Broken very broken

When walking things play out in my head a million thoughts find themselves one by one storifying within my head it does little but i try, New Years nothing to do nowhere to go, no point birthday, empty, alone, sad nothing

Hi @Redraw.

I hope you don't feel this is any form of criticism because it isn't.
I try hard to apply it to myself.
I hate it when people say ' I know how you feel', because that's BS, eveyone is different, but you did a good job of describing many of my similar thoughts and emotions.

What I offer is paraphrased from a quote, I can't remember the source right now ( pretty sure it's a recent famous movie or TV show) but it will come to me in the next couple of days and I'll post it up.

But basically, we aren't a loser etc unless we choose to be.
Perhaps you ( or I ) ( felt we) were, as recent as up until 1 second ago.
But we are what we decide, or choose to be.
And we make this choice every second of every day, over and over, so it's impossible to just 'be' something, unless we choose it to some degree, because it's a future that is until that moment, undecided.

Our illnesses, circumstances, pasts, cognitive biases, all shape and influence these choices, sometimes to astonishing degrees.
But in the end they are influences, and we still choose.
Every second of every day.
We are all choosing, right now, what we are at this moment.

You have proven this even by such things as posting on here, by loving words as you obviously do.

So if you claim to be a loser, or whatever, maybe you were or weren't, but that was the past you.
It doesn't mean it's the future you, even from this second onwards.

So choose wisely my friends, because although the past is limited and set, the future...well....the future is infinite undecided possibilities.

• @utopia without a doubt.

Almost constantly, and especially at any 'special' event, (especially especially for kids or cared ones) , I put on a 'mask', and I pretend I'm enjoying myself.

I have massive social and general anxiety as well as bipolar.

I'm never enjoying myself.

But as Neil Gaiman famously said, you fake it, one bit at a time, because almost all of the time, people can't tell the difference between a genuine act of kindness and a 'fake' act of kindness, because from their perspective, the result is the same.

I don't do it to fit in. I stopped caring about that long ago.

I do it so that I don't ruin other people's happiness or enjoyment.

And I have absolutely no doubt that I'm not the only person there that does it.

@utopia et al.

Many people ( including myself, pretty much constantly) say, or tell themselves they don't care what other people think.

But it's sadly not true. I don't want to hijack this thread into a discussion about evolutionionary biology and mirror neurons, but simply put, we do care because we are wired to care, and although for some reason we like to pretend we don't or convince ourselves we don't, it's not something that is natural, and it will always break down.

Like it or not, we do care, even when we don't want to.

I would be hypocritical to say I don't try to force myself not to care, or to pretend I don't, because I do, despite knowing the science behind it.

So I'm trying to learn how to incorporate it into loneliness as best as possible.

As I just quoted in another thread and will borrow again for here:

"What's true in our minds is true, whether some people know it or not."

-Robin Williams / What Dreams May Come

No sense of going over my about 37 years of ostracisation in all ways, I see the look on people's faces the dismissive pity looking through me, the disgust, the abhorrence looking on me like I am an idiot child. Maybe one day I won't feel anything maybe one day I will be able to accept that a the most monstrous human being, even people that I refuse to acknowledge as human have more worth than me. I am just dismissed as that weird guy, people I have known forever have labeled me as some kind of psychotic, I don't lie and am not one to hide things from anyone.

When it comes to what others think it's just like judging, though i would say it's primal instinct rather than evolutionary biology, we care because we have to otherwise we are limiting species continuation and self protection, but people terrify me and could care less about me so what would I know

@Redraw

People are all just people, not gods, not better, but flawed, often selfish etc.

No one's opinion of you matters more than your own.

To base your self-worth and self-opinion on the opinions of other undeserving people who are in reality no better than you, is like judging all books by one book or all songs by one song, especially if it unfortunately turns out to be a book or song you hate.

If you had lived a perfect, wealthy, spoiled, loved, priveledeged life, chances are you would be an unlikeable and unbearable prat.

You have lived and suffered, seemingly a lot.

Perhaps, Instead of considering those things as weights that drag you down, or flaws that make you unpleasant, consider them life lessons than many may not have learnt, and choose to use them as such: ie things that you learnt from, and made you a better person, not a worse one.

You refer to the past as your measuring stick.

But the past is the past, and everyone has a stick.

If you keep looking backwards, of course you are going to keep smacking into things and hurting yourself.

And to be blunt, no, there's no use going over the past X years, because all you do then is suffer through it twice. Wasn't once enough?

--

‘I could tell you my adventures–beginning from this morning,’ said Alice a little timidly: ‘but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’
(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 1.