My faithful companions.

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A variety of IPAs. An iPod hooked up to speakers playing Opeth's Still Life album on loop. These are my faithful companions for this evening.

It is damn near impossible for me to not take things personally when I send out texts and emails to several other people in my 12-step program, and nobody even bothers to acknowledge that I am reaching out for support because of how my work on my Fourth Step is digging up the realities that I would much rather pretend were not realities.

I know, people have their own lives. But I also know that I have nobody in my life who thinks of me as being all that important as an individual. Not in my bloodline, not at my job, not in the 12-step groups, not even I think of myself as being anything worth much.

Maybe I will get wasted and pull out my most depressing BluRays. Maybe I need to wallow in sadness for a weekend to get it the f**k out of my system. Or maybe I could hit one of the legal recreational weed vendors in town, giggle my ass off and not care about much for the rest of the weekend instead.

Nah, I am not feeling suicidal. I know I am taking s**t too personally. And I know this will pass. And I know I am being uber-dramatic, for that is what I do best. Perhaps I should put the still unopened beer away and just go to bed.

I feel very deeply that I am nothing without external validation.

I always starved for it. And why would I not? I was facing disapproval and I was being force-fed shame everywhere I went when I was growing up.

I look back at my attempts to reach for grandiosity when I was a very young child, and it all comes back to this belief that I am nothing without external validation. Everybody was telling me that I was nothing, so I had to prove that I was more than just something. I had to prove that I was great, not just above-average, but flat-out brilliant.

Needless to say, that led to a string of failures where I got both emotionally and physically beaten into submission by the people closest to me.

What I want is what I will be eternally denied - the unconditional love of a parental figure. So, I retreat into bitterness, because bitterness is far easier for me to handle than acceptance that some things are eternally denied to me. I won't get it from my bloodline. I tried seeking it out from a wide variety of chickenhawks when I was a teenager and young adult, and you can probably guess how that turned out. I don't know, I feel as if I cannot move on without this thing that I feel completely empty and incomplete without. So, it is easier for me to repeatedly b***h and moan about how my entire family has wronged me than it is for me to accept that I have to find something else to fill up the emptiness.

I need to learn how to validate my own worth, and I am left here to deal with this task without a manual, a map, a compass, etc. It is unsettling territory.

The toughest things I have to face alone, and these are the toughest things for me. External validation cannot be what makes up my worth. I have to find it within. I do not have the slightest f*****g clue where to begin. I know that I have a high IQ, I know that I can write better than a lot of other people, and I know that I am capable of empathy and that I really want to help others when I have an honest idea of what they are going through. But I also feel that grandiose need to really prove myself to myself. And I hold myself up to a much higher standard than I would hold anybody else in the world up to.

My biggest fear is never figuring out who I am supposed to be. I also fear that I will always be on the outside, looking at people who know how to connect with others in appropriate ways, always being outside of society, never having a place where I can be who I am and still fit within the rest of the world around me. How the f**k can I be a part of society when I do not know who I am to begin with? How do I explore who I am without a 1000% chance of being knocked further into the ground? I fear that a perpetual string of personal failures is ahead of me, and that fear paralyses me.

No, I am not drunk. Getting drunk is not going to help me tonight. The beer is still taking up space in my fridge.

Why am I posting this here? It's almost 2AM, and I have no place else to turn this time of the morning.

I am torn between retreating into alcohol and bitterness, and facing my demons head-on. The former is simple, but it will only get me more of the same. The latter is an area of potential high reward, but also potential high failure, and gambling with stakes this high scares the f**k out of me.

Hi ya KagamineLen.

I think failure can happen either way, retreating into bitterness is a failure, facing into the high risk unknowns will have its own pit falls, the former being a guaranteed fail, and the latter being a risk with better odds for success.

I've been there...the seeking of external validation. The largest way I achieved it growing up was through scholastic achievement. I still deal with a fear of failure, and a need to prove myself.

I distanced myself from my parents, and lived my life. It's not a glamorous life, and I've made some really awful mistakes. Somehow blundering through my life has eased that need for validation.

Just remember that life can have vast opportunities. It is truly your own to steer in whatever direction you choose. Even if you experience catastrophic failures, you can just learn from them and realize you're still okay.

KagamineLen, good for you for not drinking. It is tough to figure out who you are. While you are not secure in yourself, it will feel like you are getting bounced around, but turning to alcohol will certainly prevent you from figuring this out. It's a tough road, but you must travel it. You will be strong in the end.

Feel free to PM me if you want someone to talk to.

I spent most of the last 36 hours in bed. I still am in bed now.

I do not want to leave my bed. I just want to fall asleep and not have to worry about waking up ever again.

blast out SERENITY PAINTED DEATH for me, my friend. Just one play for tombo.

Sure thing.

That whole album is great music to feel bad to.

I've been going back and forth between Still Life and Damnation for the last several hours.

I am crying, and I am praying for death, because I do not have the motivation to bring it upon myself.

And I know that I have to pull myself together really f*****g soon, for tomorrow I have to return to work. I am a 36-year-old man, so I cannot afford myself the luxury of indulging in deep depressions like this one.

The toughest things are the things that I have to face alone. I know that now. It has been made painfully clear to me. I have to step up and move forward. My emotional wounds are bleeding critically, they are infected, they have never been properly treated. Yet I have to move forward while bleeding profusely, for the path towards healing them does not involve remaining stagnant and hoping external forces will take care of them eventually.

f**k it. Like Ben Folds said, it sucks to grow up and we're still fighting it. I feel like I am trapped in an angstridden middle-school phase. I do not know how to be an adult, because frankly I grew up with adults who do not know how to be adults either. I have no road map, no compass, no manual. I have to stumble forward blindly and pray that I get some things done right along the way.

Well, perhaps I should start by forcing myself to take a trip to the YMCA, run on a treadmill for an hour, and sit in a steam room after that. Who knows? Perhaps I should start by facing my current aversion to healthy activity head-on.

I really want to crack open the IPAs I have in my fridge and pull out the most devastatingly depressing movies that I have in my BluRay collection, but I think we all know that won't help at all at the present moment. That is exactly something that an angstridden middle-schooler would do in this situation.

Depression sucks. It always passes for me, eventually, but in the moment, it feels genuinely perpetual and all-consuming.

Exercise is not something that I really like doing, but it helps me to feel better (Neurobiological effects) and of course there is the runners high reward as a respite from the depression How to

I understand this, its the same for me.

Now you know you have us. You are not alone.

Get out those tapes.....but get up to go to work tomorrow.

I'm sorry you had to spend the last 36 hours in bed.

Road map is the steps; manual is the big book; the rest sounds like Third Step to me.



Other than meetings, etc., the thing that most kept me sober the first two-three years was 45 minutes of cardio each weekday. Forget IPAs, endorphins are where it's at!

Yeah, I know all of this is what I should be focused on at the present moment.

Instead, I am obsessing about how I deeply want what I will never have. How f*****g infantile is that? Extremely.

I really do get the feeling that I will be perpetually lost without the guidance of a parental figure who actually cares about my well-being. Now I'm just being whiny about it. I'm being a worthless whiny individual instead of doing what I need to do with myself.

And I know that you know all of this. But as you also know, saying it to one another anyway is the way folks in the program show caring support for one another.


I'm guessing best case would be if you could find a Higher Power to fill that role.

Well, whatever Higher Power that exists formed me as a man who is utterly devoid of personal worth. Without a place in the world around me to call my own. With parts of my heart and brain missing and shattered at birth, leaving me a defective and disposable part of his grand creation.

Yeah, this is what my Fourth Step is bringing up within myself.

Good Fourth Step then, if you are getting in touch with deep stuff like that.

I was told that if I get stuck on a step then I may need to revisit a prior one. If the power that created you messed up like that, then maybe back in Step Two he/she/it could be replaced by another one?

When I came in I had to abandon all prior beliefs. Instead I "made a decision" to make the program itself my HP. That worked rather well for me.