The Instagram is private and me sharing is for group of people that have shown concern when I do not contact.

It is proof I am getting outside and doing something

Because my normal pattern of behaviour is to close myself off and isolate as I feel “insert negative emotion”

I want social connection because I am starved of it, so I am sharing it in a “safe” environment provides a means to get a social need met- which I have not been doing, hold myself accountable to my actions while having social pressure to keep doing it and doing something that improves my overall health

On the oversharing thing, yes I am very guilty of that, but just posting pictures of where I walked and milestones is, I feel, a healthier alternative to how I usually react which is either too much or nothing at all.

Thank you for the offer

I am currently trying something for myself seeing as my options are limited.

Basically I am walking - target, for now, is 5 KM a day with a goal of 25 KM a week and then post on a weekly schedule to act as a cataloguing tool in conjunction with social media to reaffirm a feeling of social connection.

It isn’t perfect but I am trying something to try and work on the the deep self-hatred, self-shame, loneliness, etc.

I feel by doing something that works the energy out and acts as proof to validate that I am not alone, especially when a few people I have on the social media acknowledge it - small victories.

I am also hoping that social pressure will help to motivate me to not stop and can hit a few birds with a stone throw - so to speak.

Your daugther is very lucky to have you, to show care and support and try and build her up to be able to handle the harsh world.

I want to change, I really do and it feels so hopeless to keep trying and being knocked down time and again, it feels like it would be easier to just end it and then everything would stop.

This is like a thing in general that I am tired of struggling alone and not being able to find “instrumental characters” to show me a different path. Every path I have tried to take leads me to failure and those failures somehow get bigger and more painful as I struggle to move forward which ends up just making things worse because of my poor emotional upbringing cascading with the results of having that compound with trying, but then realising it was not enough and thinking it will never be enough.

I am carrying all this with me, all these things with me and it is ruining my life and robbing me of being a better person.

It is decades of unresolved and untreated misalignments sparking off and making things worse. The myriad intertangled and almost “cancer-like” buildup of things that is a overwhelming burden of carrying something no one knows what it is and feeling “like what is wrong with me, why can’t I just do this thing” and I must just carry this burden on my own, I am expected to be this “pillar of strength” when it feels like my strength is spent and I am tired of trying and consistently failing.

Thank you for your reply

I wish to say that my reply is not to demean or invalidate what works for you and has led to you finding results that have been met with success and just a realisation that I just need to accept the situation for what it is.

Additionally, not this group but another I tried to seek assistance with in a different environment, but it is something of a sore spot for me to mention because I have mentioned my financial difficulties and how it is hamstringing my healing process. I wish to say that I am not asking for financial support. It felt demoralising to want to air the frustration of how difficult it is to get the help I need and not be able to afford the means to get it.

I understand that people have their own difficulties in life and it is hard and answers cannot be always be found, but the feeling that it gets treated like I am begging for financial gain, for someone to “save me” with a swipe of a transaction really felt insulting and I wish to iterate that I am not asking for financial assistance.

I tried to plan trying again to go the hospital and endure what I would after breaking away from feeling how my treatment was not taken seriously.

Currently with my finances, I cannot afford it, I worked it out and at most I can afford 3 trips

• So making an appointment to get clearance for an appointment with the mental health services (getting a proof of requiring attention)
• Then an appointment for assessment
• Then an appointment with a psychologist to then run the tests for assessment
• Then come back to go to get answers for assessment and being assigned an diagnosis

That is not taking into account if they drag their feet again and waste my time and what I assume above is the best case scenario, which is usually not the case - even if it might be easier or harder than what I imagine.

Then if I want to apply for a grant - which should be able to at the very least help alleviate some pressure and be able to pay for transport costs

This will require and hinge on the hospital actually giving me my diagnosis paperwork and not decide that meds is all I need like the last time I tried to get help. I can be able to get the necessary documents sorted with it all hinging on whether the hospital wastes my time again or not within the 3 trips I can afford.

Currently it is not feasible to get the support that I want - I will need to wait for family to gift me money over my birthday or Christmas time to afford this process. The house is somewhat existing on the charity of family to keep it above the point of uncomfortable struggle.

I have to just accept the fact that I just cannot afford it, right now.

The only thing I can do is try to “self-medicate” and unfortunately that is met with mixed results, because I do not have the luxury of much choice. Best I was able do recently is go for an hour long walk and adding music to it the routine. This is to stave off the unbearable inner voice that accompanies me while walking, only thing I need to do now is try and build some consistency with it.

There are other things I wish to try more forward with but there is a lack of self-confidence and I guess planning to be able to where I want to be.

I have tried to cut back on sugars - have coffee with 1 sugar at most twice a day, with a rare exception of 3 times, only drink water with the occasional sugary drink that the family shares once week.

Evening meals are alternating between chicken and meat with variation with potatoes, vegetables or some form of refined product , but I do admit there is a lot gluten (bread, processed foods because cheap), milk, refined sugars in bread and most likely seed oils (used for cooking, in food additive products ) in the way the food is prepared and served.

Thank you for the suggestion though

I mean only one side of the family is the benefactor, but they are too far away to offer more support than trying to keep the things above water.

But I do get the point, even if they are far apart they still put some effort to help and I should see that as a positive that they are offering said support, regardless of how small it is.

That doesn’t discredit your experiences, it just I think a part of me has given up as it feels like the more progress i make the more pain and trauma i seem to attract.

Being silent in my mind is torturous as there is a lot of these many small and deeply intertwined emotions and traumas and I am surrounded by and living in. The “voices” are so persistent that even if I calm them that unless I get to understanding and healing them, it is just too much to process. I can force it for a time, but that is like tying a knot in a hose with running water.

It is bad because the moments I feel better about myself, I end up doing something that destroys all the progress. It feels like I am sabotaging myself everyime I think I am ready but reality finds a way to drag me back down.

It is hard to get away when I cannot, to do so requires that which I feel incapable of grasping as it keeps falling through my fingers from my skills that feel inadequate.

I try and fail and it is on repeat and this really drains me because I wish I had someone around to just get through to me when I falter to keep me going forward. Like someone to help me break through that wall I keep getting stuck at because every time I hit it I can’t break through clearly and I start at square 1 again.

It feels too hard for me to maintain on my own as I cannot trust myself to make the right choice, especially when I process and see where the wrong choices were taken.

There is a part of me that feels a need to explain my thinking in regards to feeling do negative about work prospects, so I will spoiler it for those that are interested to look at their own discretion.

Thank you for the reply

Yeah the strong sense of justice thing i get because I have been in the situations where I feel angry at it and is almost character defining

I don’t know if that is a result of childhood trauma mixing with later life trauma and from that just becoming a state of existence

I like that aspect of being able to talk, but unfortunately the person who I could talk to for hours was an ex, and that is messy because there are still feelings there and because of that I cannot communicate with them when they are hopping between relationships

Otherwise, people just shut down, make assumptions or move away.

So I have just been very avoidant and keep everything in because when I share a lot of the time it is met with silence or disinterest.

I don’t know if I mentioned it before but in the country where I live there is about 33% unemployment which enforce quotas require race and gender based distribution. Unfortunately by legal definitions, I am in the least desirable demographic.

Without a form of nepotism, one has to be, jn my case, generally exceptional to make it past such filters and even then expect to be stuck at lower end of the ladder because the upper end has its quotas already filled.

It is just a fact of life here that connections equal job mobility or one must start one’s own income stream.

If not, then sucks to suck.

The thing that worked the longest, but collapsed was a regime of

-exercise -read a book -Journaling -meditation -affirmations -mindfulness -self-care

But without support to help me keep going when times are tough I just backslide

From that, I disliked the reading as it felt forced and the Journaling ended up being something I would be stuck ruminating on and that felt unhealthy

Affirmations and mindfulness, I guess helped but felt fake and forced

Meditation was alright when in the right headspace but generally became annoying

Exercise was probably the most positive,but my room is too small now to really do the regiment I was doing and my headspace is really messed up that I keep myself locked in a room because I rationalize no reason to leave it - which I is wrong but struggle to cognitively understand why my being refuses to just go out - probably some deep seeded traumas I have not got around to.

Self care is inconsistent

Hi

I get that and thank you for the advice

I am just so tired of suffering and doing so alone

It is something that I have had to deal with since childhood and I am not asking for pity or sympathy, It is just I am so done with life and not knowing what to do.

I am tired of being strong on my own and not having the strength to be better for myself. I wish I had it, but I don’t.

The proper path is always out of reach because I have no support, no one to give me a hand, not even my own parents and thus I can rely on no one for help and I get that I need to find my own way, but I have been trying to do so for so long and I think a part of me has given up and is tired of trying and getting nowhere.

I am so tired of reaching out, really trying and then getting subpar results because I cannot afford the type of stuff that I need to do. I am living off of someone else’s charity and this illusion is going to break eventually and what is going to happen, scares me so much. It feels too much for me.

I know nothing is easy, but damn, it so hard to continue living when near everything thing I try to do continuously results in some form of failure or I get left behind with something that leaves me bitter.

It is not easy, and I don’t expect answers but I wish I was a better person to be able to find a way out of this constant suffering.

Thank you for your advice

Although I find it difficult to work on most of the suggestions put forward I can at least work on some of them at least - take small steps

I have tried some of the things you have mentioned before in the past, but I usually backslide because I have difficulty keeping it consistent, for at my best about 3 months, but that is because I did not have support to keep me going or something happened that disrupted it enough that threw me off my rhythm and then I fall into bad habits again

I know in another group mention that a friend recommended me a church counselor for mental health counseling and although it is not perfect I do have an appointment in about 2 weeks.

It is just a lot of going through rejection, isolation and feeling like what I say doesn’t get taken seriously (in regards to when I went to the hospital - they stopped trying to diagnose and just started giving meds and I got very frustrated after 6 months of that and how they were stopped looking for the cause and decided that treating the brain chemicals was more important)

I only recently got told I most likely have neural divergent patterns because usually people do not really bother to get to know me or I am manipulated by people thinking I am too soft.

So basically I have like decades of built up issues because I don’t have a means to get it out of my system, so yeah it is like a stewing pot that is always too full and bubbles over when I try to “serve” up information - it can get messy. If anything I have gotten more coherent compared to how I used to be, was told I don’t need therapy, I need an exorcist before - from a normal person.

Thank you for the advice.

I do have a thing with video games and I can be very invested in shows that can make me emotional from tying a moment to a scene. I do try to get involved in groups, but unless it is small I get socially exhausted and then I have difficulty getting the motivation to get back into it.

I tried to get a something in software dev (but after getting my diploma) realised that that kind of work environment is not a good fit because I am not a great at coding and felt stronger on the information systems side but lacked confidence and the ability to “stretch the truth” to even know that I am capable because of bad interviews (my part largely ) giving me the impression that I am not qualified for the role - I have been more open to the idea of the embellishment concept, but I haven’t had much luck to test it. I kind of abadoned that career path and try my hand and looking at TEFL but that is also an over-saturated market that I do not have experience in.

I sort of like books, but it is something I really need to enjoy from the start and then I can “lock in”, chess I feel out of my depth in as I know it is a game that rewards large scale pattern knowledge and it is a bit too involved for me.

I know this is subjective, but I had embraced the narrative and got into the character’s head as he slowly lost patience with everything

My decisions were at :

“The hanging was screw you, I am not playing by your rules”

and

at the crowd scene, things leading up to it made me just as frustrated at the characters, that I also was getting sick of things, and gunned them down because I got tired of it all and I inhibited the character - that was a point that I felt just as tired as the characters and thought everyone can die, no one here is worth the effort,

Them doing the cop outs does make the scenes weaker, I agree, - the hanging I feel was early enough before things went off the deep end, but the crowd scene, for me, was memorable because I made a mistake in the heat of emotion, when I let myself be engrossed in the role-playing as the soldiers physically, mentally and emotionally break down, it was what stuck with me especially when you reach the end and you realize how you’ve been played for a fool the whole time.

Would it have been better if it was tighter and they fully commited to that descent into madness, yes. Did they have to go so heavy with the messaging, not really.

The no russian mission, I felt initially shocked the first time, but once the police arrive my illusion was broken. You can just walk through the whole civilian section and do nothing and be blamed for the attack anyway - it had more impact if you were killing people but it also has initial shock value but it is all an illusion like the choices in Spec Ops.

There was a bit of a disconnect with how was it, 5 men in only body armour made a fool out of russian equivalent of swat - they were performing riot police procedure on men armed with machine guns and grenade launchers - no different than spec ops in the last stretch of the game where you are killing juggernauts and armoured vehicles, the airport guards I can understand - but the special police were funneling into killzones - and maybe that was the idea for the context for war but it was like the North Hollywood Shootout, only both sides were carrying equivalent weaponry and only one side was really using it

I know Makarov was connected with politicians and the whole thing could have been decided to be green lit as a false flag to have a pretext.

I think it forms part of bigger meta narrative, and the end of the day you still go through with the white phosphur attack as the game is forcing the choice on you to proceed as the only way to solve the problem - which is what the character believed in

Its message is,to me, “are you having fun” playing a game of murder -it forced, albeit clumsily, the reality of war when you feel you have no other option - a choice you are forced to make like pulling the trigger of a gun. You can leave the game and not do it or you pull the trigger.

You are still killing after that point soon after, with character quick to stat blaming others and you are still going on for the ride by playing- to finish the game, to get to Komrad- it comes off pretentious i admit, but the wp was acting as a turning point and was using a blunt force narrative to make you start asking questions about the character’ sanity

Could it have been done better - sure, but the thing is you, the player, still went through with it and pressed the button instead of putting the game down and refusing - it is trying to sell the point of view of the player’s character you are playing decided that it was the “only way” and by continuing to play the game you have accepted the condition forced upon you and continued to be complicit in the events that unfold because you wanted to see the story through.

“No Russian is shock value, but there really isn’t much player consequence as it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you keep up, you could even skip it”

If you wanted to avoid the nastiness of what you were doing you could in No russian, specs ops decided to comfront the player with deciding for the player to either accept the nastiness or don’t and if you want to see the story to completion you better get your hands proper dirty and not half ass it.

Again, conveying that is not easy and what they did could have been conveyed better. You are seeing things from the perspective of a dude with severe ptsd and you have been murdering people up to that point on fragile pretense

I think this is where the nuance is and where the things can go off the rails. Your example is that you want to more easily be connected with people that you enjoy engaging with but find it hard to find - which you did attempt to find a work around for, which I do commend.

I think because of the volume of scale of the internet it has been fine-tuned and engineered towards benefiting the major players more as they have taken convenience features and frankenstein’d it into a tool of “increased engagement”.

It is like a market square and everyone is shouting out their wares at the same time and the major players (and others) have done their research on how to be the “loudest and most attention-grabbing hawker at the square”

Here the algorithm approach is useful to help “silence the sea of voices” and find “hawkers” that sell “products” that are of interest to you. It does require some discipline on the users part to curate their “hawkers”, but overall the experience is improved as one deals with “products” that is aligned with one’s interests.

I feel, in general, however that the intent has been twisted into something that has become a slippery slope that slides down towards “how can I get eyes on my thing and keep people coming back” for as long as possible. One’s attention gets bombarded with as many ideas as possible and, from this, one’s scope starts to bloat and becomes muddy as one processes too many different ideas and viewpoints in a short time frame and as a result one spends less time forming a individual opinion. I believe this does contribute to shorter attention spans as we attempt to “offload” our thinking onto something else as we try to make sense of all the information we take in.

The easiest thing I can think of is TikTok and how quickly the short video format was incorporated into the big platforms.

It is a human shortcoming I feel that gets taken advantage of (and I feel like it is being cultivated) and as humans we do have a side to us that tries to optimise the shit out of a things - often to our detriment.

I was served the channel by the algorithm and was concerned with the length so I attempted to share in a neutral manner unsure on reception.

I found it interesting and wanted to share the opinion

Yeah, there is a lot of evolving information, yet for now one can still have some measure of control over the content one can engage with

Yes, that is a good idea around what I am thinking in regards to the “magic addictive formula”

They have a system in play that optimises the play experience in a way that is rewarding to “addictive habits” and attempts to “encourage” a habit that leans towards an addiction.

Thank you, it seems the scope of the thought was a lot more open-ended than I imagined.

Was thinking in the line of the how the big game companies seem to try to hook people onto their game experiences and when one hits it big, how they attempt to moderate that experience around trying to keep it at a level that is akin to selling cigarettes.

It is like they are trying to find that “magic addictive formula” and try to be the sole provider of that experience to keep a person coming back to them.

That sounds depressing, it is like they commoditised cheat codes. Sad to see it fall into the trappings that the game makes fun of. I can almost imagine what the GTA 6 version might become if they decide to intergrate that level of “hooks” into its shiny game environment.

I think that was the 2K launcher, if I recall, I remember they were doing something with their games (was playing XCOM 2 at the time) and promptly made use of a workaround

Didn’t like the extra steps just to get into a game - like they were reminding you that you only pay for the license to play the game and the property is theirs to do with as they please. I mean, it is, but still doesn’t help feeling like I am being constantly reminded.

That is probably one of the more famous examples, yeah. They pivoted resources from the single player experience once they saw how much money they were making with their shark cards (I believe it was called). Developed an ecosystem that encouraged spending money to enjoy the game (but not forced) and I guess it was an equivalent experience of getting players to “micro-dose” with a payment to bypass elements of grind to get the best stuff and have an overall smoother experience.

Yeah, they are more apt comparisons where the target market is built upon consistent small (or large) payments that are in a business’ best interests - like in-game currencies (chips in gambling sense) are used to obfuscate the value of what a player is spending money on (which falls into one of the many psychological tricks you mentioned)