For the first time in my life, I feel hopeless and stuck. I can’t make a decision or a choice to make my life better.
I can’t quit my job that I hate, because I have no alternative. And having no alternative scares me. As trying something new and probably failing scares me even more. I just can’t take the leap!
Although I have a life that many people would envy, I just can’t seem to be happy and content with myself.
I have a job (although it sucks), I have an amazing girlfriend, I have my beautiful cats, I have my own apartment, I live in a beautiful country and I’m free to live anywhere in the world. But yet, I can’t seem to enjoy my life fully. How’s that possible?
Having things alone is not just enough to make you happy. You need to have a positive mindset to be actually happy and content. It feels like that is missing in my life right now. I keep focusing on the negative aspects of things happening to me and that leads me down into a dark spiral.
Whenever I get good news, I start questioning it and trying to find something negative about it. Like my brain is telling me to always be cautious before I even have a positive emotion. This is exhausting, and it sucks the joy out of me.
On top of that, as a person, I tend to own other people’s problems and bad moods. When I see someone unhappy, I automatically try to fix it and I get frustrated if I can’t manage to do so. It adds an extra burden on my well-being considering the dark and negative mood that I’m in.
I can’t even help myself to get out of this dark hole, how can I even consider helping others in that case? It keeps pressing me down and makes my thoughts run in circles. Which drives me crazy in the end.
This is an emergency situation. Like the ones happen on the planes, where the oxygen masks come down. First, you need to put it on yourself before you help others. Otherwise, you would probably both die.
In my case, I know that I need to help myself first and solve my own internal issues before thinking about others. But it’s not that easy. Call it a personality trait, a curse or a result of how I was raised. No matter how hard I try not to own others’ bad emotions, I can’t help it and find myself in the same situation over and over again.
The solution is having compassion, empathy and being helpful towards others, but doing it without beating yourself up and feeling down for their problems. This can be done by listening to them and being there for them.
I would never ask others to feel bad for my own problems. So I’m sure they would be more than happy to have you as a listener and a supporter, not an owner of their issues.
I wrote these lines 2 months ago when I was in a dark place. Going through it now and reading it again shows me how much my life changed for the better since then. The decisions that I took along the way and the changes that I made in my mindset towards a more positive direction helped me immensely to achieve that.
I started to say "no" more often and set my boundaries clearly. I started learning the difference between compassion and empathy better, and that helped me not to lose my own mental wellbeing for others' issues and problems.
I started to take things one step at a time, by not rushing or thinking too far ahead. That helped me to acknowledge my achievements, no matter how big or small they were and gave me back my confidence. Every small step you take doesn't have to be a giant leap for the mankind (unless you are travelling to the moon).
We all feel we are stuck at times, as if we are trapped in an empty desert. We feel lost, clueless and have no idea which direction to go. We realize how annoyingly simple everything is in such land as we keep searching for clues and meaning. Since we are smart creatures, such simplicity feels almost like an insult to our intelligence and we have difficulty to accept how that could be possible.
We keep walking and walking, hoping to find a mirage, or a sip of water. We invent cures, entertainment and goals to be saved from that vast and empty land. Sometimes, we rush ourselves to find those goals, by ignoring our ever-healing past wounds and burdens. Just waiting "aimlessly and inefficiently" fills us with guilt over time and we feel obliged to take some solid actions. Even if we cannot see anything in the first 100 kilometers of our desert walk, the help that is waiting for us will definitely be there at the 101st kilometer. All we have to do is simply be patient, wait, listen to our own depths and keep walking.
Because that's what makes being in the desert beautiful; somewhere inside, it hides that well that will make us feel alive again.
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