Have you ever, like, missed every professional commitment you had? For two days in a row? Because you’re chronically exhausted, battling intrusive thoughts and have roughly the executive functioning level of a “functional” hard drug addict? And you channel the frustration into getting mad on the internet about things you have no control over? Because, LOL
@“bwood”#p95767 Yeah I am always extremely wary of the self-help industry or any piece of media with a title like that (an ideologically loaded one, to boot) but if there are concrete activities that people find helpful that sounds worth a look
@“2501”#p95920 liking a post in this thread feels like a minefield. I offer mine as a way to show recognition. I‘ve been there and it’s rough. I‘m sorry you’re going through it.
@“2501”#p95922
I am too.
One of the first things I did to get out of my own way was ask myself what type of principles I wanted to live by. I think I chose four: honesty, kindness, security, and knowledge (heh. It kind of sounds like stats for a video game). I then worked on building myself up with those stats. I was a real jerk, so it took a while to break myself out of my meanness, and in doing so I also grew apart from family members and friends.
Before focusing on principles, I felt like I was trying to make a broth while constantly stirring the pot. Focusing got me to stop stirring, and the toxic fat began rising to the surface. I started skimming the toxicity off by fixing or cutting off toxic relationships, quitting social media, dropping the sarcasm and only saying honest, nice things to people, and then going a step beyond and doing nice things for people.
I knew I couldn't get better on my own, so I looked for someone to mentor me. I asked a friend of mine whom I really respected, and he turned me down, but there was a woman at work I only saw at meetings who appeared very genuine and kind, and she said she'd help me out. She didn't even really do anything. I just made it a point to say hi to her, ask her how her day was, stuff that sort of forced me to be the person I wanted to be.
Another thing I did was start to work on a schedule. To this day I'm garbage with this sort of thing, but IIRC the book emphasizes making room for things that benefit us physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.
The other thing was making a list of what I had to do, but put the items into 1 of 4 quadrants.
Quadrant 1: Urgent and Important
Quadrant 2: Not Urgent but Important
Quadrant 3: Urgent but not Important
Quadrant 4: Neither Urgent nor Important
I definitely dumped everything off of quadrant 4. I don't remember what I did with quadrant 3 stuff. I realized it was stuff important to others and not to me. Somehow I got rid of it. Either I told people I couldn't do whatever it was, or if it was extra work I told them no, and if it was mandatory work stuff, I guess I moved it to quadrant 1. I then chipped away at both quadrants 1 and 2, because the goal is to just live in quadrant 2. Stuff like reading books, playing video games, and playing guitar are in my quadrant 2. Just because others don't think they're important doesn't mean they're not important to me. But I no longer watch tv or go on social media (except here) because I was only doing that stuff out of FOMO or habit.
I hope these tips are helpful. Actually, because you got me thinking about this, I'm going to get back into working on being a better me, so thanks.
When I was like that I went to the city‘s behavioral health services, which is right next to the hospital. You might be in a state where a forum cannot help you. There’s no shame in that.
Perhaps take a shower, so the overstimulation of water might calm your brain down, and if you can't get out of the brain funk, seek professional help.
Slept through the start of work (which means missing the whole day) three times this week and might lose my job hooray
@“2501”#p96550 Forgive me for overstepping my boundaries as a stranger on the internet, and ofc I have very little contextually important information here, but: if you have not done so already you need to tell your boss/whoever what is going on, if they don't already know, and do whatever is within your power to get out of this spiral. Is there a therapist/psychiatrist/hospital/wellness center you can go to? Is it prohibitively expensive to do so?
@"2501"#p95743
@"2501"#p95920
Wrote a letter to my supervisor explaining I have a diagnosed sleep disorder (which is mostly true), no mention of mental health
this right here is one heck of a thread! thanks to everyone who’s had the courage to post in it so far.
like many of you, i relate to a lot of what’s been shared here, but to me, it all comes down to this, which @"2501"#281 summarized:
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alienation from community, family and sense of collective purpose.
i feel alienated from everything, all the time. personal interactions with almost anyone except my two children and a few select others is a source of pain, frustration, fear and shame. and yet when i am alone (which is almost all the time physically, and even more almost all the time mentally), i yearn (so much so that i actually felt justified using the word ‘yearn’) for meaningful contact with others.
how do we even interact with each other meaningfully anymore? it always feels like there are layers of bullshit in between, whether in the form of corporate bureaucracy, social obligation (agreed-upon calendar dates or pre-established ‘reasons’ which i had no say in), or media-mandated pleasantries.
i feel like a crazy person and/or a Holden Caufield writing these things. but i do feel like a phoney and everyone who appears to be genuinely enjoying themselves free of irony most of the time appears phoney to me.
comfort can be found (for me) in the fact that some ancient belief systems teach that existence is indeed suffering—that sounds about right to me!
learning to meditate – daily mindfulness sessions and guided meditations using an app – has been a relief, but everything about the world freaks me out. i am going to be 40 years old soon, and i still don’t know what i want to be when i grow up. i am only just now getting comfortable with the fact that humans killing the planet we live on is just part of who we are.
(god it felt good to get that out. thanks for setting this thread up, @“Gaagaagiins”#429)
I‘m in a weird situation right now where I’m struggling a lot with some stuff and it‘s affecting me a lot in my day to day life. I know seeing a therapist (and eventually a psychiatrist because im sure I’ll need meds regarding some stuff) would help me a lot, but I've been unable to do so because when I was in my early teens I had some really bad experiences with psychologists and psychiatrists and that has led to a lot of trauma.
Last year I went to three different therapists but it turns out it's very hard to find a therapist that's both knowledgeable about queer and trans stuff and isn't totally dismissive about autism and ADHD. (I was diagnosed with both when I was 12)
Seeing three new therapists that didn't work for me last year (even though I only went to one session with two of them) was an extremely emotionally exhausting experience.
Right know I identified a therapist that could be a good option but I havent been able to actually make an appointment because the thought of seeing a therapist that could potentially be bad is hard at this point and my trauma is holding me back. I'm also afraid of making the appointment but when the day comes being unable to actually go.
It's very ironic that I have so much trauma regarding one of the things that I need to get better right now.
@“whatsarobot”#p96836 i know very little about what your personal life/work life is like, so not sure how much this question applies, but i‘m curious how much the feelings of isolation you’re describing are related to living in a foreign country? maybe “foreign” isn‘t the right word, since you’ve been in Japan for most of your adult life if i‘m doing my math right – though it’s still not the place you were born in or grew up in, and i‘m assuming your parents and other (non-spouse/kids) family don’t live there. (not that proximity to family necessary reduces isolation.)
@“saddleblasters”#p96864 this is a question i wonder about all the time.
choosing to live in a foreign country and also being privileged enough to come from a country that would be very nice and tempting to return to sometimes feels like kind of a curse. there are days when i'm sure it's because i live in Japan that all these mental badtimes plague me, but there an equal or greater number of days when i thank the heavens that i live in Japan, both because it is a wonderful place to live and because my depression felt so much more acute when i was back in Canada (particularly during the winter).
it's a constant game of "what if...?" that i choose not to try and engage with too much.
i have friends here, and i also have friends back home. and i know folks from both of those friend groups who suffer similarly to the way i do. some of them were born in Japan and still live in Japan. some were born in Canada and still live there. some of them were born elsewhere and now live in either Canada or Japan, or elsewhere! i feel blessed to have a support network of friends, family and in-laws. if i were _truly_ alone, as i know some people are, i don't know what i'd do. and my heart goes out to those people.
i will say that i do feel more "at home" here than i do whenever i have returned to Canada, although i haven't actually done that since before the pandemic. but i also don't feel 100% at home here.
so, in conclusion, does never feeling at home anywhere relate to feelings of alienation? lol yes, to some extent i have to admit that it does. to what extent, though, is the question.
one thing i didn't touch on in my original post, but intended to…
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a sense of collective purpose
i work a bullshit corporate job, and as many people in my situation will tell you: i'm blessed to have this job, where my body is not at risk, and i get paid a decent salary. but it does also basically feel like mental and emotional prison, where i have to spend most of my living hours serving powerful people who are trying to accomplish things i don't believe in or care about.
how much better my life would be if i could teach children who wanted to learn, and cook for people, and make my community more beautiful, and care for the elderly who have no one to depend on, and walk dogs!
i _could_ do some, or all, of those things, and i try to when i can. but i don't have time or energy for them with my current employment situation, and i can't afford to voluntarily earn less money!
that's the larger issue, for me. and, i suspect, for a lot of us here.
Hey buds. I‘ve been thinking a lot lately about my relationship with the things I create and the people who interact with them. People throw around the term “imposter syndrome” a lot and I guess that’s what it is, but I‘ve got a lot of conflicting feelings and I don’t want to reduce them down to some catchy phrase for the sake of containing it in some figurative box because I‘ve never heard anyone talk about quite the same kind of nuances I’ve been dealing with (at least not within my social circles, which pretty much all consists of different flavors of creative-types). I figure a lot of you guys here make stuff too, so I‘m wondering if any of you can relate to these feelings. If not, I still think it’ll be useful for me to try and articulate this stuff.
A couple months ago I released a game, which [I made the decision to never directly promote here](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/190-podcasts-that-nobody-knows-about/58). Part of that was because I felt gross thinking of you guys as an "audience" to "promote" to, which is definitely a true belief that do I hold and will continue to hold, but I also realized another part of it was that I'm afraid of having people I respect check out something I've done because there can only be two consequences: you either like it or you don't, and both of those are equally freaky to me. This is what I've kind of been reconciling with lately, this idea that someone liking my work feels "wrong."
My game isn't terribly popular or anything, but [it seems like the few people who have played it really resonate with it](https://www.backloggd.com/games/commonplace). On one hand, this is amazing. All I want to do with my life is make things that can [mean something](https://twitter.com/Funbil_/status/1563891857062592514?s=20) to someone, so it's incredibly fulfilling to see that it's happening beyond [some comments on YouTube saying "this is great!"](https://youtu.be/VE2LlY5dIoc). It's amazing that my friends helped me pursue something because they believed in the vision, and now that it's released, even people who have never heard of us are able to appreciate that vision too. I've been in Discord servers where people mention _Commonplace_ as their 2022 game of the year without even knowing I was there (is that the first time I've addressed _Commonplace_ by name on the forums? That feels wrong, too. It feels gross). It's the most fulfilled I've felt in my entire time spent creating things (which is just about my entire life), and yet, it doesn't feel good. It feels like a trick. It feels like I'm getting away with something, or these people are just being kind to not hurt my feelings (provably untrue), or that if people played more "Good Games" they'd see that _Commonplace_ isn't really that special after all. I guess this is the part they call "imposter syndrome," but whenever I hear about "imposter syndrome" it tends to be nothing but these bad feelings. What's strange is, for example, when someone mentions how much they like the game, it's both the good and the bad at the exact same time. I'll read the nice things people have to say about _Commonplace_ and it nearly makes me cry because I'm so glad I could do something that means something to someone, but at the exact same time it feels so wrong that I get sick to my stomach. It's like I'm not letting myself accept that, y'know, maybe I actually did a pretty good job here? I feel embarrassed, I feel guilty, I feel ashamed. Someone is expressing how much they enjoyed my work, and I feel ashamed about it. Something I poured so much of myself into is being validated and I feel sick about it.
A long time ago I understood that nothing I'll ever make could even come close to being a fraction as good as the things that inspire me, but I still haven't exactly come to peace with it. I also understand this is a perspective basically every artist has by proxy of being the one who creates things. I'm not going to be inspired by my own work because it's born of already-existing inspiration; using that as a gauge of quality, and therefore comparing my work to work I enjoy, is fundamentally flawed and I'm acutely aware that it is. But I still do it anyways. I guess this might be the reason it feels so unreal when people are inspired by my work. I just can't comprehend how it'd feel to appreciate my work on that kind of level (which now that I'm thinking about it, understanding that people can have such drastic values from me is something I touch on with my therapist from time-to-time, though it's normally more along the lines of "I can't focus on anything because I can't understand why conservatives think it's okay for cops to kill people." (in case it wasn't clear, I am on the autism spectrum ([can you tell?](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/2253-overhead-run-and-guns-without-the-guns)) and one of the ways that "manifests" for me is by how intensely I need to understand things – hence this post, I guess (oops!! I didn't necessarily mean for this tangent to go in that direction – though I guess if anyone can relate to anything mentioned in these parenthesis, we could talk about this too))).
What's really concerning to me is that I'm already feeling this way after such a small reception to such a small project. I'm working on some other games right now that already have some pretty large user-bases (like a couple thousand per), and I can't imagine how it's going to feel when my work is implemented into those games for so many people to see. Then I think even further to the future, and I've concluded: the absolute worst thing that could happen to me is to become famous. All I want is to be "successful" enough to live comfortably off my work, but I'm sure even that is still gonna feel kinda awful. I can't imagine if one of my games took off in a major way and made some kind of actual cultural impact. I don't want to imagine it. Some of my other game designer friends talk about how cool it would be to become "The Next Toby Fox" but to me that sounds terrifying. I'm already having a hard enough time with a handful of nice reviews on Backloggd Dot Com...!!!!!
Re-reading what I've written here feels pathetic. "Oh no, people like your thing too much and that feels weird for you." I want to tell myself to just get over it, but I'm imagining if one of my friends came to me with these kinds of concerns about themself, and I wouldn't react that way. I wouldn't call them selfish or annoying, I'd want them to feel better. So I'm trying to show myself the same kindness by allowing myself to talk about how I feel. Anyone else ever catch yourself doing these double standards about how you treat yourself vs. how you treat others? Anyways, thanks for hearing me out.
@“Funbil”#p99386 Thank you for expressing yourself. I relate to this a lot, and it honestly helps me to know that other people struggle with seemingly discordant feelings surrounding (for lack of a better term) creative output, especially when it‘s folks who do such cool things. I often get stuck in a mindset of thinking that anyone who makes something I like or admire, or sometimes just puts out anything, must be significantly “less broken” than I am, because I feel like I can’t do shit. Which is, of course, demonstrably false. More than that, it's a completely false way of thinking; “brokeness” is not a spectrum in people and is ultimately a pretty twisted way to think about myself.
I'm going to talk a lot about myself here, mostly because I don't want to prescribe anything to anyone else, and because I want to demonstrate how I relate to what you wrote beyond saying so.
In Fall 2022 I re-entered higher education for the first time in literally 10 years to finish an undergraduate degree. I was terrified for many reasons, not least of which because I ended up in a higher-level art class. The program material was so in line with what I was returning to school for, I felt like I couldn't pass it up. During the first day of class, it was immediately apparent (to me at least) that I was surrounded by intelligent, accomplished people. I was the person with the lowest "class standing," meaning I had the fewest credits/college experience of everyone. Many people in class were already working in the field I want to go into - library and information sciences. Archivists, book workers, and librarians who were in this class simply to get to the number of credits they needed to graduate. The idea that I was going to generate creative work, present it to these people _for critique_, led to a series of minor anxiety attacks and one major one during the term. Even worse, my classmates ended up all being so kind and generous. They would engage my work thoughtfully and with an insight I feel undeserving of - me personally and the work itself. Some of what I made, and I feel weird even typing this out now, seemed to mean a lot personally to a few of my classmates and that sure does make me feel _weird about it_.
Ultimately what's helped me a lot is a focus on the process of it all. Staying in the moment with my creative process, divorcing my own thoughts and feelings about it from the thoughts and feelings of others, all towards the goal of feeling playful and having fun in my work. I think "playfulness" is a very embodied feeling, a way of knowing with the heart rather than with the mind, and there's a whole filing cabinet full of therapists' notes llisting reasons why that might be difficult for me to access. But that's what practice is for. In the end, I feel I got a lot of practice at that during Fall term. My professor is big on play in process in this way, and I ended up being so into it that I'm following her to her next two programs. Woops, I'm an art student this year. Really, I feel I just need more practice. It truly feels like a valuable life skill to learn, and can apply to many things.
My professor shared [this Lynda Barry comic](http://theophantasmagoria.blogspot.com/2010/08/two-questions-is-this-good-does-this.html) with the class, and this framing really helped me. I like that it highlights both praise and criticism as potential blocks, as well as the cyclical nature of these kinds of feelings (there is no permanent transcending of feeling like this - it's all part of the process.) To me, this serves to sidestep turning this perspective into a "have you tried yoga?" of creative process issues by placing it as an organic part of the creative process itself.
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@“RubySunrise”#p99401 feeling playful and having fun in my work.
Funnily enough, this is exactly the sentiment I try and impart when giving music theory lessons. I try to point out that the key of playing music is the "playing" part, which fascinatingly is linguistically true in other languages too like French and Japanese. Around the world, humans describe the act of creating music as "playing." Despite how much there is to learn and how intensely personal and important this stuff can be, it all comes from the joy of simply doing the thing. It's good to remember that's true for all art forms too, even if it doesn't necessarily have such a goofy etymological reference to tie it too like "playing music" does, lol. That playfulness is something I value a lot during the act of creation, but I guess I forget to keep it around after the creation is finished, too.
@“Funbil”#p99386 I totally understand and relate to what you‘re saying, and I agree that it does feel like “imposter syndrome” doesn’t quite describe it.
I have actually been having a similar experience recently as I put more and more of my writing out online. Only a few months ago was the first time an absolute stranger (not even from here) came upon my work and started following it and leaving nice comments and such. At first, I thought that they weren't real, and then I thought they were trying to trick me and make me look a fool, and it was only after a few weeks that I settled into the obvious conclusion that they are just a person my work resonated with. It seems like exactly what you'd want from putting your creative work out there online, but when it actually happens, it's somewhat terrifying. Just this awareness that someone you don't know is thinking about you, and has developed some sort of opinion or expectations about the work you create. It's weird! Currently, I am telling myself that I will get more comfortable with it over time, but I still only have the one "fan" that I know of, so who knows.
Also, I totally have felt exactly the same sort of misgivings about sharing my work here, from the guilt of trying to "promote" something (even if it's free), to the feeling that if anyone whose taste I respect were to read my work, I would die. The former I have sort of managed to deal with by conceptualizing it as "sharing" rather than promoting, just like how I send my stuff to my friends. It would be a weird place to try to "promote" because by my reckoning there's only 30-40 very active posters here, and so I can assure you that absolutely no one here is actually going to think that an actively participating member is only here to shill something.
As for the latter, yeah. All I can say is that I totally get it. People you know in real life (at least in my experience) tend to react with something like, "Wow, you wrote a _whole_ book!" which is an understandable sentiment/response but doesn't feel like recognition of it as a piece of creative art. But then sharing your work with people who are smart, well-read, and thoughtful is terrifying because they will read it as they would any other _real_ author/writer's work and I'm not sure if I'm ready to stand up to that level of judgement. But some day we have to go through it, I suppose! Or else nothing will end up anywhere.
So we're kind of in the same boat there. Perhaps if we row hard enough we can take it somewhere.
Also, one final thing: I often feel that having all the bad feelings I have aren't as bad as the continuous guilt for having bad feelings. That feeling that we don't deserve to feel bad because of x, y, z, etc. I think almost everyone in this thread shares that sentiment toward ourselves, but we all know when we read each other's posts that in every other person's case it's _complete nonsense_, since of course you are allowed to feel bad about stuff because it's hard or weird or even just because you feel bad! So I have been trying recently to just delete that part of my thinking that asks/tells me whether I deserve or don't deserve to feel bad about this or that particular thing, because I am allowed to feel bad whenever I want!
By which I mean, of course, that none of your concerns are silly, and just because things are going well in certain ways doesn't mean that your emotions can't be complex and difficult to deal with.
@“Funbil”#p99386
You know far be it for me to analyze someone without any credentials, but is this not a side effect of your subconscious cultural awareness of “tall poppy syndrome” producing a rational sense of dread? As they say in China, the tallest tree faces the greatest wind. By taking on a greater presence and degree of self actualization in society you effectively take on a greater responsibility and risk, you can look at almost any social media outlet to find scores of shitlords who do nothing all day but sabotage the success and self esteem of others. Who among us has not achieved and immediately faced scorn or sabotage from the cruel and unloved? In that sense perhaps childhood trauma or conditioning from unscrupulous educators or misguided parents is what ingrains this sort of inhibition into our behavior. Self sabotage and punish yourself before anyone else is able to, and they won't have a chance to get angry in the first place.
Just look at me, I succeeded wildly beyond my means over and over and _my life is completely fucked!_
I guess I'll post about that when I have a bit more brain juice a little later, I stress walked for 2 hours today and did over a hundred push ups powered by pure self loathing on a calorie deficit. Healthy it would be if I wasn't also >!suicidal!<.
I feel bad every time my dog looks at me like hey dude are we walking home now or going in another circle for 2 miles. He's a trooper and he eats good though, he don't mind too much when it's nice and cool outside like it is.
Edit: Every day I wake up and I remember.
My heart starts racing and my day is instantly ruined.
Edit:I am already exhausted after 3 minutes and my emotions are shutting down.
Edit: I will spend the entire day wasting time. I don't want to do anything anymore. I can't feel better but I can feel worse.
I‘ve been meaning to write a post itt for months now but I think it would take hours to compose all my problems into words so I’ll try to stick to a topic maybe everyone can relate to.
How weird has this pandemic made you as a person? How much harder is it to get out and go to things with human beings? I don't think I mean fear of covid: I've been quadruple-vaxxed, or quintuple if you count the bivalent as two in one, and I fully recovered from the virus itself. I'm not worried about catching it again.
Before the pandemic, I had been building a pretty healthy week of social activities, I'll try to recall them all: Mondays swimming, Tuesday about an hour appointment with someone I would be talking to the whole time, then Wed-Fri all life drawing. (Friday's life drawing was so good: held at a college where they teach animation, so the poses were all super dynamic, they started with like 30 second gestures maybe shorter so every session was kicked off with a really vigorous warmup. AND they only charged in donations to their food bank, so not only was it the best life drawing offered in the city, it was also the cheapest even if you donated generously. Beyond rad.) I wouldn't necessarily hit all of them every week, but I had a grab bag I could use to keep myself social and active. I started talking to people in one or two of my life drawing studios. I was feeling really optimistic about the progress I could continue to make!!!!
Now though, my week has changed but there's still loads I could get out to. We have *two* indoor skateparks here with "Girls+ nights" Mondays and Tuesdays I could take my blades out to—I'm in the Chicks in Bowls discord for our town and people seem real swell even. There's that ice rink with the Wednesday public skates that are open, apparently, year-round, and that totally rad life drawing is now held on Thursdays. Four out of five ain't bad, Jerry!!
What's the problem? I'm scared of people again! I feel really weird showing myself in person and doing stuff in front of other people. I feel like I've somewhat crawled back inside my shell. Even though a lot has changed for the better about how I see myself since the start of the pandemic, I don't really remember how to feel excited about meeting new people. My upbringing left me with a default dread of, I guess, getting close to people that I can definitely overcome with consistent positive interactions, but that just ain't been happening. I feel like I've still dealt with much worse anxiety than this, but it's always hard taking that first step out of a rut. There's more to it than that, but I'll save it for now.
So that's one thing I been dealing with lately. How about you all?