I've been crying almost daily for a year now, while trying my ass off to keep a stiff upper lip. I've been desperately hanging on to the standard justifications (maybe tomorrow it'll be better, can't let them win, this will pass, won't rain forever, etc., etc.) out of sheer inertia, but I honestly can't say that I believe any of them.
I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out which way to take it in life, what to do with myself, but all I feel is the walls closing in. And they're suffocating me. The world is a fucking mess, my life is a fucking mess, I'm completely alone save for a couple of acquaintances with whom I have no true relationship, my close family is entirely dead (which, if I'm being perfectly honest, isn't all that different than when they were alive, except I've been grieving the death of my mother for five years now and it doesn't seem to end), and I'm getting old.
There is nothing which makes me want to wake up in the morning anymore. There is nothing to get me excited anymore. There is nothing to look forward to. And I don't think I'm depressed, because depression felt like letting myself sink in lukewarm tar. This feels like a desperate, rabid sadness, like my soul wants to shred my skin off and just howl itself apart. I can feel my innards wanting to live, truly live, to experience at least some satisfaction, some sort of enjoyment, but I don't know what I could do to get there.
I used to love being creative, but now it's as though that pipeline got clogged up with rotten socks. I used to love interacting with animals, but all I conclude when thinking about getting a dog is that it would be unfair to that poor creature to have it bunk up with my despondent ass. I used to love hanging out with friends, but all of my friends turned out to be people who were only looking out for themselves. I used to love my country, but there's nothing left to love around here anymore. I used to be fascinated by nature, now all I see is how little sense it makes and how worse it's getting due to climate change. I even used to love loving someone, but now I just think about having to go through the process of dating and I'd rather just throw my soul away than have to do that again. I loved smoking weed, now it's just a waste of money, because I'm just as miserable when stoned. I haven't felt joy in... I don't even remember how long, but most definitely not in the past decade...
And I'm so... so fucking tired. I feel more tired than I've ever felt in my entire life. And not "I need more sleep" tired, it's as though I'm one of those old cars abandoned in parking lots, with busted wheels and corroded bodywork, with weeds growing through the upholstery. I don't feel sick, I feel spent. Utterly spent.
And I don't think I can do this anymore.
Hey. I'm so sorry that you're feeling so spent, so tired, so helpless.
Faced with these feelings, you have tried what many sensible people do: we try to feel better by telling ourselves that it'll be okay, that tomorrow it'll stop raining. Sometimes that helps, especially if it indeed stops raining. However, if the rain doesn't stop, telling ourselves that it'll be okay feels fake. This is actually backed by research on the topic.
I don't mean to say that optimism is bad. I mean to say that maybe there's different paths that we can take, paths that I'll mention here. Maybe some of these paths are new to you (given that you mentioned wracking your brain). Hopefully they get you closer to where you want to be. Maybe you already know the paths (again, given that you mentioned wracking your brain). Hopefully there's a new way you learn to traverse them (for example by bike instead of walking, or looking up at the canopies and the valleys instead of looking down at the ground). Maybe they don't resonate at all with you, and at least you can have the certainty that you're not alone, that we have all struggled finding our path. It's all okay. Ultimately, it's up to you what you do.
This is a public forum and many others will hear my words. They may have heard me before and they will know that I tend to recommend a set of paths that lead to psychological flexibility. I do this because, regardless of what we're faced with in life, we will always be accompanied by our brain and its voice, our thoughts and their recommendations, and our sense of self and its aspirations. Psychological flexibility teaches us how to relate with ourselves, how to approach that machine that sometimes tells us that life is unlivable and we are unlovable.
You mentioned that your brain is telling you that the world is a mess, that you're lonely, that you're old. In a weird way, it's trying to take care of you. It's predicting where the tiger is hiding and how to avoid it. "Don't try dating or finding new friend-groups! It'll be exhausting and you'll leave there with nothing good". "The world's a mess. Don't even try." But our mind plays tricks on us. It's like a friend who is trying to take care of us but is sometimes confused. It's an advisor who sometimes nails it, sometimes fails miserably, and sometimes gets stuck. It's usually when our inner advisors get stuck that our lives become full of unnecessary suffering.
That's psychological rigidity. Our mind becomes a dictator, entirely sure of how the world works and what can and can't be done. Our thoughts become repetitive and our life shrinks, kind of like how you described the suffocating walls, closing in on you.
The good news is that there is a way of pivoting from psychological rigidity to psychological flexibility and that there is solid science behind this. Here's something I've said elsewhere some time ago:
I hope you can see how those same words apply to this context.
Now, you mentioned crying daily with a stiff upper lip. But you also mentioned that you can feel your innards wanting to live, to truly live. These two are related. We hurt where we care and we care where we hurt. The crying and the yearning are two sides of the same coin. You have a yearning inside of you for life-affirming experiences. It hurts to see yourself not having them.
I just wanted to point out that this pain that you feel is tied to the passion for living a well-lived-life that you have inside of you. That energy that you have spent trying to tell yourself that things will get better, crying, putting up a facade— that energy can be redirected to a life that you find valuable. Hopefully the tools I mentioned earlier help you do exactly that.
Two things before I let you on your way.
First, you may consider the program "Healthy Minds". It's an app/program developed by a non-profit that has been tied to the research of meditation and human flourishing. I donate to them because their research is well grounded, their app is well designed, and they're life-changing. If you cannot do the investment of time or money or effort for ACT, Healthy Minds is the single easiest thing that you can do daily that will have the biggest impact in your life.
It's important to note that, while Healthy Minds is the easiest thing with the biggest impact, it's not a replacement for ACT or otherwise therapy. Here's a very cartoonish way of thinking about it, but it exhibits my point. Let's say you have been crawling on the floor. Healthy Minds helps you to walk. ACT is like the high-speed train. Walking is not a replacement for the high-speed train.
Second, as to feeling like a rusty and corroded car, it's worthwhile to point out that there are ways of removing rust and reinforcing existing structures. Heck, there's even recycling! A phoenix can arise from the ashes in the same way that people can grow from trauma (it's a thing; look up "post-traumatic growth").
I hope this helps.
Thank you for taking your time to go this in-depth, and I resonate with a lot of what you've expanded upon!
To start off, you're right. I know those mantras are fake right here and now, and the only reason why I still kept them going is because that's what literally everyone I've met so far kept telling me would help, and it would feel... scientifically dishonest (for lack of a better way to put it) to not experiment and see what happens. But I also know that the grand majority of people whom I've met so far haven't been where I've been, or haven't processed that enough to understand if they have, so the things which work (or seem to work) for them are not the solutions I need. But I try in the interest of thoroughness. I'm not judging them by saying this, just to be clear, I'm just listing the data.
Related to my brain's status updates, I may have overplayed them a bit in my initial post - yes, I do think all of those things, and while I know they're not necessarily permanent states, I also know they're what applies right now. To my eyes, the world and my life are a mess. Dating has so far produced nothing but a long, long string of disappointments and failures (with everyone involved being to blame for it, including - especially - myself). And I know exactly why - because I'm significantly different than what people try to define as "normal" nowadays and I'd been trying to fit a mould which wasn't mine to begin with.
And that's ok! Sincerely, I've reached a point where I'm ok with how specifically different I am and I kinda'-sorta' love (or at least respect) myself for it. And I also accept that this specificity of mine requires different approaches, which, again, is all fine, it's the human condition. My point with listing those things was closer to "I need to try something different, to focus on other things for at least a while, but I have no idea what," although it's not evident in my initial post, for which I apologise.
This brings me to how this relates to psychological flexibility. I've been working on this for a long time now, because, as weird as it may sound, this isn't the worst I've ever been. I went through 7 years of depression after finishing Uni because my life went down the toilet completely, plus past traumas were shoving their way in to get their dues. I hated myself - HATED myself. Not even a drop of compassion was wasted on myself, to the point where I believed the only correct and fair thing to do was to remove the plight of who I was from the world so that it wouldn't hurt others.
But I managed to get through it and literally unlocked the cage I'd built for myself (I did it alone, which probably wasted a lot of time, but water under the bridge). And it was exactly this "scientific honesty" to which I so insistently cling that got me through it, it helped me see just how grey I was instead of the pure monster I was convinced I used to be (there was no proof for this, but it was what my family had told me all my life, so I believed it). After that, I wanted to go deeper, so I finally went to therapy.
I started to understand why my family didn't understand me (I'm most certainly not neurotypical), why they were so abjectly against even trying to understand me (good ol' unaddressed transgenerational trauma), and while it helped me to let go of my resentment, it also helped me to understand that I couldn't count on them for support. Which is ok (not ok as in it doesn't hurt to know that they never had my back, but ok as in I know what I have to work with).
Then I started digging into philosophy, because while I know that what works for others doesn't have to work for me, I fell back on the things which I knew had worked - gaining an understanding of this species' greater and historical context and trying to figure out where I fit into all of this. I wanted to try to start from as blank a slate as possible, so I did my best to let go of my previous convictions (which were compromised beyond recognition and weren't even 'mine' to begin with).
And it worked. Not 100%, but paired with my immense luck in finding genuinely good therapists, it worked a lot more than anything else had worked up to that point. I slowly started to piece myself together, to see my inner workings and to map myself out for myself. Which brought about acceptance after a while, to circle back to the start.
My current state stems mostly from external factors, to be perfectly honest. I buried the last two members of my immediate family within the past five years (granddad from mum's side was the last to go, in 2024, mum went in 2019 right before the Pandemic hit). In addition to this, the string of romantic failures continued throughout that same period. My dissatisfaction with my career had reached a breaking point, twice. I'd lost my social circle during the Pandemic, when everyone started showing their true colours (for me, it was the best break I could've asked for, I miss the Lockdowns...). I took a massive hit, though, when humanity started losing its collective shit starting with 2020, because I can't and won't deny myself my empathy. I've recently moved from a city in which I lived for mum's sake, to a city where I have no idea what to look for. And this is why I feel spent.
And this, I hope, makes it clearer why I feel the need to try something different for a while, to try to focus on other things, but I have no idea where to start. The desire/need to live meaningfully is entirely realised within me, and while my more impulsive parts want it to happen here and now, I know it can't and won't happen overnight - took me a decade and a half just to undo the hereditary damage, it, again, would be "scientifically dishonest" to assume the road from here will be any easier or shorter.
My mind is as open as it's ever been, and I want to open it even more if the hinges will allow it. I take a modicum of pride in this and the fact that I've reached a point where I can accept and process cognitive dissonance without the sheer horror of not being able to pull a straight answer from that tangle of data. My only problem is, well... what next? Because while I know that the world being on fire and myself not getting younger aren't the end of the road for me, they also change the playing field to the point where I need to adjust my course. But right here and now, I'm sailing blind, and I can't define what's urgent and what isn't from the new conditions I have in front of me just yet.
So, again, thank you for the resources and the depth of your reply, I will most certainly dig through them because information is my heroin.