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Belongs to: Therapist reacts to Save Me by Jelly Roll
This song touches me. I am so socially phobic due to my disability that I am often very alone. I used to know I was needed by my daughter but now she is old enough to care for herself and is marrying. Sometimes… Often I am just waiting to die so I won’t be in pain anymore.
Hello my friend.
Thanks so much for posting about this and giving us the opportunity to support you in this. I know that in my life, feeling vulnerable has sometimes led to me turning inwards, not outwards, and I commend your strength.
In your post, you mention being socially phobic due to your disability and how a loneliness looms overhead. Especially now that your daughter is grown, is getting married, and has moved away. That sounds incredibly difficult. I imagine that feels incredibly isolating. More than lonely - perhaps a bit hollow. You mention that you use to feel needed with regards to your daughter. So perhaps there is also a sense of lacking purpose or directionless? Being a father, I can imagine feeling just…lost outside of that purpose.
I don’t want to overstep any boundaries and ask your disability or anything - and I think it may not be pertinent to know the exact thing you’re struggling with. But isolation, no matter the cause, can be maddening. I firmly believe that humans are meant to be social. And if you’re in physical (or emotional) pain with no way of distracting yourself or dissipating it, I imagine pain becomes this all encompassing storm over your head.
Regarding the sentence “I used to know I was needed by my daughter but now”
It’ll sound cliche and maybe like you’ve heard it 1000 times. But your daughter being grown doesn’t mean she doesn’t need you. But I understand that you’re not physically doing the care-taking anymore.
In that vein, I have to ask if there is anything your passionate about? Social work? Helping others? Is there anything that sets your soul on fire like art? Or writing?
My story is quite quite different than yours. But the long and short of it is that I spent nearly an entire decade spinning my tires, grinding away at my “career” because I was looking for a feeling. Through a lot of hard work and some therapy, I uncovered that I was looking for a reason - a driving force to “stay”. A justification to live. In my case, it was through content and content creation. If I got enough clicks and likes and shares and subs and blah - maybe I would then feel…whole? Or feel like it was ok to exist. Feel like I’d done something for the world to justify the resources I took up. And also, perhaps I’d earn love.
The fallacy was that I don’t need to earn love. Nobody does. People are born into this work and deserve to exist and live and thrive. No justification required. And that the thing that I thought was my sense of purpose, was actually the only way that I felt deserving or worth it.
To loop this back around, I think you deserve to exist without needing to earn it. Though purpose is really important for people, I don’t think I could exist without having some project (I’m currently writing a book) creating a value exchange out of it made me feel worse.
I think you have so much to offer this world. So much that you can still do. But you deserve to exist, even without doing those things. Additionally, and again - cliche, have you considered therapy or professional help to perhaps unwind any narratives you may hold about yourself.
I am glad your alive and glad to be able to be here to support you. I hope that what I had to say made some semblance of sense or connected the way I intended.
We’re here to support you. I hope you get feeling better my friend. You deserve it. Hold fast.
Huge hugs. Reading this early this morning meant a lot. I used to work with prisoners. I was a counselor but because of the need to restrain and at times intervene in fights I couldn’t go back. I had seven surgeries in seven years and the pain is terrible. I know emotionally some of my hurt comes from being bullied.… I was spit on literally and told what a bad person I am. Its hard when I hear my daughter say I know you want to die… and its really not suicidal. Just a desire not to hurt anymore not physically or emotionally