Mental Dump/Life Update?

Haven’t written in quite a while and I know it helped me a bit previously so here goes something.

Lately I’ve been battling a lot of stress and anxiety surrounding various areas of my life. I feel like I’ve been fighting uphill against the flow of things for months on end. To make things worse, every time I feel like I’ve reached the top of one hill, I find out that what I reached was simply a small ledge at the base of another sheer cliffside, this one even taller and more daunting than the last. And I’m just a worn-down, broken human whose only remaining tools to climb are sheer force of will and survival instinct. The problem with this of course is that my will power and mental/emotional energy are finite resources and lately I’ve been running on empty across the board. I have too many stressors and not enough opportunity to decompress which is causing me to start falling back into bad mental habits that I know lead to a very dark place in my mind. And quite frankly, that terrifies me. But to understand that, you’d have to know the depth of what has been causing me to go there.

For starters, my work life has been anything but stable. About a year and a half ago, I took a leap of faith and moved into a different role at the company I work for. I had been feeling run-down in my old role for quite some time and had been searching for something new to do when the opportunity arose for me to move to a different team and take on a role that was better geared towards my skillset. On top of that, this new role gave me the potential to move up without having to directly manage people. Managing other people’s work has never been something I’m interested in. I’m very good at doing my job and contributing to larger efforts, but managing people is something that just never really spoke to me. So I took on this new role and gave it my all. I learned everything I could learn, asked for feedback, and looked for new ways to improve my work to make it as useful as possible to the people it directly supported. About middle of last year, the small team I was on had a bit of a mass exodus. My team went from 4 people and a manager, to just me and the manager in less than 2 months. An attempt to backfill the open roles before our busy season was made, but when the dust settled, we only had 1 other person on our team and there responsibilities were fairly limited. It was around this time I also learned that I was being pretty severely underpaid for the work I was doing. So I started having conversations with my manager about correcting that. I was told that the work I was doing was definitely worthy of greater compensation, but my timing was poor as the company didn’t like making pay changes during the busy part of the year. So I remained patient and continued working my ass off for the rest of last year. I effectively did ~2 people’s worth of work during the busiest time of the year and handled it like a professional, holding onto the promise of greener pastures when the new year came. Well here I am in mid-April, still making the exact same amount of money I made when I changed positions in late 2021, roughly 18 months later and over 6 months since I initially brought it up. At this point, all I’ve been told is that it’s been escalated as much as possible and now we just have to wait for a definitive answer. Meanwhile, the beginning of the year came and now the 1 other person we had also left. So I was now doing more additional work while my manager tried to get me some help. The help eventually came…6 weeks later. I’ve spent the majority of the year doing everything I could to keep things stable within my workspace while also prepping it for the next person in line when help eventually arrived. I give my all at work. I get everything done efficiently and effectively. I task myself with improving whatever I’m working on to best work within my schedule and how I operate best so that everything that I produce is high quality and fast. Yet I feel like all I’ve gotten for all this effort is a pat on the back. I’ve been demoralized by this for months, slowly eating away at my will power as I continue to sit in limbo.

On top of the work stuff, I’ve recently gotten into hunting for my first home. It started around the beginning of the year and the whole process has been exhausting. Through the weeks of determining my buying power, to actively going and looking at a bunch of places, to actually putting in offers, all of it felt like I was getting hit by wave after wave of new information and things to look at. Anyone who has been through the process knows that there is a lot of work that goes into it. I’ve received a lot of great advice and assistance with the process, but there was even a point where all of that became overwhelming. I felt like I was being rushed through the process and I was being told to make massive compromises to help make things move faster. And while I knew it all came from a place of care, it just felt like an assault on my process and how I go about handling daunting tasks. I wasn’t moving at a comfortable pace and it was causing some issues. Fortunately I was able to navigate through that well, but it took its toll just like everything else. After a few weeks I fell into a good pattern of finding intriguing places to go look at and working with my agent to put in offers on places I liked (my real estate agent is truely a life saver and enormously helpful). And now, I’ve actually had an accepted offer on a nice condo in Tukwila. I had to make some small concessions on my original vision, but I made sure I was fully comfortable before submitting an offer. That in turn ended the hunting portion and began the exhausting process that is closing a home sale. I’ve read and signed more documents in the past 2 weeks than I had in the previous 5 years. This has sapped what little energy and mental fortitude I had left as I continue to try and keep up with things day to day while also planning for the next steps once the sale has closed. I’m excited to have my own space and all the great things that come with that, but I’m also anxious about all of the new things I have to stay on top of with owning a home. There’s some days where I just sit and wonder if I’m going to be able to handle it all and remain even remotely sane.

On top of all of this, I’ve been actively seeing a therapist of about a year now. I’ve made great progress in my overall self-confidence and healing some trauma that has existed within my brain for exceedingly long periods of time. I feel like I’ve made a lot of personal growth, but there are still days where I feel like everything is exactly the same as it was before I started therapy. The areas of my life most effected by my mental state and the goals I have all feel like the most minimal improvements have been made and I continue to emotionally injure myself in new and exciting ways when I allow my mind to wander into the murky depths. I do everything I can to push these negative thoughts and feelings out of my mind. I exercise every tool I have gained from therapy and fight back against everything that my brain tells me is wrong with my life. But as with everything else, this is extremely taxing mentally. I go days at a time fighting battles in my mind that only serve to eliminate the bad thoughts/feelings but fail to replace them with anything positive. The most critical portions of my brain feel like they’ve just been boxed in and tucked away for the time being, but they still exist in the periphery and make their presence known when I don’t have the mental energy to fight them off anymore. I start remembering the pretty crappy person I have been for parts of my life. I remember all of the dumb things I did or said which almost certainly made me more enemies than friends. Hell there are some days I wonder how I ended up with so many good people in my life that I do have. I know I can’t change the past, but I also can’t erase it from my brain and that haunts me. I can’t ever seem to quiet my mind. It’s always racing in 17 different directions as fast as possible and many of them are straight into a dark place. All I can seemingly do these days is try to focus my mind on the task at hand and shut out everything else. Unfortunately this takes its toll just like everything else, and lately there’s really nothing left for my brain to use as fuel to focus and distract itself.

This has also been exacerbated by my search for companionship. I’ve made attempts, but I can say for certain that they weren’t my best effort and I can say that it’s entirely fair that I remain a lonely dude in my 30’s who can’t get a date to save his life. This has been a major point of injury for me as it speaks to my attempt to be more open and emotionally vulnerable, while finding minimal success. This is partly because of some bad history with this area of my life. I’ve allowed my logic brain to take control and run wild, wreaking havoc on my anxiety and my emotional state. I’ve presented myself in a way that is not reflective of who I actually am as a person and have likely failed myself more than anything as a result. A lot of my work in therapy has been to address this way that I’ve injured myself emotionally and continue to do so as my logic brain and emotional brain do battle in this area of my life. I’ve made progress personally, but my goals yet remain elusive and so my brain continues to expand on all the negative outcomes I’ve imagined for my life over the years as I get beaten down by the stress of everything else going on in my life.

So that’s where I am now. I’ve worked myself exhaustively in my career for minimal if any gain, spent and continue to spend massive amounts of time and energy finding a place to call my own, all while doing my best to be more comfortable with who I am and portray that in a way that I can eventually meet the goals I have set for myself in all aspects of my life. I guess at the end of it all, I just want some peace. I want to wake up in the morning not having to fight through every day as an uphill battle. I want to feel happy and fulfill all the desires that exist within the emotional part of my brain. It all just feels so tiring and I have a hard time seeing the peak of the mountain I feel like I’ve been climbing for years to dig myself out of the mental crater I created. I’m at the end of my rope and have run the well of mental fortitude and emotional energy dry. I just don’t know what it will take for me to begin refilling that well nor how long it will take. I’m just trying to survive each day and the challenges they bring, all while fighting the worst parts of my brain every step of the way.

All of the above said, there are things that happen in my life that do help keep me afloat every day. I’ve had people I thought had long since put me in the past tell me how much they appreciate the memes and such that I share on Facebook and that they regularly get a good laugh at whatever new silliness I’ve posted of late. I get sent memes from friends occasionally because it made them think of me and even though I’ve seen some of them before, it makes me happy knowing that something happy reminds my friends of me. It lets me know that no matter what negativity I have going on in my brain, I know there are people out there who I help brighten their day when I share things that make me laugh or smile. It reminds me that if nothing else, I know I can provide brief moments of joy and laughter in what can sometimes be a very dark and sad existence. I have friends that I spend time with very frequently and have a lot of fun with. Whether it’s through video games, sporting events, or even just the random get together for a drink, I know there are people who actively want to spend time with me. I treasure these experiences as they remind me that I’m not alone in this world and have people that value my presence in their lives, even if only for a short time.

To friends and family that might read this and feel some concern for my wellbeing, please do not worry. I am not on in any imminent danger and have no plans to do anything drastic. I’m just trying to make sense of my brain and why I’ve been having such a difficult time overcoming the bullshit it throws at me every day. My life is in a lot of flux and I’m having a hard time keeping up with all of it in a healthy way. Just know that I’m not going anywhere anytime soon (to be honest finding my own place has been an enormous pain in the ass and I have no plans to give that up any time soon).

For anyone who reads this and wishes to say something, feel free to send me a message on whatever platform you feel comfortable. I’m not really in a good place to speak verbally about where my mind is, but I can certainly respond to messages. I would hope so after writing the fucking novel above lol.

I’ll end this by just reminding you to take care of yourself, whatever that means. Life is too short and too chaotic to let your mind and soul get erased by all the bullshit in the world. Find your peace and happiness and hold on to it tight. It’s a tricky thing to find and even harder to hold onto.

Thanks for reading, this helped me decompress at least a little and hopefully I can start making some tangible progress on my goals, or at least maybe find a little peace.

-Neal