You accept that you are in a difficult situation with no great answers.
You focus on being good company for yourself and treating yourself like someone of value. Be kind and understanding to yourself and try to minimize negative self talk.
You open yourself to creating new connections with others, but without preconceived ideas of success or failure.
Thankyou. Simple and practical answer
Edit
intrusive thought
Why is it not okay for the world if I want to be a part of it as well?? Why am I not allowed to … also be?? I’m acceptable as in
Ya know, you're awesome, but please just stay "over there", don't sit or come too close to me yeah, okay? Thankyou 😬Or am I just fooling myself with this???
Excellent answer
Acceptance. A lonely person can’t solve their loneliness by themselves. You can’t logic your way directly out of being lonely.
Profound
I joined a men’s group. We meet every week.
That means at least once a week, I see someone who cares about me.
Solidarity to men and brotherhood!
Nah it’s less like a team rally thing and more like a weekly standup meeting about emotional state, as an exercise to train perception of our own emotional states.
I myself discovered I had absolutely no idea what emotion I was experiencing. What I believed was my emotional state, was a sort of “good” or “bad” depending on how much energy I had to act like I felt good.
I was playing this character, and the character was a positive person whenever I had the energy to be pleasant and act happy. And I played that character for decades from childhood on and wasn’t aware of it.
Just identifying how I felt once a week, and staring it to the group, helped me notice that there was an actual stream of real emotion happening, that I was treating as a sort of background noise to my project of summoning the energy to “feel good”.
It’s hard to explain. I had this universe of emotion that was fake, and I thought it was real. It’s like having black and white patterns, different patterns for different emotions. Angry is diagonal stripes, scared is squares, happy is circles, whatever. Then one day that rips open and behind it are these fields of pure color: blue, green, yellow.
I don’t know what those are.
But week after week we meditate and then after meditation I tell how I’m feeling. And eventually I realized those colors are the real thing that I thought those patterns were referring to. I thought those patterns were the colors.
I wish I could describe it better.
I accepted that I will be forever alone, so I got a cat
Create something. Art, music , programs or whatever.
Keeps me going regardless of what’s happening.
The first step is to take care of your body. Exercise, sleep 8 hours, eat healthy.
Next step is to start taking care of your mind. Not as straightforward as the first step, with quite a bit more nuance.
Lastly, something that helped me is to find the difference, in your life, between motivation and discipline.
sleep 8 hours
🥲
(above is simultaneously crying and smiling emoji)
Best I can do is 4.
Omg I always thought that was a snot bubble and I had no idea wtf that emoji was supposed to convey.
Holy fuck I’m dumb sometimes.
I know 🙃 8’s a great goal. Hard to achieve, but always worth trying for.
The first step is important and well studied. Double your results with exercise by doing it outside. Again, it’s well studied that being with nature improves your mood, so why not take a hike through the woods or along a river? Put your phone away, leave the earbuds at home and just focus on the moment.
From time to time, when the weather is good and everyone’s still asleep, I’ll take a hot cup of tea outside to the woods near my place and sit on a fallen tree and just be quiet. It improves my mood all day. I did it during the first snowfall of the year during covid and could hear the snowflakes hitting the leaves. I could still hear the yelling from inside the house, but somehow it was not my problem in that moment.
fuck off. I did all of that shit at times when I was depressed and guess what, I just wanted to die even more because eating healthy is so much work
Whoa! You’re coming in hot there, buddy. But there is no situation where step 1 doesn’t help in some fashion. My guess is step 2, the infinitely more difficult step is where you struggle. Good luck, I guess…
The answer is different for everyone but:
Reach out to others.
Create something.
Set goals you care about and force yourself to start working towards them.
Set a time where you do something for you daiky, weekly, etc., pending the size of it.
If all of those feel too big or impossible for you: seek help. A friend or family member first, ideally, but sometimes the only answer is professional help. If said professional recommends drugs to help you get back to a positive mindset, don’t scoff. Sometimes we need to external correction before we can take care of ourselves properly.
Everyone is different but based on my experience you should try to fill your days with new hobbies. If you can, invest money into it. Learn new skills. Do things you never thought about before. Have strong opinions. And most importantly be proud of yourself for all of that. You will hopefully start to like yourself and like being by yourself.
I never stopped feeling like an outcast but I did stop being sad about it. I don’t fit the norm but that can be a good thing.
That’s the neat part, I don’t.
This is a defeatist answer. The real answer is yours to truly find and the advice here can really help, but you absolutely can pull out of it even though it might seem insurmountable
That’s assuming someone has the skills. I’m surrounded by people everyday. As friendly as they are, they are too exclusivist for me and I have the problem of not being good at keeping a conversation alive. Nothing sticks and it’s hardwired, it’s not going to change unless one of the unchangeable circumstances change.
Well do you think socializing is something you even enjoy? If yes, then most people I meet that aren’t good at conversation are facing 1 of 3 problems. One being they just don’t want to talk or two they have nothing in common with the person or lastly you might struggle with a lack of confidence. To keep a convo alive just ask the person about themselves is the easiest way. But truly getting into hobbies and interests will help you find friends and good conversations. This is one reason why I find video games so useful because you will always find someone who likes the same game as you.
And if no well then what does make you happy?
I do enjoy conversations, I just never get to have them. The weakness comes from drawing a blank and then the conversation dying, and if I try forcing myself to say something anyways, it just ends up like this.
So a tip for that you might not know, just be honest in the conversation. If I’m drawing a blank or need time to think I’ll just tell them “hold on I’m thinking” or “wow that’s super interesting give me a second to think/digest that” and they’ll be okay. You can even say “sorry I’m a little flustered/overwhelmed give me a second”.
Silence is fine, but if you don’t let the other know why there is silence they’ll assume you’re done talking. The more honest during conversations the easier they are I feel. Absolutely no one will judge you for needing time to think and if someone does then they are not people you want to talk with anyways. To make this a habit won’t happen overnight. Do it when you remember and overtime it’ll become a habit.
Being honest is the problem though. Everything I could bring up about myself in a conversation comes up equally and then I never end up choosing any response because if I did it would sound awkward. I’m not saying I ever want to do it, but lying, to everyone’s dismay, would actually work better in a conversation. Sadly nobody I have ever spoken to has accepted “give me a moment to come up with a response” as an answer. You’d be the first to not consider it an unrealistic accommodation to provide. You’d also be the first person to not consider silence too underwhelming.
That’s unfortunate that I would be the first. I think everyone deserves to have someone that’ll give them the time of day to talk. I do believe it’s only a matter of time before you find someone IRL that’ll listen to ya.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thanks Pipey.
Go out for coffee to the same place, at around the same time every day. Do not discount the value of superficial relationships, seeing the same people every day will help. It’s a start but a good one, and easy one.
Do you not have a job?
You can feel lonely while having a job
I have a job, but who talks to a depressed looking person? And when I’m using my fake happy-mask, there’s not much real connection going to be be built.
Worse with forcing myself to be in a place where I don’t even have a purpose that I can focus on to distract myself from my despair (and shame).
Thankyou for the response.
To piggy back on what that guy is saying… better put… He’s talking about becoming a regular. I’ve done it at more than a few places throughout the years.
I haven’t lived in one place for more than 3 years out of the last 25 of my life. Making friends is hard. But one thing I did to help me get out of my funks is to go do something I enjoy. For me it was to find a restaurant I like and go sit at the bar. Don’t need to be there to drink, fyi. Just go get some food and be present. Being on your phone is ok, but you’ll be more approachable if you’re looking up at a TV or something like that, so make it a point to put the phone down every now and again. Often times I found that even if I was on my phone, someone sitting next to me might make a comment about whatever is going on with a game or fight or something that was playing and it would spark a conversation. Doesn’t have to be a long one. Remember, we’re taking baby steps here. And hell … You can fake your way through some of those conversations too. About a fight? “Yea man this is a really tough matchup, who do you think takes the win?” It does help to know at least a little about what’s going on, but it’s not required. Even a simple “I haven’t been following along, what happened?” Can keep it going.
Anyways, after showing up more than a few times the servers and bartenders notice and will start talking to you. Asking your name and all that stuff. Conversations from there will go where they go. The great thing is that they are working. There’s no pressure to hold an in depth long conversation since they have things to do. It’ll start as small talk and eventually get deeper.
Again, this is in baby steps. This won’t happen over the course of 2-3 visits. It’ll be more than that. But stay for the meal, get one more drink, then leave. Same will be said about a coffee shop.
The key to this working is persistence and patience. And that goes for beating depression as a whole. It’s not going to happen over night. It takes work, and it takes time, but eventually you’ll get there… Just like you’ll eventually become a regular at that coffee shop, restaurant, bar, arcade, pool hall, or whatever place you decide to go.
One foot in front of the other, keep it moving one step at a time, even if those steps are the length of a dime.
As a final note… Try not to talk down about yourself. It creates a feedback loop that can be hard to break and is self-fulfilling. Positive Mental Attitude… PMA. You’re worth the effort.
So part of the coffee shop advice is true. Even if you feel it’s superficial to start. There’s actually a lot to be said for “fake it until you make it” type socialization. Showing up regularly at the same place, be kind to the staff, learn their names, and little by little you’ll find you start recognizing other regulars and the you. It’s okay for connections to start out not super real or deep, it still works those social muscles out. After that it’s just time investment.
No, because, obviously I made it, everyone’s believing the story that I built by faking, except myself. I never allowed my true self to be seen
Edit: I’m arguing here, because I need to understand that I made it, I need to speak it, voice it and dare to let my true self be seen since I obviously made it. Get it? If I never hear that I made it, I’ll doubt forever that I made it
It’s normal to feel like you somehow don’t “deserve” your life. Please know that many people around you have the same struggle, and to some extent it’s true. Who among us deserve even to be alive and aware and conscious? To live? We don’t. Nobody deserves anything. But we have it anyway - you have this life, it’s yours, without deserving or earning it it’s yours. That is wonderful and a gift.
What you consider your true self may also be an illusion, because you are not kind to yourself and do not see yourself objectively.
You may be faking it till you make it but at some point you must admit you have, in truth, made it.
The point is this isn’t a quick thing. Go long enough in an environment as a regular and you’ll feel safer and more able to open up.
But if you’re going to argue with the advice provided then why ask?
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Specifically to the isolation, lately I’ve been volunteering twice a week. Not a “cure”, but it’s been an improvement for sure.
Depression is another beast entirely, though. I like to think I’m “out” of it now, but it took me a long time to get here.
One thing my therapist suggested was to find your values and try to work toward those. So for me, I’ve found that I care a lot about Education and Community, so I started volunteering teaching English to refugees.
I’m generally nihilistic, but when I’m volunteering it makes me feel better to know I’m making their lives better. Gives me a sense of purpose where it was always lacking before.
I hope you’re able to find something that works for you. Just remember that things can and will get better, even though it can be nearly impossible to believe that when you’re “in it” so to speak. Just keep going, and only do as much as you’re able.
Have you also tried asking in the depression community? [email protected]
It’s easiest to connect with people who share passions. If you like board games, find a group (facebook, meetup, etc) that has a board games night and go along. Most board game players I know are introverted, and it seems you likely are too, so you’ll be on the same ground.
Get out and do things, ride your bike if you have one. At the traffic lights you can exchange a few words with other cyclists who will be happy to tell you where they are going, accept compliments on their bike, etc. Same for mountain biking.
Go to single-day community events. I went to one recently for jade carving. By the end of it you are all chatting and comparing your work, exchanging tips. It’s fun.
TL;DR Get passionate about something. Chase it and join like-minded communities.
Those events add up too. Even if you don’t have a lot to say at the first one. You’ll be able about jade carving at the park cleanup day or whatever is next. Also, outside events are extra good if you are the flavor of introvert who needs physical space…
Keep busy, have animals and focus on making 1 thing better at a time. Start your goals small so that you can actually achieve them.
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Gotta bite the bullet. If you work at a physical location with coworkers, if there’s any that you speak with more than others, I’d just come clean to them and say “hey, i don’t get out too much, thought it’d be cool if we could hang out some time, no problem if you’re not into it”. And set a time if they’d like.
Barring that you can find online communities or sites based around finding online friends, I found one off the subreddit gamer pals back on Reddit. You could even try and PM people you see around a lot on whatever social media you frequent, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, etc.
Even if some of those people don’t want to be friends I doubt they’d judge you for trying, and if they did then they’re a fuckin ass hole anyway.
