Oh jeez, woke up to an inbox flooded with replies to this. Umm first let me say I'm sorry it was kinda long and rambling, I started off just wanting to post a response to the Duders with Anxiety thread about how envious I was of Dan's ability to tackle his anxiety. Anyway I kinda got carried away and a few hours passed and i ended up with this poorly written thing, and I didn't want to post a huge wall of text in that thread like I was trying to throw the most words at it to brute force my way to pity points or something. I tried to put basically the whole thing in spoiler tags but that didn't work, so I just posted it in a blog and linked to it.
Second, thanks for the kind words, sure seem to be a lot of other duders with varying levels of anxiety around these parts. I think that maybe hits on something I wonder sometimes, and thats the effect that video games have had on my life. I've been playing videogames since I was a very small child. My dad purchased an Atarii either before i was born or right after (not sure how the dates work out) and I remember playing that a bit when I was very young, and when I turned 5 I got a NES and have basically been playing them non-stop since. Looking back its hard to tell when i started to develop my anxiety and depression issues. Definitely in high-school but maybe before that. I spend a lot of time wondering if my increase videogame seclusion was a cause or a symptom of my decreasing ability to deal with the world. I generally accept that its just my coping mechanism instead of more common ones like drugs or alcohol.
@cerberus3dog said:
@skithus When I was taking medication for ADHD, I always found my mind veering towards depressing thoughts, I became less social too. The medication, I believe, altered my personality and social behavior. This has happened to my sister and a couple other friends taking ADHD medication. My sister had to change medication a couple of times, I eventually decided to get off of ADHD pills. This could be happening with you and your prescription. Just wanted to inform you about that. The depressing thoughts you are experiencing may be enhanced by the medication you are taking. Look out for yourself, duder.
I guess I had not really considered that, I know the side effects on a lot of anxiety and depression medicine is increased anxiety and depression (good job medicine) but it starts getting really scary trying to sort out what are my thoughts, and what is the depression, and what am I not feeling because I'm on the medicine and what is the medicine making me feel.
Thanks for writing. Having a mental illness without understanding it isn't something I see a lot of attention given to, but I think it can be a really messed up thing to go through. When the world around you can't imagine you as anything other than equal, then depression becomes laziness, anxiety becomes selfishness and reclusiveness, and you rationalize that people are supposed to feel the same way, or that you're just personally a little adrift and need to reconvene with normality - easy.
When I didn't understand anxiety, I perceived the symptoms I had as weaknesses, which made me highly reluctant to accept or admit them. It can be painfully counter-productive, I guess is what I'm saying. It doesn't help when as a male, you've had it built up in your head that admitting a weakness is something you should avoid, and so you might be shutting out the possibility of a dialogue, if not an internal conversation with it. Escapism in the form of games is something I've done a fair amount of, but the idea makes me a little uneasy now. Obviously it can turn into kind of a dark road.
It took me a long time to really accept Anxiety as a thing I even had, and not just a word Dr's made up to describe people who don't want to do things. I still have a hard time accepting depression as a thing because my unhappiness seems so logical. Of course I'm unhappy, I've got no job, I'm still overweight, I can't handle speaking with people or being in crowded places. I can't even order a pizza over the phone.
My wife points out however that like the tiniest things can swings my mood from happy and content to depressed for the rest of the day, or week. Things like "Oh no the battery on my ps4 remote died" "someone screwed up in my raid and we wiped" "My PC can't run Dragon Age Inquisition through a combination of my PC getting somewhat old, and that game being a huge goddamn mess on PC at the moment" or "My car needs new windshield wipers, but that means I have to take it someplace and talk to a guy, can I order them online? I don't know how to change them. Is my wife going to die in a fiery crash because she can't see because one wiper is getting old?" I never seem to notice these little things happening, even being aware that dumb things like that can send me spiraling into a self-hating hole that starts with my ps4 controller battery dieing and ends with "everyone around me would be better off if I died" I know that these things happen, but a lot of times I can't see them in the moment.
I was ready to go on a tangent about how you shouldn't enable yourself and your problems and hide behind broad labels like depression and anxiety, but then I finished your blog and realized you are not, you have been ignoring these disorders for many years and that I am the one with the issues, because that's how I deal with my own anxiety problems. However they seem milder than yours, I refuse to acknowledge them and often ignore that there is something mentally wrong with me.
I struggle constantly with the idea that I'm using Anxiety and Depression as an excuse to just continue living my life the way I've been living it. I know trying to explain that I have a mental illness to people when its encased in "Yeah I basically sit around all day, and play video games" doesn't tend to elicit any understanding from them. I feel like a huge burden on the people in my life, Me and my wife still live with my parents and I know she wants to move out but its hard to support two people on a single salary. Back before we got married I came to the conclusion that the only reason I hadn't been able to get over my Anxiety is because I hadn't been placed in a situation where I had to, so I moved out of my parents into an apartment alone and tried to get a job, I sent out hundreds of resumes, went to head-hunters, trawled Craigslist ect.
The First job I got was at a self-storage place, I'd be working there either alone or with one other person at a time, so it seemed really low stress. The 3ed or 4th day of my training one of the guys tells me about a time some guy pulled a knife on him and I had a extreme panic attack, I didn't run off or say anything but it must have been really obvious because the owner stopped by and saw me and asked me what was wrong, and I explained and she said If i couldn't handle dealing with things like that, that they didn't want to bother to continue to train me.
After that I got an office job doing data entry, The position said my only responsibilities were to do data entry and organize files, on my 4th day there they said I'd need to start cold-calling medical companies about something or other. I went the rest of the day doing the data entry work, couldn't pick up the phone at all. The following day they said they'd accidentally hired to many people and that they didn't need me.
I kept going to head hunters, none of them ever got back to me. I started specifically questioning if jobs had phone responsibilities or customer interaction. Turns out just about every entry level job either involves talking to people or answering phones, they figure any uneducated idiot can manage those two things. Well I apparently can't. Few months of that and my already miniscule self-esteem was depleted, I was extremely depressed and eventually had to move back in with my parents or end up out on the street. When I moved out I was sure that given the opportunity to sink or swim I'd push past my anxiety, but when push came to shove sinking is all I managed.
I am gonna buy a GTX 970 soon and that's gonna be awesome though!
Hell yeah it is.
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