Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
I wrote myself off as dead at 14, after having a look at my situation. Was not too far off, surprised I ever got a job or lived to 30
A lot of unhappy teens and young people can’t imagine enduring a whole lifetime after they get even a short taste of how exceptionally bad life can be. And it doesn’t help that so many people hold onto this feeling through their lives that they don’t work towards a better tomorrow - making the societal problems even worse as so many people stop investing in their communities and their future.
As one of those that carried that feeling throughout my life. It’s not that I haven’t worked to make things better. I’ve worked my ass off and all I’ve been able to achieve is barely treading water. I can’t invest in my community because I don’t have any spare resources to do so. I’m almost 40 and I’m still renting a room out of someone’s basement ffs and there’s no indication that anything is going to get better any time soon. If I wasn’t on the hook to act as a (shitty) safety net for my brother’s family when our parents are gone I’d have probably domed myself by now.
Eh, it’s not one specific thing that triggered it. I was left alone too long, and realized I was failing. So I made some very dark and cynical conclusions that didn’t help my growth at all. Basically, I believed I was inferior to other people, and that the only way I can achieve anything is to throw away my life, and focus on success instead, which backfired (trying to suppress all emotions just made me unmotivated and miserable, which was made worse by ADHD). Took quite the long time to realize something.
Nowadays, I’m trying to establish a balance to compartmentalize my time, expectations, and experiences. I want to keep a routine and discipline, so that when it’s time to say, draw something, I will only do that, and care about nothing else. Only care about work during work, only be available to friends at a certain time, and work on myself with a cool head.
The idea is to be completely detached from the outcome. I don’t care if I fail or succeed, since trying too hard also backfired in the past. Worrying too much about a problem just caused extreme anxiety and brain fog.
Instead, it is important to just go through routine and try, try to have some semblance of a meaningful life, with no expectations.
So far, I can’t really even do that, I have a lot of disfunction to make up for, somehow. I tend to forget what I’m supposed to do for entire hours…
I beat the worst of my depression and anxiety by connecting this very idea to the realization that my brain would start writing stories to explain my feelings, and those stories didn’t necessarily need to even make sense, but those repetitions were reinforcing a feeling, which reinforced the thoughts, which reinforced the feelings… etc, etc. It’s called rumination and it’s the enemy of life and happiness.
Learning to identify where my feelings start attacking my thoughts helped me beat rumination but that’s only the first step.
You’re on the next step, which is healing and trying to find new meaning. It will get better, but keep pushing yourself to discomfort, to doing things you’re not used to. Your brain is locked into “survival mode” and that means a lot of executive function is still in safe-mode, bare necessities for survival only. It makes it harder to experience joy or fulfillment from even the small things that people enjoy.
Some of my therapists have told me this heals and you will rebuild yourself. I can tell it is healing slowly, but it takes so much time. I wish I could tell you how long it takes. I’m still on that step.
It takes forever, as it is always an ongoing process that keeps healing. It will get better for us though.
fuck it, doesn’t have to be your teen yrs.
had that happen in my 30s, truly believing I wouldn’t see 40.
yet thankfully here I still am.
“this too shall pass”
Having gone through a mid-life “reset” and having to say goodbye to nearly everyone and everything I knew for the first several decades was not an experience I would want to repeat, or even think back to most days.
But even through the worst moments of those years where I had to do some of the very hardest things that anyone would ever have to do, I chanted to myself under my breath “this too shall pass.”
And it did. It slowly, agonizingly, got better. It all passes. And eventually you will look around and realize it passed too fast.
true words of wisdom