Introspective
I feel like an alien observing another species, trying to learn fast enough to try to fit in before others notice. But no matter how much i try, how much i learn, I’m always going to be an alien.
I have no identity because I’ve always changed myself to fit in.
I attach my identity to my ideas and thoughts, not anything physical. This might be why I feel so separated from others; I feel like i can’t truly express my identity because others don’t comprehend or are uninterested in my more abstract ideas.
I fear things that I want
• When I want, I give up part of the control that I have over myself over to that thing
• By wanting something, I create a vulnerability. By not being able to control my emotions towards something, I allow it to manipulate my emotions.
• I fear the things that I want because they have the power to hurt me without my permission
• One possible reason why I (and why others may as well) push away both things and people that I care for and want is that they’re all vulnerabilities; they can all hurt me.
• I guess I’ve been hurt so bad that I feel like I can’t afford to have that happen again. I don’t know if I can survive another shattering of my soul, reality, and heart
• I believe this shattering has occurred twice the first was of course with her. The second was kind of a 2 parter. 2a was when I took a leave from school and 2b was when I dropped out of school entirely. These are my biggest failures and my biggest scars.
• These (her and school) are the main recurring dreams I have. I feel as though it means that these are the things that are weighing on my soul whether or not I’m thinking about them
• This fear of wanting and the pain that comes with it is why I get so anxious whenever it comes to getting into another relationship or in general self improvement.
• These are my two deepest wants
1. A genuine and mutual loving relationship with someone kind and intelligent
2. Self improvement (and testing that improvement). I’m the type of person that always wants to improve, and gets uninterested when I feel like there’s nothing more I can do to improve myself or my surroundings.
• I used to be afraid of losing what I wanted and had, and because of that I lost everything that was important to me. When you hold on too tight, you crush the thing you wanted to protect.
• Now I’m too afraid to want or have anything, because it’s easier to live without what I love in the first place than to lose what I love.
• For the longest time I thought I was only happy when I was high, but I wasn’t feeling happy. I was feeling relieved because the I was able to forget my loneliness for just a little while.
• When all you feel is pain and loneliness, becoming numb becomes addicting.
• I broke a long time ago, and I don’t have the energy anymore to pick up the pieces. How can I ask someone to shoulder that burden for me?
• This is one of the few times I feel like I’m neither prepared nor worthy of what I want.
• I don’t settle, and unfortunately she set the bar extremely high.
• I don’t know how to try for my own happiness anymore. I can’t be with someone to make myself happy, so I need to know at least I’m making someone else happy.
• I feel like I failed myself in that relationship. I wasn’t at a point where I could maintain it.
• I’m not good enough right now. I’m not up to my own standards, so I don’t want to give myself over at half best. “Good enough” isn’t good enough.
• I don’t really hate myself, but I don’t like myself right now. I know I want to change. I don’t want to be with someone who loves the me right now.
I’m running low on energy. I can keep swimming, but I don’t see anywhere to swim to. So right now I’m just treading water.
I’m waiting for a wave to catch to help me make the significant progress that I know will be worth my energy, but the waters I’m in are too calm.
Calm is good for survival. I won’t drown. But I won’t get anywhere where I am right now. If I’m going to swim again, I want to swim somewhere full of energy.
Medication is the last chance I’m giving myself to finally start swimming without an external wave. Once that fails, I have no other excuse to finally leave these waters.
• I hate myself because I can’t save the world, but then I hate myself more for being so arrogant that I think I could possibly save the world. But then I double down to improve myself so that I can save the world, but then the process just repeats itself.
• I’m a fucking joke. How can I save the world when I can’t even save myself?
• I don’t even know if I really want to anymore. At this point, I want to the world to burn, and I want to die along with it.
• I’m waiting for everything to collapse so that I can pick up the pieces and build it in my image. I’m done trying to protect the world from its inevitable self implosion. Just let it happen and let the worthy try to rebuild. I don’t even care if I’m one of the ones left over. I’ve wanted to die long before this ever materialized.
• This is what happens when generation after generation chooses the easy and comforting lie rather than the hard truth. We’ve built our society on a crumbling foundation, and now we’re acting surprised when it’s collapsing under its own disgusting weight.
• For some reason I’m the bad person for wanting to leave this disgusting existence we call life.
• All I want to do is explore death, but for some reason I’m forced to continually suffer in a toxic world because others are so selfish that they want me to stay around like a miserable animal locked in a cage. If they didn’t want me to kill myself, they should have tried harder to make the world a place worth living in. I’ve given up on my happiness, but they still expect me to stick around and play the part for their sick and twisted fantasy.
• We’ve been aware of these problems since history has been recorded. I’m tired of the world relearning the same lessons over and over again. All it does it wait for evil to take hold and then ask for those greater than them to save them from their sin and arrogance.
• People who claim that they don’t understand how God can let such horrible things happen to us are fucking idiots. I don’t understand how he can keep giving us chances. If anything, he should have killed Noah along with every other person during the flood. Humanity continues to prove that we’re incapable of learning. We’re all just stupid animals who deserve to be slaughtered for thinking they were gods.
• Every time we create something wonderful, we pervert it to the point that an even greater evil spawns. We have enough resources so that everyone can live happily, but we’ve decided that living happily isn’t enough. Instead we only decide we have succeeded when we are better and happier than everyone. But instead of improving ourselves to be better, we ruin the lives of everyone else because we’d rather destroy the lives of everyone else rather than put in any effort to improve ourselves.
• Anyone who is surprised by our current state of events is a fucking idiot. We all knew what China was doing. We all knew what a America was doing. We all know what every corrupt government was doing, or at least we should have. All the information was there, but for some reason, even though we have the tools to prevent evil, we’d rather just be comfortable. We think our phones and computers are more important than the lives of the people who make.
• Everyone is so goddamn self-righteous it’s sickening. Anyone who looks in the mirror and doesn’t see a disgusting monster is lying to themself.
• I’m done. I don’t deserve anything good. If I somehow live through all of this, I’ll do whatever I can to help the next generation since it’s not their fault that they’re born in such a shitty world that we’ve created with our greed, arrogance, and stupidity. But as far as I’m concerned, everyone deserves the hellfire that is on its way.
• I’m tired of holding back. From now on, I’m going to let everyone know how shitty they really are. We bathe in evil, and the world reeks because of it.
• I’m tired of improving myself while the world shits in its own shit of mediocrity.
• They’ve decided their comfort is the most important thing. As far as I’m concerned, every American is just as evil and corrupt as the politicians that run the place. How can we complain about how we’re treated when we treat the world with just as little respect? At least the top 1% aren’t even pretending to be evil anymore, which is a lot more than I can say about the rest of us.
• I keep torturing myself because I see how much I benefit from the evil of others. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m just as evil for letting the evil propagate.
• The gift of life is wasted on me and everyone else.
• Is there even a point to starting over? All that we happen is the same things that have happened throughout history. We never learn, and I’m almost convinced we never will. Greater minds have come to this conclusion, so who am I to say otherwise?
• I’m tired of working with the arrogant imbeciles of the world. That’s why I like children. They’re as dumb as adults, but at least they don’t pretend like they aren’t. Learning hurts, but they want to learn anyways because they want to better themselves without even knowing it. Adults want the benefits if learning without the pain that comes with it, so they’ll cut corners anywhere and everywhere.
• I’m tired of sacrificing myself for those who don’t deserve it. I respect Jesus so much that I wanted to be like him, but I’m reaching my limit. I don’t know how he did it. He somehow kept seeing beauty in the most disgusting people. He was the greatest among us, and his reward for it was the most gruesome death imaginable.
• I don’t want medicine because I don’t think I’m the one who’s sick. The world is sick, and I don’t want to trick myself into living in a sick world anymore. I just need freedom to actually breathe the air that isn’t filled with the toxicity of man.
• What’s frustrating is that I know I have a counterargument to every negative comment here. That’s why I haven’t killed myself. This is just the first time I let myself vent without trying to convince myself otherwise. Just because I know I’m not right doesn’t mean I’m wrong either. I can’t give up, but I can’t keep trying on behalf of everyone else either. There are plenty of reasons to save the world, but it can’t happen until everyone else realizes that too.
• The reason I smoke weed so often is that it dumbs me down enough that a conversation with they average moron doesn’t hurt so much that I want to kill myself
• It’s physically painful to be this smart. That’s why I have such a short temper, and the littlest things set me off. I’m already struggling under the weight of my mind, and every little annoyance is just the straw that breaks the camel’s back
• That’s also why medicine will only cover up my problems instead of fixing them. No matter how much I do to take care of and better myself, everyone else remains painfully idiotic.
• What’s even more frustrating is what idiots think you’re stupid because their idiocy is so dumbfounding that you don’t even know where to start to correct them.
• If I don’t want to become what I hate, I need to keep moving forward, improving myself with every step. It won’t be fun, but at least it’ll be good.
As long as I believe I’m worth saving, then I’ll believe the world is worth saving.
If I give up on myself, I give up on the world.
The world feels disgusting, and so do I. But there is enough beauty in the world to remind me of the beauty in me.
I’ve recreated the world within myself, along with all the pain, struggle, and turmoil felt through it. But with that pain comes all of the beauty the world has to offer. That beauty makes trying to solve my problems, because since the world is within me, if I solve my problems, then I’ll solve the world’s problems.
I don’t think one person can save the world, and I don’t plan or expect to save the world. But if I can make any progress at all, I know someone will finally make it to the end. And even though I don’t expect to see the world in all of its beauty without the pain, the mere thought of that world eventually existing drives me on.
Accepting My Feelings, And Applying the lessons
Advice From The Light At The End Of The Tunnel / encourage
To start, her name is – – – – – – .
She was studying to be a nurse,
And you could really tell.
She had that confident caring to her.
She was kind to everyone,
But she had that
Self-respect and spunk
To not take shit from anyone.
She genuinely wanted
To help people,
Even becoming a nurse
Over becoming a doctor;
Because she wanted to have
A genuine relationship
With her patients.
She didn’t want to
Walk in,
Look at a clipboard,
And walk out.
She wanted to stay,
And give the care
That can’t be put in a pill bottle.
She sounds lovely!
I can see why you loved her. I’m really sorry it didn’t work out for the two of you.
It definitely hurt losing her,
but the more I look back,
the more I feel it was worth it.
I learned so much from her when we were together, but even though we rarely saw each other after, it felt like she taught me even more after.
Even though I didn’t have her, she was still my inspiration. I never really thought we’d get back together, but the only reason I ever improved myself was if by some miracle it did happen, I was going to be the best I could be for her.
I wouldn’t make the same mistakes.
Even though we didn’t get back together, I still realized she made me the best person I could be.
That’s such a mature outlook on things. I wish everyone looked at their previous relationships through this lens. I think there would be a whole lot less animosity.
I know that not everyone can say the same about past relationships, but even just looking at the relationship as “what can I take with me from this” is really emotionally mature.
I’m glad that you were able to make improvements on yourself and that you were able to experience real love even if it didn’t end ideally.
I’m excited for whatever comes next for you!
That’s nice to hear.
For the longest time I felt like a pathetic love-sick kid, so hearing that I sound emotionally mature definitely means I’m going in the right direction.
And you’re right about getting the chance to experience true love. As you said, it didn’t end the way I wanted, but I couldn’t have had a more perfect experience. Our time together felt straight out of a movie. It didn’t feel real how perfectly everything fell into place.
I’d love to hear more about it/her sometime.
In fact I’d be honored!
I think part of moving forward is being able to talk about these experiences freely with gratefulness. It sounds like you’re able to do that really well.
That really was one of the hardest parts. I couldn’t be mad at her. I didn’t want to be. And even when I tried, it was never real anger. It was just me lying to myself.
I think it’s harder to end a relationship without anger, because anger is probably the closest to love in terms of its effects on us. It can fill the void left behind, at least partially. But without it, you’re just empty.
I’m really intrigued by your comment about anger being the closest thing to love. Can you expound upon that?
I’ve thought a lot about this, and I’ll have to go through old notes to get it perfectly right.
But it’s kinda like the saying “two sides of the same coin.” Anger and love are birthed from the same base feeling, it’s just how you react to it.
It’s impossible to ignore either emotion. They make you act.
I guess the base emotion is inspiration. Something to drive you forward. Something that affects you at such a base level that denying them is equivalent to denying your existence.
Ah. Thats deep. I’ve never thought about it from that perspective, but it makes a TON of sense.
That’s also why I tell people not to hate people they don’t like. It’s better to just not care about them.
Feeling hate is saying that you care about them enough to devote your time and energy to them. And just like love, it must be expressed unless you want it to eat you from the inside. But unlike love, hate tends to be destructive to everyone involved. You can express it, but the best you can hope for is to feel the emptiness and dissatisfaction left by the expulsion of such a powerful emotion.
But it’s important to know that hate isn’t bad. We need hate as much as love, it’s just that we need to be more careful with it. We should save our hate for injustice, cruelty, evil. It still will leave a scar, but at least you can be proud of that scar. That scar means you stood for something that was important.
Another similarity between hate and love, is that they’re both self-propogating. Love leads to more love. Hate leads to more hate.
How would you advise someone from stopping themselves from hating?
A lot of self-reflection and willpower. You have to learn what’s important to you, and you must feel satisfied with being the bigger person.
It feels good to hate in the moment, but it poisons you. It’s kinda like alcohol in that sense. A little is fine, and can even help sometimes, but addiction to it will lead to misery and an early death – whether that death be physical or emotional.
This is getting to a little different but related topic: there are three aspects of being/self: physical, mental, and spiritual. They all work together to make you who you are, and they each have their own health. To fight hate, you must be equally healthy in all three.
What’s difficult about hate, and even more so depression, is that it can start in one aspect of your being, and then spread and corrupt the others.
You can start thinking about hating someone, but eventually hate will start affecting you spiritually and physically. You lose that inexplainable part of you known as your spirit, then you lose the will to take care of yourself physically. And if you can’t take care of yourself physically, then your mind will soon follow.
It’s a vicious cycle, because even if you’re able to make one aspect of your being healthy, if you don’t take care of all of them quickly enough, then the healthy part will just get corrupted again.
Yes! That reminds me of the bio/psycho/social/spiritual idea that we talk a lot about in counseling.
So would it be fair to say that your take on fighting hate is to actively attend to your whole self?
Most definitely.
It’s kinda like the idea “you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others.”
If you aren’t fulfilled as a person, you won’t be able to do anything else until you are. Even if you try to give back to the world, all you’ll be able to do is to take from it, thinking that somehow something outside of you will be able to fix something inside of you.
The most difficult thing about staying healthy is that each aspect of being is more difficult to notice than the next. Everyone can see when you’re physically unhealthy. Those close to you can see when you’re mentally unhealthy. But only you can truly know if you’re spiritually unhealthy.
And a big problem with that is our world has a fundamental misunderstanding of spirituality. That’s why so much suffering is in the world. We neglect our spirit until our body and mind fails.
I think I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. It’s helpful to gain another persons perspective on it.
I think I have been awfully tempted to hate recently and I want to be proactive about fighting it, but not entirely sure what that looks like. Well maybe I did, but I didn’t know how to put it into words.
I like how you put that. The “maybe I did” part.
I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit with how much we actually do understand about the universe, both inside and outside of us. I forget who it was, but a philosopher once said that we never really learn anything, but rather remember it.
It’s just that what’s easy to describe from one aspect is almost impossible from another. That’s why I love poetry. You feel something in your spirit, you form the words in your mind, and then you bring it into the physical world when you write. Writing poetry let’s you adress all aspects of you in one action.
That’s a beautiful way of describing poetry. That thought forces me to think about the things I enjoy in my own life and wonder if I invest time into anything that allows me to be connected to all parts of myself simultaneously.
I think you do, it’s just hard to be aware of it when we’re not entirely aware of our aspects of being. I only recently came to this conclusion about poetry.
Also, if you ever need help with hate or anger, I’m always here to help.
Thank you. I appreciate it. I struggle with it in my personal life, but I’m realizing I also struggle with it in my professional life as well.
The children that I work with have experienced some of the worst traumas a person can go through. Typically these traumas occurred because the people that were supposed to be protecting and advocating for them failed. It’s hard not to hate those who failed when you’re staring into the eyes of an innocent child.
I know exactly what you mean. Children are probably my favorite thing in the world. They’re so pure, and they have so much potential to be amazing. It’s the greatest evil to destroy the will of a child.
And I definitely struggle with hating people who destroy the lives of children. And though I struggle, I try to remember that they were once a child who was probably failed by those who were supposed to care.
I still can’t excuse their actions, and I don’t feel negative emotive when their actions finally come back to bite them. But I never let myself feel positive emotions when something bad happens.
When something bad happens to them, I try to feel remorse. Because I think it’s important that when you see someone who acts in a way you disagree with, that you don’t wish for pain and punishment for them, but rather that they’ll lead from their mistakes, and become the good person that everyone is able to be.
As I was writing, it reminded me the story of Saul/Paul. Someone who was once the worst persecuter of Christianity would eventually become one of the greatest disciples.
That’s funny that you say that.
I was spending a lot of time today challenging my own thoughts, and one of the things I told myself to do was to picture one of my clients as a parent, and the likelihood of them causing their children pain is a lot greater just given their experiences, and I was able to extend even the smallest amount of empathy towards their parents.
Yeah, I know people hold the capacity for change. Otherwise I wouldn’t be pursuing this kind of work. I think of some of my greatest failures and shortcomings and how desperate I was for grace and forgiveness… that helps.
I think it’s one thing when someone expresses remorse, because I am able to connect to their humanity a little easier, but with those that don’t have any remorse for whatever they’ve done it’s a lot harder.
This is going to get a little bit away from the philosophy I’m more certain about, but I’ll try to explain my feelings towards people who lack remorse and empathy.
I’m really good right now.
I had forgotten what it meant to feel this way.
Toxic people feel the need to be heard. Helpful people are there to balance out the toxicity.
Never saw it that way. I guess we all just want to be heard.
I think we all want to feel validated. I think those who scream the loudest aren’t validated by those close to them, so they go somewhere where no one can physically make them shut up. And they think the best way to get a response is to say terrible things.
I’m dealing with anger issues and depression. I admit I do this in real life when I’m frustrated.
Screaming.
The need to outrage.
Despair.
That’s understandable. Most of my views I form are from self-reflection.
I used to have terrible anger issues, and I had to take a long look at myself to figure out why I was responding the way I was.
And I empathize with that feeling of despair. I described my depression as an abyss that took away the light of my life.
A major cause of it was me trying to reject and deny my feelings. I felt guilty for having them, so I pretended I didn’t. It’s important to know that you’re not a bad person for feeling things. We can’t and shouldn’t control our feelings, just how we react to them.
My best advice is to find a healthy and constructive way to express yourself. I personally turned to philosophy and poetry, but there are many healthy ways to express yourself. I believe all art is good, but some people aren’t necessarily drawn to it. Things like sports, studying, music, or even volunteering are very good places to start.
A lot of what you said here definitely rings true for me.
I used to draw, and sort of “gave up” on it. I think I need to draw again, as an outlet to express myself.
Thank you for the advice. I’ll take it to heart.
Are Drugs Good for you?
The short answer is sometimes. But that’s only when you use them responsibly.
I can’t say they’re absolutely bad for you, because without this recent shrooms trip, I would still be in the pits of depression. However, when you’re depressed, you’re probably not going to use drugs for the right reasons.
I describe drugs as mental tools. They should be used responsibly to unlock certain aspects of your being. Like tools, they can accomplish things much more quickly and efficiently. But also like tools, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to get hurt. A jackhammer isn’t inherently dangerous if you’ve been trained to use it, but you’re bound to hurt yourself if you play with it.
As someone who struggled with depression and anxiety for years, I realize that I was very much abusing drugs in order to cope with my mental illness. I know for a fact that it drove me down deeper into the hole. Drugs numbed me to the world, so I let myself fall without ever trying to catch myself. And then when I finally hit the bottom, I was still too numb to get up; to climb from the pits of despair.
However, I don’t necessarily regret using drugs to cope. It definitely would have been smarter to ask for help, but the world teaches us that asking for help is weak.
It’s not.
But when your cries of help are continually rejected, you start to believe that the problem really is you and your weakness. So I refused to rely on anyone else, and I had to rely on drugs.
Like I said, the abuse of drugs is not good for mental health, but it did keep me alive long enough to finally address it. What I mean is that, had it not been for the drugs numbing me from life, I probably would have killed myself. Every time I smoked; every time I drank; every time I went on a three day Adderall binge was me saying I wish I could kill myself. But I refused to kill myself, so I chose to do something that I thought would kill me, but kill me slowly. The way I saw it, either the drugs would keep me alive long enough to finally climb out of the abyss of depression, or they would eventually give me what I thought I wanted: Death.
I’m not saying that if you’re struggling with mental health problems that you should turn to drugs. Quite the opposite. Go find help. It’s hard, painful, and scary, but it’s the only way that you will ever get better. It may not feel like it, but there’s always someone rooting for you. Someone who not only is willing to help, but wants to help. So many of us have experienced the emptiness of a dead soul and a broken mind, and we don’t want to see anyone else suffer through it.
I still enjoy drugs. They let me access parts of my being I never knew existed. They have taken me to new heights of enlightenment. But if used in a reckless and irresponsible way, they will send you to the depths of hell, where escape becomes a miracle rather than a challenge.
The fear of mental illness has lead to a mental health pandemic. We’re starting to become more understanding and accepting of it, but I can’t wait for when seeking therapy/counseling becomes the norm rather than an embarrassing exception.
The world needs to know that mental illness isn’t a weakness, just another challenge that we must face head-on so that we don’t fall into the trap of delusion.
♡Sugar☆World☮ 