Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (June 2022)

I dropped a class because it turned out to be more work than I could handle. It was the right choice, but it does make me feel like I belong on disability. No immediate financial problems though. Just loneliness and soul-searching.

I'm really tired, but I'm being pulled in happy and sad directions both.

Happy: After months of searching for a better job, I get two solid hits within days of each other, either one of which would be an upgrade, and both of them are in the process of extending initial offers, so I have some bargaining room with both of them.

Sad: My mom, who was diagnosed with ALS at the beginning of the year, is still dying. She's going to be entering hospice shortly, which, while not the end of the road, means that the end could be here at any time. Mercifully, assisted dying is legal in California. Her doctor has signed off on a prescription that, if ground up, mixed with water, and drunk, will let my mom just fall asleep and not wake up. As compared to the later stages of ALS it's a merciful end, and the question is just about the specific timing, assuming some other thing doesn't take us by surprise in the meantime.

So I've got a bunch of big stressors pulling me in all directions. My emotions are whipsawing back and forth like mad. Thankfully I've got a new therapist starting in a couple weeks, not with the expectation that they can fix anything, but just to have someone to talk to that's unconnected to the situation. I've got friends who I do talk to a little, but I can't just hammer them with these heavy emotions all the time, so it'll be nice to have someone who'll listen.

I need a break.

My mom is selling her house but the market has cooled down enough that it isn't selling. She is cash poor and property rich (she bought in the bay area back in the 90s) so she needs the house to sell to retire. She missed the boom from the past few years and is now very stressed out, not happy with the realtor (she isn't easy to work with), and calling me almost every night to talk about it. I know she needs the support but it's a lot. I also have an upcoming work deadline that is kind of a "make or break" for our company. We have until the end of June to finish our major projects so it's been non-stop for about 2 months already and only getting more intense. On top of that some of our really good friends are leaving the area. One couple got divorced and the other is buying a house across the country. It feels a little like a "the band is breaking up" moment for our little neighborhood community (the husband of the divorced couple was kind of our lynchpin). He's awesome and I'll really miss him.

I think I'm going to take a few days and put things on pause. The weather is beautiful and I need to be outside.

I’m ok.

I think.

Although I'm overall OK, yesterday I had a very poor mental health day.

Growing up I always grasped things very quickly, and I got praised for high marks on tests in many subjects. Doing the homework was a different beast entirely; I had a very unstable home life at the time and got passed around often to different houses and in general felt very unwanted. If I didn't draw some measure of self-worth from that kind of performance, my self-esteem would have been truly in the toilet, so... well, of course I did. It was a self-defense mechanism.

Many people with these same habits have a lot of trouble transitioning to an environment where more work and study is required, and I did OK there as well after a bit of a rough start, but that coupling of my self-worth to my ability to perform complex tasks has never gone away.

Now the problem is I'm doing some new stuff for the first time in a long time. I'm actually a bit surprised my role involves so much of it, considering how I tried to emphasize my skills in other areas, but it is what it is. On some level I'm excited to have new skills, but on another, the process of learning vacillates wildly between being engaging and satisfying for me and being absolute torture. Nobody likes being bad at something, but sometimes for me it feels like an existential threat.

Yesterday was more on the torture side. I spent an afternoon weeping and doing my best to fend off some very ugly intrusive thoughts in reaction to feeling slow at learning some new stuff for work. I have extremely high expectations for myself. Or, maybe that's not accurate so much as I imagine everyone else has high expectations for me, and I imagine their frustration and disappointment with my lack of progress.

And it doesn't make sense! I've been told I'm doing fine, but I feel like I can hear their cordiality hiding their true feelings of contempt... either that or I believe I'm being cruel to them by taking advantage of their politeness much in the same manner of a con artist. I suppose it wouldn't be called mental illness if this intense anxiety - to the point of suicidal ideation because I can't make a flexbox do what I want - made sense. It's funny how small the thing that can send me into a full death spiral can be: one negative thought and the others follow like a deluge. Hey cricket, how dare you have this job when you're so utterly incompetent - you can't do simple things and your brain is like swiss cheese. If people knew how much you lied about being smart, they would stop being friends with you because what other redeeming qualities do you have? Think about all the times you have embarrassed yourself socially or accidentally made a situation uncomfortable, why would anyone be around you otherwise? (Oh and by the way you're also ugly, just thought I'd bring that up too while I'm at it. Your wife should probably leave you.)

Christ! People tell me I'm doing OK, often! I know, and will tell others, they have value outside of what others can get from them. But some days I just can't take my own advice.

Tldr: Can't find the drive to work on anything about myself for any reason other than "because women want that in their partners", and I it find reasonable to believe that's a bad reason to work on yourself

For some reason it feels like I have basically no drive to do much of anything for myself, health-wise or person-wise. Doing exercise (in a gym, with my mom, whatever) to have stamina for more than 5-10 minutes of basically any physical activity that is more than 50% running, or so I don't feel the need to move my neck basically incessantly, not having lunch at like 4 PM because for some reason (presumably doing nothing 24/7 and not gaining fat over it?) I have a weirdly low appetite, avoiding scratching some random minor itches I get (although I may be partly doomed to it by my type of autism featuring extra skin sensitivity) or, switching from the subject of physical health, try to become more self-confident via doing the former things or plain hubris (apparently some people say positively name-calling themselves actually helped them get more confident?), and some other personality and behavior-related stuff I find hard to imagine how to do like not being uncomfortable around women (especially if they're attractive).

Every time I feel like my classmates think I'm a weird or bad person I feel the need to do self-improvement like the things above to stop being weird so I can assume people (well, mostly women cause most the dudes in my class that aren't already part of the girls' group(s) including me are halfway to peers) won't come up with one or more reasons/excuses to avoid me or even tell me off explicitly and/or entirely if I ever try to interact more seriously (not necessarily romantically). That or I just feel like I need to work on myself for the explicit purpose of being desirable to women, which I've seen enough people say is a bad goal/motivation to not genuinely try, but for some reason all the other reasonings I could have to work on myself just don't compel me that much even though they're just as good if not better reasons. That and you shouldn't need a reason to be healthy at all. This reminds me of depression but I'm by no means depressed since I can operate entirely normally in school and among the handful of peers I have, so I'm not entirely sure why I feel so little natural drive to take care of myself.