Anxiety is kicking my ass. In September, it only showed up once or twice, and always with a clear reason. Now it's returned to a broader state of mind, rather than individual things that can be addressed. The school psych program is awful. They're always in bureaucratic or administrative meetings, not working with the kids that need their help. The rare time that they will help, it is when they want it to as opposed to when you need it, and without notice. In previous years, we've been short staffed, so I couldn't be too harsh, but now we have a full time psychologist, and three interns who are supposed to cover him, yet somehow there was no one in the office who could help me for two periods in a row. Wound up leaving early, simply because I couldn't get the services they had promised at my IEP meeting.
The program is still in its infancy, so feedback from its subjects (who are currently very few in numbers, making each voice count for a lot) is well heard by the administration -- though seemingly not heard by the program itself.
I screwed up my life again. Have to take a Leave of Absence from school. Been in Therapy for anxiety but it didn't help with school. Gonna have to re-focus to Depression-oriented stuff. Not sure what's gonna happen in the meantime. Mom has been kind of difficult with understanding and things are very tense.
I told my mom about myself taking Ritalin and she's very proud of that fact. Back when I was 10, someone came to my house to diagnose me and confirmed I had ADD. My mom wanted to put me on the medicine, my dad didn't because of it was mild and didn't think it was worth medicating me because of the risk of it turning into addiction. She cried about it and history took it's course. It explains how over time I was incredibly smart, but slowly declined in high school and I squeaked by in college by perseverance.
Before I told her I was on this medicine and going to therapy, she already said I am a well adjusted person. The fact that I told someone in my family about it and accepting it really made her happy because she's is proud I am taking more steps to better myself. Happiness is so important and getting control of your head-space takes a lot to challenge. She has accepted my faults and how I felt emotionally unworthy of things. But told me that her life didn't really start off until she was 39.
I am an emotional person. And that is okay. Took me a long time to learn that, but it is okay. What sucks is, my brother is logical to the point of never admitting fault. So likely, I'll never quite get along with him. It's been hard to accept, but over the past few weeks, I have accepted that. (And he's a believer in 3rd-Wave-Feminism that'll destroy the Constitution. That sucks, but...wow)
It has really been a developmental set of months. I guess part of the whole thing has been learning about when to understand emotional behavior and when it's good or bad and controlling it. Either letting it pass through you so you can push on or re-directing it into something to learn from.
Anxiety is kicking my ass. In September, it only showed up once or twice, and always with a clear reason. Now it's returned to a broader state of mind, rather than individual things that can be addressed. The school psych program is awful. They're always in bureaucratic or administrative meetings, not working with the kids that need their help. The rare time that they will help, it is when they want it to as opposed to when you need it, and without notice. In previous years, we've been short staffed, so I couldn't be too harsh, but now we have a full time psychologist, and three interns who are supposed to cover him, yet somehow there was no one in the office who could help me for two periods in a row. Wound up leaving early, simply because I couldn't get the services they had promised at my IEP meeting.
The program is still in its infancy, so feedback from its subjects (who are currently very few in numbers, making each voice count for a lot) is well heard by the administration -- though seemingly not heard by the program itself.
Definitely pursue whatever help you need, but if you can't get it I think that's alright too. You're familiar enough with this feeling to see how it grows and changes. We learn a little something from every low point, whether we know it or not. You seem aware enough for that knowledge to keep you on an upward trend.
I screwed up my life again. Have to take a Leave of Absence from school. Been in Therapy for anxiety but it didn't help with school. Gonna have to re-focus to Depression-oriented stuff. Not sure what's gonna happen in the meantime. Mom has been kind of difficult with understanding and things are very tense.
Don't give depression too heavy an emphasis. Face it, describe it, acknowledge it for everything it is, wrestle it, and all that good stuff. Then come up with a detailed vision of happiness in all of its activities, thought processes, and silver linings. We will be dealing with depression for the rest of our lives. We will also be dealing with happiness for the rest of our lives.
I told my mom about myself taking Ritalin and she's very proud of that fact. Back when I was 10, someone came to my house to diagnose me and confirmed I had ADD. My mom wanted to put me on the medicine, my dad didn't because of it was mild and didn't think it was worth medicating me because of the risk of it turning into addiction. She cried about it and history took it's course. It explains how over time I was incredibly smart, but slowly declined in high school and I squeaked by in college by perseverance.
Before I told her I was on this medicine and going to therapy, she already said I am a well adjusted person. The fact that I told someone in my family about it and accepting it really made her happy because she's is proud I am taking more steps to better myself. Happiness is so important and getting control of your head-space takes a lot to challenge. She has accepted my faults and how I felt emotionally unworthy of things. But told me that her life didn't really start off until she was 39.
I am an emotional person. And that is okay. Took me a long time to learn that, but it is okay. What sucks is, my brother is logical to the point of never admitting fault. So likely, I'll never quite get along with him. It's been hard to accept, but over the past few weeks, I have accepted that. (And he's a believer in 3rd-Wave-Feminism that'll destroy the Constitution. That sucks, but...wow)
It has really been a developmental set of months. I guess part of the whole thing has been learning about when to understand emotional behavior and when it's good or bad and controlling it. Either letting it pass through you so you can push on or re-directing it into something to learn from.
You're on the right track, man, keep it up. I call it emotional Akido; redirect to disarm and do no harm. Everybody's got their own flow to follow, and for emotional people like us deviation is particularly punishing. Not realizing how exhausting this post would be I have started rhyming and alliterating against my will. Point is that broken and disadvantaged people learn to learn quick.
So, I'm done with being physically in school. Being in class is too much for my system. I'm going in to collect my books and stuff tomorrow, but after that I'll be getting instruction and coursework from a tutor who meets with me outside of school. My parents are really down that it's come to this, but I'm happy that this is even an option.
Greg, my kid is in almost the same situation as you but she refuses to admit anything is wrong. I am prepared to enroll her in an online school program but that will not help fix the core anxiety problem. I need a way to reach her so that she will be able to see the problem and want to be helped.
I've had similar issues and pretty much just sought treatment when I was unable to function at school. If her grades are slipping or whatever, try to convince her that her performance isn't what it usually is and that it's a mental health problem that can be fixed. It's hard to hear and if she's depressed she will probably have trouble believing that and blame it on herself instead. I know it took me a while to come to terms with.
I already knew I didn't want to feel like I did. I was willing to do anything just to not loathe everyone and everything around me. When someone said "take this and you'll feel better," I just went with it.
I already knew I didn't want to feel like I did. I was willing to do anything just to not loathe everyone and everything around me. When someone said "take this and you'll feel better," I just went with it.
That's what I did to. Watching some online testimonials and see all the connected dots to how my problems could come from a core of something mental. It's tricky because so many feelings of anxiety and depression come from several different sources and can be alleviated by some physical activities such as being more social or exercise/healthy diet. But when those feel too hard, going for a different route is very helpful and that's what helped for me.
Second PAX AUS, second post-PAX epiphany. I think I've managed to introspectively figure out (in reasonable detail) some events that happened in my mind on Sunday, so hopefully this might be of some use to the people here. It's hard to be sure, but I'm reasonably confident that this view of events is relatively accurate.
The basic thesis I'm backing here is to view mental illness as computer faults, which can be in the form of software as well as hardware. This is somewhat complementary to the "chemical imbalance" thesis that's pretty common in this thread; loosely speaking, "hardware" problems are neurochemical issues, and "software" problems are cognitive issues.
From what I gather, I've figured out that I probably have a mild issue with social anxiety. That part is, I think, totally obvious in retrospect, because the symptoms are rather clear-cut (in many social situations I will often have pretty strong fears of doing something wrong and/or embarrassing myself), but I had never really thought about it very much until now. Basically, I had already been dealing with the issue by using the core ideas of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT)---I had been overriding the concerns by rationally analysing the situation and concluding that my fears were ridiculous.
So, from what I've pieced together, I most probably had a minor mental breakdown towards the end of the last day of PAX AUS. I was in a situation where I almost started crying (likely uncontrollably), but I just barely held it together. Overall, I think it was due to contributions from a confluence of factors, all of which probably had a significant effect.
First of all, I hadn't been getting much sleep; I generally sleep a lot worse when I'm not home, and the excitement of PAX can't have been helping in that regard. It's pretty clear that lack of sleep reduces cognitive capacity, so I think that it would have had a significant effect, and I think it supports my thesis.
So, on that Sunday I played a few good board games, and one thing I noticed was that I was more worried than usual about taking too long on my turn. I know that I take a pretty long time sometimes, but I let it get to me much more than it normally would.
Later that day I sat down to play some Burning Wheel (the Trouble in Hochen scenario) and I'm pretty sure that was the proximate cause of the breakdown. Essentially, I think I unwittingly put myself under a *lot* of pressure for that game, and I wasn't properly able to deal with the cognitive load. There were two things I was concerned about: - I wanted to roleplay well. - I wanted to make sure that the people who hadn't tried Burning Wheel before enjoyed the game. I don't think there was anything wrong with having those concerns in and of themselves, but upon reflection it is quite clear to me that neither of them was a serious issue. Had I been on the ball it would have been clear at the time that those two concerns were pretty trivially met, and weren't really genuine concerns at all.
I think what happened here is that there wasn't enough cognitive capacity left to run the subroutine that would otherwise evaluate those thoughts and go "no, that's stupid". Roughly the same thing applies in the case of taking too long on my turns - I did sometimes take a while, but it was obviously not so long that it would be any kind of major problem.
I was still able to keep going until the end of the session, but I pretty much broke down afterwards and I think the main reason for it was probably that the absence of that subroutine resulted in a serious build-up of stress. Originally, I had wanted to make it to the closing ceremony, but it was clear to me at the time (and still is now) that continuing the BW game was obviously the better decision. So, after the game finished I tried to make it in to the ceremony in a relatively panicked manner.
Around that time I was hit by the emotional wave from the mental breakdown, and my brain tried to work out what was going on. What happened afterwards was, I think, a completely open-and-shut case of rationalization. My brain took note of the event, and then attempted to come up with an excuse for what was happening. However, instead of considering the currently obvious hypothesis of cognitive malfunction, my brain went straight to attempting to explain it away as a reaction of regret in response to a poorly-made decision.
Jake and Prad noticed the state I was in, and Jake (saying he'd never seen me like this) pointed out that my reaction didn't make sense; I had had plenty of opportunities to leave the BW game and go to the closing ceremony. The rational part of my brain agreed with this; staying at the BW game was quite clearly the correct decision, so it didn't make sense that I would regret it. At that point, in an attempt to rationalize, I pointed out that I could have managed to both finish off the BW game and make it to the closing ceremony as well. Retrospectively I think that's probably true, but my current realisation is that it's almost entirely beside the point. Even if perhaps I made a mistake in that regard, that mistake had almost nothing to do with my mental state at the time.
In fact, in an attempt at introspection at the time, I said something along the lines of "Well, obviously I'm being irrational, because reacting like this doesn't really make any sense regardless, but what can you do? Humans are naturally irrational, and there's not much to be done about it." That, I think, is probably true overall, because regardless of the situation that kind of reaction was obviously ridiculous. However, even then I attempted to rationalize further; "But then, doesn't it make sense that bad decisions should be punished with negative emotions?" Sure, yes, but not to that extent...
Summary thoughts: - Get enough sleep. - Make sure your cognitive subroutines are functioning properly. - Look for the real sources of your emotions. - Try to recognize rationalizations for what they are.
Other thoughts: 1. 2. Debugging is a whole heck of a lot harder if you have to use the same flawed hardware and software that you're debugging to do the debugging itself.
Okay, so I've heard about post-PAX depression, but for the second time after a PAX AUS I'm having pretty much the opposite effect.
In an overall sense, I'd say it's like my brain is operating in a higher gear, and in pretty much every way that counts it's just straight-up better.
I think the overall symptoms are a pretty close match for the tail-end of a mild bout of depression, but I figured I'd list them out here for reference: - I feel healthier - I feel more confident - I feel like social interaction is easier - I feel more focused - I feel more motivated - I feel less bored / feel more interested in things / care more about things - I care more about the food I'm ingesting - Sleep comes more easily and I feel more inclined to keep to a "normal" sleep schedule
It makes sense that this happened after the first PAX AUS, because before then I had been fairly depressed, but I think most of that was situational---I had graduated from university in mid 2012, and I didn't really know what I was going to do with my life. The prospect of a normal job in CS or engineering seemed relatively boring and "meh", so I had already decided on postgraduate study, but that idea also was not very enticing because I had no idea what field of research I would go into. The effect was worsened by the concern that the long period of unemployment would look bad on my record, and then there was the overall shame of being unemployed for such a long period of time. The effects of that shame cut my social interaction down to pretty much nil, which definitely didn't help; the depression also had a similar effect in reducing the amount of time I spent playing video games or having fun more generally. I had a suicidal thought or two at one point, but those were quashed pretty quickly by the rational part of my brain.
The above is why my previous posts mentioned my "second" post-PAX epiphany; the first was when I basically realised "oh fuck, I was depressed; that makes a lot of sense..."
Overall, I think the mental breakdown that came with the second epiphany was totally worthwhile, because the value I gained in terms of introspective insight easily outweighs any of the negatives. However, although the experience after the first PAX makes a lot of sense, I'm a little surprised to find a similar effect after the second. I didn't really feel depressed as far as I had noticed, I wasn't avoiding social interaction and I wasn't really feeling unmotivated. I guess I was procrastinating more than usual, but I have a long history of procrastination so I don't think it was particularly out of place.
Overall, my best guess is that it was mostly because there was plenty of work to be done and I felt really busy, which might've hidden away any telltale signs. Alternatively, I was simply feeling "normal" before and I am simply in a "higher plane" right now, but even if that's true I'd still rather stay here.
Anyways, my current conclusion is that I should pay closer attention to my mental state, because that is something I haven't done that much in the past. If I notice anything amiss and feel unable to do anything about it, I will most definitely seek professional help.
The first PAX AUS was pretty much the catalyst that helped me make up my mind on what I would do for postgraduate study. At the time, I was pretty "meh" about all of the topics that had been suggested to me by possible supervisors, but the first PAX AUS was enough for me to make up my mind.
One of the biggest factors was playing Hanabi, because I was like "hey, this game is really fun, and it's also genuinely non-trivial from a mathematical perspective". Before the convention I had already been thinking similar things about the game of Mafia---even in an abstract sense, with all of the psychology aside, Mafia is also much more complex than one might expect. So yeah, I knew I cared about games, and I knew I was really interested in Artificial Intelligence (a woefully under-developed area at this point in time), so I figured that that was what I would do.
I guess the second time around, with the second post-PAX lift, I'm inclined to believe that I should probably focus on lifestyle changes. I think that's probably all I need at this point, but as I said earlier if I run into trouble I'll definitely get professional help.
Today, I reviewed a case that is on level with an episodes Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. On top of possibly getting the flu, I almost got sick after reading the documents. I ended up crying for bit. These are the times where I need to step away from my desk, but I don't because I just want to do my best to help people.
*Breathes*
Ok, just needed to get it off my chest. I feel a bit better now.
Fuck, I feel like shit right now. I marathoned "Moon Embracing the Sun", and cried nearly every episode, even when I knew what was coming. But I still haven't been able to shed a tear for my good friend that was shot and killed last year. I feel so insanely guilty that these characters and this show could make me cry while I still haven't been able to cry for him. Even though I know this show was designed to make people cry, I can't shake this horrible feeling. Am I really that defective and horrible of a person that I can cry for fake people in a made up story but I have to try to even feel sad about my friends dying?? I know I can just get drunk and forget how I'm feeling right now, but this will keep haunting me and I don't know how to stop it.
Often times what happens is that we don't want to admit that we're sad about something, and it manifests elsewhere. I lost my grandmother about a month ago, and only cried over it once or twice. But when Terry Pratchett died, I had intense waves of grief for days. This wasn't because I was a Terry Pratchett fan -- I actually could never get myself to finish one of his books -- but it was because I was still grieving over my grandmother (it doesn't help that I closely associate him with her). Just because the show is what makes you cry doesn't mean that that's what you're crying over. Lord knows how many times I've cried listening to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, because I was already in a bad place.
I've developed carpal tunnel as a guitarist. A life of bouncing between typing at work, taking pages of notes in school and then playing guitar at home is at fault, I'm at fault. Not being able to play guitar is giving me anxiety, I feel like I can't properly process my emotions. I even had to take them out of my study be cause they would distract me completely.
It's painful, but keep stretching your hands and wrist. Hold your arm straight, make a fist and bend your wrist downward and hold, then open your hand to a relaxed position and hold it straight forward, then fully extend your fingers and stretch upward. Use a wall to help if you can't hold or reach a full 90 degrees either way. It's uncomfortable even without carpal tunnel, and then it's hell, but it does help.
@ La Petit Mort: Are you sure it really is carpal tunnel? RSI might feel similar but requires different treatment. Also if you are not getting a lot of sunlight you could try a Vitamin D supplement. I've had nerve-pain in my arms and fingers due to a lack of Vitamin D and it completely went away when I substituted it.
Relearning to play left-handed isn't really going to solve this because what the other hand does isn't less demanding, it is just a different form of strain. Specifically for carpal tunnel it might be even worse I guess, but I never had that, just a bunch of other different variants of arm related pain.
I used to play guitar too many years ago, and I wanted to learn fast Death Metal and Power Metal styles. While I did get to the right level of speed my wrist didn't get along with that and I ended up giving it up .
Monotonous tasks like typing or writing can often cause RSI which is short for repetitive-strain-injury. Contrary to what you'd think this one might actually get better with working out and training the muscles involved in the motions. You could try wringing out a towel multiple times. Starting with very few repetitions and slowly working your way up. Stretching before and after is also very important.
I've also heard good things about using a gel-pad or folded towel for typing and your mouse arm. This one is especially good against carpal tunnel because it softens the pressure that is applied in this area.
Oh, I checked with my doctor immediately, she put me on a splint and anti-inflammatory medicine for a month, after which she'll check if more drastic measures are needed. My grip is weak to the point that I have to hold many things with my whole arm, but that's fine. Not being able to play still makes me incredibly anxious, but having a date for my followup helps a lot.
Comments
The program is still in its infancy, so feedback from its subjects (who are currently very few in numbers, making each voice count for a lot) is well heard by the administration -- though seemingly not heard by the program itself.
Before I told her I was on this medicine and going to therapy, she already said I am a well adjusted person. The fact that I told someone in my family about it and accepting it really made her happy because she's is proud I am taking more steps to better myself. Happiness is so important and getting control of your head-space takes a lot to challenge. She has accepted my faults and how I felt emotionally unworthy of things. But told me that her life didn't really start off until she was 39.
I am an emotional person. And that is okay. Took me a long time to learn that, but it is okay. What sucks is, my brother is logical to the point of never admitting fault. So likely, I'll never quite get along with him. It's been hard to accept, but over the past few weeks, I have accepted that. (And he's a believer in 3rd-Wave-Feminism that'll destroy the Constitution. That sucks, but...wow)
It has really been a developmental set of months. I guess part of the whole thing has been learning about when to understand emotional behavior and when it's good or bad and controlling it. Either letting it pass through you so you can push on or re-directing it into something to learn from.
Don't give depression too heavy an emphasis. Face it, describe it, acknowledge it for everything it is, wrestle it, and all that good stuff. Then come up with a detailed vision of happiness in all of its activities, thought processes, and silver linings. We will be dealing with depression for the rest of our lives. We will also be dealing with happiness for the rest of our lives. You're on the right track, man, keep it up. I call it emotional Akido; redirect to disarm and do no harm. Everybody's got their own flow to follow, and for emotional people like us deviation is particularly punishing. Not realizing how exhausting this post would be I have started rhyming and alliterating against my will. Point is that broken and disadvantaged people learn to learn quick.
The basic thesis I'm backing here is to view mental illness as computer faults, which can be in the form of software as well as hardware. This is somewhat complementary to the "chemical imbalance" thesis that's pretty common in this thread; loosely speaking, "hardware" problems are neurochemical issues, and "software" problems are cognitive issues.
From what I gather, I've figured out that I probably have a mild issue with social anxiety. That part is, I think, totally obvious in retrospect, because the symptoms are rather clear-cut (in many social situations I will often have pretty strong fears of doing something wrong and/or embarrassing myself), but I had never really thought about it very much until now. Basically, I had already been dealing with the issue by using the core ideas of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT)---I had been overriding the concerns by rationally analysing the situation and concluding that my fears were ridiculous.
So, from what I've pieced together, I most probably had a minor mental breakdown towards the end of the last day of PAX AUS. I was in a situation where I almost started crying (likely uncontrollably), but I just barely held it together. Overall, I think it was due to contributions from a confluence of factors, all of which probably had a significant effect.
First of all, I hadn't been getting much sleep; I generally sleep a lot worse when I'm not home, and the excitement of PAX can't have been helping in that regard. It's pretty clear that lack of sleep reduces cognitive capacity, so I think that it would have had a significant effect, and I think it supports my thesis.
So, on that Sunday I played a few good board games, and one thing I noticed was that I was more worried than usual about taking too long on my turn. I know that I take a pretty long time sometimes, but I let it get to me much more than it normally would.
Later that day I sat down to play some Burning Wheel (the Trouble in Hochen scenario) and I'm pretty sure that was the proximate cause of the breakdown. Essentially, I think I unwittingly put myself under a *lot* of pressure for that game, and I wasn't properly able to deal with the cognitive load. There were two things I was concerned about:
- I wanted to roleplay well.
- I wanted to make sure that the people who hadn't tried Burning Wheel before enjoyed the game.
I don't think there was anything wrong with having those concerns in and of themselves, but upon reflection it is quite clear to me that neither of them was a serious issue. Had I been on the ball it would have been clear at the time that those two concerns were pretty trivially met, and weren't really genuine concerns at all.
I think what happened here is that there wasn't enough cognitive capacity left to run the subroutine that would otherwise evaluate those thoughts and go "no, that's stupid". Roughly the same thing applies in the case of taking too long on my turns - I did sometimes take a while, but it was obviously not so long that it would be any kind of major problem.
I was still able to keep going until the end of the session, but I pretty much broke down afterwards and I think the main reason for it was probably that the absence of that subroutine resulted in a serious build-up of stress. Originally, I had wanted to make it to the closing ceremony, but it was clear to me at the time (and still is now) that continuing the BW game was obviously the better decision. So, after the game finished I tried to make it in to the ceremony in a relatively panicked manner.
Around that time I was hit by the emotional wave from the mental breakdown, and my brain tried to work out what was going on. What happened afterwards was, I think, a completely open-and-shut case of rationalization. My brain took note of the event, and then attempted to come up with an excuse for what was happening. However, instead of considering the currently obvious hypothesis of cognitive malfunction, my brain went straight to attempting to explain it away as a reaction of regret in response to a poorly-made decision.
Jake and Prad noticed the state I was in, and Jake (saying he'd never seen me like this) pointed out that my reaction didn't make sense; I had had plenty of opportunities to leave the BW game and go to the closing ceremony. The rational part of my brain agreed with this; staying at the BW game was quite clearly the correct decision, so it didn't make sense that I would regret it. At that point, in an attempt to rationalize, I pointed out that I could have managed to both finish off the BW game and make it to the closing ceremony as well. Retrospectively I think that's probably true, but my current realisation is that it's almost entirely beside the point. Even if perhaps I made a mistake in that regard, that mistake had almost nothing to do with my mental state at the time.
In fact, in an attempt at introspection at the time, I said something along the lines of "Well, obviously I'm being irrational, because reacting like this doesn't really make any sense regardless, but what can you do? Humans are naturally irrational, and there's not much to be done about it." That, I think, is probably true overall, because regardless of the situation that kind of reaction was obviously ridiculous. However, even then I attempted to rationalize further; "But then, doesn't it make sense that bad decisions should be punished with negative emotions?" Sure, yes, but not to that extent...
Summary thoughts:
- Get enough sleep.
- Make sure your cognitive subroutines are functioning properly.
- Look for the real sources of your emotions.
- Try to recognize rationalizations for what they are.
1.
2. Debugging is a whole heck of a lot harder if you have to use the same flawed hardware and software that you're debugging to do the debugging itself.
In an overall sense, I'd say it's like my brain is operating in a higher gear, and in pretty much every way that counts it's just straight-up better.
I think the overall symptoms are a pretty close match for the tail-end of a mild bout of depression, but I figured I'd list them out here for reference:
- I feel healthier
- I feel more confident
- I feel like social interaction is easier
- I feel more focused
- I feel more motivated
- I feel less bored / feel more interested in things / care more about things
- I care more about the food I'm ingesting
- Sleep comes more easily and I feel more inclined to keep to a "normal" sleep schedule
It makes sense that this happened after the first PAX AUS, because before then I had been fairly depressed, but I think most of that was situational---I had graduated from university in mid 2012, and I didn't really know what I was going to do with my life. The prospect of a normal job in CS or engineering seemed relatively boring and "meh", so I had already decided on postgraduate study, but that idea also was not very enticing because I had no idea what field of research I would go into. The effect was worsened by the concern that the long period of unemployment would look bad on my record, and then there was the overall shame of being unemployed for such a long period of time. The effects of that shame cut my social interaction down to pretty much nil, which definitely didn't help; the depression also had a similar effect in reducing the amount of time I spent playing video games or having fun more generally. I had a suicidal thought or two at one point, but those were quashed pretty quickly by the rational part of my brain.
The above is why my previous posts mentioned my "second" post-PAX epiphany; the first was when I basically realised "oh fuck, I was depressed; that makes a lot of sense..."
Overall, I think the mental breakdown that came with the second epiphany was totally worthwhile, because the value I gained in terms of introspective insight easily outweighs any of the negatives. However, although the experience after the first PAX makes a lot of sense, I'm a little surprised to find a similar effect after the second. I didn't really feel depressed as far as I had noticed, I wasn't avoiding social interaction and I wasn't really feeling unmotivated. I guess I was procrastinating more than usual, but I have a long history of procrastination so I don't think it was particularly out of place.
Overall, my best guess is that it was mostly because there was plenty of work to be done and I felt really busy, which might've hidden away any telltale signs. Alternatively, I was simply feeling "normal" before and I am simply in a "higher plane" right now, but even if that's true I'd still rather stay here.
Anyways, my current conclusion is that I should pay closer attention to my mental state, because that is something I haven't done that much in the past. If I notice anything amiss and feel unable to do anything about it, I will most definitely seek professional help.
The first PAX AUS was pretty much the catalyst that helped me make up my mind on what I would do for postgraduate study. At the time, I was pretty "meh" about all of the topics that had been suggested to me by possible supervisors, but the first PAX AUS was enough for me to make up my mind.
One of the biggest factors was playing Hanabi, because I was like "hey, this game is really fun, and it's also genuinely non-trivial from a mathematical perspective". Before the convention I had already been thinking similar things about the game of Mafia---even in an abstract sense, with all of the psychology aside, Mafia is also much more complex than one might expect. So yeah, I knew I cared about games, and I knew I was really interested in Artificial Intelligence (a woefully under-developed area at this point in time), so I figured that that was what I would do.
I guess the second time around, with the second post-PAX lift, I'm inclined to believe that I should probably focus on lifestyle changes. I think that's probably all I need at this point, but as I said earlier if I run into trouble I'll definitely get professional help.
*Breathes*
Ok, just needed to get it off my chest. I feel a bit better now.
I can't remember ever crying over the deaths of grandparents or any aunts/uncles.
I haven't known any close friends who passed so hard to say, but the thought does not seem to bring more sadness than my family passing.
Don't I assume your wrong, you may just see death as a natural process and nothing to cry about?
Relearning to play left-handed isn't really going to solve this because what the other hand does isn't less demanding, it is just a different form of strain. Specifically for carpal tunnel it might be even worse I guess, but I never had that, just a bunch of other different variants of arm related pain.
I used to play guitar too many years ago, and I wanted to learn fast Death Metal and Power Metal styles. While I did get to the right level of speed my wrist didn't get along with that and I ended up giving it up
Monotonous tasks like typing or writing can often cause RSI which is short for repetitive-strain-injury. Contrary to what you'd think this one might actually get better with working out and training the muscles involved in the motions. You could try wringing out a towel multiple times. Starting with very few repetitions and slowly working your way up. Stretching before and after is also very important.
I've also heard good things about using a gel-pad or folded towel for typing and your mouse arm. This one is especially good against carpal tunnel because it softens the pressure that is applied in this area.
Let us know if any of that helped.