The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Throwaway. Disjointed thoughts. Not really sure why I'm posting this here. Dont' really want "advice" as such, just venting mostly. Maybe don't read this.
Trying to deal with a longstanding family divorce-but-not-quite situation. It feels worse for two people who actively hate each other to be staying under the same roof. Problems are cyclical: a temporary reprieve of icy silence for a few months, followed by an intense two-week conflict. (Yes, maybe I should just forget my parents and do my own thing. A sense of obligation nevertheless remains.)
Trying also to figure out what my life looks like, overall. I'm in my early 20's, so I likely have 50 or so years of useful-ish life left to me; but I am disabled (which erodes any sense of agency I attempt to possess) and, in general, I simply do not have anything I dream for. It feels like some sort of learned helplessness: my wanting-machinery has internalized something which I don't know how to put into words, and that has made me just not want any thing at all with particular intensity overall. I have enough skills/intelligence/opportunity to be able to earn well and prosper; but to what end? I don't know.
I also seem to have a high sex drive, which (coupled with the disability and the selfloathing) is a big problem. Disability in particular is a huge epistemic distortion-it's always there, like an invisible monster, questioning if people are expressing what exactly they feel about you, questioning if the positive feedback you get is authentic. anyway, high sex drive coupled with bad at being human is not great. Porn can only get you so far, and I personally dislike it for many reasons (least of which being the fact that it seems to act as a crutch for other mental problems-3 hours of trance, just repeat that...).
I can probably take steps to try fixing these problems. Sleep, food, exercise, talk to a psychologist, find futures which feel reasonable given my circumstances, all of that. But as I put it to a friend earlier-all of that needs some sort of underlying source of will, which I feel like I have run dry of. I don't know how to fix that. I don't know if I can, or if I want to.
All I know is that I am tired and I want to not have existed. (No, not suicidal-but if there were a magic button which could make it so that I had not been born, I'd very likely press it.)
In my not-entirely unrelated experience, the first thing to do with fighting parents is to be very clear what is, and is not, in your control. You cannot have a strong effect on your parents' relationship; you can't make them stop fighting or make them start liking each other. What you can do is behave honourably towards them both and give them both at least one loving family relationship. Focus on making it clear to both that you love them both, and that because you love them you will not be taking sides, betraying confidences, or nodding along while one belittles the other to you.
Secondly, at the risk of being callous and mistaken...
This is pretty much life in your 20s for lots of people. Certainly it describes my early 20s pretty well, and I wasn't disabled at all, just shy and with few good friends. The majority of people don't have huge life goals, they just muddle along doing whatever seems vaguely amusing at the time until they die. Not saying this is a good thing, just that you shouldn't beat yourself up for not being a Steve Jobsian ubermensch and I think that you should think about your disability less. Being human is hard, but that's normal. You're not cursed to misery forever because you're disabled.
I feel the same way, often. I'm still trying to figure it out, but I think that this is more a disease of the body than the mind. Light exercise (the kind that really doesn't take a lot of will, just a walk for an hour outside with an audiobook or equivalent) seems to help a lot. Counterintuitively, I think the flow is exercise -> energy -> will rather than the other way around. Expecting a little bit more from your body will make it squeeze a little bit more out, and that's a positive feedback loop.
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Any advice someone could give you depends on what exact disability you have, any chance you could elaborate? Especially considering this is a throwaway
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What sort of disability? Can you mitigate its consequences through physical therapy or technology?
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Have you tried getting into religion?
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