Depression/tough times killed my game/joy for life, can it come back?

[Indian Race Troll (IRT)]

Back when I was 18-20 years old, I had this joy and excitement for life. This interest, passion, love, and energy for being out of high school even though I was commuting college, being around new people. Yeah I had a toxic family I had to be around but whatever. After that I transferred to a state school and I almost felt my passion for life slowly die, realizing how late I had been to the party and everything, got hit with a depression.

Started going out for the first at 21, alone, and was excited but ran into a lot of bad encounters (harsh girls, rude people, and cliquish crowds, got AMOG'd a few times too). That version of me died though, the one that was focused on being interesting, having a lot to talk about, and all of that. I saw meatheads with single digit IQs who were acting dumb get hot girls and guys winning because they had nothing going for them but being popular and lucking into the right crews, it killed my passion and joy for the game and improving myself that I once had.

Already talked about how that went but then I got out of college, spent some time depressed living at home unemployed with parents at the age of 23 before finally getting a new job in a bigger city. Moved to that city, enjoyed life, went out a bit (alone), but then a couple months in realized that my sociopath boss was scheming to ruin my time at the company. Got so bad it made me quit but I was in a depressed state. The theme was also around realizing how much I had missed out on by not peaking in college and how miserable life after it is supposed to be.

But I felt like back when I had that zest for life, a new me was there.

Like I was excited, almost had a passion for things like an intelligent conversation or the future, until I came across some depressing material, had to deal with toxic people and toxic work environments, and saw the dry and empty parts of life that sucked the life out of me. I was passionate about the future and had a sort of energy to me that made me fun to be around and made people laugh at my jokes.

I became dry and started having a cynical jaded view towards life.

Hot girls only want popular guys. Popularity is finalized by end of college. People are all evil and out to get each other. Everyone having fun is an evil schemer looking down at the rest of the world.

It has come to a point where I cannot even cold approach anymore during the day and have so many negative, toxic, and bad thoughts running through my head about people.

Yet I feel like they developed and are now slowly starting to go away as I am in a new chapter of my life but I have this feeling.

The passionate me who was worldly failed hard in college because people in college suck for the most part but in the city I am in, I feel like once I can connect with that version of me, there is something really special that awaits!

Can you really get back to that point mentally?

 

[nad_bigger]

see a doctor, in Russia it is free, don't know about your country though. But this is a classic case of writing on forums when you actually need a doctor.

 

[Hue]

Toby,

From reading your posts, and experiencing the same thing myself, it seems that you "relapse" on self-defeating beliefs / depression. It's pretty common actually.

People have epiphany moments where they "see the light", feel uplifted and as if a huge burden has been removed.

Example:
Stopped living in the past, feels great. Why life after 25 can be awesome!

Then, some time goes by, and they find themselves "stuck" within the mental frame work they have operated in before. This is an effect of how humans operate within a Default Mode Network.


This is why changing yourself is so hard. Every time we operate in these toxic frameworks, we "train" ourselves to think in toxic frameworks. Or, because we have ingrained behaviors that can yield toxic frameworks in ourselves, we receive a temporary fix to the psychological aspect, only to keep operating in the same faculties, to which the psychological ailment returns.



My advice to you?

1). Take shrooms.

2). See a therapist.



Shrooms will neurologically rip you out of your default-mode neural network, and literally force you to think differently. They are very intense. It's an incredible experience. It has helped me recover from addictions and shown me far more about life than I can articulate. The medical backing on psilocybin continues to grow everyday (Tim Ferris, Joe Rogan, and others endorse their use as well).

My biggest takeaway is how they give you the ability to look at yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses, and the lies you tell yourself and not get upset about it. You just SEE YOURSELF, and then you almost immediately know what to do with yourself.

After the initial craziness and chaos of the drug subsides you're only left with one thing: Clarity.

Just as you spend hours stressing out, going crazy and losing your shit, thoughts swirling, cortisol hitting ridiculous levels over what you tell yourself.... then you find that moment of clarity and have an epiphany. It expedites the process by literally making you go crazy (turn your phone off and hide it), and then bringing you back to earth. That's why it's called a trip. Like a mental vacation. Short term fix, somewhat short term results (usually).


Therapy will begin the long and hard process of changing yourself. Seeing a professional will allow you to be completely open and honest IN PERSON with somebody, instead of bitching about life on the internet.

They are trained to help you help yourself.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy attempts to address this by tackling both the cognitive rerouting of what the client thinks / knows is a healthier, better mindset, and then ingraining the realities of those mindsets in behaviors. After months of WORK and TRAINING yourself to operate in this way, you start seeing the results of putting in effort to train yourself, and then you DO train yourself.

However, people still encounter relapse along the way. Downward spirals of self sabotage and self defeating thoughts destroy them, and upward spirals of optimism, hard work, and hitting goals upholster them. During the process of upward spirals, it is still expected to fall back into a downward spiral for some period of time. As the training progresses, usually people find that those periods of time spent in depression / self-defeating thoughts get smaller, and smaller, and the time spent in the upward spiral get longer and longer.

And as you go through the process, you're shaving off all the warts and ugly parts of you that you dislike, and adding on healthier skins, brains, and body to yourself in the process. It's a long-term project with tremendous benefits at the end.


The former is an instantaneous solution that will teach you a lot but may not stick with you. The latter will teach you skills so that you can coach yourself, train yourself, and maintain your happiness and satisfaction in life.

I could get a lot into how I had the same optimism towards life, then had it shattered to pieces once I encountered the real world, and had to pick things back up and start again, but that's a long story I'd rather not share given your history of taking advice over posts. Just know that I've gone through the exact process you're talking about.


So yes, it CAN come back.

IF you put in the work.


Good luck!


Hue