Indiana. It makes me feel sad, too.

I’ll give a hopeful one:

Many years ago I was in a hopeless and hellish state. Unemployed, sleeping on a cot in my parents basement, my health failing me, and recently bankrupt.

I was suicidal but not to the point of having ideation. “You should just kill yourself” was a common refrain of my internal monologue.

Then I read something on reddit like “How long would you stay friends with someone who talks to you the way you talk to yourself?”

So I started on a serious effort to remove that from my thoughts. It was 2008, and Obama was running against McCain. I liked them both but was definitely in Obama’s camp.

I tried replacing “You should just kill yourself” with “You should just kill John McCain.”

And it worked! That shocked me out of that self hatred long enough to start to laugh it off.

A little time went by, I met someone, got a job. The someone convinced me to get surgery for my issues. (a hernia but I didn’t think fixing that would even help the overall stuff I was fighting)

We have been married almost a decade. Nine years in the house I got her when I got a better job. I work from home hanging out with all our animals.

Things CAN get better. There’s never a guarantee but it’s worthwhile to not give up. You can climb that mountain, dig that tunnel, whatever you need to make that journey through the darkness.

And I left a LOT of shit out of that story.

About two years ago I stared into the void. I didn’t have any real problems in life, but my job was boring as hell and my colleagues were always constantly negative, depressing and whined about everything, which affected my mindset after months upon months of that.

Freshly out of university, the job (which I couldn’t leave due to contacts) sucked out my every hope and dream of having a fulfilling career where I’d have an impact on the world. I felt so useless. To make matters worse I fell in love at that time.

One day I vaguely felt bad, got home, sat down and started crying like crazy. Life felt so meaningless. Not my life specifically, but life as a concept. I could change my life, but to what purpose? I sincerely felt regret for ever having been born and existence felt like a cruel joke, it was all vanity, pain, and at the end you die without even feeling the relief of it being over since you would be gone. It was a feeling of meaninglessness where even doing something about it was as meaningless as doing nothing.

The next day I had another crying session, didn’t eat anything the whole day as well. And in the evening I remembered how Seneca wrote that nothing bad happens to good people since those “bad” moments are the only time we get to show our virtues. Didn’t really fix the basic problem of meaninglessness, but it did reinvigorate me. Reading Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus” also got me to handle the absurd better. But the moment I got out of the whole ordeal altogether was about 8 months later when I realized that I was very much pushed to such a state by my colleagues, and that I yearned for some sort of warmth and comfort from others. But nobody has really ever shined for me, I realized that I had to be my own light and that I should not do things to earn other’s approval, but for me (this does not mean being selfish, according to Platonic and Aristotelian ethics, doing morally good deeds is for the benefit of the doer). I’ve been fine since then.

I was so broken in my early 20’s. I had been consistently struggling with college, did not understand myself, and just genuinely felt alone. It wasn’t until my 30’s and getting into a psychology class that I started piecing together that I have ADHD (officially diagnosed now), a sleep disorder that makes me tired unexpectedly and intensely, and just generally started to find who I was as a person. It took years of working with a psychiatrist and psychologist (therapist) to start unraveling years of negative self talk and also work through some religious trauma.

The one point I remember is I was thinking just how easy it would be to drive off a bridge…but I liked my car too much to do it. Those were rough times, but I made it through and haven’t been that low since.

Ohio.