#8 - ramble

Below is a copy and paste from what I sent to Samaritans. I just figured it was worth putting here too.

 Hi,

My name is Connor, I'm 22 years old, and I thought unloading/venting some thoughts here might help. I want to preface that I'm doing this completely freestyle so I don't really know where this is going to go and it might be a big mess, so I'm sorry in advance. I'm also sorry for the fact that I'm probably going to write a LOT here. There are no hard feelings if you don't want to continue after seeing the absolute wall of text below.

The main reason why I'm emailing you guys is that I feel like I don't have anyone either in person or online to talk to about my problems. I live a very private, slow-paced life, so I dont have many friends or people I'm close to. I have great parents, but they've been separated for years now so I only see my dad on the weekends. My mum has constantly reiterated to me that if there are any problems in my life, I can go and talk to her, but I just dont have it in me to unload my huge barrage of issues onto her. It just doesn't feel right of me to do, I just physically cannot do it. While I am close to my dad, I made the mistake of being too personal with him, and I regretted it, therefore I won't go down that route again. I feel like I really have no other choice but to try some third party thing like this. I've been bottling it all up inside for months, even years at this point, but it's all just too much now. 

My main issue that I am struggling with in life right now is that I feel incomplete and irritated. I've always felt lost ever since I left school, because I knew that I'd have to get a job and just instantly integrate into society with the click of a finger. I struggled for a few years, which I knew was bound to happy because of the type of person I am, and I never really landed a consistent job until January of this year. I also had a small part-time cleaning job at my old secondary school from 2019-2020, but I lost that (against my will) to COVID in 2020. I had some extremely rough moments throughout 2020-2022 and I was very close to being suicidal. Thankfully I managed to persevere and prevent myself from doing anything stupid, however I was practically on the verge of giving up mentally and almost ready to do so physically. I firmly believed that, throughout all of these years that I was struggling, once I got a job, everything would fix itself. I told myself that all of the core problems in my life would be fixed once I got a job and gained some independence. I thought, 'the main reason why I am unhappy right now is because I'm not serving a purpose to society in any way, therefore I feel useless. Once I get a job, and I feel useful to some people in some way, I will feel much happier because I will have a purpose and a reason to get out of the house and to live my life.' I got a volunteering job in March 2022, as well as a Kitchen Porter job starting January 2023. My initial start at the volunteering job was great and I felt like I was finally being useful to some people in some way, however it was more of a temporary feeling as I was only working 2 days a week, for 3 hours each day, and I was also not earning any money while doing so. While I was mildly happy with the fact that I at least had something to my name, it still wasn't enough, I wasn't satisfied overall. I should mention that my main problem is with my low self-confidence, as well as my extreme levels of social anxiety. My anxiety absolutely controls my life. It has taken many potential paths of my life away from me due to the multitude of fears, overthinking, worrying that things may go badly if I try it, etc. I have to live my life in a very 'cookie cutter' way as to make sure that I'm not dealing with constant panic attacks on a daily basis, and the list can go on and on. I have struggled with my anxiety ever since Primary school, and it's only gotten worse with time. I would have thought that, with time, I would have learned how to deal and cope with it, but unfortunately that hasn't been the case. My reason to mention all of this is that, as a culmination of all of these anxiety and self-confidence issues bubbling over throughout the years, it's resulted in me being unable to get a job for years, until this year. The job hunt was just awful. Everything to do with it absolutely disgusted me. I hated it with every single core fibre of my being. Being forced to check out all of the job listings, seeing the requirements they list, how far I'd have to travel, how many hours I'd have to work; it all made me sick to my stomach because it made me acknowledge how useless I actually was to society and the people around me. Every time I went to a job support meeting, whether online or in-person (Reed in Partnership and many other companies through the 2-3 years), I would leave each meeting feeling even worse and even more dejected than the last. I absolutely hated these meetings because they would always amount to nothing meaningful, and I felt like a helpless case. It was a genuine nightmare. In fact, in 2022, I actually got a letter from the government that claimed I was exempt from having to look for work because my anxiety was so bad. I had to attend a lot of written/verbal meetings to discuss this topic, and, in the end, the government told me that as a result of my extreme anxiety, I didn't have to look for work, or work at all for that matter, for at least the next 6 months (at which time they would then interview me again and repeat the process.) Ultimately, while this was nice to have on paper to try and calm my stress and anxiety regarding my life, it still just didn't make me happy. I have passions and destinations that I want to reach; I don't want to stagnate and end up amounting to nothing. I could simply just not work, based on the assumption that the actual government says I don't have to, but I don't want to choose the easy, cop-out answer. I actually want my life to equate to something meaningful. While I absolutely don't judge those that do, I don't want to live a life on government benefits. It makes me feel disgusting and unworthy and like I'm being permanently judged by society. With all this being said, I did somehow manage to get a job in January 2023, which involves working at a local bakery in my town centre as a Kitchen Porter. I am eternally grateful for this job as it ticks many of the very specific boxes I have for work requirements; it is in walking distance, they allowed me to work reduced hours to accommodate for my anxiety, and the work in general is decently simple (yet still quite stressful at times). The long story short is that I got very, very lucky to have an opportunity to work here; the owners are honest, good working people, they understand my anxiety, at least to some extent, and they even worked with me to accommodate around it. I will always be grateful for that. However, the turning point in this is that I thought that once I got a job, that was 'it'. I'd finally be free from the shackles of my mind. I'd be independent. All of the problems in my life, all of the stress and overriding anxiety I've faced in regard to my feeling useless and pathetic, will finally disappear. I can finally live my life and do everything I've always wanted to do without any guilt or judgment on myself. However, I realised after a month or two that, in the end, nothing has really changed from before. I still feel the exact same as I did in 2021 and 2022, and I haven't felt the huge revelation I was hoping to have. While I was unemployed from 2020-2022, in my head, I pictured a future reality where I was walking to work as a 'free spirit', just enjoying life and having freedom, and it was as simple as that. But my reality just doesn't feel that easy at all. It feels like I'm living life on hard mode, unable to get out of my head, unable to just slow down and pause and enjoy life for what it is rather than overanalysing and overthinking every single tiny instance that happens. For me personally, money has never been a motivator in my life (perhaps another reason why I struggled to get into work.) My core motivator in life is just to have inner peace, to achieve true happiness within myself, to wake up one morning and not have to regret going into work or having to do whatever I need to do. I told myself that I will simply refuse to live a life where I'm miserable waking up in the morning as a result of work, or feeling so stressed that I feel sick, etc.. I will forever stand by this mindset, because I have lived too long shackled by my anxiety and my stress to allow myself to add even more third-party stress on top of that. The problem is that even in my 'relaxing' life that I've built for myself, I still simply don't feel happy or satisfied at all. I feel like I've been cocooned into too much safety and now I can't break out. In a way, I feel 'trapped', because I'm not very independent or capable of doing anything for myself. I can't cook or clean, I can't do anything for myself unless it involves a computer or a trip to the shops. There are little successes I have in life that make me happy, like the success of finishing a workday, or going to get my own lunch, or successfully talking to the person behind the counter in a shop and leaving thinking 'That was a smooth conversation, I didn't mess up at all.' But these small wins aren't capable of amounting to something big enough for me to feel satisfied permanently. It's like I'm giving myself temporarily boosts of happiness for a few minutes or a few hours each day, but overall, I'm still permanently unhappy overall, and I'm powerless to change this permanent happiness. I've adopted such a cookie cutter way of living for myself that anything I do just feels stale and repetitive, but I lack too much confidence in myself to try to shake things up and do new things alone. To be honest, I've felt an extremely strong desire to move out of home for a few months now; there are a lot of little things I'm unhappy with in my domestic situation right now, but the reality is there is no chance I can survive living alone. I can't look after myself on a good day, so trying to move out permanently is just an idea I won't even entertain. So with all this being said, I feel like I'm at a standstill in my life, which is why I felt like I had no other choice but to send this email in desperation. I truly, seriously, don't want to go back to those dark days of 2021-2022 where I felt lost and hopeless in life. I feel like I have so much unseen potential, I truly believe I can reach big heights and do new and exciting things, but I don't have the willpower or the self-confidence to go out and achieve it. I'm still shackled down by the burdens of my commitments and issues that I face on a daily basis. I'm stuck in my own little cocooned world, and I can't break out of it. I used to be fine being alone, but after being alone for so long, I'm no longer just alone, I'm alone and lonely. Nowadays, I often envision a future me in my mind where I'm walking down a road, I'm happy and at inner peace, feeling satisfied and smiling, like I've 'made it' in life. And yet a part of the current me feels like I will never be able to reach that destination, because at the current pace I'm going, I will never be able to make it there. I feel like, every single day I live in this cookie-cutter, cocooned reality, I'm fighting a war within my head, a war that no one else can see. I'm constantly battling thoughts and worries and doubts and fears and stresses that no one else can see or hear or feel, and I'm just supposed to pretend it doesn't exist and that everything is all fine and perfect. Even with my simple baking job, in which I only work one day a week for 4 hours [11AM-3PM on a Wednesday], I still have extreme anxiety every single morning that I go into work without fail. I'm unable to eat breakfast because I spend too much time in the bathroom trying to calm myself down and telling myself I'm okay, often times resulting in me actually being late for work. I have to listen to music to try and place myself out of the reality of the situation and go into a small corner of my mind where things are peaceful and hope that my heart doesn't start racing and my palms don't start sweating and my vision doesn't start going blurry and I don't start panicking. These are the little things that I have to deal with, that no one can see, that is so unbelievably exhausting to have to deal with on a daily basis. I could try to talk to someone about it, but to be honest, the bottom line is that I'm just tired now. I'm only 22, but I'm already tired of life. You know that saying that says, once you come home from work, you don't want to talk about work? That's how I feel about my life and all of my mental and anxiety-related issues. While it's helpful to talk and vent about it, as I am now, it's simply too exhausting to acknowledge it in person. It's like, where do you want me to begin? Exhibit A, Exhibit C, or Exhibit K? I have so many overriding issues I've lost track of what is what anymore, and it's all just so overwhelming and stressful and unenjoyable. I truly thought once I got a job, all of this would just stop. I'd finally be able to just pause... and breathe... and be happy. I'd be able to make friends, converse, have banter, maybe find a girlfriend, just... live my life. I'm 22 and I'm at a point where I'm very frustrated with simply wasting my days away. I thought that these were meant to be the best years of my life? Other people my age are getting into relationships, getting married, making families, moving out, travelling the world, living their lives. I'm stagnating away in my cocooned world going nowhere. I am VERY conscious about the time I spend in my day; it matters a lot to me. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, and I personally HATE wasting my days away, or feeling like I could have spent those hours better, or feeling like I'm not doing something 'important' or 'noteworthy' at all times. I just can't shut off, or turn off, and my mind is constantly running at full throttle for every single minute of the day that I'm awake. I just don't know what to do anymore. I'm trapped in my head. I want to live my life, but my limitations prevent me. I'm scared of my life just stagnating away and ending up amounting to nothing, and I'm really trying my best to change that, hence getting the job at the bakery, but it still feels like it's not enough, it still feels like I'm not doing enough. One day I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be like 35 years old and I've realised I've done nothing with my life and I can never get those years back. It feels like I'm on a motorway that says you need to go 100MPH to exist, but I can only go 40MPH, I physically cannot go any faster no matter what I do, and society and everything around me and even myself is telling me 'Come on dude just go 100MPH, you can do it, everyone else can go at 100MPH, why can't you?' but no matter what I do, 40MPH is just the speed for who I am. I cannot change the core fundamentals of who I am. That is why I feel just... hopeless and lost. I want to reach the happy future that I envision in my head, but I have absolutely no clue how I am ever going to get there.  

I am really sorry that this was so long. I tried to keep to a concise point, but I may have rambled too much. Ultimately this is the result of months, maybe even years, of bottling up thoughts inside and not telling anyone until now. Again, I'm so sorry this was so long, and if you have actually managed to read everything up to now, thank you so much for reading and listening to my rambling.

All the best,

Connor