I Feel Like Shit Today

It sounds like you're half blind. You see the negative and focus on it, but you ignore and marginalize the positive. And even when you briefly mention the positive, you almost immediately go into the negative and completely negate it. And don't get me wrong - it sounds like everything that you're saying is true. It's just not the whole truth. If you only focus on the negative, then that poisons you. There's no other possible result.

I don't understand the psychology that drives some people to only focus on the negative, and to hold themselves so vehemently within those lines, but I do know that it's common. I do it too in some areas, and in the past I did it a hell of a lot more in a hell of a lot more areas. I can't speak to the psychology behind it, but I can speak to the result of that psychology - the result is that it makes your entire existence depressing, miserable and hopeless - not because your life actually is depressing, miserable and hopeless - not completely anyway - but because you can only see the dark parts of it.

If you truly want to keep seeing only the darkness, then nothing that I or anyone else does or says is going to change that. But if you want to make things better for yourself, then there are tools and options and paths and whatnot that can help - you just have to reach out and look for them. I think that what it comes down to is this:

What do you want? What do you truly want, in terms of your highest priorities. Because everyone, whether they admit it to themselves or not, wants to avoid leaving their comfort zone, to avoid growth, to avoid seeing the things that they don't want to see, and to avoid letting go of the stories that shield them from change. It doesn't matter if your comfort zone is miserable or if your life is terrible - because on some level, we all want to hold ourselves in place, regardless of how good or bad or really-fucking-bad that place is.

But we also all have a will to grow. A desire to grow as a person, to move toward seeing the truth about ourselves and the people around us - to become more than we are, and move toward real health and happiness.

We all have a system of values, and we all place personal growth and happiness and staying in our comfort zone and holding onto our stories and a million other things into that value system. We all want happiness, but do we want it more or less than we want to avoid the pain and the responsibility and the often monumental effort that would be required to actually achieve that happiness?

If you've spent years and years being unhappy - then the painful truth is that there's something that you value more than you value happiness. If there weren't, then the unhappiness and the difficulty of everything and all of it - it couldn't and wouldn't have lasted for so long.

At the end of the day, the only way to step out of that trap is to admit that you've spent so many years holding yourself in it - which is a truth that's too painful for most people to bear, so they reject it.

This is the kind of story that feels all too common for our generation. Getting work was tough, most of it was crappy, and now a lot of us are stuck in those crappy jobs. We can't afford to improve ourselves to get better jobs. And what little money we do have we spend on what others view as frivolous things because we need the stress relief. Saving for noble goals doesn't do much good when you mentally snap before getting there. And then we feel shit about ourselves as all the older people who let the world turn into this nightmare judge us for not being able to make it like they made it, completely ignoring the fact that work was usually more steady and paid living wages.

🤗 I feel ya. Hang in there!

Why not try just tackling one problem with no expectation of doing anything about the rest? I think that might help. People paradoxically will try to wait until they feel good to take care of things, when in reality taking care of things is what might make them feel good.

Might not be the case with you, but you'll never know til you try

🤗

Life sucks, yeah...