Sittting around with my own thoughts for a week has given me the need to write stuff down. I’m not sure why, but maybe I want to take a screenshot of being at my lowest and being able to look back later and be proud of how far I’ve come from this point. I guess a little story is in order about how I got here in the first place…

I’ve struggled with mental health issues since I was a child. I was bullied at school and even though I had friends I always felt a little left out. My dad was a harsh man who worked five days a week so the main parenting was done by my mother. When she passed away when I was 12 it was the start of real mental issues combined with rough teenage years where a lot of emotional and mental abuse happened. I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD aswell as unspecified anxiety disorders later in life. I have abandonment issues coupled with a deeply ingrained feeling that no matter what I do, look like or achieve in life it will never be good enough. I’m thanking my dad for the latter.

Fast forward to 2019. I got promoted at work and was struggling filling the position. I didn’t really have anyone to support me and the work itself was starting to bore me. I had a lot of plans that never really came to fruition because I kept getting dragged into the day to day stuff which I loathed by that point. Then the pandemic hit in 2020. Right before we got sent home in March 2020 I was getting my life a little bit in order again. I visited the gym and the swimming pool multiple times per week to prepare for my 3 week trip to Japan, something I was looking forward to very much. Instead we got sent home, my trip got cancelled and that was the start of the current almost 2 year streak of working from home. I had my Japan trip cancelled again in 2021 and in the meantime being at home all the time was slowly pushing me into a serious depressed state. I missed going into the office, I missed the social interaction and being at home alone just drove me insane. Alas there was not much I could do about it so I turned to online communities a lot to keep me company and lift my spirits.
In the meantime the resentment towards my job grew and I applied for another one without success.

This is where I met my partner in January 2021. Even though there was a lot of distance between us, both in age and in actual physical distance, we decided to take a leap after about a month and a half of talking and became exclusive. I was happy, he was happy and we met up multiple times throughout 2021. In hindsight though little cracks were starting to show and we didn’t attend to them at the time, leaving time and space for them to become bigger and bigger until we had a major argument around New Years Eve. Things were said, things were discovered, we were both majorly hurt. After a lot of contemplation we broke up last Saturday. The differences were too big, maturing needed to happen and there was just too much hurt to be able to fix. I’m right in the middle of grieving this relationship and am feeling angry, sad, relieved and desperate all at the same time.

Unfortunately this was also the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After resenting my job more and more in 2021, and another failed transfer to another job, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I went to my GP and received a burn-out diagnosis. I’m currently working much less hours and have transferred a lot of my responsibilities to my coworker. I feel tired 24/7 and am just picking up the pieces of a life that I thought would turn out much different than it has. I’m at my lowest point in years and I guess the only way from here is up. I’m not sure yet how I’m going to achieve this, but I don’t want to be silent about it to anyone anymore. I’m done hiding how I’m doing and pretending everything is okay when it isn’t.

So here I sit, trying to rebuild myself from the ground up. I need to be nicer to myself. I need to accept that right now I can’t do all the things I may want to do and be content with the things I can do. I know that I will pick myself up eventually and that this will be one of the biggest learning moments of my life.
Right now though, I’m just tired, lost and left wondering how the hell I ended up here.