Category Archives: depression

Moving on…

It has been difficult, but I have moved forward, and am beginning to find what I want to be. And what I want to do. It just won’t involve other people much.

Most of us find ourselves having to reconstruct our lives… the nons evolve, but not in isolation. We have to deal with suddenly discovering your world is not what your thot. Without warning, we find our world gone… and we are alone to rebuild.

I have written about how people who find themselves the victims of mental illness, will find their friends slipping away. Gradually, many of us end up without any direct contact with the outside world. We tend to become “loners” because we are forced to, not because we are driven to. The illness does not make us want to be alone… it makes us want to be understood.

What makes us seem to want to be alone, is that we can’t get people to understand what is happening to us. We can’t just “get over it”, or “move on”. We can learn about our illness, and sometimes find ways to mitigate it. But those problems/mistakes will never go away. We will have to always be on guard for each little sign that something is amiss.

People have said I am brave. It makes me feel good to hear… but I do not think of myself as brave. Is it brave to swim ashore from a sinking boat?

This is where I am.

I need to find a life… a way forward. And I need to do it on my own. It is slow going. But there is progress. In reality, I do thing I know what I want to do with my life. I am struggling to try to make it happen. But there are no other options.

I’ll try to write more about how I am doing towards my goal. I will actually be taking a needed step forward today. It may well make no difference at all. There are still major obstacles. But I have to move forward.

Coming to Acceptance

My thoughts have been drifting around my memories, and what is lost. There are so many wonderful things I have done, and seen. I have had great friends, and been involved with wonderful people. I loved my time in archery, college, and teaching. At every step, I thot I was making life-long friends. But I always found that when my life had to shift places all those friends were lost.

“All” is not a fair word. I still know a couple people from my archery days. In Seattle. I have not seen them in many years. That is my fault. But when I left teaching, I was shocked how quickly I was forgotten. Not one person I had known contacted me after I left. I tried communicating with a few… a few times. Some said we would get together when they come to Portland… never seemed to happen.

Retirement was almost 20 years ago. I have not had any new social contacts since. There have been no new people coming thru my life. That makes it hard to make new friends.

I give up.

All my life, my single greatest fear… one I constantly fought, was of ending up alone. Here I am.

So now what? What do I do with my life now?

I have hobbies… they are not very fulfilling though. There is no purpose to my life. I have no goals. No dreams.

That has to change.

I have struggled with what to do. Without friends, I have no-one to read off. There is no-one to react to what I do, to give me any feedback. So I never have any sense of success. If I write, who will read it?

This is where I am. For a couple of years, I have been trying to find purpose. No luck. How can I find purpose with no feedback? As a teacher I understand how important it is to perceive ourselves as making progress, and succeeding. After years of no feedback… my ambition has faded. Now I usually don’t try.

This is where I am.

Next?

Non-Traveling Guy

My travel has gradually diminished to nothing. There is no-one to encourage me to go. I am on my own in figuring out how to work past my fears… phobias. Even remaining people close, have given up trying. I will not be trying.

Putting effort into travel is virtually guaranteed to be lost effort. And one more failure. I can’t do much by myself. I will only put energy into things here at home.

That has been the de-facto situation for a couple of years at least. But has been recently confirmed. I need to move on.

Who Am I?

I live in a nice city in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. I am about 40 miles south of Portland. We love this city – a majority of the population are Hispanic or Russian. People are friendly, and easy to get along with.

I have agoraphobia… somewhere on the spectrum. I can go places I know if I need to. Some things are easier than other. But basically I just go to a few stores, and shops. Plus doctors.

There are hobbies, but individual things I “work” on at home. Photography, and building things. I have a metal and wood shop, plus a work area in my office. I don’t work on things much… anxiety is difficult to deal with. And I get depressed often. Meds help a lot. They reduce my anxiety to a manageable level, and greatly shorten my depressive episodes.

Forty years ago, I was a Nationally known archer… I coached the U of Washington team to a National Championship. I had lots of friends, and traveled all over. Then my life started to fall apart. A year later, I dropped out of college and worked for a few years before going back to finish my degree, and then get my teaching certificate. I taught at Seaside High School for 15 years – all levels of math, but mostly Calculus, and Trigonometry. I also taught Physics every year…

Due to shoulder injuries I had to stop even trying archery back in about 1988. But I had already stopped competitive shooting – 1978. The year it all fell apart.

I was a popular teacher, teaching the hardest two classes at Seaside. 20% of seniors took Physics, and/or Calculus… mostly both. Calculus had 15-18 hours homework per week. And they did it.

We were married while I was still teaching… no-one from the school came. No friends at all came.

Eventually I burned out from teaching, and retired. I moved out of Seaside, and never heard from anyone there again. I have only received a few messages ever, and they were in response. But I have not seen anyone I worked with since then.

We moved again after a year, and are now back in Oregon.

I lost all my friends along the way. I am estranged from what little family I have. My hobbies don’t get me out much, and I am not good in groups anymore anyway. So I don’t get out. Even if I could, where would I go, and how would I deal with people?

Mostly… I just have no family or friends. And I am afraid to trust anyone anyway. Why try?

Fighting Aloneness

WOW!

I picked a huge topic today. but important to many people.

There is a huge emptiness in my life. I am a writer… trying to write a book… it is in my head. I used to have friends I wrote letters with… handwritten! No-one does that anymore. On-line is shallow and fleeting. I struggle to go past our driveway. Being around people is frightening to me. My cats understand me…

Where do I go from here? I have been here a very long time… where do I go?

Finding Social Contact

This has been my Achilles Heal. Having lost all my friends years ago… decades ago… how do I get started? What should I do? No-one I know has any ideas.

On-line is nice sometimes. I write Blogs occasionally. And sometimes I am on Facebook. But you can’t really make new friends there. It is nice sometimes… it also reminds me how alone I am. There are many conflicts.

I have always got along well with people in person. I can be oddly humorous. The effort can overwhelm me… and it is easy to give up. Then I am on my own. That is where I often make mistakes. Over the long haul, it just does not seem worth the effort.

It is time to go silent again for a while.

Trying and Pushing = Brave?

I am at a point in my life, where I have to change what I believe. I have been working on it. I need to change the way my brain inter-relates to the world. No small feat.

Progress is measured in very small increments. I cleaned up a work-space to actually be able to work on something. Why? Because I wanted to. Got a problem with that?

This is not where I thot I would be at this point in my life. I need to teach my brain to want what I have. How does one change so many decades of training? The “slow-motion” PTSD must be rewired. There is no guarantee of success… or even progress. Make what I have work.

Being Brave, is what you do when there aren’t any other options. It is another state of our being. Others will see it in a different light, and will call it “brave”. OK… But it is just us doing what we must do. Especially for the Mentally Ill. We have to be “brave” just to get up in the morning!!!!

I am not truly brave. I am scrambling to survive. The options have narrowed significantly over the last few years. My presence on-line is my only reaching-out place. so here I am.

It is very difficult to reach out to an empty audience… OK… OK… not “empty”. Though I would like to hear more from people. Is this where I remind you all, I have no friends? No? Ok… later.

I am not in point of fact, looking for friends on-line. Friends are people you actually see. Sigh… there is a whole spectrum of “friends”. You can be very close to people you never see… or distant from those you see frequently. But it is more difficult to start with no foundation of brick-and-mortar friends. Not impossible… “It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Hello… my name in Neil.

An Open Window…

I am trying to give people a chance to hear from the other side of the Mental Health issues we face. These Blogs may come back to haunt me. I make bad decisions, and people may respond in ways that make me think they are angry at me.

My response: Get in line.

I am used to people being mad at me. Even when they are not. My brain goes into protective mode and it assumes anyone with cause, is mad at me. Unless I have direct knowledge, they are not. There is almost a constant fear in my brain of people being mad at me. If I cannot know better… my brain assumes they are mad.

That is what my brain does. And NO amount of knowing that, will ever be able to stop my brain from going there.

If you fall into a pool of water, your brain will respond in a certain way to save you. It would take a lot a practice to learn exactly how to react in the best possible way… that protects you the most quickly. But it would take practice. You would need help…

Here is the catch… there is no way for the mentally ill to practice unless there is someone to practice with. We need help. We need someone to unlock the doors to the pool.

I don’t have the keys.

The Eclipse

My plans did not work out… but I was able to enjoy the eclipse anyway. We live in the line of totality. I was in my office, watching my weather station data, and looking out the window. I watched it get dark, and the kids outside watching it happen. It was fun enough for me.

I had a bad weekend. I was not up to even going outside with the glasses I had purchased. I did not care enough to walk outside.

Welcome to my life.

Depression

I am amazed at how people do not understand Depression. Lori gets mad at me if my depression interferes with plans. After 25 years, she still gets mad when my depression hurts our plans. It is pervasive, and constantly damaging to our relationship. But it is what it is.

When I am depressed, I am totally on my own. No-one does anything to make it easier.

If Lori does not understand why I am depressed, then I can just disappear into my office. I can tell when Lori is mad at some bad behavior of mine. I can even hear the greater impact of her feet on the floor… stairs in particular. I understand why she is angry. She is a normal human being. But she does not understand how I react, let alone why I react in strange ways. So she gets angry at me. almost every time.

I have learned to deal with things on my own. Depression lasts a lot longer, and takes more of a toll, but I can get thru it on my own. I have for 55 years… since my first memorable panic attack.

Mentally ill people spend a lot of time and energy trying to adjust to the behaviors of even our closest friends. I do not understand you every bit as much as you do not understand me… stop getting angry. I have tried anger, and it does not help. Try to image a different reality. Give us a break.

It has always been my experience, that when I, and other mentally ill people, need help the most, is exactly when people pull away the most…

Is It Abuse?

Is it abuse if my wife uses a known mental illness weakness of mine as a way to make a point, and/or punish me?

The issue is the anxiety I get from not know what is going on, when it directly affects me. I can overload and crash from it easily.

My wife does not like having to keep me informed of her plans. Including, not going to be home for a week. So she withholds informing from me.

Here is current the issue: I have been writing a book for about a year. I have struggled a lot with it. One problem I have consistently have mentioned is that I don’t have someone to read it – Lori knows me too well. Lori is away this weekend with her friends at a resort. I had mentioned that I might print a part of my book for all of them to read. I chickened out.

But… early the first of their 3 days, I emailed her a copy. Almost 24 hours later, even though we had exchanged email on other subjects, she never mentioned my book.

I think that is the kind of thing most people would respond to. You know… an email about getting it? Especially one that gives irrevocable permission for her to share with those friends? Wouldn’t most people say something??

She does not tell me – I think – to prove she shouldn’t have to, and to punish me. I think she is using a known mental illness issue I have, to punish me. What is that called again?

NOTE:  When I told Lori it was upsetting she had not emailed, she literally said… “I thought we were past that.”  She thinks I should just change, if I see the problem in hindsight.  It is a common issue.  Did I mention she has a Master’s in Experimental Phycology?