I know it’s not normal. It’s something that needs therapy that I can’t afford or get to fix. Most people don’t sit there when there’s a quiet moment thinking about how horrible of a person they are, pulling examples from throughout their life to reinforce just how much worse they’ve made the lives of everyone around them. I know it’s not normal to need constant noise to try and keep your brain distracted enough to quiet those thoughts as much as possible. But I just wonder, what must that be like? What’s it like to be normal where you can just enjoy a little peace in the silence without going through your biggest hits: regrets edition?
I know part of it’s just being born broken because I was doing this shit when I was a little, little kid. But these days, I can’t even blame bad luck when the reason there are so many examples at the ready is because of my history of terrible decisions and bad behavior. I had opportunities many beg for handed to me, and I squandered, wasted, or rudely refused every one of them until I got where I am now.
Every problem I face today is one of my own making. Every time I vent about it I’m reminded of that as people will come in and tell me how they were, “Just like you once, but I fixed myself up and got out of that, so you can too.” But I can’t. It’s doable. Just not by me.
So instead, I sit here, day after day, just trying to make enough noise to drown out the regrets. But sometimes there isn’t enough noise, it all boils up, and I’m left stewing in my regrets until it all runs dry and the process starts all over again.
I’m in this exact position right now and it helps to hear I’m not alone. So if nothing else, you’ve impacted one person positively today. We’re all gonna make it buddy.
I know it’s not normal to need constant noise to try and keep your brain distracted enough to quiet those thoughts as much as possible. But I just wonder, what must that be like? What’s it like to be normal where you can just enjoy a little peace in the silence without going through your biggest hits: regrets edition?
This is a very familiar feeling. I can’t really give you any advice because I have the same issue but I do just have to co-vent a bit here. Mostly the same boat here on the therapy too. I have had therapists before but they’re all overbooked and I’m not a high priority case so as soon as I started showing any signs improvement they gave me the “ok you’re better, now get out” vibes. Of course as soon as I was no longer in therapy I spiraled back to my pit. It also doesn’t help that after going through that for years you get really good at hiding how you’re really feeling from everyone and I also did it to my therapists.
I am on a medication now that helped amazingly for a while. The intrusive thoughts were gone and I could just live. I could think about the things I wanted to think about. I could even enjoy silence without my brain immediately finding a stick to beat me with. I was able to aknowledge my past mistakes without the self loathing and work towards fixing the ones that I could to make life better for myself. It was amazing. Unfortunately my body builds up a tolerance to most medications very quickly and I could already feel the medication losing it’s effectiveness months ago. I’m back to sleeping in my livingroom with the TV on 24/7 with the volume up so I can drown out my own thoughts. Even when I try to distract myself with a game I need youtube on in the background just in case there is a quiet moment in the game. At work I need my earbuds playing something just to keep me from unintentionally verbalizing the thoughts around other people. The whole time I know I do still have enough room to bump up the dosage on this medication one more time but I don’t want to yet. I’m still technically functional. I’m still working, eating, sleeping, and getting bills paid. I wasn’t reliably foing any of that before this med. The sooner I bump up the dose the faster my body will build that tollerance to the new dosage. The medication is still slightly effective at this dose. At some point it won’t be and that’s when I’ll need to bump up the dose. As it is I want to delay the inevitability of this medication completely stopping working as long as possible because when it does I’m screwed. I’ve been through 8 different meds at this point all at various dosages. None of them have worked nearly as well as this one and I’m not confident that I will ever find another one that works this well.
For me having been on a medication that worked for a while only to stop is almost worse than never having had a medication that worked. I got to feel what it was like to be normal. Now I have to slowly watch myself slipping back to where I was before with no knowledge of any way to stop it.
Even when I try to distract myself with a game I need youtube on in the background just in case there is a quiet moment in the game.
That, I mean, yeah. I can’t remember the last time I just listened to a game’s soundtrack without having a video either on or at the ready so that I didn’t need to sit through the lulls like the artists intended. I actually, um, I got a “gaming” mouse recently, one with extra buttons that can be hooked to macros or other commands. I assigned one of the buttons to the play/pause media button so that I didn’t even need to grab the keyboard or move my hand to start up whatever was queued in the background. Just a flick of my finger and it’s started back up.
As for the rest of your story, I have to say, fuck. That sucks. And I’m sorry that you’re going through that.
That’s actually a really good idea with the mouse. I have a gaming mouse and I never actually use any of the side buttons. I’ll have to set that up tonight so thanks for the idea.
Also from the sound of it we’re in the same boat. We’ll get through this. One thing that did and still does help me is a kind of dark but still encouraging saying I came up with. It’s kind of a bastardization of the army EOD motto which is officially “Initial sucess or total failure”. It makes sense because when someone is defusing a bomb and they fail then the bomb goes off and they die. But logic would dictate that if they’re not dead then they haven’t failed yet. So when my brain is being uncooperative about something I did I just think to myself “That didn’t kill me so I didn’t fail yet.” It’s just a way to remind myself that unless a decision I make actually kills me, I still have a chance to fix it.
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