Mr

[Guest_27299190]

I can’t do it, all of it. My head hurts, my eyes hurt. I can’t process conversations properly. My wife is going through it and I’m struggling. It’s all just to much. I always wanted to be married and have kids but why does it feel so hard. Constantly on the edge. This life is exhausting. Trying is exhausting. I want to give up. I want to lose my  mind. I don’t want to try.  I can’t be perfect I cant, please just stop. My head burns and aches. I’m tired of holding it all in 

[therising]

The warmest of welcomes to you at such a tormenting and torturous time in your life. My heart goes out to you while you try to hard to manage the many struggles you face, along with what sounds like pure exhaustion.

As a 53yo gal, it's taken me decades to work out how I tick in certain ways. If I'd been told to start with, when I was younger, it would have made life a heck of a lot easier. It's been more so about trying to work out what a wide variety of my anxiety inducing and deeply depressing challenges have been about over the years. A 'learn as you go' kinda thing can be a tough way to learn. I hope some of what I've learned helps make a difference to you and allows you to be much kinder to yourself

• There are some challenges that cannot be managed alone, something we should be encouraged to understand when we're young. A solid guidance and support system is a 100% absolute must on occasion. Btw, I've learned not to listen to the destructive inner dialogue that can dictate stuff like 'You should be able to cope with this on your own. If you can't, it's because you're weak. Anyone else would be able to manage it. Why can't you?!'. When people talk about so-called 'Inner demons', this one's a bas***d, that's for sure. It's one that can stop us from gaining the guidance and support that can make all the difference. Pays to learn how to block it out
• Trust your feelings. If something feels seriously out of balance, seriously depressing, seriously stressful etc, it's because it most likely is. Don't let anyone tell you you're imagining what you're feeling. That's just dismissive. All feelings are telling, therefor it pays to listen to what they're trying to tell us. It also pays to find people who can sense how we're feeling or empathise with us and what we're going through
• Sounds strange but 'how to lose your mind' becomes a skill, one worth mastering. How to stop thinking or mentally processing is definitely a challenge that takes practice. Giving the thinking/processing/problem solving over to someone else to manage can be key at times. Also, when the speed at which we're thinking becomes anxiety inducing and exhausting, pure thoughtlessness comes as a relief
• Inner dialogue's not a problem unless it becomes a problem, one that needs addressing
• Breakdowns can prove constructive. Constructive breakdowns become the reverse process of the lead up to tipping point. Constructive breakdowns are about list making or breaking things down into point form, to make better sense of. Sometimes the list can be quite shocking. There can be dozens and dozens of things that have led up to tipping point, which can leave us realising how inevitable it was that we were going to meet with that point at some stage. We don't necessarily recognise the tiniest of weights or pressures adding up until they begin to accumulate in ways we can definitely feel. Can also lead to the revelation 'No wonder I feel the way I do, it makes complete sense'
  
• Mental dis-ease or unease can be felt as physical disease or unease at times. 'I'm sick of...' can become 'I'm sick because of...'. The word 'because' can help explain a lot at times
• Anyone or anything that insists on us behaving in a certain way, a way that can be impacting our overall wellbeing, needs to be seriously questioned. Standards can eventually become questionable and intolerable. Up until then, we may simply be trying to tolerate them without question. If someone or something is insisting on perfection from you, it sounds like a destructive and deeply depressing standard as opposed to a constructive and inspiring one. Whether insistence on perfection comes from our own ingrained belief systems or someone else's (who's dictating them to us in a number of ways), some intolerable beliefs have got to go

I could go on but I won't. There can be so much we're never taught and it just doesn't seem right. I wish they'd teach this kind of stuff in school, so that we didn't have to suffer so much without it. Btw, marriage and raising kids can be seriously depressing and anxiety inducing at times, something else I've learned (the hard way). We should be allowed to say this without feeling bad about it. I'm glad you've gifted yourself the freedom to vent what you feel the need to say. A good start.