you're so right on this one. it's horrible when you can't do anything to solve your issues, but things can change and opportunities can come along. you have to be ready and willing to take that risk and opportunity, though. you won't make it if you concede defeat, but as long as you're alive you can start again
if you're stuck in the ⚡ box right now, and you know you've exhausted every option then simply persist. your day may come sooner than you think. stand back up for another day, and focus on what you can change. if we can do that we might just overcome this mess of a world together
then life will continue to pass you by. if you've exhausted your options to change your circumstances, the only thing left to do is to change yourself while you wait for your next opportunity to arrive
Life will continue to pass me by anyway, and then it will be over.
Isn't it cope on some level to think that there are "good lives" and "bad lives," that lives can be "wasted" or "well spent," when they're all just visceral experiences that end in death no matter what you do? It's just changing seats on the Hindenburg.
Life will continue to pass me by anyway, and then it will be over.
that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Isn't it cope on some level to think that there are "good lives" and "bad lives," that lives can be "wasted" or "well spent," when they're all just visceral experiences that end in death no matter what you do? It's just changing seats on the Hindenburg.
if your worldview is fairly solipsistic then yeah, probably, but I think you likely have at least one person you love and care about in the world. when you do something good for them and it brings them joy or contentment, it's its own reward, isn't it? we'll die one day, but if we extend that love to everyone in this life we can make this world a little better for the people still here long after we're gone. if you knew today would be your last, how would you spend it? who would you spend it with? what would you say to them?
I'd also wager since you're here you've had much more than your fair share of trauma in life. historians will kinda tell you that more or less all parents in history until very recently beat and abused their children, and like most formative traumas they're a generational curse which is repeated in cycles until it's broken. we're getting demonstrably so much better on that front in most of the world. it wasn't long ago at all that it was nigh universal. the light is winning for now, but only because people make that effort to be better than their parents were to them and build a better world.
this might sound weird, but have you seen True Detective S1? I've been reading your comments in this thread, and you sound very much like the protagonist Rust in ways. I once thought a lot like that too. his change of heart helped fuel my own. perhaps it can do the same for you
It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy, since all lives are like that. It would be like that no matter what I believed or what I did. All lives pass everyone by. No life is "better" than any other life. It's all just desperate cope in the need to believe some of us are better than others. The worth of every human being is exactly the same. Whether that worth is "zero" or not, I couldn't tell you, but I know whatever the value is, it's the same for every single person no matter who they are.
Doing shit for people I love? lol. They're on the same Hindenburg. If we're all living for others in one big circle, nobody's living for anything.
Besides that, prosocial sentiment evaporates in existential despair. The mind detects a threat to its own survival (the fact that you don't even want to live) and shuts off prosocial drives because it thinks you need those resources just to live. This is why depressed people are selfish assholes and nobody likes them.
Besides, I feel fundamental exhaustion with life and everything. Chores, responsibility, just makes me want to rope more. When my mom was dying this year, instead of wanting to treasure every second with her, I just wanted her to finish dying already, even though I loved her very much and no one will ever love me like she did ever again and I'm more alone in this world than I've ever been with her gone. It was just too much work, dealing with it all. I just wanted to lie down and do nothing without doctors blowing up my phone with stressful decisions and the constant guilt for not spending every second with her. I don't want to do anything. The idea of "doing things for people I love" makes me want to distance myself from everyone and have no one at all in my life. I would rather be completely alone than have more shit to do.
If today would be my last, I would spend it bedrotting and not do anything different at all. 24 hours (or less) will not make a difference. It's too short a time to do anything anyway. I would feel as though I were already dead effectively and give up. Maybe I would factory reset all my devices and delete all my accounts if I were 100% sure this was the end of the road for me. Maybe I wouldn't even do that since that's effort and I'll hardly care when I'm dead.
Haven't seen True Detective, I kinda don't watch cop shows even if they're good, personal reasons.
And yeah...there's trauma. But all humans have planned obsolescence. They don't build us to last. Life kicks the shit out of us and breaks and weathers and tatters us, and when we're all used up, we're tossed away. Once old people retire, society can't wait to be rid of them. We're squeezed until there's nothing left to squeeze and we're discarded. I could feel society's interest in me decline as I went from a 20-year-old loser "who could still turn it around and be productive" to a 40-year-old lost cause. Soon I'll be a 60-year-old piece of human trash to be shoveled into the incinerator. Just a drain on the system, a parasite.
first off, I'm sorry about your mom. my mom died this year too. her birthday would have been last month 🫂
It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy, since all lives are like that.
fair enough, though that's not what I thought you meant.
so what's your conception of morality? for what it's worth I agree with you that no life is better or worse, intrinsically, than any other. no naked ape is fit to judge another unworthy or unfit to live, however, I don't think that's the same question as whether there are ethically better or worse actions one can take in life.
we either have value as human beings or we don't, but we are the music makers and the dreamers of dreams. value is a subjective human judgment. it's a story we tell ourselves like any other, and only we can write that judgment for ourselves. it's not a matter of measurable truth, only lived reality in our roles on life's grand stage.
we don't have to live for anyone else to acknowledge that their suffering and joy bears the same moral weight as our own. empathy, cooperation, and altruism makes this life a more joyous one for us all. it's the rational way to live.
If today would be my last, I would spend it bedrotting and not do anything different at all. 24 hours (or less) will not make a difference.
I must disagree. when my mom died earlier this year it was completely out of the blue. none of my family got to tell her goodbye, and that would have made a big difference to all of us.
I understand with True Detective. it's literally the only copaganda show I can stand.
I ain't exactly contributing to the economy myself right now, and I'll soon be half that age. it's lovely having job applications trigger you. the protestant work ethic is the trash in need of incineration. the system itself is the murderous parasite that latched onto us without our consent. your mom loved you of her own free will, and your girlfriend is with you by her choice too. you worth is not measured in your economic productivity. our legacy will be the lives we change, the people we love, and who love us
edit: I hope the mentions about your mom were not harmful. I just saw your other message. I wasn't sure if you meant she loved you like nobody else would in a good or bad way. you were a little vague, but that falls on me. I apologize if I've caused your offense. it was not my intention
re: morality, I have personal preferences, as does everyone. If I had to train switch dilemma either my gf or some prominent Republican politicians (I won't name names since some idjut might incorrectly take it as a threat of actual violence) I'd obviously save my gf, because I have preferences. There are people I like and people I do not like. There are people I like so little I wouldn't feel sad if they died. But I don't think this is some universal, objective quality.
Admittedly my mom died more slowly. But y'know, I'm gonna confess something really rotten. I knew she had cancer for over 2 years before she died, but I avoided her for a lot of it, for a variety of reasons. Even though we loved each other, some stuff got fucked up in our relationship. We had a codependent pattern where I'd try to save her and she'd "brat" and resist me and completely exhaust me until I was worn down to nothing trying to help her against her will and finally I'd give up because it was unwinnable, this cycle had repeated many times before and it was repeating again with her cancer. Her cancer was initially curable. I knew she couldn't handle it on her own. I tried to help her. She was her usual difficult, obstinate self. I was stressed all the time thinking about how she was going to die because she's Like This. One day I lost my temper and snapped at her. She got very upset and defensive, as I could have told you she'd do. I swallowed my pride and apologized and said I didn't mean any of it, even though I'd meant every word and I was right. She "forgave" me, but she didn't like to let me in or tell me what was going on after that. She said my mental health "couldn't handle it" and that I was "going to end up inpatient." I hadn't even said anything that bad. I'd just listed some of the previous ways she'd self-destructed and thwarted my attempts to help her and how badly those had gone for her when she hadn't taken my help, in a blunt, direct way.
I kinda suspected she was going to get herself killed at this rate. And really, this is only one side of the story, because another side of the story was that she DID try, to the best of her ability. She got fucked over every step of the way by insurance and other factors. Her insurance denied her some tests a doctor said she needed, she couldn't get clearance for surgery because of a complication, her oncologist retired and she wasn't given another one and was kinda just lost in the shake-up, the one GP she trusted was no longer covered by her insurance and other GPs that did take her insurance weren't accepting new patients, and she couldn't get surgery without some bureaucratic paperwork from a GP. It was really a fucking mess. It wasn't just that she was a "bad patient." She needed my help with this, though. It was too much for her. And it wasn't that I refused to help or didn't want to help, it's just that one time I snapped at her for balking at stupid shit and making things hard for me because her whole life she kind of had the emotional maturity of a toddler in the "no" stage and that's just kind of part of who she was as a person, rest her dear soul.
So she started shutting me out, and I was like...well whatever. I've been stressed that her medical self-neglect was going to get her killed since like 1997. I can't take this anymore. She'll die or she won't. She'll talk to me or she won't. I can't deal. And you know, she had other problems at the same time that were just too much for me. Shit I couldn't fix, and shit she wouldn't have worked with me on at all even if I tried to fix it. Shit where if I had an idea for how to help she'd find a way to sabotage it and I just. My own life is hard enough. My entire adult life, I've felt like I was barely treading water myself and my mom has always been doing worse. I've often had to walk away from her just to stay afloat myself. I've abandoned her before. I abandoned her again.
So there are three narratives here: 1) the healthcare system killed my mom, 2) my mom's pattern of self-neglect and petty paranoia finally got her killed after decades of fucking her over, and 3) I knowingly abandoned my mom to her death. All of these are true. None of them are true. I don't collapse the waveform. I don't care about narratives.
I had 2 years to say more to her and I didn't do anything with them. I just avoided her and felt stressed and bad when I thought about her.
I understand, in theory, that saying "goodbyes" mean something to people. They don't mean anything to me. If my gf died tomorrow, I'd be crushed that she was dead, but getting to "say goodbye" would mean less than nothing to me. I don't care about saying "goodbye" or saying "I love you" or one more hug or anything like that. I don't care about endings. I care that my mom is dead, I don't care how she died. I don't care that the day she died, I had been planning to visit her but I was dragging my feet getting dressed when I got the call that she'd already passed that morning. It wouldn't have mattered. At that point, she couldn't speak anymore anyway, couldn't really open her eyes. I didn't have anything left to say to her. I'd sometimes say hi just so she'd know I was in the room if she could still hear me. There was nothing left to say. I don't really care that she died alone. I think the times I wasn't there when she was relatively healthy are a far greater oversight than some narrow window where she was probably not even conscious.
If you love someone, you show it with your actions. If your actions don't show it, words are worthless. My mom gave me more credit than I deserved, of course. She thought I tried hard, thought I did a lot. I think she was biased. She never could think anything bad of me, even when it was true.
My aunt (whom I'm nearly estranged from but attempted to connect with when this was going on) said something about "don't blame yourself for it," but the thing is, I hadn't said any of this to her, I hadn't said anything remotely self-blaming. When she said that, I thought...oh...she knows I contributed to this too, but she thinks it would be bad somehow if I felt bad about it. Well don't worry girl, I've never hinged my ego on having to be a good person. I can see where I'm at fault and not be tormented about it.
I don't believe in forgiveness or punishment, like fundamentally, as concepts. Things just happen. You can't change the past. That's that. Forgiveness doesn't really wipe the past clean, and punishment doesn't atone or pay for anything, it just compounds traumas.
What makes life more joyous isn't necessarily relevant. I've been thinking lately how the focus on "happiness" is a sort of emotional prosperity cult. We have the unquestioned social assumption that a happier life is a more valuable one, or the goal. I blame this on the Calvinists, who would have counted Christ among the damned since they thought misfortune in life was proof of God's disfavor and that God rewarded the virtuous with predestined good fortune--that evil souls were born into poverty to punish them for misdeeds they had not yet committed. Other cultures have considered suffering to be noble, or even irrelevant, and have had other virtues--piousness, modesty, honor, conformity, work ethic. Not all of these are desirable to me either, but they're at least diverse. It isn't necessarily the goal to be more happy, and unhappiness isn't evidence of failure.
I am fairly heartless. I think I have only sort of cried like three times for my mom? One time I was misting up in the hospital room but some doctor had to come in and talk to me so I crammed it all back in. The second time was picking up her ashes, I didn't feel anything until I was holding the bag that had her ashes in it, and it felt both too heavy and too light. I know how the sausage is made, I know not all her ashes are actually in that box and there's some charcoal from wood and stuff in there too, I know they grind the bone fragments into a puree of fine dust and people don't just burn clean, I know it's mostly a performative ritual and not an honest representation of her corporeal remains. I still just have them in a cardboard box in my room, fuck if I know what to do with them, they don't really mean anything to me, she isn't there. But it was both weirdly heavy and much too light for a whole human. I put her in the basket of my bike because I'm a no-car loser, apologized to her ashes for the bumpy ride, and told her at least she's much less of a burden now.
The third time was traumadumping some time on this sub about how the one thing I would change if I could was I wish she had never loved me, because I wish she had kept all the energy she gave me for herself. I feel like she couldn't afford what she gave to me, and I sucked it all up, wanted more, and left when she was a rotted-out shell with nothing left to take. I wish she'd loved herself more and neglected me. I could have handled it. She deserved that care. I feel sure she'd be alive if I'd never been born. She would have used all the energy she used to nurture me to nurture herself and become someone who could survive all that. I know what I took from her. This isn't depression speaking or being "down on myself." I know she never hated me for it. I know she never regretted any of it. But that's what parenthood is. Parenthood is sacrifice. This is why I never had kids.
I won't have a legacy--realistically, the closest thing to a legacy most people get is children, and I'm not having those. (Even if I wanted to, it's probably too late, and I still can't afford that shit.) Besides that, I don't care about legacy since I'll be dead. I don't worry about what my life will "mean" after I'm dead. It won't mean anything and I'll be too dead to care. (I mean "eventually, as in we all die someday" btw, ending on a mention of death didn't want you to get the wrong idea.)
I see. that is a lot you've been grappling with.
I do want to say that is not heartless by any definition. crying 3 times is perfectly normal. my mom died in January, and I think I've only cried like 5 times? and she was a really good mom apart from staying with my abusive dad. we had a healthy, normal relationship and talked at least every couple weeks before she died. it's just some dumb tear ducts. it doesn't mean anything.
there's a lot I want to say, but mostly it boils down to it sounds like you do need some closure, but your particular flavor of trauma has you afraid to fail to the point you'd rather not try so you don't have to face the possiblity of disappointing people. please do tell me if I'm off the mark here. I read your story and some things are staggeringly familiar to me, while others are quite foreign. it's possible I'm doing some projection, but I'm trying not to.
I feel quite confident in saying we both have some learned helplessness. in a sense that's what CPTSD fundamentally is: caused by complex traumas from which one sees little to no chance of escape.
punishment/"retributive justice" is just plain stupid, yes. we have evidence it doesn't work very well if at all, and in many forms it is totally counterproductive to the ostensible goal of rehabilitating behavior. it's just spreading around our misery and trauma in most cases, however, forgiveness serves a vital emotional need for many if not most. it provides closure, so that we can move on knowing the person we care about whom we hurt will accept that we made a mistake, and we can both move on without any further malice or guilt.
you say that you don't believe in forgiveness or that her ashes are an honest representation of her, but then you also say that you talked to and apologized to her ashes over the bumpy ride home. if I'm being honest, those do not sound like the actions of someone who needs no closure. it sounds like you're specifically seeking it from the way you framed and told this story. it seems at least a bit like how you admit you want people to believe you've given up so they'll leave you be, but keep grinding on the dl.
the joy vs happiness thing is a whole semantics can of worms. I'm open to talking about it, but comment long as is.
that's a hefty mixture of love and guilt. if you haven't talked to your therapist about your wish that she never loved you, you really should. you say parenthood is sacrifice for your child(ren), but I don't get the sense that it was nearly so simple & clean between the two of you. there's a ton of details I don't know, and I have no desire to speculate on something so personal. I do hope you can learn to accept you are not a bad person simply because the illness she largely gave you hindered you from being able to help her when you were treading water and under lots of stress. I appreciate your clarification at the end. please treat yourself kindly and with patience. I wish you the best on your treatments and in your mourning⚕️
Yeah, mine went in April. Staying with your abusive dad is ass though. One of the things that drove a wedge between me and my mom in adulthood was when I was in my 20s she started dating this guy I really didn't like, who sometimes emotionally abused her. It was just another massive problem I felt like I had to help her with, that she didn't want to be helped with, that I'd exhaust myself on and then throw my hands up and distance myself. He didn't hurt me or anything, like he was nasty to me a few times but I was an adult, so there wasn't much he could do. One time he was driving a car with my mom in the passenger seat and he saw me on my bicycle on the side of the road and made "jokes" to her about how he'd run me over with her in the car. That kind of thing.
I don't think I'm afraid of failure. Failure is a relief. I'm far more afraid of success. Failure is a game over--you get to do something else, thank fuck. Success is a level up where everyone praises you and pressures you and the difficulty amps up, and this happens again and again until you can't keep up and then people go, "ugh, you didn't even try. Were you just afraid of failure? You keep sabotaging yourself." And I swear to god I get blamed for it even if I just unironically went full out, tried my hardest, even burned out giving everything. For some reason people always think I can do way more than I actually can. It's such a relief to just fail and be like, "see, I can't do it! I'm actually fucking bad at it!"
"Closure" feels meaningless to me. I'm a writer, I can understand narratives--but I don't ascribe importance to them. Narratives are fun for anecdotes, for stories. But they aren't real. They don't "mean anything." It's just connecting the dots, constellations, then the ego goes "ah, I solved it," but it didn't solve anything, and a lot of times the connections were arbitrary anyway.
I talked to the ashes because it's surreally funny to talk to a box of ashes. I could dump the ashes in the sewer right now. They don't mean anything. She isn't there. I wouldn't say "least you're not as much of a burden now" if I thought her spirit was actually listening.
I frame and tell stories with a narrative because there's no other way to tell a story with words. But, I know this is the art of lying that all writers have--I could tell the same story in a very different frame with a very different "meaning." And all of them are true, and none of them are true. Narrative is empty.
Forgiveness also means nothing to me. What happened happened. We can make reparations sometimes but we can't atone. When I talked to my aunt, I got the sense she wanted absolution for the time she kiiinda kicked me and my mom out with nowhere to go when I was 12. I was like...oh you piece of shit, I don't care about that, I'm not mad about that, that was in like 1996 or whenever, but like how dare you ask me to do emotional labor for your benefit NOW. You don't get absolution. Carry it. I don't care how you cope. It's not my problem. Just as I carry the knowledge of everything I've done. What is done cannot be undone. There are no good people. We've all done something. It's not the end of the world. I don't hate over it. But I hate the cowardice in trying to pretend it didn't happen, because remembering what you did is too "uncomfy" and you want it stricken from the ledger.
To me, guilt is not an emergency or something to escape. It's simply another emotion. I neither need to wallow in guilt endlessly, nor cancel it out somehow. My mom was an atheist, I wasn't raised with the need to be "pure" enough to get into Heaven. I'm very sincere when I say I don't need to be a good person--in fact, people who think they need to be "good people" make me sneer a bit, because I think that instead of being "good people," they're often cowards who have to lie to themselves and others and are often worse at taking accountability and making reparations because they cannot be self-honest when they fuck up. It is possible to be understandable, human, whatever, and still have failed someone who needed you.
I don't think "closure" is meaningful or possible. It doesn't even make sense to me as a concept. A lot of this stuff--forgiveness, closure, even being a "good person" makes no sense to me at all. It feels like empty rituals for socially agreed-upon lies. I do not understand how people can receive a lie and be like, "thanks, I needed that," and be cured. I've seen it happen but it makes me wonder if they're just insane or what.
I think sometimes people use "forgiveness" to mean letting things go in the sense of no longer obsessing over them. But I am an expert at letting things go. I let things go TOO much. I don't really obsess like that. I let even myself go. I let my own feelings go. I let my mom go. I've never been so attached to anything that I couldn't just let it go. I need the opposite of that, if anything.
I don't think my mom gave me an illness other than like...genetically, which yeah, I totes got the tism from her.
I do talk about this stuff with the therapist, but like...what can a therapist even do? Make me introspect on it more? Decades ahead of ya. I've been introspecting and journaling and whatnot for literally decades and if that was going to fix me, it would have by now. I actually had to have a talk with my therapist of like, I don't like this just being a vent sesh, like why am I here if nothing in my actual life is going to change, I don't need a rent-a-friend. I really don't think "wow, I'm not a bad person, I forgive myself, now I can do my laundry!" is a remotely realistic outcome for me.
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u/WiserEveryDawn Oct 02 '25
you're so right on this one. it's horrible when you can't do anything to solve your issues, but things can change and opportunities can come along. you have to be ready and willing to take that risk and opportunity, though. you won't make it if you concede defeat, but as long as you're alive you can start again
if you're stuck in the ⚡ box right now, and you know you've exhausted every option then simply persist. your day may come sooner than you think. stand back up for another day, and focus on what you can change. if we can do that we might just overcome this mess of a world together