Source
r/SuicideWatch•
FunctionalDepressive

I just have some questions

I've had these questions for a long time, probably as long as I've been depressed and I doubt you guys will have answers, but here goes.

  1. If you can't love yourself, how will others?

  2. If you can't decide how to live or end your life on your terms, what's the point? Seems like I'm always accounting for others before myself.

  3. If you can't change your locus from external to internal, are you really living?

  4. If I choose to value my life based on relationships but have none/they are unfulfilling and I can't bring myself to change why bother?

  5. If my mind was poisoned by unhealthy ideas and standards for relationships and I can recognize it, isn't it better for me to die alone than bring some poor soul down with me.

  6. And this isn't a question, but please stop telling me to find a different purpose. I serve the government as essential personnel and all it's done is cement that fact that no one cares beyond supposed decency. You people don't know me but you'll probably ask me not to do it. But why?

  7. My last question. Why shouldn't I do it? To spare my family and friends? What if they only seem to care? Is a life without love worth living?

Posted Jan 20, 2018, 11:04 PM UTC · edited

320
silliestperson•

If I order your questions in a circle instead of a line, it’s an interesting cycle to look at. It sounds like you are experiencing being either unloved or treated in a way like you’re not worthy of love. It also sounds like you love others/behave in ways that are loving/honouring of them and their needs and that you don’t get that back in return. I don’t know if I’ve got that wrong though.

In answer to 1, I think it’s bullshit when people say that other people can’t love you if you don’t love yourself. I’ve loved tonnes of people who didn’t love themselves. I don’t think that others’ love of a person is dependent on their love of themselves but I think that love of oneself is dependent on experiencing consistent and trustworthy enough love from others at least a bit, and expressed in action not just in words.

5
FunctionalDepressiveOP•

All I've ever wanted was to get back what I put in. I give and give and give and then I'm tossed to the wayside. At least that's back when I tried. I gave up.

I just expect to much out of people. At the end of day, no one cares more than a few canned phrases. "You matter, don't go, there's no coming back"

If the only way to get my love is by ending it all, then that's wrong.

Why didn't I get just one person who cared more than just to tell me some hollow words?

2
silliestperson•

It makes me really fucking angry that people have been so repulsive, so arrogant and vile in their selfishness that you are left with that. You wouldn’t get their love from ending it.

This is not you. This thing that has been happening to you is not because you inherently somehow can’t be connected with someone else who is a giver and a genuine, trustworthy, open, loving person who will actually put their money where their mouth is and be there for you. You have, unfairly, been socialised into a situation in which those around you are selfish and you are left isolated and can’t connect with them on the level you need to to have a life worth living. You are not alone in this world though. You are rare, you are not one of the majority but there are more people like you. And when you connect together it is the most beautiful thing.

1
FunctionalDepressiveOP•

I can't make it anymore though. Everyday I get these thoughts. Everyday I participate in willing self-destruction. I can't continue anymore.

Maybe that person is out there. But I won't make it to find them.

1
silliestperson•

I understand. I do too. I’m highly ambivalent though about whether I can ‘be’ or not though. If you could ‘make it’, would you want to?

1
silliestperson•

Also I don’t think that you should find a different purpose. I think that relationships are the fabric of life for most people even if they don’t recognise that. I certainly feel most alive when I am connecting with another person, when interaction is happening.

1
silliestperson•

Yeah I hear you. I think that’s exactly it though. No you’re not ‘supposed to’ do anything or feel anything or be any particular way. It’s a fallacy we learn as a part of growing up where you’re either doing good or bad, nothing in-between and the expectation is that everything has an answer, a way you’re supposed to feel think or behave. It’s not real though, and so really you can just do as you like. It just doesn’t seem like it. You can be whatever you deem to be selfish and be alive. It doesn’t have to be death. There’s almost dare in there, ‘I dare you to keep being unfair to me, world, and if you do I’ll kill myself!’ But the world as a whole, life, doesn’t care, doesn’t notice any single person. There is no supposed to. So killing ourselves would prove nothing, achieve nothing, just end life at a point when we’re not getting what we want out of it. Of course life could go on and on being crap and continue to just be a series of painful encounters with parasitic people. In a way though, understanding that there’s no reason good or bad that ‘people’ should particularly care about us, and that it’s just a case of finding and maintaining those few actually meaningful relationships can be a liberation. I hope you can find that liberation and break through that just world myth to the side where you can really start just doing more of what you want instead of putting other people’s wants above your own needs. It doesn’t have to be a case of being just as bad as them, or of changing what you want out of relationships, just saying no, when you want to say no and being happy for others that they can do the same might do it. Breaking through is necessary and death seems like the only way out of this walled life in which it’s all just being drained and everything is flat, but that doesn’t let you know the outside.

Stupid example, but Truman show, it’s a bit like that. Everyone is fake as fuck and he starts feeling the emptiness and thinking somethings really wrong here and he wants out, he’s desperate and he knows he doesn’t want to be entrapped and defeats and shit into that world. He’s never known the outside world so he can’t even imagine it, but he will fuck everything over and break the rules he was socialised into following in order to get to that place. Another option would have been to just kill himself, but then he’d have just died in that fake dome and never walked through that sky door to experience the other world outside.

1
FunctionalDepressiveOP•

But what if the outside is the same or worse than the inside?

1
Ifeelzero•

i've done everything, i've tried to be more social, i've gotten exercise regularly, i've tried to appeal to people and look nice. but nothing has happened and im just waiting and waiting and the pain of waiting gets more intense every night.

1
silliestperson•

Then my love you can still try to break through to somewhere else, or you could even kill yourself there. I think it’s frightening also though to contemplate it being better, in a way. It means there would be hope, and hope is a bright hot painful thing to hold.

1
FunctionalDepressiveOP•

Am I scared to get better? Is this an unconscious manifestation of my brain trying to keep the status quo? If this is all I know, then what do I do?

I don't live in a place where it's okay to be babied and coddled back to health. Hell I barely feel comfortable telling anonymous strangers on Reddit who I will never interact with irl. How do I break through these walls and stigmas?

How do I truly admit I'm messed up? Do I just break down crying at the therapists office, or on the phone to my parents? What do I do?

1
silliestperson•

It sounds like working through it on here is like a very first step. It's better than if you were pre-contemplative about it. I don't know. What would it mean if you were to get better? Can we start with that? What are the pros, and what are the cons? Often there would be cons as well as pros and I think that all of it deserves some examination.

1
FunctionalDepressiveOP•

So I have a huge disconnect in my head that I recently identified. I never liked my life growing up because it felt like I was just coasting by as a background. People said they cared but I never felt like it.

I turned to maladaptive escapism. I used fantasy books, videogames, and TV shows. Those characters always felt like they mattered, always had someone there for them even if they didn't want it.

Obviously fiction usually only tells us the best stories or more appropriately, the stories which have drama and conflict because no one would care otherwise

i felt like my life was meaningless. Nothing I did mattered. So why would it suddenly be such a huge thing to die. If I was meaningless, no one would care right?

That's where the cognitive dissonance and frustration stems from. I don't think I have inherent value, never had. I rely on others to affirm my worth. I never got those others.

I have this toxic dependency that I need to get out of. But I can't. So at the moment I see three courses of action.

Find someone who will affirm my worth and allow my dependency to continue.

End it all.

Find my own worth from within.

1
silliestperson•

Those are three fair options.

I see it that nobody has inherent value outside of their potential to do things that are valued, which is the ‘potential value’ I see as inherent in all people. I think for some people, that sense of being valuable is instilled in them by parents who behave as though they are valuable, and who value themselves and each other. That’s how that sense of self worth is observed, first received, then internalised.

If your situation was reliably loveless at critical periods of development, you’d be cold and mean and you wouldn’t give a fuck or value other people. Somewhere around a third of people are like that. If you were securely attached with reliable love you’d feel okay about yourself, no matter what you thought about it, or your philosophical position.

If you had unreliable, on/off messages of love, compassion, attention and affection so that you couldn’t guess when you were going to get a response/a good or bad response from your adult/s, then generally speaking you end up with a needy/desperate/searching kind of feeling about others, mixed in with some ambivalence so that sometimes you feel like you’ve go to try really hard and other times you feel like you want everyone to just go away. It sounds like something along the lines of the third thing might have happened for you. Does it make any sense at all or does any of it sound familiar?

Then that gives a fourth option, somewhat like your first and third combined, where you seek an audited secure attachment type, as an adult. That’s just one suggestion for a potential fourth way. I’m sorry if that’s not the kind of response you wanted. I see your reasoning. What do you think?

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