Chronic depression and other garbage

Someday I'll be hot enough that people will buy my dead skin.

 

I really want my sister to have respect and consideration for anything that isn't herself. She treats our cats like they're stuffed animals instead of living creatures, not letting them go unless they start clawing her, no matter how much they're struggling to get free (also she seems to not worry about their needing to eat). she abuses our mom and frequently ignores my boundaries, going in my room without my knowledge or permission, going through my stuff, refusing to leave me alone even if i have spent the last twenty minutes asking her to please, please go away, grabbing the steering wheel when i'm driving and so on. she doesn't seem to care about wasting water either. not just her seltzer cans which she only finishes about 1/3rd of, but also tap water and so on. she's been in the bath for 40 minutes and keeps adding more water to it. i would really like it if she could respect other people and things.

 

I saw a really awesome cosplay and now I don't know if I can cosplay anymore.

 

I'm going to kill myself. i don't know when, hopefully not soon, but when I die it's going to be suicide.

 

I don't like being me. I'm weak. Why didn't mental illness and abuse and hardship make me strong? My friends are strong. I'm just broken.

 

I'm running out of friends.

 

So I was at a mental health treatment facility for about 48 hours. I uh. Haven't been coping with stress and anxiety well. And I officially need help. I am going to be seeking counseling, actual counseling, and possibly adjusting my medication since 25mg of antidepressants may not be working. I need to get better, and I will be working on that a lot more from this point forward. Hopefully as time goes by I will need this thread less and less.

 

i'm glad you're getting help! i hope the counselling helps you turn things around.

 

Why don't I make content that people like

 

Stop mocking me. Please.

 

I need to just accept the fact that people don't like me.

 

This feels like projection of your own feelings onto other people, because it seems like you currently don't really like you. I bet there are people around who do like you :)

 

I have like. Nine friends. I routinely get ignored by people I try to talk to. I have 28 followers on tumblr as opposed to 200 or 2,000. People don't like me.

Honestly the fact that I'm so negative about myself is a contributing factor but I'm still pretty sure I'm right.

 

Finding a therapist is hard. I live in the middle of redneck nowhere. There are three therapists who live in the city I'm in, and one of them specifically has a "Christian focus." I just want my brain to stop being like this. It shouldn't be hard.

 

Went to see a therapist out of town that my case worker found for me. Still trying to find someone local, still having no luck.

The therapist suggested mindfulness exercises, and something akin to exposure therapy for my negative thoughts. She says it's worked well for other patients before. Hopefully it'll work for me.

 

So I can do something that makes sense and people won't hate me for it? That just... doesn't sound right.

 

People are making posts related to the new Overwatch comic saying "I don't play Overwatch but I'm so happy Tracer has a girlfriend" or similar. One of these posts, made 8 hours and 40 minutes ago, has 40,850 notes. That's roughly 79 notes per minute. And I'm so mad. I want to be popular. I want attention. I want double digit notes for once. No one cares about what I have to say on tumblr and it bothers me.

 

Hey, I'm really sorry you're going through this. It sounds incredibly rough. It also sounds a lot more like mental illness than a personality flaw to me. I think maybe I feel something like you're experiencing sometimes when I'm very depressed and anxious. It's like somebody cut a hole out of the middle of me. It doesn't even necessarily hurt all the time, something's just gone. I'm suddenly obsessed with cultivating appearances so I'll seem perfect and everyone will admire me. I desperately hate people who seem to be doing this better than me because it feels like a zero sum game even though I don't rationally believe that it is. Does that sound at all similar?

Did you ever end up adjusting your antidepressant? Did it help at all?

I suspect no amount of followers and notes is going to be enough for long, because that's not fixing the problem. There's only one person whose positive opinions matter, and that's you. If you can't do that for yourself right now, it's not your fault. It's something you can work on with a therapist and medication, but it's not your fault. Hating yourself for feeling envy is not significantly different from hating yourself for any other perceived flaw.

 

I don't know what to do. Trying to be perfect just makes me decent, while I hate myself and others and everyone hates me. But not trying to be perfect means I won't be good enough. I don't know what to do. I don't see an in between here.

 

I have a suspicion that everyone doesn't actually hate you because that sounds so much like the result of distorted thinking. It sounds like your brain is probably finding and locking onto the worst possible conclusions. Metaphorically pouring poison in your ear.

It sounds like your brain is telling you a lot of horrible things about yourself that aren't strictly true. It actually reminds me a lot of certain patterns of bullying. Like, not targeting things about you that are necessarily bad, but going for things you could be persuaded to feel bad about? That's the impression I get. Dunno if it's accurate.

Maybe perfectionism is a way to create a sense of control over suffering. It may be awful to feel as if your pain is somehow your own fault for not being good enough. And yet if it were true, it would also mean that there exists a specific way you could stop it, if you did all the right things to become good enough. That's hope of a sort, or at least a direction to explore in the quest to not feel so crappy, instead of feeling lost and at the mercy of hurt you might not be able to predict or influence. Because that's honestly terrifying.

Perfectionism doesn't seem likely to pan out very well as a coping mechanism in the long term. Your brain never signed any agreement to give you relief in exchange for good behavior. No matter how well you do, it's probably not gonna feel like you really succeeded as long as you don't experience the feeling of reward you expect from success. Maybe sometimes you will feel it, but I imagine a person could try harder and harder forever in a situation like this, always feeling like it wasn't enough, always believing the lack of reward meant they failed, rather than the possibility that their brain just didn't produce the reward feeling at the time. Maybe it couldn't. Depression does that.

I definitely don't want to suggest the perfectionism isn't a serious problem in its own right, but perhaps it's reflecting or manifesting some larger issue involving a lack of meaningful control? In any case, maybe it could be helpful to try to dig under the perfectionism, whether that's stuff about control or just the question, "Good enough for what?"

For the record, I don't think you're weak. I mean what is all this anyway that you've been going through? Something like the mental equivalent of repeatedly getting up to walk on broken legs in search of help?

Wow, I hope this is coherent. I'm beginning to have trouble keeping my eyes open, so I should probably stop trying to write. But before I go, I want to say that I really hope things get better for you.