Venting Mourning lost time

[Rocinante]

I was a shut in for most of my late teens and early adult life(18-23) up until two years ago due to my depression. I'm 25 now and the loss of my entire youth is so unbelievably crippling I'm finding it hard to be remotely hopeful at all.
Feel like I've destroyed any chance of happiness or normality I could have had and it is unbearably painful.

 

[touyathecat]

i feel you there, i'm 20 and i feel ive wasted my entire childhood due to depression. i'm sorry you have to deal with that, i see your pain

 

[Angst Filled Fuck Up]

Not only are you still objectively young with the rest of your life to do fun, outgoing things, but in a way you've also protected yourself by self-isolating. I'm not saying it's all necessarily positive, but life brings a lot of bad mixed in with the good. When I speak to my mom on the phone and I tell her nothing's really happened this past week, she says "good." She knows that boring times aren't negative per se, because things always have the potential to get really ugly.

When we mourn time like this and wish we had a re-do, we assume it would have been filled with great experiences, but what if it had yielded heartbreak, rejection, loss, or injury/illness? I know it sucks to feel that you've lost time, but it sounds like you're aware of what you were missing and have made the necessary changes now. I hope the future brings you excitement and good things.

 

[ijustwishtodie]

I relate to all of this. I believe that, for most people, the best times of their life is during childhood. Whilst that is true for me, my childhood was incredibly miserable because I also had depression (and therefore anhedonia to the hobbies that kids would have during childhood). I could have had an enjoyable childhood if it wasn't due to my depression and autism. I'm so annoyed at how my childhood is gone and there's nothing I can do about it. I can't do anything to make the best times of my life as enjoyable as possible because time only moves forward.

It really is painful and unbearable... fuck it's too much. The only choice I have now is to kill myself or to survive a life where things only get more and more downhill from here on out. I think I wasn't meant to live a life at all...

 

[jar-baby]

If it's any consolation, your youth definitely isn't over by 25. I think you have plenty of time left to do youthful things.

 

[Throwawayacc3]

If it's any consolation, your youth definitely isn't over by 25. I think you have plenty of time left to do youthful things.

I mean chemically it kind of is. It's around 24-26 that's the brain is completely developed and then following this it starts to go downhill. It's why when you are young neurone firing and connections is so strong and resilient whereas past this (especially with the frontal lobe) it becomes unbearable.

Plus you start to see how fucked the world is and your surroundings. Just school itself is the biggest eye opener. Lots of spiteful mutants spawned from bad humans that bully and cause havoc. Not to mention teachers who can similar.

 

[youwantitdarker]

I relate to this a lot. I was also a shut-in in my teen years and now that I'm in uni I realised just how much I've missed out.
You hear all these stories people have, expierences they've been through, and then you just think to yourself "my god, just how much i've missed out on?" It's very soul-crushing. Human connections are important, and here I was, in the most important years of my life in terms of development, sitting in my room, on my laptop, living online basically.
It's so despair inducing realising all that

 

[jar-baby]

It's around 24-26 that's the brain is completely developed

I'm being a pedant, but that's a myth. Besides, even if that were the case, it wouldn't disqualify OP from being able to do fun/normal/young-people things—he'd still be in his physical prime and considered young by most people.

 

[Throwawayacc3]

I'm being a pedant, but that's a myth. Besides, even if that were the case, it wouldn't disqualify OP from being able to do fun/normal/young-people things—he'd still be in his physical prime and considered young by most people.

Really? SLATE? ….

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24501-frontal-lobe

As a side note if you are young and not socially aware (through upbringing or autism) you aren't going to get anywhere. OP and me have something in common and I'm 35. I masked heavily but you need money to do things even yourself. I got hyper fixed on golf and ran out of money so couldn't continue (was newly pro after 4 years and never played before). But it's only because I had the resources.

Prime isn't age nowadays it's money. Money allows you to get in your best shape (best diet and no work so can do it), excel at hobbies (time and money for equipment - music, guitar, piano, sport like golf), go and see animals or help sanctuary's (living in another country and volunteering). That's it. I got in the best shape of my life at 33 than what I had when I was 14-17 constantly at the gym.

 

[jar-baby]

Really? SLATE? ….

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24501-frontal-lobe

Have you read it? I wouldn't have linked the article if they hadn't quoted relevant experts and papers.

[Larry] Steinberg is a giant in the field of adolescent development, well known for his four decades of research on adolescent and young adults. [...] he said roughly the same thing as Cohen: There's consensus among neuroscientists that brain development continues into the 20s, but there's far from any consensus about any specific age that defines the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. "I honestly don't know why people picked 25," he said. "It's a nice-sounding number? It's divisible by five?"

Kate Mills, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, was equally puzzled. "This is funny to me—I don't know why 25," Mills said. "We're still not there with research to really say the brain is mature at 25, because we still don't have a good indication of what maturity even looks like."

According to a 2016 Neuron paper by Harvard psychologist Leah Somerville, the structure of [the prefrontal cortex and occipital lobe] and other brain areas changes at different rates throughout our life span, growing and shrinking; in fact, structural changes in the brain continue far past people's 20s. "One especially large study showed that for several brain regions, structural growth curves had not plateaued even by the age of 30, the oldest age in their sample," she wrote. "Other work focused on structural brain measures through adulthood show progressive volumetric changes from ages 15–90 that never 'level off' and instead changed constantly throughout the adult phase of life."

I can't seem to find the 24-26 figure in your link.

I agree that money is probably more important than youth when it comes to doing the things that you want to do but OP seemed to be mourning his youth specifically, which is why I mentioned the physical aspect.

 

[deltahead]

i'm 25. i left school after 4th grade and have spent every year 2009-current completely isolated from the outside world. no contact with family members, no friends. i didn't get my ID until i was almost 17. my country has a mandatory army service thing that every guy must do once they're 18, my parents just never brought this up with me and we had to go when i was 19 and pay a fine because of it. despite all my free time i have not developed any skills or learned anything, just stayed online a lot. i have no experiences or any idea of how the world works. i don't know how to cook or tie my shoes or write by hand. i can't get a job. i leave the house once every 3-4 months. i tried to practice noose tying a few years ago and bought SN but i still haven't used them. i just let the years pass by, they feel like days now.

i don't know if you'd call this isolation or not, i don't know what it is

 

[madoka]

i relate alot ! as a teen, i was a shut in,, i did try to go to school and whatever ,, but i just couldn't due to depression and anxiety. eventually i dropped out and just rotted in my room. recently, like maybe a year, i started to try get my life together ,, i want to try do things before choosing to ctb. it's very hard as theres many things i don't know, still feeling like a child, dealing with my mental issues, etc.. but i'm going to try schooling again!

 

[landslide2]

I'm being a pedant, but that's a myth. Besides, even if that were the case, it wouldn't disqualify OP from being able to do fun/normal/young-people things—he'd still be in his physical prime and considered young by most people.

yeah, it's one of those things that catches on for some reason as the neuroscientist in this piece also mentions the myth of only using 10% of your brain. we keep learning throughout life, if we're lucky enough.

 

[Abbyssmal]

Not only are you still objectively young with the rest of your life to do fun, outgoing things, but in a way you've also protected yourself by self-isolating. I'm not saying it's all necessarily positive, but life brings a lot of bad mixed in with the good. When I speak to my mom on the phone and I tell her nothing's really happened this past week, she says "good." She knows that boring times aren't negative per se, because things always have the potential to get really ugly.

When we mourn time like this and wish we had a re-do, we assume it would have been filled with great experiences, but what if it had yielded heartbreak, rejection, loss, or injury/illness? I know it sucks to feel that you've lost time, but it sounds like you're aware of what you were missing and have made the necessary changes now. I hope the future brings you excitement and good things.

even with being so removed from everyone else and most social circumstances, id only really experienced the rejection and loss and illness. there was nothing i couldve done to stop my mom from dying and there was nothing i couldve done to have been seen and accepted in school. i feel like i was punished for simply being human and i still never experienced love or friendship or family back then. i wouldve changed everything if i could because i know what im feeling now is a thousand times worse than if i didnt waste every day of middle and high school being so isolated even while i was at school. i wasnt meant to be an indoor cat.

 

[landslide2]

Mourn, let it all out. We need to grieve what we've lost, whether it's loved ones or it's ourselves and time that slipped away. Part of that forgiveness towards self, a reckoning that we have to wrestle with at various times in our lives. I also feel this loss of time in my own way. Hope we can find some healing from that reckoning and can turn the page to the present, doesn't even have to be the future. Just not looking back in pain. But i know it's hard.

 

[innominesatanas44]

You don't get a second chance. I hate the old people who tell me not to live with regrets, it's too late, I already regret everything, and things I couldn't control. Rather die than live in a world as cruel as this