((Sunspace)), I think you just taught me something about my husband. Maybe I know how to help him now. Thank you.
Vision, your post reminds me of something my sister says: pain has a way of expanding within a person’s heart, no matter how big or small the incident was which caused the pain. So it’s useless to play “my victimhood is worse than yours”. It still hurts.
I would post my story but right now I think I should go and hug my husband instead.
It’s a privilege to read this thread. Without knowing any of you beyond your words on a grey screen, I can see that you are worthy people, you are survivors. Whatever good you’ve got, you’ve earned, and more.
I’ve started to reply to this several times, and stopped each time. I’m not really comfortable sharing personal stuff on-line.
The worst time of my life began almost a year ago, on March 16, 2007, when I watched my mother die.
Since then it’s been one goddamned thing after another. My wife’s car breaks down, to the tune of $4,000 (while I’m in law school and we’re living on loans). I go unemployed for six months. Of necessity, we move into an absolutely shitty little house that we can barely afford. Etc.
And then, a few weeks ago, I find out that my wife is having an affair. Welcome to Divorcetown. Population: You.
I hope the shit-rain is over. I think things are starting to look up. I’ve got a good job now, and the separation from my wife is nearly complete. Dear god, I hope this is the end of the bad spell I’ve been having.
As to the OP’s question of “how did you climb out of it”: I’m still working on it. I’ll let you know.
I’m glad I could help.
I’ve been disabled (chronic depression) and on government assistance for years now. Now certain funds have stop coming in. What’s left is not enough to pay the rent and utilities every month. I need to find a way to come up with $150 a month. Right now I’m trying to start a clowning business and get on eBay (I used to be a collectible toy dealer so I have a lot of merchandise to sell).
If I can’t make the money, I’m looking at homelessness or possibly (death may be preferable to this) living in a group home.
I don’t know if I can get out of this.
You hit “rock bottom” every few years or so in your 20’s. Jobs lost, boy/girlfriends ditch you, dope, drink or whatever clouding your mind.
You just move on. Every day is a healing process. It doesn’t always feel like it, but it is.
20 years later you look back when you had the Glock in your mouth and you just grin, knowing it wasn’t really all that bad.
I’m hesitant to respond to this, as I’m about to post my own novel of despair and then won’t be able to revisit this thread for at least 12 hours, but am I being whooshed here? I really hope so. If not, dude, did you even read the op, let alone the responses?
Well, I’m in the worst time of my life so I can’t answer the bit about climbing out.
I got sick my last year of high school with what was diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome and steadily got worse over the next four years, to the point of being essentially housebound. The fifth year I was sick I was diagnosed with Lyme disease and about 6 months later with babesia as well (tick-borne red blood cell parasite). In the two years since then, I’ve been on antibiotics (and anti-babesia meds); first oral antibiotics, now IV, and my health has remained stable but not very much improved.
I’m still living at home, can’t work or go to college. I go to physical therapy once a week and to my shrink every other week. That’s pretty much the extent of my social life for now.
Emotionally and physically, I’m kind of at a crisis point. I’d always been shy and withdrawn (a lot of that due to not being, for lack of a better word, socialized well as a kid. In their own ways, my parents are both rather socially dysfunctional). This only got worse as I became more isolated because of my health, to the point that I veered very close to developing a personality disorder (schizoid. I don’t know if I was formally diagnosed, but my therapist, to whom I owe more than I can say, pointed out to me that I fit enough of the characteristics to qualify). Basically, I smothered my need to interact with and have relationships with people outside of my immediate family and most of my emotions.
Now that I’ve recovered my emotional capacity, I’m nearly drowning of loneliness but not able to socialize much at all because of my health limitations. I also am very worried that I’m just not capable of forming close relationships with other people (haven’t had any friends since middle school, never been in a romantic relationship) and am at the point where the only way to know is to try, but, like I said, I mainly physically can’t for now.
I’m also in a similar place physically. I’m very scared that I’m not going to get any better. What I hope for in the future requires me to be able to do more, physically, than I can now. I can’t know how limited I’ll be until I see the antibiotic treatment through.
So I’m kind of in a wait-and-see position right now, which is often very difficult to bear. I expect so much of myself, I can’t help but fail spectacularly on a daily basis, and I’m often depressed and anxious, and usually wind up retreating into my head. I’m pretty sure I’m at the lowest point mentally in my trajectory now (I hope I’m at the lowest point), so at least things can’t help but get better as I try to change my thought patterns and allow myself to feel and to accept myself as I am and basically just keep trying trying trying. I expect that the coming year will be especially difficult. My younger sister is graduating from college and my baby brother is graduating from high school this May and starting college in the fall. I feel so far behind, and the years just keep slipping by. I’ll be 24 in April; I don’t feel much more than 18.
The thing of it is, and this is mainly what I came to say, maybe it will help someone else, I’m alway choosing this, in a way, and that makes it easier to handle. The only options are misery (hopefully, lessening misery) and denial, and given how ably I’ve deluded and blinded myself in the past, I’ll take misery. And I know suffering is to my benefit, in the long run. Being chronically ill is simultaneously the very best and very worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I am a far better person for it. It sometimes scares me a bit, looking back, what my life might have been like otherwise. I think I’d have lived as ‘should’ rather than ‘am’, and for who knows how long. I’m very lucky that that train got derailed before I’d built a life around it, not to mention while still qualifying for coverage under my mother’s excellent health insurance policy.
I’m kind of nervous about posting this, but it took a long time to put together, so here goes.
All of you have really written your hearts here, and that is incredibly moving. I think that is the best of this board, when people can be emotionally honest without shame. BrknButterfly that sounds like a terribly painful and overwhelming experience but I found your conclusion to be incredibly inspiring.
For all the snarkiness on the Dope, I really love these warm little pockets of safety. There are some fantastically good and loving people on these boards, and you’re them.
I can’t find the quote, but Viktor Frankl has a lovely one in which he renders all suffering as comparable to a gas that fills up all the space within a heart, whether it be a tiny drop or a great quantity.
Here’s a quote I could find:
Frankl was a trauma psychologist at the time he was forced into Auschwitz. This afforded him a unique perspective on the psychology of survival. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning he treats the suffering of his fellow concentration-camp survivors with as much tenderness as the unemployed guy coming in for treatment decades later.
I think the attitude between, ‘‘I have suffered… but everyone suffers’’ and ‘‘I have suffered more than anyone else’’ is a tough balance to strike. The former runs the risk of minimizing the impact of a personal experience, while the latter, obviously, lacks compassion, empathy, and common sense. Suffering is a qualitative, not quantitative measure. Does my friend whose arm was broken by her father’s beating, and who spent a portion of her childhood homeless, suffer more than my other friend who was raped at knifepoint by her brother when she was in fourth grade? It makes more sense to talk not about the quantity of suffering but in how each of them bears it, how it shapes their personal experience, their wisdom and their strength as compassionate human beings.
I think it is true that our experiences should not totally define us, but it is disingenuous to imply they shouldn’t impact us at all. Whoever I am now, it is in part because of what I went through as a child and as a teenager. Until the day I die those experiences are going to be an integrated part of my being… but in a fully conscious and calm way, from an adult perspective that thinks about the child I was and understands the unfairness and helplessness of her position and accepts it and moves forward. I was at least 22 before I figured out I wasn’t 12 years old anymore. Sometimes I still have to say it out loud, to remind myself.
There have been times in my life I have felt fated to suffer, but the truth is there is nothing remarkable about that fact. We are all fated to suffer–that is the human condition. The more we work on accepting that simple fact, and letting go of the need for life to be free of pain, the sooner we will experience authentic joy and gratitude no matter what our circumstances.
My Dad gave me a plaque one year, it’s hung over the door to the garage: Never, ever, ever, give up.
I’m sure there’s crap out there I’ve yet to experience, and I’m sure some of it will visit my life, but there’s one thing I can take away from my experiences: It tested my mettle, and I did okay.
It’s a pretty common behavior for older people to look at the younger ones and say ‘bah, your problems are nothing, come back when you’re REALLY got it bad.’ And to a certain extent, it’s true…until it isn’t and a younger person really DOES have a big wheelbarrow load of crap.
Just know that the odds aren’t ALWAYS against you, and statistically, things WILL look up. They have to. When they do, you’ll have scars to remind you you’re strong enough, you’ve handled adversity before.
I think having kids was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. Not because it’s particulalry challenging, but because life kept happening in the meantime. Not only did you have your usual work and relationship issues, but if the kid barfed all over the carpet, nobody was going to pick it up if you didn’t. It didn’t help that the kids were a sounding board for my issues. You could tell that they could tell Mom and Dad weren’t getting along.
Steady as she goes, just keep swimming, hakuna matata, whatever…statistically, things WILL get better, or you’ll adapt, and things will seem better. That’s just human nature.
I keep writing things to add to this thread, and they veer so quickly into self-pity that I won’t bother you with them. There’s too much of a back story to explain. The problem is that I had a whole sequence of problems hit me, one after another, seemingly without respite. So I hit rock bottom, then found out that I’d been mistaken, and there was a rock bottom below that, and another one below that.
I’m not sure how I got out of it. Since I’ve always had a problem with depression, it colored my reaction to things. In particular, I drifted away from all my friends rather than trouble them with my problems. I didn’t seek any support from my family, mostly because I’ve never really had contact with them. So when money problems, chronic pain and job crises hit me, I contracted my entire world down into my relationship with my then-fiance, and that was probably too much for her, because she ended our relationship. At that point, I was very much alone. I had two people who I kept in contact with: my sister in the midwest and a friend in Boston. This was because they kept calling me, even when I didn’t call them back.
I think the biggest factors in my turnaround were 10 years of therapy finally kicking in and, after a five year search, finding a mix of antidepressants that at least got me out of bed in the morning. Additionally, it seemed that the universe ran out of things to throw at me and took a breather.
So I dramatically scaled down my expectations: maybe I’d have back pain for the rest of my life, maybe I’d never get back into a relationship, and even if I couldn’t regain my reputation at work, I at least still had a job. I started counting the most minor things to be signs of progress. Some days I couldn’t muster the will to get out of bed, so on the days that I did, I counted that as a win. If I could get to work, I’d consider that a victory, even if I just touched my desk and turned around and went home. Two people at work had seen me crying in my car on different occasions, and I started using their offices to cry in (not very often, but when it hit, it hit hard). That made it just a little easier to get to work, because I had some ‘safe harbors.’
So I just kept moving, and focused on two things that I could control: work and money. No matter how bad a mood I was in, I knew that if I could get myself to work, I’d do something useful and get paid for it. I probably should have declared bankruptcy, but I’d felt great shame over my condo being foreclosed in 1998, and I couldn’t accept the notion of declaring bankruptcy. I completely faced up to my financial situation (see post), buried myself in work and started seeing improvement. Sometimes it can be difficult to gauge progress in emotional matters, but seeing my debt decrease week by week gave me something to focus on.
This thread is really coincidental, because two weeks ago, I actually recovered a repressed memory, just like in those cheesy Lifetime movies. I’d thought that my problems started in 2001 when my fiance broke up with me, but in the course of an afternoon (and in public, at work), I suddenly remembered a traumatic event that occurred in 1999. I was pulled off an important program for basically flooding the newly-installed managers with process improvement suggestions. The result was weird: instead of talking with me about my ideas, they ignored me, and after a few weeks, one of them printed a list ranking everyone in the area for performance appraisal purposes and apparently forgot about it. I picked it up while doing security monitoring (closing up the area for the night) and saw that I was in the bottom third. This really hit me hard, because up until that point, I was generally acknowledged as one of the best people there. In short order I was removed from the program. I went into mild exile for two years on some unrelated programs and tried to restart my career from scratch. Since my brain apparently decided that I didn’t need to remember this, I think it might be a fairly big deal. Had I not been depressed, I could have recognized that through this period, I kept getting slightly above average raises, so my line managers must have looked at the list, thought that the program managers didn’t know what was going on and ignored it.
And here I am now. I’ve conquered my financial problems, I seem to be on good footing at work, I’ve reconnected with one friend in Seattle. I’ve discovered a cousin living locally who strangely, was also completely kept away from our larger family by an insane mother, and we’re trying to get to know each other. My back pains are gone, and I happily accept the fact that I have to do a series of exercises every day for the rest of forever. I’m not really remembered for the Big Important Contribution I made in the early 90s; through no fault of his own, my co-designer seems to generally be perceived as having designed the whole thing, and I sorta-maybe accept that he’s been promoted (way) above me. My opportunities for future contributions like that are limited, since I’m no longer on the right “short list.” But now I’ve reinvented myself as The Guy Who Gets Things Done, no matter what. Not much opportunity to engage in creative design, but it’s still a positive.
Last Friday, I saw a pretty woman and actually felt nervous because I felt attracted to her. This hasn’t happened since 2001, so I think it’s a good sign.
About 10 years ago. I talked my wife and our youngest son into leaving our hometown (he was a sophomore in high school then) and moving to Oregon where I was offered a job as editor of a newspaper on the coast. Reluctantly, they agreed to move; both adjusted nicely, my wife found a great job and the lad fit in with the music crowd very well. Things never went all that well at the newspaper, however, and within six months I was fired. That was December 8, 1997. That Christmas I was unemployed in an area of double-digit unemployment, we had to sell the house we’d lived in only three months (lost the $10,000 we’d put down on it) and moved into a cramped apartment. It was the worst Christmas I ever remember. Over the ensuing months I moved back to Colorado and took an hourly job at a call center. I almost lost my family in the process, but in the end we all ended up together in another small apartment here. We’d run through our savings and retirement funds, owed huge amounts of money on credit cards and had damaged our relationships with both sets of parents.
It took some counseling and some plain dumb luck, but we ended up back on our feet within two years. I give most of the credit to my wife’s determination and money sense. The experience changed all of us, but now I believe our family bonds are stronger than ever. Good came out of it.
Forgot to add: since I’m the guy who gets things done, I’ve been air-dropped into a big, troubled program to help them get to delivery. The program? Yep, it’s the program I got kicked off of in 1999. Just like in a movie.
Yeah, wait until your 40s and then you’ll really have something to be depressed about. 
I don’t really have any particularly bad experience to share. I’ve lost jobs or girlfriends and had various set backs and stuff but nothing what I would consider life-altering. I haven’t lost a limb, found myself homeless, been man-raped or accidently killed anyone with a stupid prank or anything. That in and of itself is pretty much enough to make me realize that whatever problems I have are pretty much minor.
Another thing is that looking back at 35, so many things which seems so significant at the time really didn’t matter. Some girl I dated in high school, that F in calculus, some jerk I roomed with in college, an issue at some nothing job I had 8 years ago at a company that no longer exists. Yes, these events may shape who I am today, but they are no longer relevant to my life as it is today.
I see too many people who spend so much time wallowing in how miserable their life is that they miss out on the very opportunities that would allow them to change it.
Hey, if you can afford a $500 pistol, life can’t be all that bad can it? 
I almost flunked out of college my senior year due to severe depression, for which I didn’t seek help until it was almost too late to save my academic career. I ended up with a .75 average for the last semester, and I only had that because of piano. I graduated because I begged the ballet teacher to accept an essay instead of, you know, attendance, to complete my gym requirement, and my advisor went to bat for me with the department head to make an exception on the requirements and take two of my high school AP classes as major requirements. The humiliation was worse than the depression.
I went home, took a year off, took Japanese, came out of it on my own.
Worst time in my life? It’s still going on but slowly improving. We had a son but never could get pregnant again. After trying fertility treatments for 3 years and experiencing 5 miscarriages, two of them in the second trimester, my wife and I decided to adopt through DCFS. In April, 2002, after almost two years of dealing with red tape we finalized the adoption and she was our daughter forever. That summer my wife got pregnant without medical assistance. The doctors did everything possible to save the pregnancy, including a radical surgery. On November 30, 2002 my son Tommy was born at 20 weeks via emergency c-section. He lived only a half hour and died in my hands.
One week after, on the day of his funeral, my wife’s incision dehisced, essentially popping open and pouring blood and pus. We rushed her to the hospital where we found out she had a major infection in the wound of staph, strep and E coli and it had eaten through the tissue and through the fascia layer over her intestines giving her an abdominal hernia. It was decided to leave the wound open (it was the size of a cereal bowl) so it could heal from the bottom up. When it had healed they would reopen her to fix the hernia. Her work told her that she had to be back in the office by the end of January because her short term disability and FMLA were expiring. We told her she couldn’t come back. They fired her (they were within their rights to do so). She had been making over twice my salary and now she was reduced to her long term disability payments, about 2/3 what she had made before. Money became horribly tight.
When the wound had healed, they opened her and tried to fix the hernia. A week after the surgery the wound opened. She was having a reaction to the mesh they used. They tried to clean it out but eventually had to reopen the wound completely and remove the mesh. They let the wound heal up again and then tried a different material. This time she got MRSA on the new mesh. Again opened and cleaned and leave the wound open. They tried a tension closure but it didn’t hold. Pig membrane didn’t stay attached and dissolved. Finally they tried one more tension closure and the hernia was repaired but the actual wound will not stay closed. My wife still has a whole in her belly about the size of a nickel and almost 5 cm deep. Now it looks like the tension closure failed and the hernia is back.
In between I have lost two jobs due to corporate buyouts, we have eaten through all of our savings including her 401(k), we have sold everything we can and try to make do with my salary and her Supplemental Security Income (they transitioned her from long term disability because there is no way she can go back to work in her present condition). Her father has money coming out his ass but wouldn’t give us a dime. My parents wouldn’t call me for almost two months after each job loss. Great support system.
And to add insult to injury, in the summer of 2006 our 13 year old neighbor tricked my daughter (she was 5 at the time) into a closet and touched her. He had been working up to it for a long time. Because of his age and because there was no penetration he couldn’t be charged with a sex crime but instead as assault. Fortunately, she is OK and has had no issues over it.
What has kept us going? My wife and I turn to each other. The world can shit on us, turn its back on us but we will always be there for each other. I don’t know what I would do without her. We take any good times as a gift and hunker down when the bad times come. It’s hard to live constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop and it’s tough for my son (he’s now 15) to have hope or to look forward to things, but we know that whatever comes our way that we will stick by each other.
Sure things could be worse. One or more of us could have some terminal disease, I could still be unemployed, a tornado could hit our house, Pauly Shore and Paris Hilton could plan a remake of Casablanca. No matter how bad things get, we turn to each other and we just hang on.
Of course my Wellbutrin and her Lexapro help!
Rights, my ass. What an evil thing to do. Only a real lowlife scumbag would make a decision like that.
Oh they were evil lowlife scum. They cleaned out her office, shipped everything in a box to our house. There was a note in top of the box wishing her a quick recovery and their condolences (in that order, too). But the law was on their side. She had to go on hospital bedrest and they used up her vacation and sick time, then maternity and finally short term disability. The disability was run concurrently with the FMLA time, which is legal, though royally shitty. I checked with HR people and a lawyer friend and they all said the company could do that. So be warned about FMLA, folks. Make sure you talk with your HR before you try to use it.
When I was sixteen, I was in an accident that left me blind in one eye. The five (unsuccessful) surgeries caused me to miss school for nearly two months. I was lonely and in pain and suffering from intense headaches caused by adjusting to a new way of seeing. When I started going to classes again, I just couldn’t get back into the swing of things and I failed one class and nearly failed a few others. Before my accident, I was an all-A student. The shock of not being “smart” hit me pretty hard.
At the same time, the cost of my surgeries left my mom financially incapacitated. She was going to school full-time and working nights at Shopko, a recent divorcee trying to build a life for herself. We had no money and eventually she declared bankruptcy and lost our house.
So I was physically broken, mentally broken, and suffering from some serious guilt issues for ruining my mom’s life. What did I do? I had unprotected sex with my boyfriend and got knocked up.
Never told my boyfriend, never told my family. I miscarried at six months. I took the bloody sheets and the thing that could have been a child to the dumpster in the middle of the night. The next day, I went to school to struggle through another class.
Before all this happened, I was pretty religious. Not following any particular Christian doctrine, but I had a relationship with God and prayed every night. After all this stuff, I just lost every ounce of faith I had. I felt truly alone, in my life and in the universe.
But eventually, things got better. I got better. I never went to therapy. But I’m a generally happy person and that side began to reassert itself. That time, that depression, it barely seems like a part of me. It’s like it happened to a different person. I think that period made me a more compassionate person, a very empathetic person. It’s always made me tolerant of the little annoyances life throws at me. I can’t get mad or upset at stupid things anymore, because I have real pain to compare them to.
Godalmighty, I don’t know why it is, reading this thread doesn’t* depress* me, it makes me sad and I am gobsmacked at the amount of pain that people have to endure and yet I am overwhelmed with admiration for the strength and determination and sheer cussed doggedness that so many of you have.