About five months ago I was planning to end my life. I didn't want to but I was in a terrible place at the time, the company I worked for had been giving me signals they were going to lay me off very soon and my mom had just died. I would have periods at work (I worked at home) where I would have rage attacks that were basically screams for help that always failed before I inevitably started pacing around my house plotting my death until panicking when I realized I needed to get back to work. Eventually it got bad enough I had to leave my job and enter into an IOP program to step me down from the edge.
In general I'd say I'm feeling better than I was. I've accepted my mom's death and the time I've spent away from working has done me some good, now I'm trying to get comfortable with working again. I started with volunteer work and now I'm taking a part time job at a farm, work itself doesn't bother me so much but what I'm really running into now is a lack of drive to build a career and actually establish a good income. Before I left my last job I had worked at an advertising agency as a copywriter and later as a compliance coordinator. The act of writing gave me a lot of purpose in that position but I burned myself out in that work to the point that it's hard for me to write anything at all, including this forum post. On top of that writing is just a dead career at this point, my company was diving head first into AI adoption and that's the direction of basically all writing jobs now so I'm just obsolete. Basically, I need to change my career entirely but I just don't have the drive and ambition necessary to make that change anymore.
I was thinking to myself today and I came to the phrase that really expressed how I feel perfectly: I feel like I was meant to die. Now that I've decided to live I'm left in a position of needing to form a new place in the world, fill my life with meaning and purpose, carve out a new livelihood. The problem is I just don't have any passion anymore, I feel like I've accepted a reality that I will see my life through to the end but all that living is just waiting to die, I don't have any actual interest in doing anything with my life unless it involves spending time with my wife.
A few days ago my wife shared a video with me that explained that a great career path was getting into data analytics and working for a non-tech company. It didn't help the way I think she thought it would though because all I saw was an impassible hurdle I had no interest in crossing to get into a potentially lucrative career in maybe 2-4 years. I have no interest in learning SQL or Python, going back to school to get a statistics or CS degree, and building out an enticing portfolio to make myself hireable, I'm not interested in coding or computer science, those fields are just lucrative, I don't feel interested in anything.
I don't want to curate a portfolio, I don't want to "upskill", I don't want to compete for my livelihood. Just thinking about all this makes the thoughts creep back in, knowing that my value as a person is so tied to what I do for work and that if I don't figure that out soon I'm just gonna get fucked makes me think that maybe I made a mistake not killing myself. I don't know what to do because in order to escape this feeling of rotting I need to just miraculously develop a sense of purpose out of thin air. I fantasize about getting cancer and denying myself treatment so I can just live my life to the fullest until the end but that's just a fantasy. If I don't find purpose soon my life will be worse than death.
In general I'd say I'm feeling better than I was. I've accepted my mom's death and the time I've spent away from working has done me some good, now I'm trying to get comfortable with working again. I started with volunteer work and now I'm taking a part time job at a farm, work itself doesn't bother me so much but what I'm really running into now is a lack of drive to build a career and actually establish a good income. Before I left my last job I had worked at an advertising agency as a copywriter and later as a compliance coordinator. The act of writing gave me a lot of purpose in that position but I burned myself out in that work to the point that it's hard for me to write anything at all, including this forum post. On top of that writing is just a dead career at this point, my company was diving head first into AI adoption and that's the direction of basically all writing jobs now so I'm just obsolete. Basically, I need to change my career entirely but I just don't have the drive and ambition necessary to make that change anymore.
I was thinking to myself today and I came to the phrase that really expressed how I feel perfectly: I feel like I was meant to die. Now that I've decided to live I'm left in a position of needing to form a new place in the world, fill my life with meaning and purpose, carve out a new livelihood. The problem is I just don't have any passion anymore, I feel like I've accepted a reality that I will see my life through to the end but all that living is just waiting to die, I don't have any actual interest in doing anything with my life unless it involves spending time with my wife.
A few days ago my wife shared a video with me that explained that a great career path was getting into data analytics and working for a non-tech company. It didn't help the way I think she thought it would though because all I saw was an impassible hurdle I had no interest in crossing to get into a potentially lucrative career in maybe 2-4 years. I have no interest in learning SQL or Python, going back to school to get a statistics or CS degree, and building out an enticing portfolio to make myself hireable, I'm not interested in coding or computer science, those fields are just lucrative, I don't feel interested in anything.
I don't want to curate a portfolio, I don't want to "upskill", I don't want to compete for my livelihood. Just thinking about all this makes the thoughts creep back in, knowing that my value as a person is so tied to what I do for work and that if I don't figure that out soon I'm just gonna get fucked makes me think that maybe I made a mistake not killing myself. I don't know what to do because in order to escape this feeling of rotting I need to just miraculously develop a sense of purpose out of thin air. I fantasize about getting cancer and denying myself treatment so I can just live my life to the fullest until the end but that's just a fantasy. If I don't find purpose soon my life will be worse than death.
