2025-08-09 00:00 UTC
I don't know what's been going on, but I've been on a self-deprecation kick over the last 24 to 36 hours. I haven't really done much externally to show this, but internally it's been quite the war. I seem to have this bad habit of ruminating on the past and re-framing its events in a more negative way. I'm not sure why I do this, especially now. I'm not sure what exactly has happened in my life to make me do this horrendous combination of rumination and negative re-framing, but I just know that it's been quite hard on me cognitively and emotionally. I just look at a lot of the things that have happened in my life and can't help but feel a great sense of failure and hopelessness regarding them. It's given me an extremely negative self-concept and I know that it's not sustainable to think this way. But also, I can't really figure out how to not do any of that stuff. It seems like it all stems from this deeper uncontrollable feeling that I can't get away from. I feel it in my head almost all the time. It's like this constant pain that I can feel just behind my eyes and it radiates throughout my whole body. It's a pain I started to feel when I was about 16 or 17, and I remember I first started feeling it when my first girlfriend broke up with me. Not to say that this feeling stems entirely from that experience, but I think it's safer to say that it was my first trigger for it and that it's something that comes from a much deeper place than getting dumped. But ever since then, I haven't been able to escape this feeling. It goes away for a while, but always finds a way to come back. Daniel Johnston used to talk about a "pain in the brain" and that's exactly how I feel about it. It seems like it's just something that will always be a part of me, but I hate the fact that I have to learn to live with it. It's been so hard living with it. I feel like I'm missing out on so much in life because of it. It makes me feel like someone who had a limb amputated in an accident or something. I remember what it was like to not feel this way, but every day that goes by I forget that feeling more and more. It's starting to come to a point where this is all I know, and that scares me.
I have this feeling that I'm going to become some bitter and angry and rude and overall toxic person to be around because of this pain I feel. Everyone else can go around and be happy and productive and all those other things while I just sit around, alone and angry with no recourse but to swim around in my own thoughts for the rest of my days. I've thought about how nice it would be to have a regular job and regular things in my life, but I fear that I no longer have the wiring to sustain that kind of lifestyle. No matter how well I get, things will always come to a head and crash and burn. I can have everything "figured out" but still not be able to sustain anything meaningful. Employers don't understand that I have to take these sabbaticals for what seems to be no reason at all, and they simply can't excuse that because of how drastically it affects their bottom line. It doesn't matter how productive, useful, or necessary I am. I will always have to deal with the burnout and society isn't made for people like me. I also don't have the talent or the luck to be someone who lives off their creativity or anything like that. I recently saw those famous blog posts from Hyperbole and a Half about being depressed and I feel that way exactly, but fortunately someone like Allie Brosh gets to live a lifestyle that works well with her depression. As for me, I have to just try and figure it out somehow. I don't think I will, though. I feel a great tragedy coming for my life. I hate to sound so negative, but I can't see it any other way right now.