What would "giving up" look like for you?

In My Humble Opinion
101

A lot like the past few months, really. January through about June were good months for me and saw me coming more and more out of the shell I’ve always lived in but the past four months have been some of my worst and have me regressing, hard.

I’m still living with my mom almost a year and a half after I moved back to Tennessee because she can’t work and my stepdad can’t keep a good paying job; I’ve gained back thirty of the 180 pounds I’ve lost over the past couple years; I had the engine in my 2001 car (that I had only had for two years) blow up because I was a dumbass and didn’t perform the routine maintenance that would have prevented it; had my first relationship end after she dumped me for my best friend (which, honestly, was a blessing because I was too cowardly to dump her before she did it for me); and found out within the past couple weeks that she’s pregnant and intends to keep it even though I was plain I ***NEVER ***wanted children and was told flat out by her numerous times that she did not either, though in hindsight, I’m fairly certain she was trying to entrap me (or any man dumb enough to fall into her clutches) and I was the one lucky enough to get caught.

In light of all this, I scheduled five days off from work and had originally planned to visit a friend in Oklahoma to take my mind off things and escape for a while but, unfortunately, her life’s been as rough as mine these past couple months and she wound up cancelling on me. I’m not angry at her at all but I have shut down even more in the days since and haven’t done a damn thing the past couple days besides clean my room, binge (and sometimes purge), surf the net, and for the day that I didn’t have an internet connection, watch reality TV even though I don’t even like reality television.

In essence, I’m the quintessential twentysomething loser and I don’t see things getting any better anytime soon. I’m doing my best to not let all this bring me down and this is actually the end result. I shudder to imagine what it would be like if I truly gave up.

102

This is going to sound really pathetic, but here goes. When I was in third grade I got so frustrated with being left out of everything that when we were lining up after lunch one day I yelled out “Is there anyone in this class that likes me?”

Crickets chirped. A tumbleweed rolled by.

I grew up to be a person who’s amazed she actually has friends. I’m not as amazed anymore, but I still wonder if anything would have changed for me self-esteem and mental health-wise if someone had said “yes.”

Bastards, all of 'em.

103

That was me five years ago. There’s always a way out of the hole. I may have slipped back this year, but I caught myself before I went all the way to the bottom. You can do it too. Really.

104

This isn’t close to being the worst period of my life and I’ve bounced back from much worse so I know. Thanks for the encouragement, though.

105

Here’s something interesting – I was going to write a total Me Too response to this, then I realized it’s not really true. I’ve always felt I was kind of antisocial, and that I had a hard time making and keeping friends. Up until 8th grade that was true, but even then I always had at least a couple of friends. But my friendships tended to be exclusive to one or two people, and they were pretty long term.

The past seven months have been the least social of my life, until recently. But even so, the people in my life were so low maintenence thet I’d go for months without seeing them.

I had sort of an uncomfortable time right at the end of college. I had three core friends, and we’d spend every night of the week together drinking beer and watching baseball. I hate baseball. And I was starting to feel stifled by my friends. Some nights I would rather have stayed in by myself. My friends gave me stick for being antisocial, and I felt like I must be a weirdo or something.

It took me years to realize that alone time is OK. I can totally entertain myself, and that’s actually pretty healthy. Unfortunately I took it a little too far sometimes, and my relationships started to atrophy.

Fifteen years ago I totally isolated myself so that I could do some self-work. I totally climbed into my own soul to give myself a complete makeover. (I had friends. Why did they all have penises? I want the other kind!) Then for the next fifteen years, a more or less regular pattern emerged where I would have one friend and one friend only. She would become my whole world. My only relationship would be with her. If we did things with other people, it would be with her people. And my other relationships would atrophy even more.

When my last GF and I broke up, I found myself in a barren wasteland of a social life. Of my lifelong crew of BFFs, only one remained, and now she’s moved away. I didn’t even know the fate of the guy who was once my best mate. No idea if he was dead or alive. (Turns out he’s still alive, thank Og! I need to call him.)

But I was still socially awkward. I never really got the knack of talking to strangers. But I’m working on it, and it’s freaking awesome. I’m meeting some wonderful folks, and I’m (sometimes) witty and charming. :smiley:

I’ve had friends all my life. Never really realized it until tonight.

But I don’t want to talk about it now. It’s Friday night, and while I have to do some painting, I’m going to go out for an hour, have a beer, and see how many times I can get my face slapped. My goal is to get more than five rejections, and feel great about it.

106

Sunspace, gigi, thank you for your kind thoughts.

Even in the bleak times, there is always comfort. I have an incredible family and a miraculous circle of friends. I’ve survived, in part, because my housemates are more than happy to let me put three months’ rent on the tab, my younger brother will make me laugh until I wet myself, and my other friends shower me with love. Now that I have a better handle on my depression (don’t stop taking the Prozac, duh), the ADD, and a few other matters, I have days when I feel like I can take on the world.

I have a fantastic full-time teaching position with a wonderful private school, so half the stress of teaching is just gone. Poof! I have a social life. I have an active church life. I’ve even been writing the past couple of months. As horrible as being caught in a depression is, coming out of it is indescribably wonderful. It’s impossible to take anything for granted.

Of course, I say that now, but I really need to get my butt back to the gym. It’s always something, isn’t it?

107

Go you! I hope you have 20,000 more of them (or whatever the number is for you).

Me too, I hope we all do.

A bit upthread, the marvelous and excellent gigi accused me of being a horn dog. Guilty as charged. Over the past few months, I’ve been a bit like a lost ship at sea. Sometimes tortured and suffering, sometimes completely at peace with my lot. Mostly the latter, but it was mostly directionless. I’m not OK with lonely, but I’m just great with alone.

But it was life without growth. It was a sort of peaceful form of inner death.

I told the marvelous and excellent gigi that I’d taken on a new agenda. Gee, “friends”, thanks for asking! :wink:

How do I meet some wimmen-folk? How does one meet girls? How does the art of the pickup work?

Most self-help books suck. Go to your local Barnes and Noble, and stroll over to the self-help section. There you will see the largest collection of expensive kindling that you will see in your life. But there are a few roses among the thorns. A small, select few are actually worth thumbing through. A tiny fraction of those are worth their weight in gold, if you read them with a critical and thoughtful mind.

Books on how to meet women come in two categories: The excellent, and the sucky. The latter are more abundant. The former invariably have, at their core, one central message: Live an excellent life.

And that is my new agenda. If I can ramp up my health, I figure I have about 14,000 days left. Each one needs to be excellent. Excellent art, excellent music, excellent friends, excellent girl(s).

Excellent times.

When I’m on my death bed, I don’t want to say “Wow, my life is nothing more than a series of regrets. And now I regret that it’s coming to an end.” I want to say “Holy shit! That was FUCKING AWESOME!”

Some call it sustainable fulfillment. Some call it a life of self-esteem, or happiness. Some call it self-actualization.

I call it a life of sustainable, happy, actualized, FUCKING AWESOME!

108

:stuck_out_tongue: I can so relate.

But you know what? Rejection is nothing more (or less) than a chance for growth. Growth = life.

109

That’s true, but not so much when you’re eight. That experience solidified my antisocial tendencies and instilled a deep feeling of “why bother” in me regarding relationships. It’s the little things, yanno?

The best advice I ever came across for reaching out during the dark times came from Cynthia Voight’s Dicey’s Song. I shall indulge in a quote:

110

Or ten. Man, fourth grade was Hell. Picking teammates in gym is like institutionalized psychological torture. I wish to hell they’d stop that barbaric practice.

As I was writing this, I got a phone call. “We’re not selling anything, we’re just conducting a survey. Are there any women in your household between the ages of 25 and 65?” I just laughed. It’s so much fun toying with those people.

111

If I had given up, I guess I’d be a lot like Mary Worth. Not the comic strip character, but the strip itself: marginalized off to the bottom of some other page way back in the classifieds, containing a few panels of words meaningless out of some obsure context that nobody would bother to follow, or not even bothering to read the entire three panels.

Someday Mary Worth is going to snap, go over to the society pages and take out a few of those smug brides.

112

Man, tdn, that was awesome! (And I hope the days of ‘fucking awesome’ are many for you too!)

The whole ‘live an excellent life’ thing connects to the idea of ‘non-attachment to your goals’ as well. Of course, you want to achieve your goals. Let’s take finding a mate for example. Most people want to find a mate. But if you go into a situation just wanting to find a mate, that desperation shows, and people don’t like it, because it’s only about your goal, and they don’t see anything that says you see them and their concerns.

So somehow you have to pursue your goal of finding a mate while disconnecting from the search emotionally and not caring about the outcome. ‘Living an awesome life’ is the largest-scale version of this: you’re making your plans without making their success ride on your success in your social goals.

True, there’s a degree of multilevelness and contradiction to this, but if you can achieve things that do good, or earn riches, or whatever your goal is, then there’s that much more to interest potential mates.

113

It was. Because that’s the kind of stuff I do. Awesome stuff. :cool:

Autolycus lent me a book about this very subject. It is called Wild at Heart, and it seems to be a treatise on manning up, from a Christian perspective. In return, I lent him The God Delusion. We’re nothing if not open minded.

Is that not brilliant?

114

Ok, you guys, this whole thread is like… wow. It’s like entering a soft fuzzy womb of positivity and emotional support and inspiration. I know that some of us (coughs ‘‘me’’) tend to be quite open about our personal life experiences. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that I am this vastly abnormal person because of how often I struggle. But threads like this really drive home the fact that there are so many others who go through the same thing, I’m not abnormal.

I came in here to say I knew what giving up looked like, because I did give up… but reflecting on that notion, it cannot be true. I’m alive, I didn’t give up.
I remember sitting in the hospital room with this woman who was about my age. She told me it was her 5th time in the hospital. I just remember deciding there was never going to be a ‘‘5th time’’ for me. Whatever I had been doing up until that point (wallowing in self-pity, mostly) it obviously wasn’t working, so I was going to have to think of something else.

And then I started paying attention to the way I treat myself. It’s easy to blame your unhappiness on another person or situation–for me, the easiest scapegoat is my childhood–but when I really sat down and thought about it, my past had nothing to do with my current unhappiness–it was the way I treated myself. Nobody I have ever known in the history of my life has ever treated me as badly as I treated myself.

I still find myself doing it sometimes, and it’s appalling the messages I send my own heart. Something as minor as my computer freezing up becomes this barrage of insults and predictions that I am destined to be a failure and I can never do anything right. It amazes me that all along I have been doing this to myself without even realizing it–I would never treat another person that way, so why would I treat myself that way? I’m just saying, the ‘‘negative self-talk’’ element of this thread is one I definitely relate to. I have had to learn to argue with that part of myself that just seems to have it out for me. But the healthy part of me must have triumphed overall, because here I am. I’m not only alive, I’m moving forward and doing things I’ve always wanted to do with my life, but was too afraid I’d fail before.

It’s been rough for me lately, because I just got a job, my first professional job ever, where I will be required to use Spanish about 30% of the time. The language is my passion and my albatross because it’s one of those things I know I’ll never be perfect at. I have wanted to quit my job every day since starting it, because I am so afraid I’m going to find out I’m not good enough to do the work.

But I finally sat down and said to myself, '‘Listen. This is what you want. This job will help you reach your long-term educational and career goals. It’s not for YOU to decide whether you can or cannot do this job, it is for your boss to decide. So just go in and do the best you can, because you will never know if you can do it until you try.’’

I’m still nervous as hell, but I feel better now that I’ve decided not to give up.

tdn, you have said so many brilliant and helpful things in this thread I don’t even know where to begin. Your lesson on boundaries I found exceptionally powerful. Litoris, your story is absolutely inspiring on a number of different levels, and I appreciate you sharing it here. Sunspace, gigi, same to you–that’s a side of you I’ve never seen before.

After reading this thread, I just don’t feel alone anymore.

115

Thank you! That means a lot.

Interesting thing about how you treat yourself. Somewhere in my journeys I read something I can paraphrase as:

116

Missed the edit window.

Thanks for the compliment, and I’m glad that I could convey it in a way that everyone could understand it. But I cannot take credit for it. It comes from Dr. Paul Dobransky, from the Deep Inner Game thing I mentioned upthread. Brilliant and powerful stuff.

And to clear up one other possible misunderstanding, I linked to the thread and recommended that product, but I am not a shill for it. I am not associated with that product line in any way. I just think it’s great stuff, albeit marketed in a sort of sleazy way.

117

Ah, you had to go ahead and mention David Burns. I’m reading his Feeling Good Handbook right now, and it’s pretty solid stuff. If you like him, you might like Albert Ellis. Ellis is a bit more of a hard-ass, but I love it. I’m the sort that needs a good swift kick in the pants now and then.

118

This is me now, kinda. Every time an opportunity to socialize comes up, I turn it down. The immediate excuses are that I’m too busy or that I’m tired. But really, I just don’t see what the point would be. Things beyond working, sleeping, and eating seem frivolous, risky, and stress-inducing.

When I’m in my darkest moods (but not so dark that I’m thinking about death), I think about running away and becoming a hermit, with no desires except for the basics of survival. The rational part of me knows that I would miss people–especially my family–but that doesn’t stop me from fantasizing about cutting myself off from them and everyone else.

That’s what giving up for me would be.

119

You’re a sly one, tdn. You think if you keep repeating “marvelous and excellent” I might actually believe it. A plan so crazy it just might work?? Thank you for caring enough to try.

And it’s excellent too that you keep trying in your own life, that you don’t settle. That’s great stuff. I’ve done a few little things in life because of this thread that are too trivial to mention but they mean something to me, so THANKS EVERYBODY!!

120

:o Yep, you caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. :wink:

But ultimately it’s not up to me to convince you. It’s up to you. But I’m behind you every step of the way, and if you need a helping hand, you have but to ask.