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This is an appallingly cliche boomer thing to say but life has ups and downs. When you're young the ups and downs happen on the scale of moments or days or perhaps weeks. As you age you can get large chunks of a year of ups or downs. Even older these can stretch to multiple years. For me I'm at around periods of 8 months or so of downs interspersed with ups. If this is your first time hitting a long down it can really seem terminal, this is how it will always be, etc. This is rarely the case as long as you have your health. So I can't say anything other than yes it sucks, I feel it completely, life isn't a monotonic upward progression toward anything. But after a few of these cycles you start not to care about each one too much. It still sucks when you're in the trough though.

I can commiserate! The last year has been really tough for me as well. Lots of my recent struggles have come from a lot my unresolved internal contradictions. Being in a minor crisis had heightened a lot of those tensions and forced me to work on resolving them. So even though this year has been an objective decrease in my quality of life, I was able/forced to work on some of the key issues that have been hounding me for years.

It might be best to focus on the few positive internal changes you were able to make this year as building the foundation for the rest of your life than it is to focus on the difficult portions. You said you finally found a good therapist, so I imagine you are making positive progress in some spheres of your life! Congratulations on that, a good therapist is a rare thing.

Hey RION I don't really have an answer and I'm not sure if this is wrong to do (read the room lol) but I do want to say happy birthday

stop celebrating or acknowledging your birthday. works for me, at least half the time i don't notice when it was.

Let this radicalize you against your enemies and inspire you to find new ways to defeat them. Which in this context means you got plenty of free time to work with local orgs and that networking might lead to something. Or it might not. However you will be getting out at least.

Stay home and wallow in sadness for the day. As a treat, it helps to do that sometimes to get that black bile out of your system.

I’m in the same boat, so to speak. Recently had a life altering injury that put me out of a job and on month 6 of the search. And my birthday’s just around the corner too!

I hope your birthday went well, and if it hasn’t happened yet I hope you make time for yourself to do something you want without any expectations.

In regards to the mental aspect, I’m really proud you’ve found the courage for therapy, and engaging with it so that it can be helpful. I need to make that decision myself.

Don’t forget to silence the inner naysayer every so often. You’re allowed to enjoy things that don’t make you a better work slave, and now’s your chance to find those things that you enjoy.

For me, things are getting better, albeit slowly. I’ve had to remind myself that mentally it’s like preparing for a race; not every run is going to be your best time. And some days it will rain and be shitty and feel like nothing got accomplished, but you still went out there and did the things you were scared of/didn’t feel like you could do. Patience and perseverance, my friend.

@oktherebuddy nailed it. It's really about perspective. You know there are good times out there, you've had em. You gotta buckle down and weather the storm and do the stuff you need to do to get through it. It doesn't make now not suck, but you don't get quite as mired in it if you can look to the future and see a bright spot ahead.

If I, as a secret ~~FBI~~ CIA agent at Langley posting on a Ukranian hater/train enjoyer forum, can offer anything, it's perhaps a different perspective for your mental. There's a lot about improving your situation that is fun, revitalizing, and rewarding without feeling punitive and grindy. Perhaps you can think about how much room there is to explore and expand in life. Like, if my problem was feeling meek and insecure around others and took a BJJ class, it's not like I'm resigned to having to be roughed up, it'd be like "Wow, I didn't realize how fun it would be to treat rough housing as an art!"

Besides, constant growth is for capitalists and even a capitalist knows the money line is all jagged and weird as it climbs to infinity in pursuit of providing value to shareholders. There's nothing you need to keep in mind in life besides trying your best to get the things you want and loving as hard as you can in every moment. The rest will take care of itself even if you never give it another thought again. I would SHARE a moment by HOLDING you

I ate a lot of shit my entire life and my life only gotten better recently. Mostly through timing, luck and also a little bit of force of will. To my credit, none of the good things would have happened if I wasn't a broken desperate person in the first place.

My life got better in COVID doing the shittiest jobs I'll ever fucking have hopefully. I was lucky to be in a position where I could just talk to people about getting hired somewhere.

I also grinded to make myself hireable, I had two jobs during this period, I didn't want to do that forever so the grindset was valuable to me. I dont think it is past stability and grindset types who make it their personality are more than worthless people.

As a person who goes through this every year... I have learned to just wait for next year. Things'll be a bit worse than that they were before.

I don't know if my brain completely broke or I just got too tired to be as stressed out as I used to get but I've gotten surprisingly... calm at the reality of my situation.

So I think I got to the point of "accept it, feel bad for a bit and then move on."

And happy/adequate/barely tolerable (whichever is appropriate) b-day fellow hexbearino.