I don’t really do anything worthwhile. Or at least that is what it sounds like when it is talked about. “You didn’t have to do that” “you don’t feel like that do you” I must really not be good at anything, and I really did think I was helping. But I guess I should keep to what I am good at, being in the way.
I have what I need, a place so no one will need to deal with clean up, and I have the know how. Courage is the thing I need and let me tell you my courage grows everyday.
I will probably delete this when I wakeup in the morning because I am a coward, but soon I will have the strength and need the relief enough.
I just watched a show where one character was speaking a lot like you do now. That they never did anything worthwhile.
And the other character answered with a memory of something, and said essentially that even if their whole life was just to have that one happy memory, it would be worth it.
That memory wasn’t something “worthwhile”. It was a completely trivial thing, but one that they found joy in.
Being involved in a greater cause can be a good thing, as long as you can do it and stay true to yourself. I hope you find one, if that’s what your interested in.
But don’t devalue your own joys by placing them in this category of being “not worthwhile” of some vague societal standard. Society is fractured, and grows more so by the day. So I guarantee there’s a corner of it somewhere that values what you bring.
Some things we can’t change, like who our family is. But we can always control who we associate with. It sounds like you’re associating with people that don’t value you. Before you decide to literally end it all, maybe try distancing yourself from those people, and meeting some others.
I can hear you say to yourself “but that’s so hard, I’ve never had success with it before, why should I even try?”
But that’s crap. I just moved to a new place. I was completely alone, with no friends there. But I like playing tabletop games. So I looked on Reddit/r/lfg every day, and posted multiple times. It took me months. But eventual I found a group that I love meeting up every week and playing with.
Those people all agreed to meet and play before they ever saw what I looked like, or knew anything about me. They all took a chance on me, and I took one on them. Take a chance to do whatever it is you love, and if you don’t know what that is, take a chance to do different things and find out! It might not work out, but it’s worth the effort. Don’t give up.
My joy was taken a very long time ago, by a very evil person, if it hasn’t come back by now, well, let’s just say I am not holding out hope.
I really do appreciate the story, I have always found metaphor fascinating, and you are right the hunt for community can be exhilarating, but it is also exhausting, and while there is a lot to be learned from failure at some point that failure has to be accepted as outcome. A person can only run an experiment so many times with different variables before it is time to reject the hypothesis.
Now I believe it is time for me to find the common denominator in all the failures (me) and learn to live with the added knowledge, or choose to just get out of the way and allow those working around me to move more smoothly.
So you’ve talked about the impact on your work, have you ever thought about just like, leaving?
You obviously speak English well enough to be a native speaker. A long time ago I wanted to get away from my situation, and so went to teach English in a foreign country I wanted to visit.
Have you ever thought about doing the same? Are you worried that once you get there, you’d somehow get revealed as a “failure”, or however you think of yourself, again?
You know that if that happens, you can just… move again, you know? I’ve moved around a lot, and I reinvented myself as a different, I think better person each time. Or at least I made a sincere attempt to think about what my weaknesses were and how to improve them.
How many places have you lived? You say you’ve run an experiment to exhaustion, but to continue that metaphor, if you ran each one in the same petri dish, how can you say you say they were truly independent?
There are more than a hundred countries who want native English speakers as foreign language teachers. Is there not a single one of those places you’d like to live in for a while?
Your current situation is literally making you want to kill yourself. If you think making the most extreme change you can requires “courage”, then don’t you think you owe it to yourself to try a less-but-still-extreme complete change of scenery? Have the courage to do that first at least.
So another thing I hear all too often is that I argue too much, so am going to agree. Mostly because you are right there are more variables to be tested, and you are right the courage to pull up roots and go is great. I appreciate you pointing that out. And like they say a change is as good as a rest.