When you live in a world of everything with nothing

[jedlim]

Hey everyone,

I hope you are all doing well.

I want to make this thread to share how my experience with depression, and hopefully learn from other people's experiences too.

I have very poor processing speed and working memory (bottom 15th percentile, bottom 40th percentile, respectively) . It takes significantly more time for me to figure things out and memorise things than other people. This has always affected my social life in school, and even now; a lot of the time back then, I was percieved as the 'disabled kid'. I literally made no friends, I had only a few acquaintances. Eventually though, I started to care less about what other people think of myself, and started to care more about self-improvement. The problem is, my cognative limitation is also affecting my ability to learn new skills, furthermore, me being able to work towards self-improvement. I always get mental burnouts, which stop me from learning, even when I want to keep pushing. I know this sound stupid, but I think it's a suitable analogy- I feel like my ability and rate of learning is proportional to how much time and how well an oven that is broken, can cook, that can only be turned on after 3 hours of resting, only to be used for 10 minutes.

I live in time and place where I have endless 'opportunities for success' but I can't even reach any of them. It's frustrating, especially when you're in an environment where everyone else is normal and successful; even within my family memers, i'm the bad leftovers of the gene pool.

All in all, i'm at the point in my life where I don't even care about my status, and/or other people. I don't believe it's too much to ask for, that I simply want to learn a new skill for myself, to be good atleast something (yes, i'm literally good at nothing. and I'd rather not argue that).

What I'm trying to seek out - I would like to know the experiences of other's with poor cognative proficiencies. How were you able to learn a skill, or anything for that matter?

I hope I haven't missed anything. I want to thank you all for reading till this point.

[Soberlicious96]

Dear Jedlim,

Welcome to Beyond Blue and well done for reaching out.

I must say though (as is my prerogative) that I don't agree that you are 'literally good at nothing'. Your spelling, and the ability to express yourself in your post, are actually quite good! But hey, that's just my opinion, and you can certainly disagree if you like.

I would like to share an experience with you, that I had when I was a young child, of age ten; I came off my pushbike rather badly, not wearing a helmet at the time, and injured my head and brain so badly that for the first three days after the accident, I did not even know my own name. I had to 'learn' again who I was. I had to learn to write again (even though I was already in school and knew how to write before that) and even then, to recognise my own hand-writing because the accident had changed my hand-writing! I no longer had a sense of smell (and still don't) and my short term memory and the ability to retain new information meant that I felt I was slower than everybody else. But I plugged away nonetheless, and managed (eventually) to make it the rest of the way through Primary School, and even into High school.

One of the ways in which I now manage to learn is to repeat, repeat and repeat again until it is burned into my brain. And I can't have people 'show me' how to do stuff. I have to do it myself and have them provide me with instructions on how to do it. But the only way I learn things is to DO IT MYSELF. I simply CANNOT learn by being 'shown'. I just cannot seem to take in information from an external source; I have to have my own 'experience' of it, if that makes sense? And I still forget stuff a lot. I have to write everything down. I have about a dozen different alarms in my phone at any given time, just to try to 'remember' daily tasks. Things that other people probably don't even think twice about; like packing and taking my lunch to work, or taking my meds, or putting the bin out. If I'm on holiday for example, and away from my normal routine, I even have to set alarms to remind me to brush my teeth, because I forget. Even though it's a normal daily thing. If I am out of my routine, I just seem to forget EVERYTHING.

I thank God every day for the invention of smart phones, and how much they have helped me to manage my memory problems. They have seriously helped to improve my management of my memory!

Anyway, that's just my experience. Hope that helps a little?

[David35]

Have you thought about doing any online courses (self paced) to boost your self esteem?

[bluenight]

Hey jedlim,

I don't know what you're going through or how much of a struggle it is for you to learn new skills and things but I think it's really good that you have the drive and determination to better yourself. That passion for self improvement is good stuff and you should try not to be too hard on yourself. It will take you longer then others to learn certain things but you will grasp it once you give it enough time and practice.

I just want to say also that when we don't feel good about ourselves or about the future, it's very easy to choose to think in all or nothing way. I am sure there are some things you are good at ..

I feel depressed sometimes and I tend to think like you, all or nothing, and I think nothing in my life is good and nothing is going right and I feel really down and like I have no hope for the future but If i really think about things deeply, it's not true.