Mental Health Thread • Page 380

And here I am romanticizing when I lived alone. I loved living alone and doing my own thing with nobody to pay attention to when i came and went. I enjoy living with my bf now but I don't get much alone time. I wish I was more extroverted and didn't thrive on being alone because it can toe the line to unhealthy pretty easily

 

I am in the camp of loving living alone. I totally understand why it doesn’t work for a lot of people so it’s not something that confuses me, it just really, really works for me.

I think back to how I grew up and my house was always the house everyone gravitated to and it was like that all through high school - until senior year when we moved across the city. That was my first experience of not having people just show up randomly 24/7 and I realized how exhausting it was for me to have people around so once I finally got my own place I was hellbent to keep it that way and it’s been that way for almost two decades now and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

I do think a big thing that plays a part in having it be a success on your own is how close you are to things that include people and friends. If you’re only a short walk / drive / Uber to things you like doing it’s not so isolating but if you live far away from those things, living alone can really feel like it’s just you all the time.

 

I absolutely love my alone time but if I didn’t live with my gf I’d go crazy. I can’t be alone 24/7 especially since I work from home now.

 

I do have to admit that I have a weird unrealistic view of how I think people see me and working from home has not helped that.

I tend to think I’m too short with people / cold with replies or always on the chopping block for some reason and then when I have 1:1’s with my manager she says nothing but good things and how leadership is always happy with me and I don’t hear from anyone because they know to leave me alone so I can get stuff done and they trust me to do all that I do so they don’t want to interfere. And when I am in the office (1 day a week) and interact with people in person everyone is nice and while it could be bullshit I tend to leave those days thinking “oh wow, I do get along with these people and they like me being here, weird” lol

 

Even today I ran into the issue of not living alone. I was so done with work. Completely mentally and emotionally exhausted with nothing left to give. Then I get home and am obviously cranky but my bf wanted to tell me in long detail about his day as soon as i walk thru the door and sometimes I just need time to decompress alone or with silence. I am "on" all day. I stay professional despite hearing and seeing awful things all day and being treated awful by angry clients and dealing with ridiculous things often without breaks, and then coming home and immediately feeling overstimulated is tough. I should have said something but even then I felt so over capacity I couldn't get it out. We worked it out but I miss just chilling alone sometimes. I even got stubborn when he requests I let him know when I'm leaving work. Which I know is to start prepping dinner or getting ready to workout with me, but in my head I'm like "I'll be home when I'm home" cause I'm just not used to someone worrying about what I'm doing or planning around me. There are tons of benefits to living together too which outweighs the cons but yeah it's tough as someone who is a loner and has to adjust

 

The after work vent can be difficult if your moods aren't compatible that day. My wife works a really tough OT job and when she has a lot of negative things to vent about (something I've historically struggled with), I've had to use the big grey boulder technique my therapist taught me and occasionally set a boundary (i.e., I can talk about this for 15 minutes and then we need to do something else). Fortunately, she's very understanding.

 

I think it's tough cause me and my bfs job stresses are so different. Not that his isn't valid but his job is more of that corporate office setting filled with frustrating people who never question why something is done and if it's most efficient and it's a slog. So he'll vent for like 20 minutes about the office policy of paperclips. Which like those things are super annoying in that way where it's shouldn't even have to be a thing to stress about but it gets under your skin. But mine is like... heavy. Which is the kind of stuff I don't like to discuss with him or anyone not in the field in detail because secondhand trauma and confidentiality exists. So I need to decompress and be left alone for a bit since I don't get the same relief from daily venting that my bf does. It's not that I don't care but sometimes it's like dude read the room. Blah. We worked it out for the most part but I also got called back into work at like 6pm so it's still lingering in my mind until I can finish sorting my thoughts

 

See my ex traveled for work so I had plenty of alone time and he still paid half the rent. It was a near perfect situation (minus the fact that he was pretending to still live at home to his family and I didn’t realize this until we broke up lmfaoooo)

 

Been meaning to post this for a bit, but I always put it off because I feel weird about it, but I live my life in perpetual discomfort with myself anyway so here we go. Has anyone ever felt frustrated with yourself over the way media influenced your thoughts about mental health and wellness years ago? Probably a silly thing, but when I was a kid my mom suffered severe depression and she went on medication which was poorly managed. They just kind of threw whatever at her and she literally became a zombie. She’d sleep even more than she usually did in her state of depression and when we saw her, she was checked out entirely like she wasn’t even there. It was years until she had a therapist who took the reigns and got her regulated.

Anyway, this filled me with fear because I was very much like my mom and I knew it was getting worse as time went on. I feared that what happened to her would happen to me. And that’s where the media thing comes in.

I’ll use this as an example because it’s always sort of lingering there at the forefront of my mind. When I started college and my life went off the rails I had just seen the movie Garden State and, like many kids around that time, I felt like I could relate to it. That said, what I always remember most is that Braff’s character Andrew starts out the film on antidepressants and there’s a literal shot of a plane full of people in panic over some bad turbulence or something while Andrew just sits there emotionless. It becomes a plot point and character arc that the medication has dulled his senses and that he needs to tell his father that he’s not going to take them anymore because now that he’s started to come off them, his life is so much brighter. For me, and I know this is obviously very specific to my situation but I’m curious to know what others think regardless, it only served to reinforce the stigma around mental health that I grew up with. When I was a kid, the church I went to viewed therapists as tools of the devil and medication for depression was essentially witchcraft. The reason Garden State sticks out in my mind as an example is because at one point I literally used it to try to stop my mom from pushing me to get help. There was a night where she was trying very hard, very calmly, to tell me that she was worried about me and that it was clear I was not okay. I remember putting my hands on the sides of my head and crying “no no no, please, no you don’t understand” and I decided a few days later to have her sit down and watch Garden State. I remember that when it was over she looked at me and asked “is that how you feel?” and I nodded yes. Her face, in my memory, looks defeated whereas at the time it made me feel like I’d won. And then a month later I attempted suicide. And of course years later I had a complete breakdown and started therapy and finally came to the understanding that I needed medication very badly.

So…I don’t know why this matters to me really, but it’s always bothered me and I know there are other examples I’m not thinking of right now. I guess I just felt the need to get it off my chest while wondering if anyone else has ever felt something like this?

 

Media portrayal of mental health and medication definitely influenced me a lot growing up. I feel like a lot of the stuff that was around when I was a teenager liked to romanticize being mentally ill while also demonizing antidepressants like mentioned above. That trend seems to have fallen away but I still find myself recognizing thought patterns in myself that reflect that mindset from time to time. Additionally, I’ve always hated the whole “ artists are artists because they aren’t well/taking meds and getting better will dilute your art” mindset that seemed to be huge around that time as well.

 

When I started my anxiety med months ago, the first time I’ve ever taken anything for my my mental health, I definitely stressed I didn’t want to feel “numb” and Garden State came to mind — I realized that’s where I initially got that from.

 

I think I'm gonna have to talk to my doctor about getting back on meds again. I just feel like I've been on a handful throughout the years and they never hurt but they don't really help either? Idk. But my anxiety is so bad and my sense of anxiety and dread before I go to sleep is the worst its been in a while. People keep telling me to quit my job but honestly it's not even that because it can be a weekend or I don't even have work stress, and at night my brain will create something to stress over even if I feel fine. I dread having to go to sleep and not be able to keep busy from thinking

 

I’ve been in a real bad spot lately. Just have no motivation or desire to do anything. I’ll legit just sit on the couch and do nothing. Everything feels pointless. I made an appointment with my pcp and want to get referred to a psychiatrist so I can get actual meds/diagnoses, not just the generic depression meds my pcp put me on (that I stopped taking because I didn’t think they were doing anything).

 

Finding the right medication and the right dosage is so important. It sucks that it takes weeks to really take effect so finding the right dose takes so long. But when you find the one, it feels like a fog has cleared in your brain. At least, it did for me.

 

I haven't been on any kind of anti-depressant for a good 4-5 years now (weed is my medication now) but I am going through menopause and this last almost year has been very interesting. They discovered recently that due to my unusually high White blood cell count, I have low iron (Go fucking figure). So they put me on B12 pills and even after 2 weeks it's like I'm a whole new person. I haven't had this much energy during the day in a very very long time.

I know menopause doesn't hit all females at the age of 38, but to you ladies out there, it's not talked about enough. It needs to be normalized more because I had no fucking idea what to expect or why I was feeling off literally all of 2021. Now I'm on a few different hormones, Vitamin D, B12 and Gabapentin for body pain (sup early osteoporosis). The Gabapentin also helps with insomnia and nighttime hot flashes.

 

I have to share this with my ex? on a break partner? whatever we are. She’s had a rough year and is the same age; so much sounds similar to her along with some crazy symptoms. I know she had mentioned early menopause as a possibility, hopefully she gets a doctor’s appointment ASAP and they consider this.

 

I've been this way for the past few weeks. I even called out of work because of this. I just lay in bed all day not doing anything but surfing the web and watching tv. It's really hard to find a reason to keep living.

 

This was what getting on Zoloft was like. Once I got the dosage right it was night/day.

 

I feel this. There’s days where I just feel like I exist to work and buy things.

 

I did just recently wean myself off of Prozac which I was on for about 2 years. I feel like I’m in a much better spot right now. For me it was largely prescribed to address a specific type of anxiety / worry that I was dealing with at the time. I think most of that is behind me now. I probably wouldn’t hesitate to get back on if I feel like I need it. I also think a majority of the gains I made were due to meeting with my therapist.

 

I've been incredibly lonely for years now, basically really hit in 2020 when I started living by myself. Since then I still work from home, still have zero friends so it is a lot of time by myself. But I went and saw Paramore last night and was surrounded by just the nicest people. It was the most social I've felt in years and it was so nice to talk to other women around my age who are obviously into similar stuff as me. Then I come home today and it just hit so hard. I walked into my apartment and sat down and cried. I want friends so bad. I haven't had one in almost 3 years and I knew I was looking for that, but it just really, really hit today how badly I wanted it. I really wish I could afford to move to an actual city and not live in a rural town anymore bc it is so hard to meet people out here. I'm trying to take away some positives bc I'm a painfully shy person, so I'm proud I was even talking to people in the first place but still feeling really down.

 

Hahahaha me too! Zoloft, ftw, baby!

 

Some earlier posts hit close to home as I want more and more to go back to taking meds, whether that's antidepressants or anti-anxiety ones, but I feel like I've been eternally traumatized by witnessing my mom just completely check out mentally due to them. I'm so afraid of having the same outcome, which may be the reason the last time I was medicated I was super inconsistent at it.

At the same time, I can't handle living like this anymore, being in hypervigilant state with my body reacting like it's in danger 24/7, tricking me into being scared of everything and everyone all the time. It's super exhausting and lonely and impacts every single facet of my life. Sometimes I wonder what it is like to live without an anxiety disorder. It makes me feel really defeated.

 

I can't even remember my life when I didn't have anxiety. It seems like it was an eternity ago although I never had any anxiety or depression issues until about 10 years ago.

 

I get these little moments from time to time where I think about some of the absolute worst shit I ever did and the pain and suffering I constantly put my loved ones through for years and boy does it feel fucking awful to recall that part of myself and remember what it was like. I was just such a dark force of destruction for so long and reflecting on it now feels like a nightmare and gives me horrible anxiety and depression and some other shit which I guess is mild to moderate PTSD which would make sense, it was all very traumatizing for myself and those around me. I know I’m doing super well now and everything but it’s so hard to think about the past without getting extremely upset to the point where I’m breaking down into tears