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/hope/ - Hope For the Hopeless

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File: 1446410759126.png (784.18 KB, 1191x893, 1191:893, bazinga.png)

9cb56d No.229

Hey /hope/.

I've been down and out for the past month or so. I'm 31 years old, depressed, and currently testing the waters with different kinds of medication I'm taking. I don't know where to go with my life. I have enough college under my belt to be a junior, but the problem is that the last two semesters I've had to drop out due to mental breakdowns.

The mental breakdowns are a recurring thing, in fact. I had a job as a clerical assistant, and about every 3-4 weeks, I'd have one at work, and have to either suffer through it or try to exhaust myself until it goes away. One time I climbed down 22 stories of stairs, up 10, and back down 10 just to try to get rid of the jitters that were bothering me. I've quit a few jobs in the past cold turkey, simply because I was too down and out to go to work, or when I was at work, I would feel too melancholy to want to continue.

It all seems hopeless. I don't want to be stuck on disability for the rest of my life, but I don't know what to do with myself. Counselors I talk with seem to not have answers, either. They keep telling me to either find a job (I'm routinely too anxious to leave the house after this particular breakdown) or start a company (I'm in the hole several thousand dollars in debt due to college). Even if I did want to do these things, I'd spend the entire time waiting for the other shoe to drop, for my mental illness to rear its ugly head and for failure to kick my legs out from under me and smash my head into the pavement like it has so many times already.

My family is not supportive. They don't care and they think that simply watching and dragging me to different family functions is enough. As long as I'm sentient and breathing, they seem to think that it's okay, despite a couple of them dealing with mental illnesses themselves. I have no friends since everyone I know my age is married, and therefore unable to really socialize or talk with anyone since a guy has to sacrifice his social life for the good of a relationship, apparently, and the places I keep being referred to for friends are for the mentally ill. I'm tired of wearing my illness as a badge. There's more to me than the depression, at least, I hope.

For the longest time, I felt like there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Now I don't. I don't know what to do with myself. I don't know how I'm supposed to pay these bills that I have, or if I can ever be self-sufficient. I'm tired of hearing about what potential I have. Potential is for children. If you haven't realized it at 31, then what the fuck are you? A waste. And that's what I feel like.

Post last edited at

687e99 No.230

>>229

Gimme a minute to write a full reply, anon. /hope/ isn't very active yet but I read your post and though I'm not sure if I can help, I will try.


687e99 No.231

File: 1446417730847.jpg (85.45 KB, 529x386, 529:386, its_official.jpg)

>>230

Okay. So, you're 31, depressed, unable to keep a steady job, in debt and unsure of what to do with yourself. First, I'd just like to say that you are not alone. If you are a waste, then so are millions of other young men throughout the world right now, none of whom have done anything wrong other than be unlucky enough to live during a time when society is falling apart and people don't care for each other like they used to. It used to be that everyone had misfortune, but their family and friends and neighbors would help them through it. These days, it's all about inidivdualism and social atomization - now suddenly if you can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps you're a failure. This has literally never been the case in any society except the modern west in the last fifty or so years. It is an anomaly, and everything you've been culturally indocrinated to feel about "independent living" is a lie. I know that isn't much consolation, and those feelings will remain, but let it be the first glimmer of hope I can give you.

To let you know that I'm not just talking out my ass, I am 26, have never gone to college because I couldn't even secure a loan, and was a depressed NEET for nigh on seven years who couldn't even secure NEETbux and was forced to couch surf because my own family left me in a mental ward. They just left me there because they didn't want to take care of me anymore. I have met many people much like myself, and much like you. I know we are becoming more and more common. Many of us, though, were able to make it through our hard times with a little help from friends. You aren't a waste, anon. None of us are. We're just being left by the wayside because society is falling apart. All you need is someone to show the littlest bit of care.

That being said, the very factors that ameliorate your personal responsibilty for your situation also mean that it will be difficult for you to get out. Not anywhere near impossible, but difficult. It will take genuine hope, and courage, things that I know you think you don't have. But you do. You just need to dig for them.

You will need help, too. You can't do it all on your own. You need at least one other person to lean on, if only emotionally. Human beings are not made to be alone. I had one such person. Just the one. It turned out to be all I needed. So, I know that if you have just one other person to be there for you, you could work through your problems.

That is the hard part; that there is no advice I could give you or information I could share with you in one or two or a dozen posts here on an imageboard that could help you. If that were true, you could find that anywhere. You have the Internet; information and advice is everywhere. But that's not what you need. What you need is a friend. That's part of why /hope/ was made - so anons could have friends to lean on.

I don't know if I or anyone else here could be that friend, but I will try, if you'll let me. Or, at the very least, we can talk for a little while and perhaps I could give you some perspective. Either way, email me and we'll see what happens. I don't know if you use Tox, but we at /hope/ have latched on to it as a simple and relatively secure form of one-on-one communication. It's like Skype if it was made by /tech/. Throw me your Tox ID in an email and we can talk. Or if you'd be more comfortable with IRC, we have #8hope on Rizon.


9cb56d No.238

Thanks HW/BO. Not sure what happened with that crash to make some threads link to blank pages.

>>231

Thanks, that actually helps quite a bit. I'll get Tox and try to help out some here. Maybe a sense of higher purpose would do me some good.


687e99 No.239

File: 1446574173098.png (295.8 KB, 502x282, 251:141, nyaanpasu.png)

>>238

>Thanks, that actually helps quite a bit

Glad I could make you feel even a little bit better.

>I'll get Tox and try to help out some here

Like I said, email me your Tox ID and we can talk. There's a little circle of /hope/fuls that use Tox, as well, who you could try talking to if you wanted. If you want to help out around here, just stick around and post. Threads don't even have to be on topic, as long as they follow the /kind/ness rule. We need a community around here. There's also the wiki, though for some reason I have been unable to connect to it for the past couple of days. I'll have to talk to our wiki guy about it.

>Maybe a sense of higher purpose would do me some good

It certainly can't hurt, friend. Welcome aboard.


a11456 No.250

>>238

>Maybe a sense of higher purpose would do me good.

This absolutely, I would recommend looking around your town for a soup kitchen or something like that and volunteering, it helps twofold by keeping you active and doing something with a tangible helpful result.


569f37 No.305

>>250

Another reason to volunteer is that it opens your eyes to the fact that there are thousands of other suffering souls out there who have slipped through the cracks of society. I'm 29, and like OP said, most people I know are married and having kids. But I've worked for 2 non-profits that cater to the homeless and mentally ill, and it changes your perspective in a big way to see up close this huge segment of the population drifting through life with no families and no homes. I have mental health issues of my own, and spending time around others in the same boat has helped to mitigate those feelings of loneliness and isolation.




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