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It took me the better part of a year's concentrated effort (had to, it was life or death) to learn the exact personalized life changes I needed to get my emotions and physical health in the range of where they ought to be. It was a frustrating process and often seemed pointless.
Some of the stuff I had to change, I'd resisted for literally years. People had been telling me that I was bringing certain aspects of my existence on myself, and no one wants to hear that. How toxic! How victim-blaming! Thing is, they were right.
I made a lot of dumb decisions over the past 2 score years. Some of them were big one-time decisions I can't undo and just have to forgive myself for and move on. Some of them were tiny, habitual, daily decisions I continued to make each day and refused to give up.
I could afford to be this sloppy with myself when everyone around me was more or less stable and I could use them as bumper rails or whatever. But then everyone around me started to fall apart in 2016 (right when I'd had a small renaissance) and it only kept getting worse.
I had become accustomed to living in a world where if I completely lost myself, there would always be someone there who had the spare strength to help me find a reason to live again. I realized in late 2019 - that world is never coming back. Not ever.
I'm lucky that my kids are still small enough and they mean enough to me that I felt an obligation not to screw them up by becoming part of their tragic backstory. Everything I did, I did for them, because folks, as for me, I literally did not give a crap.
I don't know how to put into words how done I was. I'd stopped even thinking of myself as a person. I was a machine I had to figure out how to get operational again because if it broke two people who did matter would be hurt irreparably.
But in a way, this detachment helped me. If it was about caring for myself, it never would have worked. There were only 2 adults in my life at that point and I was pretty sure they were only there out of sunk cost fallacy.
I was 100%, not 99% but literally 100% convinced that there was nothing about me worth saving. I'd written the only books I was ever gonna write, I'd made two decent humans, but the person who made those things was done. A drag on 2 adults, invisible to the rest.
The answer would have been obvious if not for those two kids who were still dumb enough to think I hung the moon, who still looked to ME to figure out what they should do when they were upset, how they should handle their problems.
Damn it.
So I had to open up that stupid machine. I had to figure out, where is everything going wrong? Why DO I suck so bad? Why do these patterns keep repeating? We roll our eyes at navel-gazing and self-analysis but frens, it saved my life. So, weirdly, did my despair.
Because there was no resistance to the tinkering. I had no pride left. Nothing to tell me, "No, I can't stop X or start Y, that would FUNDAMENTALLY ALTER WHO I AM, I REFUSE." Eh, I didn't care. I just needed to get the damn machine working again.
So I just started trying literally everything. I took notes. I noticed when I stopped taking notes, looked back to the last time I took notes and tried to figure out what was going on that made me drift off track.
I tried various forms of social engagement; most of them bombed in the exact same way. Everyone else was Too Sad/Stressed To Participate. And I'd rage-spiral, like, "HOW DO YOU THINK I FEEL? DO YOU THINK IT'S DIFFERENT FOR ME?" and hate everyone for a minute.
But every time I tried to turn the blame to other people, I lost progress. Whatever I had to fix, it had to be under my control. It couldn't depend on other people to be okay, or to care whether I was okay, or to find my company enjoyable. Because that wasn't happening.
Eventually I figured out that for me, at least, the social stuff had to wait until I was strong enough not to care that I was always going to be very low on others' priority lists. I hadn't lived the kind of life that made me a high priority to others; I had to face that.
So then I turned inward. What can I do, BY MYSELF, every day, that will make the other stuff work better? I discovered video editing - random! I started exercising - not random. it was... in the end it wasn't one big thing. It was the continued trying.
Eventually I found a rhythm. Little daily (or mostly daily) things I could do each day, each of them adding a little bit to my overall well being. Exercise, meditation, writing-for-fun, video editing, social gaming, stretching, various nutritional supplements, light therapy.
I made sure each of them was something that was more or less entirely under my control, so I didn't have to rage at other people for not doing what I needed them to do to keep me between the rails. I also reduced my social media dependence because YIKES.
Reading Twitter is an exercise in handing your brain over to strangers and letting them play fucking beach volleyball with it. I know now not to do it unless I am rock solid and feeling FANTASTIC, and that's maybe, every 3rd-5th day now? LOL.
But the thing is, on most of the other days, I feel fine. I feel okay. I get my stuff done. If you'd asked me, a year ago, if this level of function was possible I'd have tried to laugh and failed because that mechanism didn't work anymore.
So all I'm saying in this long rambling confessional is that no matter how bad it gets (believe me, I know how bad it can get), if you try hard enough to feel better, FOR WHATEVER REASON, you can feel better. But you have to try ALL the things, and for a long time.
Throw out what is making it worse, or what doesn't seem to help much and takes a lot of effort. Eventually you will identify half a dozen things or so that really DO make a difference worth the effort they take. (Still mad that exercise was one of mine. So mad.)
But you have to care. You have to try. You may think your pain is some secret you're bearing stoically and snarkily and "getting by," but everyone is affected by it. It hurts you most, but it hurts others, too. And you don't HAVE to be sad and angry all the time. You don't.
Find your reason to care. If you don't care about yourself, care about your kids, or your best friend, or someone who's just watching you rot like a November Jack O' Lantern. No one wants to see that. You can do better. You can.
Every day I see other people trying, making changes in their lives, doing things that scare them a little (or a lot) in the hopes that it will make just that one more lil 4% increase in their happiness. And I have your back more than you will ever know. Don't give up. Please.
