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Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (July 2025)
This is a monthly thread for those who need it. Vent, share your experiences, ask for advice, talk about how you are doing. Let's make this a compassionate space for all who may need one.
The funding bill threatens Home and Community based services.
That is what we rely on to keep my partner home with me and not in a nursing home
I'm terrified. I'm exhausted. And we have the support now. If we don't... I don't know what happens. People will die. My partner could die, from a lack of home nursing if he gets a wound, or from improper care in ever more underfunded Medicaid nursing homes.
If we got married he'd be covered under my insurance but I don't think we could afford, well, anything then. I'm not even sure how to figure it out.
Every time things look up or even out we get boulders dropped on us.
Another friend of mine is a transwoman in the US, and by this point it's difficult to even say anything at times because of how hard it is. Which doesn't happen often to me, and is, for me, a really frightening measure of how bad it is getting there.
I'm just so sorry. I have no idea how it even remotely got close to this point sometimes. It's like there is a war on empathy and the most vulnerable of people, including you and your partner, have ended up becoming targets.
I really hope you can take care, and eventually don't end up to have to summon the strength you're forced to summon now, even when you may not have it.
I have been trying my best to avoid the news/political content purely for self preservation of my sanity. Recently, someone I know has started to take interest in "geopolitics" (their word, not mine) and asking questions or talking at length about Israel/Palestine, the USA, etc. and highlighting whatever new information they've consumed via youtube or insta. It is giving me such bad anxiety because, while I can tell their interest is genuine, they've also started to share talking points that feel a little like...they're going down a rabbit hole which might lead to alt-right politics? I don't know if I'm just chronically online, if I'm just not informed enough about these topics, but they've brought up some stuff that I sort of associate with qanon spaces and I don't know what to make of it.
I try to disengage from these conversations as much as I can but I fucked up this morning when they told me South Korea was likely to be invaded by a Russian-supported North Korea and I didn't respond particularly well. They got upset with me (my initial response was confused and maybe dismissive) but I had to spend a half hour trying to calm myself down and crying because I have family there and now I'm plagued by worries.
I asked this person to elaborate later but they likely won't because they said there was no merit in the conversation if I already had an opinion on the topic and now I'm also worried this person is upset with me and...it's just a lot. I can't focus on my work today. I hope they're wrong from the bottom of my heart.
Its a really good healthy boundary to be able to tell your friends you don’t want to discuss politics, and if they don’t respect that, they are not your friend.
I’m not talking like, geopolitics is their special interest so they just kinda dump sometimes and are respectful when you ask to stop, I mean, when you ask them to stop - they either react respectfully, or they don’t, and that tells you what you need to know.
I had to start doing this with my friends last year during the election, and I was so grateful that most everyone was respectful of it. I think you’ll be surprised.
As you said yourself, they are going down a rabbit hole. If these sorts of politics are all they can talk about it doesn't even matter which side of the political spectrum they have dug their hole. Generally speaking, people who are in this deep and can only talk about this as a subject also suffer from tunnel vision and lose sight of everything else. In fact, in my experience these people often ironically are not well-informed as they just absorb all the information they come across, overloading and confusing themselves in the process.
You did nothing wrong, you are not less informed, their obsession isn't your obligation to listen to. It is okay to have boundaries, certainly when politics are involved.
It's an absolute whirlwind in my head. In a very positive way.
It currently seems like my brain is reorganizing itself so to speak and giving me the unconditional, self sustaining self love that's usually only fostered in early childhood.
Which... I didn't even think was possible for someone with my background. In fact, I don't think I ever heard of someone 'recovering' from CPTSD? I can hardly believe I'm the only one but it's. Amazing.
Also really exhausting though. It comes with some things I definitely still need therapy for, and it has been overwhelming and coming with the occasional bathroom breakdown.
I actually had to check whether it wasn't hypomania or something instead, which I only did once in the past, the first time I was relieved from depression when I was 25.
The final push for me here was in the end being goddamn lucky though. I'll have to wait until after therapy to thank her due to context, but man. it's actually making me more understanding of why the people I helped in SuicideWatch all those years ago very rarely would give you an update, even if it was quite the conversation.
It's. Very, very vulnerable to tell someone you essentially owe their life. In this case it's more symbolic rather than literal but still. I can already tell its going to be almost nauseating to say this.
I still can hardly comprehend this all happened though. Especially when I constantly, deeply hated myself in the past. And the events that led to this were mostly by chance.
Your comment comes across as if you wish to share the fact that you are happy without going in too much details about the revelations you made.
If that is the case, I will hapily respect that.
If however that is just something I am mistakenly inferring from your comment, I would love to know what triggered this re-self-evaluation.
Share as much as you are willing.
Yeah, unfortunately. It involves some very personal details not just of myself but also of some other people that I can't really share in public.
What I can share is the general dynamics though. But be warned: I have a sample size of one versus hundreds of people I talked to who struggle with trauma. That is to say, I have no idea how universal this is.
This is very vague, of course. But what I think was the core of it all is that I got plunged in the darkness, while feeling safe, and then having to gamble everything upon one person. As well as ensuring the safety of that person.
I want to state though: this might be trauma specific. Again, sample size of one. I don't think I'm the only person that can do this though even when I've read literature about childhood emotional neglect there's always this implicit 'finality' of it.
For whatever it's worth, I have recently reached a similar state but by rather a different route. I was prescribed Prozac for pmdd, and the dreams it gave me were something else. Not of my trauma exactly, but it was very apparent that the dreams were how I was doing most of the processing. A few months ago my "dream city," which was weirdly consistent every time I found myself there, flooded. I woke up not knowing if I'd be able to go back. I was, but it had been mostly destroyed, with only a few parts still relatively intact.
A couple weeks ago (for unrelated reasons) I stopped the Prozac and it was fine. Now in the morning I feel the way I felt when I first started taking it. It's kinda wild, and I'm still in therapy (and still on my other antidepressant) but yeah, I also feel like I've come out the other side of the CPTSD woods. :)
(I miss my dream city tho, it was so cool to gradually familiarize myself with a place the same way you would a real city.)
Well, now, I'm glad that you got through that too! It's absolutely wild to hear someone going through that but with a completely different way. In fact, if you didn't say that it's the same 'state' I don't think I could have even recognised it as such. Thanks for sharing regardless!
Just in case, as much as I doubt it'll leak over into Tildes.
That part of my self-love is now having war with one of my oldest, toxic parts of me inside my brain. Now, I can tell that self-love will eventually win and I'm pretty good at keeping that toxic part at bay.
But it is a rather nasty dynamic and I'm pretty unstable. Fortunately I do have therapy next Monday and there's a decent chance I can settle it at that point. Still, if I disappear for a prolonged time(or maybe I could request a temp ban if it gets to that point? No idea if that's possible) that's the reason.
I really doubt it'll affect anyone on this site for various reasons. But I know better than to just assume the best when mental health issues reach these kind of proportions. That can be dangerous, and since some of the dynamics remind me of what people with BPD go through to, better safe than sorry. We wear safety belts in cars for the same reason.
Thank you!
I love that you can know this about yourself <3
I can really relate to that sense of knowing that you will be able to get through something and have changed in quite a fundamental way.
unsolicited "advice"
Good luck and if I may: remember to mourn the old way, it was useful and protected you as best you could at some point in your life. Thank your old self for being that creative when things where hard and let them know that you have found better ways now so they can let go of the old ways and relax and rest now!Still not great. Still desperate for a job and it's now likely I'll have to withdraw my offer on the flat as all I'm being approached about is temporary roles. The last few weeks have honestly been depressing to say the least.
To give an idea of how bad things are, I did a search two days ago on the GOV.UK Find A Job board for permanent roles in my city paying between £20k-£30k a year. Only one job in finance & accountancy was on the board, but there were loads for hospitality, warehouse work, etc. Unfortunately, I went down a career path that has been seriously impacted by the recent employers' National Insurance hikes and advancements in AI, and for that reason I'm thinking about giving up on my ACCA studies altogether.
Not much news on the shitshow job application I posted here, but I did complain to the hiring manager about the process and I did anonymously leave negative interview feedback on their Glassdoor page. I considered publicly naming & shaming the firm on a LinkedIn post, and including receipts as evidence of my interactions, but that wouldn't have been a good look for me (as you all pointed out) and I appreciate being talked out of that.
One of my karaoke host friends (a lady 15 years older than me) went through a rough breakup recently and I had heard through hearsay that she apparently tried to hang herself. She showed up at a different karaoke night unexpectedly two weeks ago and I didn't see any signs of injury around her neck, so it feels like a nasty rumour. However, she has been struggling with her mental health and cancelling gigs, and I think a big part of it is that she's been trying to avoid any contact with her ex.
Not sure what happened between them. They've had a rocky relationship at best, and sometimes I wonder why they keep going back to each other. She's someone I care about greatly. Heck, I even have a crush on her, but it's not something I'd act on just because I don't want to make things awkward between us. I also think it's very unlikely that I'm her type.
That's... quite the combination. I've also had the situation where I struggled to find a job and did had a few temp ones in between, but that doesn't make it easier when you're trying to get a hold over your life. To then also struggle with housing and socially sounds like a situation where it's also difficult to ground yourself? If it's one thing I can manage, especially nowadays. But several at the same time is just difficult.
Take care with the balancing acts that must come with it. I imagine that its tiring at times for you.
My life isn't great at the moment. I have to move back to my parent's place because I have no job now. We don't have a great relationship. So mentally, I'm not great.
Then I did this thing where I looked up an old close friend who turned manipulative. Said and did things that hurt deeply because they knew where my insecurities were. We've not spoken for 4 years now maybe.
Then now those words just keep playing in my head over and over again. I really shouldn't have looked them up. I did this to myself.
I've been feeling like I've been crying for the past two days and yet there's no tears.
Don't blame yourself for being a victim. Sometimes, manipulation is etched so deeply that it takes years to get it out completely. The fact that after 4 years it still affects you like this shows how efficient they were.
Thank you for your kind words! I don't consider myself a victim but you're right that they were really effecient and it got etched in deep.
So thank you for validating my feelings.
Been better. Sad. Lonely.
My wife is with her family today, 500 miles away. There's a good reason for it. Yet it sucks. As someone who was raised Jewish (I don't self-identify as that any more but it's still there), today I feel like a Jew on Christmas.
I feel like an alien. Always have. There are just so many legitimate reasons for it.
Today, I feel it more strongly again.
I'm tired of it. I'm tired of how hard it is to feel connected to this world.
I was not wired for connecting with people. I'm autistic.
Nor did I learn how to connect with people. Some attempted to teach yet the "rules" always seemed, in a word, "stupid". If I don't respect a system, I tend to stubbornly rebel against it.
I may have found the clearest way to summarize my experience of neurotypical people: uncanny. Once I get the least bit beneath the surface, they seem surreal. I can't relate to most of their interests or their problems.
Yeah. Lonely.
I feel this in my soul. Like, right this second I'm doing fine, but yeah, totally relate.
I'm sorry you're having a hard time. This is gonna sound out of left field, but if you can swing it I highly recommend going to DefCon. Never in my life have I felt so comfortable around so many people, and I'm very much not a tech bro. It was so wild to be in a space where autistic was the default, everyone knew it, and everyone was cool with it. Like, I was sitting on the floor during a dj set (just got tired of standing) and several strangers came up to check on me.... Just real quick, no words, a thumbs up with a questioning look. I nodded, smiled, they smiled, and that was it. But you go up to a random group and ask a question, and suddenly you have a new group (if you want it). And if you don't, no hard feelings.
In any case, I get it, and I hope you feel better as the day wears on.
Your point is well-taken.
I used to run an annual Ruby community tech event on the east coast until 2018. I didn't know I was ADHD until 2020 and autistic until this year.
I didn't realize at the time but those sorts of community tech spaces? The ones where we deliberately push corporate interests the fuck away? They were a slice of fucking heaven to us neurodiverse people.
I used to believe that it was just Ruby people. You know, "Matz is nice so we are nice" (MINISWAN)? Or maybe you don't. Like with Google's "Don't be evil", MINISWAN seemed to get lost somewhere along the way since 2018.
I know a bit better that it's not Ruby people. It's neurodivergent people who truly care more about improving the world than MAU, ARR, KPIs, and all of that shit that makes me nauseous to think about.
Aside: I quit Big Tech 2 years ago, hoping to never be anyone's employee ever again, just wanting to earn enough to be able to get by reliably and not suffer terribly in old age—which seems to be getting closer all the time, and build tools that truly improve lives.
Point is: I deeply deeply miss just hanging out with tech people, talking nerd, and not having it be about business and fucking money.
Context: I fell out of love with software engineering after over 20 years on the hamster wheel of being pressured to learn the language/framework du jour to remain relevant. Went management for 5. Burned out hard. Lost touch with much of the Ruby community since 2018. Isolated myself unconsciously. Also, clearly, it's what I needed. I have had shit for boundaries in my life. Too many people have stepped over them. I made it too easy. Working to get better at it.
You get it!
Man, come to Toor Camp next year. It'll be my first and I'm fucking stoked. Got a bunch of friends coming with, one of whom even booked one of the yurts lol. Sounds even more like what you need right now than DefCon :)
Yurts.
That sounds like the event that I ran: a 3-night retreat in the woods for Rubyists to talk and try crazy things together.
People are booking for it a year out. What?
God damn, this event sounds amazing.
DefCon gives me the heebeejeebees. I'd have the shit hacked out of me so fast. How do you not? I've heard people even deploy stingrays to get people who BYO internet. Also: I'm not an infosec person. I'm just a software hacker with aspirations to build physical stuff with electronics and 3d-printing and knows that succeeding with a physical product, in this world, likely means selling out. So I stick to software and only play with the other stuff sometimes.
@irren_echo & @elight what a wonderful connection you've made here, thanks! (Although I ofc know you didn't do it for me)
Haha we've had Toor Camp tickets for a year already! They went on sale right after the last one, and they do them in waves (so it's not too late if you wanna go).
As for DefCon: I'm told it used to be much spicier, but these days most of my crew don't even bother with the burner phones anymore. Like, might you still get pwnd if you're doing dumb shit on the public Wi-Fi? Sure, but that's always true no matter where you are. If it happens at DefCon it's much more likely you'll get some kind of "lol gotcha bitch" message than something malicious (and maybe your name on the Wall of Sheep).
A really good example of the overall vibe these days doesn't even involve tech:
Stickers are a huge thing. Collecting, swapping, tables strewn with freebies, and sticker-bombing all the things. Like, all the fucking things (I really cannot stress enough how many walls, statues, stairways, etc got sticker-bombed in past years). Last year was the first at the LVCC, and they told the organizers that there would be a $500 fine for every single sticker found stuck to their property. This was communicated to attendees, but not that the stick-er would be fined, that DefCon would be. So, no consequences for attendees (unless you got caught literally in the act, I guess, but it was assumed you wouldn't be).
So, an event with 30k people and not a single sticker stuck beyond the bounds of the designated sticker wall.
Not a single fucking one.
I heard some people lamenting the absence of the sticker-bombing, saying they missed it and wished LVCC wasn't being so hard-assed about it. But like, holy shit does that speak volumes about the community!! People policed themselves just because they care about their community and don't want to lose it over something dumb.
Blew me away.
(So don't let the reputation fool you. Just be smart about securing your shit, take normal precautions, and I promise you'll be fine.)
Neurotypical: "You have to tell me when you're not well, otherwise I can't help you."
Neurodiverse says everything that is going on in their head.
Neurotypical: "I can't deal with this."
Neurodiverse: "Now you know why I don't tell you anything".
Rinse, repeat.
I'm overwhelmed but also somewhat not too behind... It's just all the things I have decided to do or am hoping to do, and I worry this summer will go to shit and then I have to live through another winter before being able to live well again.
Like I trickle-grief not having the capacity to do what I would like to do in life.
I'm likely depressed although my personal pit of numbness isn't that deep anymore so it almost feel like I'm lying when saying I'm depressed, but yes: I'm depressed!
Today I had to retake my decision to never commit suicide. I was never at risk to actually kill myself, no need to worry, thinking about it has just been a way to escape reality and not even try living my life. When my sister committed suicide I decided that I would never do it and that decision made me realise his I have used the idea of it to not engage with my life. Today the old, old, habit of toying with the idea of committing suicide popped back into my head... Took me a little bit to notice what was going on... Even had time to try and figure out at what age my daughter would be able to handle it well enough, I think 30ish with good friends feels fair, what do you think? ... Gah! This is soooo boring! Sorry!
I reached out to the closest instance for mental health... Got an appointment 3 weeks out that I had to change, got a new time +1 week... Got a message about remembering to download an app for the first time. Called to make sure which time I had = I had none! Had to get a new time +3 more weeks... We'll see on Wednesday! And I'm not very hopeful for the appointment anyway, no idea what they could even do for me.
I'm tired!
Somewhere in the last two months, I began feeling really cluttered with how much content I was consuming on my devices. It started making me feel sick in a way I hadn't experienced before. I used that feeling of sickness as motivation to get rid of nearly everything I felt addicted to. So pretty much all social media, video games, and the NSFW content I'd been frequenting.
I played through KCD2, and then once I was done and burnt out, I even deleted all my video games (I loved KCD2, but the grind burnt me out as a perfectionist). I probably will download some of them again in the future, but for now, I'm in no mood to play anymore. I also began fasting, to control that urge to stress-eat which made me gain me weight in the last few months unfortunately. Sad, because I worked hard to lose weight before that. Somewhere along, I got complacent.
Some observations - Social media really did have a strong negative influence on my mind. I never thought it could make me feel negative on that level. X was the worst, apparently (with all the negativity). Genuinely felt so positive the days after I deleted it. I'm not going back to any social media, and from now I'll only be using whatever is the minimum for communication.
Video games aren't as bad as social media, but they certainly made me lose my perception of time much more worse. I couldn't keep track of how long I was playing. But hopefully, I'll try to find a way in the future to fix that, when I start playing them again.
The most interesting thing was noticing how much reliant I was becoming on the AI apps. Asking Claude or ChatGPT to clarify every small doubt in my mind, instead of actually using my head. It was almost like I was outsourcing my basic thinking. So I've limited screentime for those apps to under an hour, just to ask limited things (I'd often waste time with them get into asking all sorts of tangential questions, because I felt at that time, that the AI had such clear thoughts, compared to my own).
All in all, June was hell of a month with all those changes. I'm now reading my news from a physical newspaper, and talk to atleast one person a day, even if on a call (to keep that minimum social contact going), and am clearly less distracted and can focus on work. Can't say I'm fully satisfied, but atleast I don't feel like the zombie I was at the end of May. I'm remembering lots of things I was suppressing in memory for whatever reason with the slop all around earlier. Example: I remembered this website I used to check out long ago (when I left Reddit), which brought me here today for a change.
I'm going to ask about a detail, the fasting. Care to tell me/us about it?
How do you fast, have you done it before? Etc, etc
A bit of my fasting story below
I try to do 16/8 intermittent fasting, but it varies quite a bit. I like how easy it's to reboot if I for whatever reason don't abide by the 16h fast one day (or two!)
I have a larger project in life to notice the passage of time that I'm trying to anchor on the daylight-cycle (equinoxes and solstices). Sometimes I manage to remember and am in the right head space to do a week long water (+salts) fast between those events.
I've been doing very well lately -- well enough that I started my last session asking my therapist if I should be worried about how well I'm doing. She assuaged my fears that this might be some sort of manic thing -- there are more symptoms to mania than just feeling good, and according to her coming out of depression can often feel a little manic to someone who's been in it long enough.
I recently made some new online friends who I really jive with by joining a roleplaying server, and that was apparently the je ne sais quoi I was missing. I'm happier than I have been in a long time. I've been sleeping less (and since I have had issues with hypersomnia, this is generally a good thing) and for the first time in a long time I have something I'm excited for each day. I feel like I've really connected with these new friends in a way that's been hard for me when meeting people around me irl, and it's almost shocking to me how much that's helped my mood, even when they're not online bc of timezone mismatches and stuff.
Of course the thing that immediately follows up feeling good like this is anxiety that it's going to stop and things are going to suck again. I know the right answers to this on an intellectual level -- I should enjoy it while it lasts even if it's not permanent -- and I'm doing my best to put it into practice but it's hard not to feel scared that the other shoe has to drop. I still have a lot of the really good friendships from when I was younger that made me feel like this, even if we've grown more distant or talk less often than back then, so I don't really have any precedent for being scared this will all blow up in my face. But anxiety does its thing regardless. One of my new friends has been particularly sweet and understanding when it comes to my social anxiety, to an extent that I've been able to stop myself from completely diving into the spiral of "apologizing for being annoying by apologizing for being annoying," at least, but there's a certain inherent level of uncertainty when interacting even with someone who seems to get you that my anxiety really likes to latch onto. And I think it's happening in large part because it's been so long since I've talked to someone who I feel really gets me like this. I didn't realize how badly I needed this, and now I'm so scared I'll fuck it up.
In a bit of a funk about the state of the world and having to work a week that I’ve should have been on break for no reason in particular. But I have time to myself now and I’m trying to not pine too hard for what could have been.
I'm struggling, honestly. I've been job hunting for months now for a teaching position and despite interviewing with multiple districts and reaching the end round of interviews with several of them, I'm still turning up empty handed.
For context, I've worked in private early childhood centers for 15 years. Thanks to my state funding ECE programs, I've finally achieved getting my bachelor's degree and getting fully licensed as a teacher. Teaching is what I'm passionate about and what I'm good at. I've seen colleagues quickly land jobs teaching over the last few years, and so I figured it wouldn't be too difficult for me.
But it is. The market must have changed, because I feel that the competition for the roles I'm applying for is stiff. Since I haven't worked in a district yet I'm also not as fluent in the system and jargon and everything else that goes with it, so despite my hands on experience in teaching I feel I'm at a disadvantage.
This all comes together to make me seriously question myself. Am I good enough? Am I worthy? Why is it that it's so difficult for me?
The lack of feedback from interviews is especially frustrating, since it leaves me guessing what I should be doing better or differently.
Couple all this with me having built up an expectation that I'll be leaving my job at the end of this summer over the last few years that I've been working on my degree (simultaneously to raising three kids and working full time - it's been incredibly stressful already with that) and I can't shake the feeling that if I don't land a new job I'll be seen as an abject failure.
I'm not doing well.