. You app…
Not sure that helps JP. As you can see from his response he doesn't see himself as being abused so yelling at him might not get the message through. One of the weirdest things I've encountered was how much the brain internalizes its existence from a very young age. Without going massively philosophical on people the question of what is 'normal' is really really fluid. Nearly everyone I've met baselines their own chil…
> They form relationships with other people only if they believe they will not be rejected. Loss and rejection are so painful that these people will choose to be lonely rather than risk trying to connect with others.
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> ...now be the best person in other people's lives. ...Why? I've spent most of the last ten years trying to do just that. Do you know what it has gotten me? Let me tell you what it has gotten me: friends and family that never call unless they need something; an utterly depleted bank account; a complete lack of respect or even human regard from my peers; a pile of strife and struggle and pain and misery and not one s…
"I can't find a good professional, so using professional help is useless" - that is an odd conclusion to come to. Yes, many shrinks suck. It sucks dealing with them. I'll still shout "Find professional help" if that's what it'll take for that person. And that's the case here. You(OP) don't go and write a whole long screed how you'd like to be left alone to then justify said screed on a site like HN without actually,…
I can't tell from your comment if you think I'm the author, but just FYI, I'm not.
> I'll still shout "Find professional help" if that's what it'll take for that person. And that's the case here.
OK, here's the thing, and it's really the only point I care to try to make here: telling someone to find professional help is not helpful. In fact, it's probably harmful, because it's the number one, most predictable piece of advice anybody can expect to get. So, being told over and over again to "find professional help" -- a task which is dramatically more difficult than the effort required to write those three words -- just makes people want to talk about their problems openly even less. i.e., "I'd talk about it, but they'll just tell me to find professional help, I really don't need to hear that again."
It's also harmful in that it's another kind of a dismissal. Surely you can see that "find professional help" could be interpreted as another way of saying, "Go away, I can't help you"? "Go find someone else and pay them to listen to you." -- I'm sure this isn't what you or anyone else means to say, but this is what it sounds like to someone with depression.