

Hey. I’m so sorry that you’re feeling so spent, so tired, so helpless.
Faced with these feelings, you have tried what many sensible people do: we try to feel better by telling ourselves that it’ll be okay, that tomorrow it’ll stop raining. Sometimes that helps, especially if it indeed stops raining. However, if the rain doesn’t stop, telling ourselves that it’ll be okay feels fake. This is actually backed by research on the topic.
I don’t mean to say that optimism is bad. I mean to say that maybe there’s different paths that we can take, paths that I’ll mention here. Maybe some of these paths are new to you (given that you mentioned wracking your brain). Hopefully they get you closer to where you want to be. Maybe you already know the paths (again, given that you mentioned wracking your brain). Hopefully there’s a new way you learn to traverse them (for example by bike instead of walking, or looking up at the canopies and the valleys instead of looking down at the ground). Maybe they don’t resonate at all with you, and at least you can have the certainty that you’re not alone, that we have all struggled finding our path. It’s all okay. Ultimately, it’s up to you what you do.
This is a public forum and many others will hear my words. They may have heard me before and they will know that I tend to recommend a set of paths that lead to psychological flexibility. I do this because, regardless of what we’re faced with in life, we will always be accompanied by our brain and its voice, our thoughts and their recommendations, and our sense of self and its aspirations. Psychological flexibility teaches us how to relate with ourselves, how to approach that machine that sometimes tells us that life is unlivable and we are unlovable.
You mentioned that your brain is telling you that the world is a mess, that you’re lonely, that you’re old. In a weird way, it’s trying to take care of you. It’s predicting where the tiger is hiding and how to avoid it. “Don’t try dating or finding new friend-groups! It’ll be exhausting and you’ll leave there with nothing good”. “The world’s a mess. Don’t even try.” But our mind plays tricks on us. It’s like a friend who is trying to take care of us but is sometimes confused. It’s an advisor who sometimes nails it, sometimes fails miserably, and sometimes gets stuck. It’s usually when our inner advisors get stuck that our lives become full of unnecessary suffering.
That’s psychological rigidity. Our mind becomes a dictator, entirely sure of how the world works and what can and can’t be done. Our thoughts become repetitive and our life shrinks, kind of like how you described the suffocating walls, closing in on you.
The good news is that there is a way of pivoting from psychological rigidity to psychological flexibility and that there is solid science behind this. Here’s something I’ve said elsewhere some time ago:
Imagine the longest essay you’ve ever had to write for school. A dozen pages? Two dozen? Now picture it in front of you, printed out, on a desk. Imagine there’s ten copies of your essay spread around the desk. Add another layer of essays on top. And another. And another. A hundred times. If you organized the documents into a single stack of paper, it would be 1.2 meters tall. That is how many randomly controlled trials there are on the effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
Here are two places where you can look at the evidence: one and two.
ACT has changed my life and that of hundreds of thousands of people. While I would suggest to get an ACT therapist (and a good one!), there is evidence that you can learn the skills of psychological flexibility if you engage in the appropriate mental processes, regardless of how. You can learn about how to do ACT exercises in A Liberated Mind, which you can find here https://stevenchayes.com/.
I hope you can see how those same words apply to this context.
Now, you mentioned crying daily with a stiff upper lip. But you also mentioned that you can feel your innards wanting to live, to truly live. These two are related. We hurt where we care and we care where we hurt. The crying and the yearning are two sides of the same coin. You have a yearning inside of you for life-affirming experiences. It hurts to see yourself not having them.
I just wanted to point out that this pain that you feel is tied to the passion for living a well-lived-life that you have inside of you. That energy that you have spent trying to tell yourself that things will get better, crying, putting up a facade— that energy can be redirected to a life that you find valuable. Hopefully the tools I mentioned earlier help you do exactly that.
Two things before I let you on your way.
First, you may consider the program “Healthy Minds”. It’s an app/program developed by a non-profit that has been tied to the research of meditation and human flourishing. I donate to them because their research is well grounded, their app is well designed, and they’re life-changing. If you cannot do the investment of time or money or effort for ACT, Healthy Minds is the single easiest thing that you can do daily that will have the biggest impact in your life.
It’s important to note that, while Healthy Minds is the easiest thing with the biggest impact, it’s not a replacement for ACT or otherwise therapy. Here’s a very cartoonish way of thinking about it, but it exhibits my point. Let’s say you have been crawling on the floor. Healthy Minds helps you to walk. ACT is like the high-speed train. Walking is not a replacement for the high-speed train.
Second, as to feeling like a rusty and corroded car, it’s worthwhile to point out that there are ways of removing rust and reinforcing existing structures. Heck, there’s even recycling! A phoenix can arise from the ashes in the same way that people can grow from trauma (it’s a thing; look up “post-traumatic growth”).
I hope this helps.
Does it feel as if they clarify the kind of life you want to live or that they’re forcing you to avoid them?