My support network hasn’t been judgemental but they do ask questions - to/and about my doctor, my medication, whether I’m doing anything to better my situation (like look for a new job) but mostly they just spend time with me either in person or on the phone. Sometimes their questions make me uncomfortable (like if I haven’t done shit about looking for a new job) but mostly I appreciate their company and the uncomfortable questions, well, they’re a good reality check (I know I need to find a new job/career, I’ve just been avoiding it because I don’t feel qualified to do anything!).
Sometimes you can be motivated to do things for yourself if you’re really doing it because you know it will please someone you care about. Fuck knows we’d probably never do most things for ourselves just because.
I’ve been pretty w/drawn socially for umm, a while now. But before I made that choice, there were many, many times that I found myself doing shit for other people that I would NEVER have got my ass in gear to do for me.
Hell yes - I’ve been at the point that I chose to live (rather than try to kill myself again) because it would please my mother, sisters and my psychiatrist. Or more to the point, I don’t wan’t to devastate them after the effort they put in after my first suicide attempt.
Me too.
I really wish all social feelings would just leave me and be done with it. I can’t meet people that I end up liking (either platonically or romantically) because it triggers a panic attack. I get over it eventually, but it just takes months and is unpleasant. I’ve mostly gotten over most of my depression. I think I’m generally an okay person, I have skills. I’m a little bummed I don’t have a job, but I have constraints on my location and skillset that are hard to work with*, so I cut myself some slack even though I don’t completely excuse myself for being unemployed. And hey, even though I’m payed a pittance (~$1k for 5-6 months of work. No, I’m not getting ripped off, this is the standard amount), professors still gleefully employ me as grader or research assistant.
So hey, I don’t think I’m a depressing person to be around like I was a year or so ago. But I just can’t make friends. Don’t know how, can’t do it. Meeting someone I want to be a friend of just makes me completely panic for weeks. I wish I didn’t have a need to be social. I mean, I’m mostly introverted, but not introverted to the point where I can go 1-3 months without a physical, in-person social call like I do now.
Currently I’m panicking over this one girl I’ve known for about a year, I met her at a camp I did last year, then she went away for the summer and I didn’t see her again until about November, where we taught an Into to C seminar together, then February, where it turned out that she was TAing the class I was grading for. She’s really sweet and nice, wicked smart, and we have a lot of the same interests (hell, we have very similar skillsets – albeit hers are a bit more advanced due to being a grad student – so we can talk about technical stuff too)**. She also has the unique (and I literally mean unique) talent of being able to compliment me in a way that doesn’t feel hackneyed or embarrassing. But now the semester is over, and thus goes my only chance of making a friend until next semester when someone might employ me as a grader again.
To be fair, I’m not panicking over HER, so much as the prospect of making a friend going away. She’s just the last person I’ve met, and the only person I’ll meet for a while, who’ve I’ve liked enough to want to be friends with, but now I’m just having constant panic attacks because everything has withered away because I just do NOT know how to make friends, I can’t think of a single way I possibly could have turned it (or ANY conversation with ANYONE I’ve ever met) into a real friendship.
I’ve tried it all, I’ve gone to clubs (as in, school clubs, not dance clubs). Hit it off with people very well. Even invited people to do things. It just. Never. Works. I don’t know, maybe I should have tried inviting her to do something, but I can’t think of a way to do it that’s not awkward, and it’s moot now anyway because I missed my fucking window.
And the worst part is is that when I get panicky, I like to take walks. Where do I almost always take walks? The University. Where does this person work/go to school? THE FUCKING UNIVERSITY. So I can’t go there and walk to relieve stress because then I feel like a goddamned creepy stalker. It doesn’t help that when I HAVE to go there (like when I went to pick up a letter of rec) I kind of secretly hope I bump into someone I want to be friends with so I can get on that whole “being friends” thing. But even if I did bump into them, I don’t know how I’d go about it. I can talk to these people for three or more hours, just shooting the shit, no problem, no awkwardness, but I just never can develop it into anything other than “person I can talk to for hours on end when I randomly bump into them”.
I. Hate. Everything. And now after typing this up I’m hyperventilating and almost crying again. [/Pathetic rant over]
- I’m a programmer, but my experience is in 3D graphics, computer vision, and machine learning research (most places want web development experience, of which I have exactly zero). I’m also constrained to Arizona and SoCal. The jobs I’m suited for tend to require postgraduate degrees or moving to some place that isn’t Arizona or SoCal. Further, I have to remain able to leave within a year or two, which knocks out anything with a long term contract.
** Yeahyeah, full disclosure, as if you couldn’t tell I have a crush on this particular person too, but dating is so not in the cards right now due to that whole “moving away in a year or two” thing. I really, truly just want a friend.
Just out of curiosity, when you say that it can take weeks to get over things, are the thoughts and feelings intrusive - in the sense that you have difficulty controlling to what extent they interfere with normal concentration? Because that sounds like OCD - at least my particular brand. Take that FWIW. 
Anyway, have you ever checked out Meetup? Maybe things would be easier if you didn’t feel like you had to “perform.” Meetup groups would be focused on an activity of some kind so you can just go with the flow. Plus there are so many - at least in my are which suburban NJ - that there are probably at least a couple that will be interesting.
Like I’ve said. I’ve tried clubs and such before. It always just ends with everyone in the group making 2-3 BFFs and me still having no regular friends. I really don’t know if it’s a problem with “me” (meaning my personality), or if I just suck at making friends. I mean, you’d think if they hated me or found me really annoying they’d find an excuse to shuffle off and not talk to me rather than sticking around shooting the shit for 2-3 hours. I’m not great at reading signals, but I’m not completely signal blind, and I’m self critical enough that I often to read negative signals where they’re not meant. So I’m at least pretty sure that if they didn’t like me at all I’d notice. Instead, my problem seems to be something other than making people not like me. Maybe I give off a vibe that I’m just not interested? Maybe I’m not interesting enough to spend more than a few hours every five months with? I don’t know, but it’s annoying.
And I’ve tried inviting people to do things. Some people just don’t want to be friends that bad, I’ve recognized that. Things like constantly being “busy”, I know that means they don’t really want to hang out anymore. But even when we do do something… that tends to be it. It just never happens again, I never see them again for months. We might chat on Facebook, but no in-person contact.
ETA: And I’m fairly sure it’s not OCD. It’s probably just my Social Anxiety, which is a thing I legitimately have.
Well, I’m not one to give advise in this area, but just approaching it empirically, it sounds like you need objective feedback. That’s hard to get. The best chance of finding it is in a support group. I would recommend DBSA which takes you regardless of your disorder(s). Their coordinators are trained volunteers. But there are also lots of very good local groups across the country set up by caring individuals and they shouldn’t be too hard to find.
NJ has a state sponsored self-help clearing house. Your state might have something similar. That would be the best place to start since they will have a specialized database to work from.
And now I’m trying to resist the urge to send some pathetically obvious cry for help email… Christ, it’s really gotten bad. I’ve never even considered doing such a thing before.
I mean, earlier this month I said I’d be willing to do that camp thing we met at, but it ended up getting cancelled (long story). I didn’t see it until now. I know replying to it with something along the lines of “well, let me know if you hear of anything else productive I can do around there” with a parenthetical along the lines of “or busywork, I’m pretty much starved for activity and human interaction by now” is obvious, pathetic, and would cause any sane person to run in the other direction screaming and thus ruin our professional ability to work together, much less shooting any chance at friendship. I’m just… so alone at this point. I just want to get on a project and talk with SOMEONE, preferably her since I know I like her, but I almost don’t care if I get a reply saying “oh yeah, some guy in the biology department wanted something”. But I know all that’s going to happen is the email will get ignored and she’ll start actively avoiding me because I send creepy desperate sounding emails.
And yet when I had a psychologist this is exactly the sort of shit they tried to get me to do to get over my SA. In fact, cold-emailing people I knew professionally but got along with was an exact thing he tried to force me to do (I never did). So maybe it’s a good thing? Maybe I should eschew the silly oblique cry for help stuff and just send a straightforward “I know this is awkward, but do you want to be friends or hang out some time?” email. Or is that even worse? It’s really worrying that I have a crush on her because I’m worried she’ll mistake it as me trying to awkwardly ask her out on a date, since she probably noticed the crush by now, even though that’s not the case and I just want to hang out. I really don’t want to make everything awkward, we get along really well when we work together and I don’t want to make it harder for me to get on projects because we can’t work together anymore due to awkwardness. I’m just lost at this point.
I’m going to stop posting now because posting-while-panic-attacked is a really bad idea. Congrats, you just got to see the thought-by-thought account of what every social interaction is like in my head, re-reading it, that’s exactly what my social anxiety looks like.
Okay, this is really weird. Or maybe not, I don’t know.
I have a good friend I haven’t spoken to in a year. I heard from another friend that his life blew up in his face lately, so I sent first good friend an email inviting him to contact me to catch up. Note this, I actually reached out to someone.* Anyway, friend called me a couple of times this week to vent about his terrible, awful, horrible, no good, very bad ex-girlfriend and the legal measures he’s having to resort to in order to remove her from his life.
In perspective, I realize that my life does not suck so very much and my problems are miniscule compared to his. I realize comparison makes you feel better about yourself. Now someone tell me why I’m suddenly motivated to do stuff and not just sit around in my book cave? Is it more of the comparison thing?
If only I can get the motivation to do the things that would really help, like look for a better-paying job…
*Now somebody tell me why I can’t call my dad for five months. I am a **terrible **daughter.
My only reason for saying the following is to give you one perspective from someone who use to be exactly the same way. Possibly worse. It wasn’t the only issue so you might have that going for you, IDK. I can’t possibly know.
In my case, I eventually got so burnt out that I just didn’t give a shit. Period. Fuck it. Don’t care. Go away. If you look up HPA axis and stress, you’ll see what happens on a biochemical basis. It’s scary.
It takes years for those changes to happen, but if “somehow” things don’t get better, that’s probably not going to be an issue. So although trying to make small incremental improvements now will probably be a long, painful process, it should also be occasionally rewarding and will guarantee you don’t go down that road. Maybe you won’t anyway. But what are the odds you’ll be WORSE off if you set very small, attainable goals now and work toward them?
As someone with OCD I know that this sort of training cures absolutely NOTHING. But it can make your life more pleasant and manageable. And over time, it does actually rewire your brain - literally. The neurons go kicking and screaming every inch, but do adapt to some extent.
edit: I’m not a shrink, but I believe the trick is to what you’re capable of and only force yourself a little, not to the breaking point.
This weekend has been weirdly up and down for me.
So, I had an appointment with my councilor, who really mostly told me that everything I was feeling and thinking… is normal for all I’m going through, and ok to be feeling and thinking. Sometimes it’s really nice to hear someone else saying that your feelings are valid.
Then Friday night, for our date night, my husband wanted to “talk about things.” This went… oh, about as well as a conversation starting that way could be expected to. It quickly devolved into a fight, with both of us being alternately accusatory and defensive. I was so stressed out by the thing that I literally got sick later. Hours later (Laying in bed, staring at the ceiling), I realized… part of the reason I was being so defensive was that he was accusing me of things that weren’t true. They just weren’t valid, but so much a part of me thinks “Well, he’s mad, so I must have done something wrong…” NOPE! That’s how depressed minds who grew up in alcoholic households think! You know what? I don’t need to think like that anymore! Truth is, I’m NOT being selfish, and I’m NOT saying that he hasn’t worked hard enough… HE is being selfish, and me saying I’ve worked hard at this is NOT the same as me saying I’ve worked harder than he has or that he hasn’t worked at this.
And then I spent all day Saturday working in my garden, about six hours worth… I mostly kept my mind off things, and I hurt the crap out of my back (Oh, yeah, weight workout on Friday, garden work on Saturday… great plan), and I just really, really missed my husband. I wrote him two emails apologizing for everything and saying it was all my fault… I deleted them without sending.
And today, I went to work as usual (I work Sun-Thur), and it was a pretty boring, slow day. I got to leave early, and watched the first ten episodes of the new Arrested Development. I loved it, it was hilarious. It was good to laugh.
But I spent all day thinking about my relationship. Part of me wants to call him and beg him to come back, part of me wants to tell him to shove off… and all I end up doing is eating too much.
I’m really anxious about tomorrow. I’m hosting a grill-out for a few friends… which is what instigated the fight. He thinks I’m being selfish by throwing it. I really don’t agree with him; I can see why he feels that way, but… that’s part of splitting up, dude! It’s not fair to get mad at someone you half-dumped for doing something enjoyable! Especially when you JUST told her earlier in the fight that you were happier living alone!
This whole thing is super weird from where I used to be depressed. I’m terribly depressed, but not in a biomedical way… I’m not suicidal, like I have been in the past. It hasn’t actually crossed my mind, other than a passing curiosity ("Oh, hey, two years ago I would have looked at that bottle of pills as a possible way out. I don’t now. Interesting.), but I’m displaying more of the Hollywood-style depressed attributes (eating too much, working out too much, can’t fall asleep, can’t get out of bed). But, I FEEL so much more than before I was on ant-depressants. I am angry and hurt and sad and lonely and… so many other things. But, I’m really realizing that there needs to be a different word for the more biomedical depression (where everything is… well, depressed in the sense of deadened or suppressed, although I did tend to cry a lot and feel shitty during that time) , and regular old life sucks depression.
I have had several different kinds of evidence-based treatment. I take four medications. I exercise daily. I only eat whole foods. I have a supportive husband and friends who love me.
And yet… the depression is always here. Every day. Sometimes I just want to give up.
[joke]Sometimes I just want to give up, but I don’t know who to surrender to.[/joke]
It’s the same for me, in that the depression is always there, it never goes away.
I did it. Somehow, I got out of the house and went on a hike today. And now I feel much, much better.
This isn’t directly depression related, but it might be of interest. It’s a study recently published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology regarding the use of kava-kava for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). I started a thread in this subforum for it with more info.
Good for you, Olives!
I signed up for a hiking meetup group. My first hike is this weekend.
Why am already telling myself that it’s going to be a pointless waste of time? I’m not going to bail out–I think!–but I keep trying to tell myself to at least be neutral about it if I can’t be excited.