Re: Victim mentality seriously starting to ruin my life, know the cause not the
Peach-
Do you intend to reply to the posts guys give you in response to the threads you start here?
You got a ton of really excellent, thoughtful advice from Michal and Seppuku, and a good wakeup call from Emerald Archer. Didn't respond to any of it; did you take much time to digest any of it?
It's frustrating to guys if they're trying to help you, and you just ignore them and go on creating new threads where you gripe about different variations of the same them ("Life sucks, nothing ever goes right for me, why does it have to be so hard").
Also, did you see Franco's response to
this post of yours, and is he correct? Because this makes a colossal difference.
If you're in a small town or a smallish city, it probably does not have the population you need to level up if you're both still a.) not a terribly cool guy yet and b.) also a
morose guy. People will help you out if you're not that cool but you're fun or at least not a drag to be around. And they may help you out for a while if you're a drag but you're also pretty cool (though they will still burn out on you sooner or later). But if you're not cool yet, and you're a drag, maybe only 1 in 100 people will want to continue to hang around you for any real stretch of time.
The easiest thing for you to work on, right now, is not being a drag. You're enough of a drag it
got you fired from work. You're also enough of a drag we had a conversation about whether it'd gone on too long here and we needed to ban you from the boards -- remember this, from the "
Board Etiquette" post (it's stickied at the top of this same forum you posted this thread in)?:
Chase said:
What I am NOT fine with is people using everyone else on the boards as their personal therapists. If you need therapy, hire a therapist; I'm not trained as that, and neither is anyone else here, and we all suck at that role and lack the mental fortitude to have to put up with someone who's a black hole of bitterness and defeatism. This place is a place for people interested in self-improvement - it is not a group therapy session, and it will break if I allow you to continue using it as this.
...
This is not about guys who are good and not good. There are tons of guys on here who are newbies on here and ask newbie questions. That's fine, welcomed, and encouraged. There are plenty of guys who make silly mistakes and can't seem to quite grasp things. That's normal; I did it, everybody else here did it, and if you're new, you're going to do it too.
What is NOT fine is unloading your victim mentality all over the boards. I have zero tolerance for this kind of large-scale emotional abuse that some people with bad mindsets engage in.
If you're going to participate in this community, it must be as a productive member. If you're unable to participate without detracting from others' experiences, we reserve the right to shut the doors to you.
You're exactly the type of poster I wrote this post for. It's SO important that it's titled "Board Etiquette" and it's pretty much the only thing covered in the entire post:
don't use the boards to vent!
I know your kneejerk victim mentality response to this is going to be to curl up in a ball and say "Life sucks, I can't find friends, lost my job, now they're talking about kicking me off the boards... I can't do anything right, nothing works, it's all so hopeless."
Check that kneejerk response for a minute. Shove it into a box or something. Tell it to get lost and come back later.
All this stuff needs to serve as a wake-up call to you. You have three things you need to do:
1.)
Quit being a drag to other people. Does it make you feel better to dump your bad emotions on others? Maybe for a few minutes. And then it feels hopeless again, right? Meantime, you've taken -10 points off your likeability score to every person who heard you unload your unhappiness. When you feel bad, write it in your private (offline) journal - it's just as effective as doing it publicly, except in your private offline journal you can close the document once you're done and say "Boy! It was good to get all that out. And I
sure am glad I didn't go spewing all that garbage to others...!"
2.)
Go somewhere with a lot more people. I know, hard to get out of your comfort zone, and you're depressed, so it feels like wherever you go it'll suck equally and what's the point, blah blah. It WILL suck for a bit in a new city -- you're not going to know anyone there, you'll be even more isolated, and you'll have even more time to reflect and ask yourself deep, alarming questions like "Is it ever going to get better?" On the flip side, choose the right town and you will have much, much higher odds of making at least somewhat cool friends within 3-4 months of lots of activity (going out whenever you get the chance, befriending EVERYBODY, saying no to nobody, etc.)
3.)
Stop being a choosy beggar. In one of your threads you said the only friends you can make are self-righteous people or nerds. And make it sound like these people aren't good enough for you.
What? When I started out, I had similar choices to you. And I decided I could choose between having cool friends who were annoyingly self-righteous, or I could choose balanced but nerdy friends. So I choose cool, self-righteous friends and just sucked it up when they got self-righteous around me so I could be exposed to their cool side and have cool-ish friends. I don't know if that's exactly your situation, but look -- if you've got friend options, take the best of the options available to you. Doing the whole "I don't like any of my options, so I'm going to go sit in a corner by myself. Oh woe is me, why am I all alone!" act is ridiculous. I can commiserate somewhat... I did that for a while. Then eventually I realized that you know what, even if I thought I was Grade A, other people didn't, and if I had to hang out with some Grade B or Grade C or Grade D people for a while to develop my social skills up to the point where I could roll with Grade A people, it was time for me to start doing it. The mantra I hewed to, until I was making A-Grade friends and dating A-Grade girls, was
"Everything anyone invites me to, I say yes." And then I would just go to everything and try to make the absolute best of it: work on my ability to interact with new people, increase my exposure to different sorts of places and activities, improve at maintaining relationships with people I'd known for some time, just improve, improve, improve.
====
Right now, you are a drag to be around.
You're a drag at work. You're a drag on the boards. I have to suspect you're a drag everywhere else too.
Stop it. Stop being a drag. Get a private offline journal and do your venting there. It works just as well as being a drag to other people's faces, I promise you. It is just as cathartic. And it has the benefit that you don't damage your social relationships even as you get your catharsis.
You're free from your job, which means you're free to move.
Go somewhere with a bigger population. The worse off you are socially, the bigger a population you want. More room for trial and error; more anonymity so it's easy to be forgotten after you screw up yet again (major plus). It sucks at first when you don't know anyone, but if you're active you will get there... and you should be VERY active -- going out and socializing as much as you can. Even if you suck hard for a while and it isn't fun. You need those reference points, and you need to focus on trying to improve socially in every outing -- it's all a big experiment, you're not actually playing for keeps.
If you're smart, you'll go to a big city that a few other members from this forum live in. And you will hang out with them and
not be a drag, because you want to be able to keep hanging out with them at least from time to time, to get clued into where the cool spots are and to see how someone who's better off than you are socially does things.
Lastly reread this post (or read it for the first time if you haven't read it yet):
How to Get Started When You’re Socially Hopeless
Do
EVERYTHING in that post.
Start with "At the Beginning / When People Are 'Meh' About You", because that's where you are right now.
Don't read it and go "Oh, some nice suggestions. Maybe I'll do one of those sometime." Actually do the stuff in there. None of it's hard. You just have to make that little switch in your head that goes from "Ew, new stuff I'm not in the habit of doing, too hard, can't do it" and switch it to "Okay, new stuff. It's uncomfortable but I'm going to make a habit to do it. And hey, if none of it works, then at least I can come back and say 'Okay guys, I tried X and Y and Z from Chase's article, went hard on it for a month, doing all this stuff 4 days a week, and it's still not working. Here's what I tried and what happened'" and you will get real, actionable feedback you can use to troubleshoot and refine.
If you can do that, you've just joined The Self-Improvement Club. Welcome aboard. Mind your luggage because this train starts slow but goes faster than a cheetah on a roller coaster once it's moving.
If you can't do that, then you're still in "It's so hard I don't know what to do" land where nothing anyone says to you is seriously considered as something for you to implement in your life, and instead you are a unique, special flower with unsolvable problems that could only be fixed by some kind of divine intervention from Emma Watson and Peter Thiel.
One final thing you need to realize, which is perhaps the most important of all... and that is that there is not a damn thing I can do to help you, or Franco can, or anybody else can. Because everything we are saying we have already said a hundred times. Either you are going to internalize the realization that "The only one who can help me is me. And time's a'wastin -- I'd better get cracking on doing all this stuff" or you're going to sink into that mire of sadness the horse dies in in
The NeverEnding Story. Where basically anyone can get out, but only if they quit moping around and march themselves out of that mire.
You can do it, dude. The job firing you is a good thing. Sucks now, but in a few years you are going to look back and say "Damn, it's a good thing they fired me."
Time to get off the fence and start fixing your life.
Chase