Sorry for the delay in my response i just wanted to give myself time to give you a proper response and to digest what you said.
i went through what you mentioned up until 4 years ago when my last relationship ended. i used to blindly look for acceptance in groups of people pretty much my entire life. it was back in December of 2018 when i lost my job over a really stupid reason so i hit a downward spiral. i started taking mushrooms every day in order to sort out issues with myself and get to the "meat" of each problem or hang up. i can say i have made immense progress and finally know myself more than ever and have become okay with parts of myself i have struggled with. so i feel i am ready to come out of my shell so to speak since my entire life i have been a loner and my only main company has been my father. he is great and i love him a lot but he also would drink and his personality would alter drastically. long story short he had a very tough life and so often after work i would watch him lament in a sort of mystified psychotic state which would progress the more he drank. it left me with all sorts of issues that i am just now confronting and i am at a place in my life where i need a social circle. i am okay with myself but since i am alone it makes me fee like a loser and like why is it so hard to just make one friend to go skate or make music with?
so i have never really ever had social activities to take time off of. i do not mean to sound dismissive at all. i really consider the point of what you are saying and i am the kind of person who will not do something for the wrong reasons. i feel i was that way before but now i just want to make some good memories and connections that i can look back on. i now use that frustration to motivate myself to keep doing the things i love. i do not expect the world to mold around me, i for sure can say that as i used to act that way it is just that i have a very malignant intrusive voice which isnt audible but is always there to put me down, i already had really bad issues with self esteem and depression since i was a kid but having my father tear into me and preach to me and watching him wish for death left me with a very fucked up internal dialogue that i am trying to undo. it's very hard because positivity is a new concept for me. being alone i have to fight against the thinking, it's a mental battle.
it's very hard to undo a lot of bad programming my upbringing left me with and while i;m willing to admit i do seek acceptance from people, i can now at least say i am doing it with good intention and not because i think the will like me because we are into the same music or movies etc....i need good conversations and good times. i have a clear idea of what it is that drives me but if i am left alone with myself i fear i won't grow.
what you say is of great value to me so thank you, it's always good to self check but i feel i have overdone that my entire life and was so unsure of a person that i never proceeded in any direction and my world view grew narrow and i had become jaded but through a lot of work i have lifted my view from the ground and have just now begun to see the clouds. i mentally checked out of life when i was about 12 as an act of subconscious self preservation and through mindfulness and psychedelics i have just become aware of that. i thought my depressive doubfutful internal dialogue was just how i was and so i let it run the show.
thanks again man, though it's abstract i get what you mean. i can understand abstract concepts more easily than linear concepts
I appreciate your bravery of sharing more about your person on here - that's not always easy to do.
I think in general, successfully breaking away from the influence of your environment growing up all the while retaining some basic lessons from the experience that you yourself want to apply as to not repeat mistakes you've witnessed or endured is quite an early challenge in life that sort of defines the turning of a person into the ideal of an adult - except of course practically, the situation is never ideal nor all either black or white, like I was saying individuals all have their history and struggles and that's including parents and relatives. There's this (literally) childlike way of keeping idolizing a select few persons in life at the cost of never really expanding past their scope (to varying degrees), and then there's stepping back (if not running away, for better efficiency) from the small picture, to realize that because you grew up around those people as default references and feeling certain ways doesn't make them especially reliable focal points and maybe you’re just attached to familiarity (which is natural).
Everyone lives in a bubble that they sometimes work on expanding in order to get closer to a more coherent comprehension of existence (including interpersonal relationships) or sometimes don't, and thus everyone falls somewhere of their own on the spectrum of cognitive progression and environmental adaptation, resulting in their life 'choices' and condition at a given time. That's everybody all the time including when it comes to substance use, be it your dad drinking, you taking mushrooms or me smoking weed all day, in the end we're only talking individual human beings trying to cope with digesting a world that's impossible to fully comprehend unless one essentially becomes selfless by giving up on the credibility of their first person point of view as an effort to try keeping seeing new perspectives. You didn't have the tools to understand what was happening to your father figure as a younger version of yourself but what you've earned from the subsequent struggles are clues to help you put yourself in his shoes and resolve that trauma, but it sounds like you've already done so to quite an extent. Your current ability to look back on the situation and analyze it is a strength you've earned from your battle, not a scar.
That is to say, everyone you'll meet is also in the process of undoing their own bad programming to varying degrees of advancement and success, so you shouldn't feel like you're an exception. Particularly troubled childhoods can be an especially tough battle, but in reality someone with one on the more normal side of the spectrum (due to odds) would develop a different type of identity crisis too and despite aspiring to some kind of artificial harmony, society is just the sum of all the individuals' personalities clashing (which is sometimes easy - and made easy - to forget).
I think the key is to realize that your condition doesn't have to define yourself. Roots only exist for you to grow somewhere else, not for you to remain there staring them down. The pain from every new battle you overcome is really just you evolving (maybe more brutally than some people with a flatter curve of experiences). In general, the worst one can do is pity their own condition as by definition that's time spent not retouching it.
Now I can empathize with your struggle when it comes to finding ways of growing without sincere interaction with other people, one indeed needs hits and misses with 'mirror images' to get a grasp of their own boundaries like I was saying, but I think unless you live in a big city where you're bound to regularly catch a few meaningful connections out of one more gazillion of sterile ones I think such occasions are just rare. Which in turn gives them all their preciousness, and significance when eventually the relationship is over but at least you now have access to a new frequency of personal wisdom. I find that if you take the hits as something that makes you grow as opposed to just pain signals then they stop hurting - maybe it’s just the way I've found to cope, but I really don't feel half bad about it.
Somehow I'm getting the idea that leaving to somewhere completely foreign would do you good - sometimes one has to physically move away from their position just like they have to mentally. If you live in a small town or suburbs, it's definitely easy to feel isolated but you’re also running in circles. You sound like you have very little holding you back wherever you are geographically right now, maybe you should consider using that as a reason to live more as opposed to an inspiration to live less. Whatever it is that you'd ideally like to do yourself in life, I’m sure there are plenty of people less intelligent than you who're already doing it, so in reality whatever holds you back is in your head and the more you'll realize that, the more you'll naturally tame those voices because you'll just know where you stand better than them.
Topic: Things You Are Not Stoked On (Read 1886410 times)