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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When things go wrong in life, I’ve made a custom of distinguishing my experience from others by telling people, “I don’t have mistakes, I have catastrophes.”
Throughout my entire life, I have the worst luck and misfortune out of anyone that I’ve ever known. When things begin to break down, they always seem to happen in ‘just such a way’ as to inflict the maximum possible damage, or make the situation unrecoverable or come at an expense so great that any recovery would amount to a Pyrrhic victory, to any attempt to improve things.
A few months ago my girlfriend broke up with me over a situation she uncharitably misinterpreted, or was using as an excuse to exit the relationship. The following week, I lost out on a great and promising career opportunity. On August 1st my father killed himself. On September 11th, my sibling died of a drug overdose. On October 4th, a long-time friend died of a massive stroke. And today on October 19th, my trusty companion and cat, Esther, passed away after being found in the bathroom. And a dear family member is in the hospital with stage 4 cancer.
I can’t even count all the shit I’ve been through from the day I was born. I’ve been through so much abuse, bullying, homelessness, and I don’t even know how I deal with things day in and day out.
I must have the worst luck in the world. I don’t have mistakes, I have catastrophes. The only peace there is comes from knowing on a planet of 8 billion people, I can’t be the only one out there that’s been there.
I’m terribly sorry to hear everything you’ve been through and I hope very much your luck turns around.
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That's awful my friend. Sometimes the world is cruelly unfair, and we suffer ridiculous amounts for no real reason we can discern. Sounds like you have suffered more than your fair share.
I won't sit here and try to give you advice or meaningless platitudes, but at least people here can witness what you've been through. And hey, you still manage to write intelligent posts on the Motte, so that's something I guess.
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Reading what you've wrote what a tough couple months. The worst tragedies I've heard from friends and acquaintances are someone living in NYC during 9/11 and remembering going to funerals for three weeks straight, and someone who's family lost everything in hurricane Katrina.
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Hmm. That's interesting. There's a lot of possible explanations for this. The ones that come to mind are basically poverty and what you might call a cultural clash, especially if you are trying to make the jump from poor to middle class.
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