My Story

I remember being depressed as far back as my teenage years. Obviously, this is hindsight, but locking myself in my bedroom listening to music and reading sports scores while not giving school work even the slightest thought was more than common teenage rebellion.

For the longest time I believed I would always be “all right”, that somehow things out of my control would always be there to keep me in “liveable circumstances”.
I believed that living a “normal/average/common” pedestrian life of “waking up, going to work, have dinner, take a dump, sleep and repeat” would be sufficient to lead to happiness. What I didn’t recognize was that I was extremely unhappy, so just aiming at keeping the same life would never change my happiness level.
So I did try living the “normal” life, had a girlfriend, rented an apartment, had a 9-5 middle management job, bought a car, had credit cards. I came off as a good guy with a good life. Reality is that I was miserable, but couldn’t even see it. I started drinking daily, my girlfriend left (to which I used to joke that if I could leave myself I would), missed worked regularly, but didn’t care about anything. That’s not quite true, I cared about how I was perceived. The “good guy with the normal life” is who I had to be. If I was unhappy or had problems it was up to me to solve them, because people are not interested in others’ problems, and admitting difficulties is whiny and needy.

So through the years, I bounced from job to job, apartment to apartment, even when back to live at home (which I actually patted myself on the back for being “strong enough” to do it). Living with my parents gave me the same sense of comfort I grew up with that despite everything, my circumstances would always be “liveable”.
Back on my own, the revolving door of bouncing from job to job, apartment to apartment continued, I drank more, lost relationships as quickly as I made them.
My frustration against the world I kept to myself (can’t be whiny), but my feelings were “my life is a fucking mess, people must know that I’m not living “normally” but they prefer thinking I am.”
My quandary was that I couldn’t express my misery (barely admitted it to myself) because that was “whiny” and admitting I wasn’t “normal”, yet at the same time I was miserable to the point of not seeing the point of living. But, get this, doing anything rash about it would not be “normal” either!!!
So I had to live with something I couldn’t bare, and was not allowed to express!!

Now several years later, more jobs, living arrangements and screwed up relationships, I’m much better. Thanks to great help as well as decisions I took to stop drinking, and take care of my overall health.

As for the “normal” life, FUCK THAT, my life is anything but normal, but I’m actually happier than I have been in a long time.

To those of you who may relate to some of this, I did leave a lot of details out. Not in order to make it a feel good story, but because some of it is still very painful. We don’t have to put every single detail out there, but it is important to recognize our unhappiness with our lives.

I don’t have any secret formula for how I got to feel better, but what has (and still does) help(ed) me is a genuine un-concern for others opinion of me. In fact, I sometimes even revel in the fact that I live on a daily basis shit that most “normal” people are too scared to even think about.