Tell me about your absolute lowest point in life
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Anonymous
Pp I'm another pp who lost their brother. It's so hard. For me I have had more than pockets of joy. Life fills in the hole slowly. Good luck to you. Grieve and take time to heal. It's a wound that will leave a deep scar. A scar that will hurt sometimes even after it heals but it will heal. |
Anonymous
NP here. My sister's suicide was 6 years ago and I would be very interested in exploring this. I often feel suspended in grief. |
Anonymous
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30th birthday. Divorced. No obvious way to support child. Felt I had ruined life/humiliated.
Now, married happily, own successful business. Total 180. One teeny tiny positive step at a time is my advice to anyone feeling lost. sending good vibes your way. |
Anonymous
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Several years of major depression. I had to leave my job and if I wasn’t living with my parents (at 35), I probably would’ve starved to death because I could barely function. I was suicidal. In fact, the only peace I got was the knowledge that I *could* kill myself at anytime. After a year on the wrong medication, I finally found the right cocktail, but the side effects of one of the meds was fractured sleep. So I could only sleep in 2 hour chunks. So sleep 2 hours, awake 2-3 hours, sleep 2 hours, awake 2-3 hours. So I was getting like 10-12 hours of sleep a day, but in 2 hour chunks.
I was so fatigued, I had to sit in the shower. I would read 3 pages of US magazine and have to sleep because it was so taxing. It was really the worst 3-4 years of my life. I finally was healthy enough I was able to get off the one med that saved my life, but screwed up my sleep. I found a new job and met my DH. Then we had 5 years of infertility treatments. We finally moved on to Donor Egg and I got pregnant!! At the 20 week ultrasound, he had died. And I remember about a week earlier that he kicked and thrashed so hard he woke me up at 4am. I know that’s when he died. Giving birth to him was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. In the weeks afterward, my arms ached to hold him. 4 years later, they still do. Oddly the thing that helped me heal was reading somewhere “you’ll never get over this”. I realized I was always going to grieve losing him. I was never going to “get over” this. I needed to find a way to deal with my new normal. A year later, in fact the day before my first baby’s birthday, I had my second son. He is amazing and wonderful and brings so much joy to my life. But he doesn’t take away the longing for my first son. And I’m always reminded when I’m asked “how many kids do you have?” To the world I have 1, but I really have 2. There is a really good post from Reddit about grief. I’ll have to find it. I always look around and think “we never really know the pain everyone is carrying around”. |
Anonymous
Have you tried EMDR? https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/eye-movement-reprocessing |
Anonymous
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Best explanation about grief
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/garysully1986/comments/6g3brt/gsnow_on_grief/ |
Anonymous
| I am in awe what some people have gone through. When something terrible happens you don’t ever really get over it. You still miss that person. You still feel the pain. But it’s not center front in your life and somehow you push it aside and live on. We’re still here. |
Anonymous
Thank you. The other stories are so sad. I feel for them. |
Anonymous
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H leaving me with only a temporary work permit, our child to take care of, and “generously” paying about 85% of our rent.
I was out of the workforce for 6 years because he was dragging his feet about our green cards. So I had to quickly find a job, any job, to feed the child and pay those 15% of the rent. I was babysitting, pet sitting, cleaning houses, taking part in clinical trials and focus groups, other odd jobs, all the while looking for a full time professional job and worrying about the green card. I was living in this invisible poverty, where to the world I was (still) married to a software engineer with a 200k HHI. Yet I was dirt poor as he cut off access to “his” money. I felt I could not tell anyone because of the green card (though it was not a marriage based case and it was a bona Fide marriage and a long term one). I am now a permanent resident and have a great full time professional job, I can afford enrichment for my son. I have yet to pluck up my courage to file for divorce - stbx is not going to be happy with what he will have to pay in child support... I realize it sounds minor compared to a lot of situations here. But the worst was the invisibility and shame of my near- poverty. |
Anonymous
Just came across some press about "smiling depression" the other day. Here's one of the articles: https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-a-dangerous-form-of-depression-nobody-talks-about There's so much going on with people. Someone who's acting "sullen" might be behaving that way because that's how they process grief. Another person might be acting happy but feeling sad and bleak. |
Anonymous
That’s the wave analogy of grief. Here’s a box and ball analogy https://themighty.com/2018/12/ball-box-analogy-grief/ |
Anonymous
| My mom died when I was 24. The three years leading up to her death were really really bad, as the cancer spread to her brain and she quickly became a shell of who she was and required a lot of dare (went from a healthy 55 year old to what seemed like a 90 year old with Alzheimer’s plus pain). At the same time, my brother’s marriage unexpectedly dissolved (wife cheated on him) and shortly after she died my sister gave birth to a profoundly disabled baby. Until that point we had all been extremely lucky in life, but somehow we muddled through, leaning on each other, and came out stronger on the other side - though I miss my mom terribly and my sister continues to have it pretty hard. It was a hell of a start to adulthood. |
Anonymous
+100 It's NOT your fault. I am sorry this happened to your siblings DP but it is NOT your fault. Have you considered therapy to work through this unjustified guilt? |
Anonymous
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Just came across this, made me think of this thread:
https://johnpavlovitz.com/2019/02/21/everyone-around-you-is-grieving-go-easy/ I’m the PP who’s son has late regression autism. I think about this all the time. I don’t “show. My chronic grief and am sure so many people are in the same boat. Empathy is hard but in the end, it’s really all there is. |
Anonymous
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I was returning home from a conference, visiting my mother in the midwest on my route home. I have just completed a degree in my field, accepted a job, and have not seen my mother for about six months. We have had a dysfunctional relationship for years, but I continued to call her every week. She has reluctantly permitted me to visit her, but refused to pick me up at the airport, so I rented a car.
I came into our home to see it covered in empty bottles, every kind of mess, and feces. In 24 hours, it became apparent that my mother decided to slowly commit suicide through alcoholism. She always drank heavily, but was, in retrospect, a high-functioning alcoholic. She had recently lost a job and decided it was not worth it to rebuild her life at 61 y.o. Her health insurance has also lapsed. She had no interest in getting help, care, or traveling with me to DMV. After I narrated all this to my husband, who was home with our early elementary school aged child, he informed me that he intended to leave me soon after I returned, now that I was done with my degree and was financially independent. How did I survive? Well, first I cleaned my mom's home, bought her a little couch, and moved her to the first floor. I did not want her to fall down the stairs and die. I packed the kitchen with little snacks and water bottles. I arranged for a maid service - she never ever let them in, but I kept them coming. I alerted her PCP, and we did have a visit together. I took her to the ER and got her rehydrated. I made an arrangement with neighbors to keep an eye on her. It was not enough, but nothing would be. I opened up to a mentor, who spent incalculable hours discussing my scope of responsibility. I ended up flying to take care of my mom one weekend a month, until she did die 6 months later. We called an ambulance multiple times, and she always refused hospitalization. You cannot treat a sane, verbal person against their will in this country. There would probably be people who would do more, but that is all I could come up with. I recognized myself as an adult only child of an alcoholic, read books, got help, begged my husband to read the same books. He recognized that many of my personality issues stemmed from this upbringing. We reconciled. It has been 8 years. When bad things happen, try - as much as you can - to nourish your survival instinct. Hold on to your job. Give 100% to your children, and prioritize your marriage. Everyone else gets what remains. That is what I learned. |