It's ... a bad spot. And when you're in a bad spot it's impossible to see things clearly. It just is. And it's also hard to take advice when you're in that spot, and it's hard to find the right advice to give as well, because the spot is unique to each person who is in it. I have been there, others have as well who are reading I am sure.
Steve, it gets better at some stage. It may not seem like it, and it may take a lot longer than you'd like, and it may involve more setbacks than you'd care for it to have, but it does get better. Sometimes the really courageous thing is just hanging on until the storm dies down, you know?
I'll pray for you, Steve. If you have a friend you can go to, in real life, highly recommend doing that, even for a bit -- it can help in ways that are hard to predict.
Steve, you are loved. And you are valued. I know that many of us, as internet friends or supporters, read this and wish we could overcome the tyranny of distance and be there for you in the conventional way. But you are in our hearts.
And, regarding what Nancy said and you replied, your list doesn't look short to me, it looks substantial. I realise many claim AI will take over some of that, but I am increasingly sceptical of that, and for two reasons. One, I am seeing a lot of YouTube material lately that is clearly or likely AI produced and it's generally obvuous, annoying and unimpressive. Two, I have used both free and commercial AIs for research and to help compose resources. They make a lot of surprisingly dumb mistakes. I think that some of the fear of how good they are is from people who don't check their work in any detail at all. More importantly, given their power and speed in other ways, the mistakes they make, which a person of average intelligence would easily avoid, reveal there is no real understanding going on.
Anyway, back to the.point. Please know that you matter to us and to many others. You matter, full stop.
So much in this post I can say, “Dang Steve, you too?” - especially the parts of executive function and the meaninglessness of (most) work. As I’ve commented before, I think this is compounded because we both saw our former vocations as having a divine mission, and it’s very hard to find purpose in most work today, and the most work that does have purpose pays poorly.
Like you, I tried the gig work scene on and off, and while there was the generous client or bonus scheme here or there that momentarily made it worthwhile, most of the time I was grinding for less than $12 an hour after backing out expenses. And that was only when I was rolling.
As men, it’s important that we find self worth as providers for our families. It’s hard to feel that self worth when you aren’t making bank each day. While finding a better job isn’t going to solve all your problems, perhaps it would at least begin to solve this one.
Clearly, you are a talented writer, and based on the video you posted last Thanksgiving, you’ve got marketing chops as well. Even a copywriter or video editor at an agency or freelance is going to beat Door Dash.
I might have some connections if you’d be willing to consider. You’ve got my email.
You bet. The last email I sent to you was on the 26th of May from a Protonmail address. Check your spam if it’s not in your inbox. If you still can’t find it, I’ll send again from a different address.
Life can be so complicated. Please know that I am praying for you and your family. There is nothing I can say to make this better, but just know that I care and hopefully that helps. You are valuable. You matter. Hang in there and be receptive to the mystery and wonder of this life.
Steve, as a former Catholic myself, I recognize the pervasiveness of shame in your life. The Catholic Church does an excellent job of making people ashamed of who they are. This has nothing to do with sin, which is a legitimate phenomenon, and I am *not* calling you a sinner. This has to do with the church treating people as medieval serfs and putting them on guilt trips just so that the clerical class can control and manipulate them.
It also has nothing to do with God.
I have been through what I think is more than my share of emotional pain in my life. It would take too long to recount it in a response to a Substack post. What has helped me hold on, though, are the ideas that God does not allow a bruised read to be broken nor the smoldering wick to be snuffed out. That’s not just wishful thinking on my part. That’s a direct quote from scripture. You can Google those phrases to find out where those statements came from, and read the surrounding context.
You need to be among people who love you where you are, respect you for who you are and can show you the truest measure of Jesus‘s love, grace, and mercy. I realize you have a lot of anger, resentment, and questions concerning God. I also realize that the Pharisees within traditionalist Catholicism lack love, grace and mercy.
One of the biggest blessings in my life happened while I was recovering from the surgical effects of an appendectomy three years ago. I met two people who were Pentecostal pastors. They showed me tremendous love, empathy, and compassion. They have become my closest friends. I have learned a great deal from them, and they say that I have been a blessing in their lives.
I am praying that God reveals himself to you in the unique, powerful, and tender way, so that you can see him for who he is, and not through the lens of religious exploitation and abuse.
One more thing: don’t stop writing. And don’t stop writing about yourself. You have the courage to talk about things most people would rather bury deep inside them. The fact that you write about them openly and honestly makes the rest of us know that we’re not alone.
You might even want to try writing poetry. I know that it’s far different from writing non-fiction. But it might allow you to express emotions more powerfully than you can through prose.
Thanks, Joseph. For now, writing is kind of my therapy. I don't know another way to deal with this. I tend to slip into denial if I don't make it real enough that I have to confront it, so publishing what I'm wrestling with makes me have to come to terms with it.
Believe me, I do understand. Essentially, your Substack column is, in many ways, like a public journal. I do the same thing privately. It does help a lot in creating better understanding of your own personality and inclination.
But you are enough already. You should read about what the lives of average people are like. What you have - Multiple kids, a 10+ year marriage, publicly-detectable success (whether in the past or not) - these are all traits of someone who is well above average.
Depression feels like the truth because it forces you acknowledge things you used to ignore. But at the same time, depression also lies. It has a bias of its own. Dark statements about yourself make perfect sense when you are in a depressed state and make no sense when you are in a normal state of mind. This proves that depression has no more claim to the truth than any other mental state.
It’s hard to see someone so talented feel so helpless. You are heard. You do matter. I wish I could help. I’m sorry this is haunting you do deeply. You’re almost too self-aware, Steve. Not sure what to do with that. If nothing else, your family needs your mere presence so hang in there.
Like others who have already commented, I wish that I could help. We've never met but I cannot help but regard you as a good man with a big heart.
However one regards the doctrine of Original Sin, it's hard not to see human life as broken. It's difficult to be a human being and there are a lot of good people for whom getting out of bed in the morning is an act of heroism. We all need to give each other a break, and a lot of slack.
After a lifetime of fighting OCD and the anxiety and depression that can go with it, I won't argue with death when it comes. I like existing, I have good family and friendship bonds, as well as work that is meaningful. Nonetheless, at 69, I'm tired, bone tired.
Thanks for your honesty, Steve. It helps us, your readers, to be honest also.
Now make a list of all the things you can do and do well. Your list of stuff you can't do, or have difficulty in was no different from mine, but I don't care much about it anymore (yes, I am older than you, female, and don't have your family responsibilities - which I can tell from your writings that you LOVE your family- ). And for heaven's sake, stop listening to stuff on the radio. If you don't like it, turn the damn thing off.
I think things will change. Soon. I think in the next 6 months your wife will have a few commissions under her belt and be rocking and rolling a little more securely w real estate. Money won't be such a critical issue. All Kids eventually grow up and can go to school. Leaving more uninterrupted focus time. Play groups and preschool can bridge the gap. You love to write. Write a book. How the Catholic Church Imploded. You know the nuance and the details. Or start to learn about a different topic and research a different kind of book. Autistic adults fixate on things. To get a book all the way to publishing almost requires an autistic level of fixation and obsessiveness. Even if you self publish.... Still makes you an author! You're a keen observer of life. Just get it down on paper. Life's currents ebb and then flow and can change wildly over many years. As you have already seen in your past. They'll change many times more again in your future. You'll see. Hold fast.
Praying for you. I can relate to a lot of that stuff, although I hesitate to spill my guts here. If your wife and my wife went somewhere for a drink, I'm sure the conversation would go on all night.
Steve, I am praying for you right now. I have seen much of what you describe in friends and family and I didn't know what it was, which just made it harder for them. May God help you and your family.
Thanks so much, Donna. I had no idea until recently. I'm sort of excavating things that are retroactively making sense of so many things in my life. It helps a little to have a name for the monster under the bed, but he's still a monster.
It would require an in-person conversation to even start to say anything worthwhile, and that’s not in the offing. I’d like to think you’d understand my blah blah…and I’d understand your blah blah… since that’s not going to happen, here goes.
The fantasy of living in the small apartment, leaving your wife and children to “do better without you” is a fantasy many have had. I have indulged this thought too. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to it, as it would’ve made me a worse person than I am even now.
The other thing that frustrates me so is your adoption of the “adult autism” and “ADHD” labels. These can sometimes be helpful as descriptive shorthand but are nowadays very destructive when taken too seriously. I have 2 kids with many of the same characteristics you describe. My spouse and I have them too- shocker! We’ve found that adoption of current therapy-view is no more insightful than the admittedly insufficient view we were raised on. You can be weird, and a critical thinker, and never satisfied in this life. It IS okay. You’re putting a lot of unintended trust into modern therapeutic ideas. It would take even longer than this comment to describe why this is a bad, bad path.
Yeah, I pray for you as other subscribers will. I actually do. You doubt that it’ll help but I still will do it. Whatever the theologians say, only God can heal us. We’re not really going to achieve “theosis” in this life. Neither are the ones who say we can. That’s my non-orthodox view.
I don't know what to say about the terms I have adopted other than that they give a name and an explanation to what I've struggled with my whole life.
When I used to work in PR, I couldn't advance out of the role I was brought in to do because I simply could not pick up the phone and call journalists to pitch them stories. It would make me so anxious I felt sick.
I've always been this way, but it's gotten worse over time. Working for myself, from home, for the past 12 or 13 years, has given me a sense of isolation and comfort that I am loath to let go of. I hate the bullshit of office politics, the polite lies necessary to assure an employer they should give me the job, the meetings that could have been an email, the inability to ever do what I'm actually good at because that's not what the company is looking for, etc.
I know there's got to be a way out, but I've lost the ability to believe in myself. For four years now I've been trying to build something new, and I am just spinning my wheels. I know that while my range of gifts may be narrow, what I'm good at are things I'm very good at. But nobody else seems to value that in a way that I can make a living from.
If I were 27 or even 37 I'd feel more hope. But I'm 47, and I'm now competing against much younger people for entry or mid-level jobs in the absence of a viable business model of my own. They're cheaper, they're easier to train, and they didn't spend the past couple decades writing cancellable stuff on the Internet.
At home, my emotional volatility makes the people I love feel unsafe. My wife cares about me deeply, but does not feel comfortable enough to be "in love" with me like a husband. I can see the stress my issues cause her. I can feel it. Me being here is making everything worse.
But I have nowhere to go. I have nothing going for me. I don't even have a normal, usable car in my name. (The huge family van is in my name, but it's about to get repossessed because we're several months behind on payments, and it's unusable to do anything practical because it's so big, and the gas mileage is so bad.)
I want to be different. I want to heal from the traumas I never addressed, and figure out how to live with the neurotype I have that keeps me from being able to do normal tasks that other folks find relatively effortless. But I'm in a pressure cooker that never lets up. I don't have time to figure things out, get my attachment disorders sorted, overcome my codependence, etc.
Everything has to happen now, now, now!
Being smart and self-aware can be its own kind of curse. You know you're fucking up and falling apart, but you can't seem to do anything to get it under control.
It's like everything in your life has been thrown in a pressure cooker and it's about to explode and you are so overwhelmed that you don't know where to start. Are you still seeing a therapist? Someone who understands and has dealt with complex situations like yours? I have to agree with another poster in regards to your work situation I feel that dealing with this will calm things down and provide purpose and for you to feel less helpless and obtain a clearer mind. If you have contacts that can get your foot in the door it will make a huge difference and you will then be able to piece by piece work on yourself and your relationships/ life
No therapist, no job prospects, no idea how I'm going to pay the rent in two weeks and I'm panicking. So much pressure cooker that my attempts to just do the stuff I'm good at feel like swimming with lead weights.
My domestic situation is untenable. It constantly drags me down. I'm weeks away from my 22nd wedding anniversary and I don't see any point in celebrating, because it's basically over, barring some miracle.
I've been dancing around this atomic bomb in the center of my life for a long time, because nothing is official yet. But I can't unbreak what is broken, and seem too structurally-limited to ever win her back. My dysfunctions have grown to the point where I am not able to provide any kind of stability or emotional security. I am falling apart in real time, and she is having to hold it together on my behalf. She has empathy and compassion, but cannot love me like a spouse. I'm lonely and hurting and lost. My entire world has come apart in the past five years and I can't seem to find my way out of the dark.
I can feel your pain in this comment and it truly breaks my heart to see another human being under so much stress and pain. I'm not sure if the US has free counseling like Australia does for low income earners but if there is any around you should look at reaching out even just to talk.
Hi Steve, I don't have much to add to the excellent comments below (I especially agree with what "Shoe" said. Buying into much of what current "experts" say can be seriously debilitating, I think).
As a more positive recommendation, have you ever thought about writing a book on the Catholic Church from both an historical and personal perspective? Not just Substack posts, but a book. So much of what you say would resonate with many, many people. And importantly, I'm almost sure it would sell. It might sell big. You should really think about it - your posts on that subject are just superb, and speak for so many.
Whether you do or don't, hang in there, and may better times come soon!
It's ... a bad spot. And when you're in a bad spot it's impossible to see things clearly. It just is. And it's also hard to take advice when you're in that spot, and it's hard to find the right advice to give as well, because the spot is unique to each person who is in it. I have been there, others have as well who are reading I am sure.
Steve, it gets better at some stage. It may not seem like it, and it may take a lot longer than you'd like, and it may involve more setbacks than you'd care for it to have, but it does get better. Sometimes the really courageous thing is just hanging on until the storm dies down, you know?
I'll pray for you, Steve. If you have a friend you can go to, in real life, highly recommend doing that, even for a bit -- it can help in ways that are hard to predict.
Steve, you are loved. And you are valued. I know that many of us, as internet friends or supporters, read this and wish we could overcome the tyranny of distance and be there for you in the conventional way. But you are in our hearts.
And, regarding what Nancy said and you replied, your list doesn't look short to me, it looks substantial. I realise many claim AI will take over some of that, but I am increasingly sceptical of that, and for two reasons. One, I am seeing a lot of YouTube material lately that is clearly or likely AI produced and it's generally obvuous, annoying and unimpressive. Two, I have used both free and commercial AIs for research and to help compose resources. They make a lot of surprisingly dumb mistakes. I think that some of the fear of how good they are is from people who don't check their work in any detail at all. More importantly, given their power and speed in other ways, the mistakes they make, which a person of average intelligence would easily avoid, reveal there is no real understanding going on.
Anyway, back to the.point. Please know that you matter to us and to many others. You matter, full stop.
Pax et bonum.
So much in this post I can say, “Dang Steve, you too?” - especially the parts of executive function and the meaninglessness of (most) work. As I’ve commented before, I think this is compounded because we both saw our former vocations as having a divine mission, and it’s very hard to find purpose in most work today, and the most work that does have purpose pays poorly.
Like you, I tried the gig work scene on and off, and while there was the generous client or bonus scheme here or there that momentarily made it worthwhile, most of the time I was grinding for less than $12 an hour after backing out expenses. And that was only when I was rolling.
As men, it’s important that we find self worth as providers for our families. It’s hard to feel that self worth when you aren’t making bank each day. While finding a better job isn’t going to solve all your problems, perhaps it would at least begin to solve this one.
Clearly, you are a talented writer, and based on the video you posted last Thanksgiving, you’ve got marketing chops as well. Even a copywriter or video editor at an agency or freelance is going to beat Door Dash.
I might have some connections if you’d be willing to consider. You’ve got my email.
Wishing you the best, Steve.
Thanks. I'll look for your email and hit you up.
You bet. The last email I sent to you was on the 26th of May from a Protonmail address. Check your spam if it’s not in your inbox. If you still can’t find it, I’ll send again from a different address.
Life can be so complicated. Please know that I am praying for you and your family. There is nothing I can say to make this better, but just know that I care and hopefully that helps. You are valuable. You matter. Hang in there and be receptive to the mystery and wonder of this life.
Thank you, Marian.
Steve, as a former Catholic myself, I recognize the pervasiveness of shame in your life. The Catholic Church does an excellent job of making people ashamed of who they are. This has nothing to do with sin, which is a legitimate phenomenon, and I am *not* calling you a sinner. This has to do with the church treating people as medieval serfs and putting them on guilt trips just so that the clerical class can control and manipulate them.
It also has nothing to do with God.
I have been through what I think is more than my share of emotional pain in my life. It would take too long to recount it in a response to a Substack post. What has helped me hold on, though, are the ideas that God does not allow a bruised read to be broken nor the smoldering wick to be snuffed out. That’s not just wishful thinking on my part. That’s a direct quote from scripture. You can Google those phrases to find out where those statements came from, and read the surrounding context.
You need to be among people who love you where you are, respect you for who you are and can show you the truest measure of Jesus‘s love, grace, and mercy. I realize you have a lot of anger, resentment, and questions concerning God. I also realize that the Pharisees within traditionalist Catholicism lack love, grace and mercy.
One of the biggest blessings in my life happened while I was recovering from the surgical effects of an appendectomy three years ago. I met two people who were Pentecostal pastors. They showed me tremendous love, empathy, and compassion. They have become my closest friends. I have learned a great deal from them, and they say that I have been a blessing in their lives.
I am praying that God reveals himself to you in the unique, powerful, and tender way, so that you can see him for who he is, and not through the lens of religious exploitation and abuse.
One more thing: don’t stop writing. And don’t stop writing about yourself. You have the courage to talk about things most people would rather bury deep inside them. The fact that you write about them openly and honestly makes the rest of us know that we’re not alone.
You might even want to try writing poetry. I know that it’s far different from writing non-fiction. But it might allow you to express emotions more powerfully than you can through prose.
Thanks, Joseph. For now, writing is kind of my therapy. I don't know another way to deal with this. I tend to slip into denial if I don't make it real enough that I have to confront it, so publishing what I'm wrestling with makes me have to come to terms with it.
Believe me, I do understand. Essentially, your Substack column is, in many ways, like a public journal. I do the same thing privately. It does help a lot in creating better understanding of your own personality and inclination.
But you are enough already. You should read about what the lives of average people are like. What you have - Multiple kids, a 10+ year marriage, publicly-detectable success (whether in the past or not) - these are all traits of someone who is well above average.
Depression feels like the truth because it forces you acknowledge things you used to ignore. But at the same time, depression also lies. It has a bias of its own. Dark statements about yourself make perfect sense when you are in a depressed state and make no sense when you are in a normal state of mind. This proves that depression has no more claim to the truth than any other mental state.
Steve, read that first sentence several times. Let that sink in.
I can read it a thousand times and it won't feel true.
It’s hard to see someone so talented feel so helpless. You are heard. You do matter. I wish I could help. I’m sorry this is haunting you do deeply. You’re almost too self-aware, Steve. Not sure what to do with that. If nothing else, your family needs your mere presence so hang in there.
Thank, Lana. I also feel like I should be able to figure this out. But so far, not much luck.
Like others who have already commented, I wish that I could help. We've never met but I cannot help but regard you as a good man with a big heart.
However one regards the doctrine of Original Sin, it's hard not to see human life as broken. It's difficult to be a human being and there are a lot of good people for whom getting out of bed in the morning is an act of heroism. We all need to give each other a break, and a lot of slack.
After a lifetime of fighting OCD and the anxiety and depression that can go with it, I won't argue with death when it comes. I like existing, I have good family and friendship bonds, as well as work that is meaningful. Nonetheless, at 69, I'm tired, bone tired.
Thanks for your honesty, Steve. It helps us, your readers, to be honest also.
Now make a list of all the things you can do and do well. Your list of stuff you can't do, or have difficulty in was no different from mine, but I don't care much about it anymore (yes, I am older than you, female, and don't have your family responsibilities - which I can tell from your writings that you LOVE your family- ). And for heaven's sake, stop listening to stuff on the radio. If you don't like it, turn the damn thing off.
The list is short enough that it drives me crazy that I can't find work doing any of it.
My gifts lie in the creative arts: writing, design, video and audio editing/production, and general social commentary and analysis. That's about it.
As for the radio: I only listen to it when I need some background noise with a beat to keep moving. Otherwise, it's books, podcasts, or silence.
Please give yourself some grace. You deserve it. I am sorry things are so hard right now.
I wish I could. There’s so much pressure to simply fix everything right now or face the consequences. I could use quite a lot of grace.
I hope you and your family get some soon
I want to take you and your whole family out for a big barbecue dinner in NC.
I think things will change. Soon. I think in the next 6 months your wife will have a few commissions under her belt and be rocking and rolling a little more securely w real estate. Money won't be such a critical issue. All Kids eventually grow up and can go to school. Leaving more uninterrupted focus time. Play groups and preschool can bridge the gap. You love to write. Write a book. How the Catholic Church Imploded. You know the nuance and the details. Or start to learn about a different topic and research a different kind of book. Autistic adults fixate on things. To get a book all the way to publishing almost requires an autistic level of fixation and obsessiveness. Even if you self publish.... Still makes you an author! You're a keen observer of life. Just get it down on paper. Life's currents ebb and then flow and can change wildly over many years. As you have already seen in your past. They'll change many times more again in your future. You'll see. Hold fast.
Praying for you. I can relate to a lot of that stuff, although I hesitate to spill my guts here. If your wife and my wife went somewhere for a drink, I'm sure the conversation would go on all night.
Steve, I am praying for you right now. I have seen much of what you describe in friends and family and I didn't know what it was, which just made it harder for them. May God help you and your family.
Thanks so much, Donna. I had no idea until recently. I'm sort of excavating things that are retroactively making sense of so many things in my life. It helps a little to have a name for the monster under the bed, but he's still a monster.
It would require an in-person conversation to even start to say anything worthwhile, and that’s not in the offing. I’d like to think you’d understand my blah blah…and I’d understand your blah blah… since that’s not going to happen, here goes.
The fantasy of living in the small apartment, leaving your wife and children to “do better without you” is a fantasy many have had. I have indulged this thought too. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to it, as it would’ve made me a worse person than I am even now.
The other thing that frustrates me so is your adoption of the “adult autism” and “ADHD” labels. These can sometimes be helpful as descriptive shorthand but are nowadays very destructive when taken too seriously. I have 2 kids with many of the same characteristics you describe. My spouse and I have them too- shocker! We’ve found that adoption of current therapy-view is no more insightful than the admittedly insufficient view we were raised on. You can be weird, and a critical thinker, and never satisfied in this life. It IS okay. You’re putting a lot of unintended trust into modern therapeutic ideas. It would take even longer than this comment to describe why this is a bad, bad path.
Yeah, I pray for you as other subscribers will. I actually do. You doubt that it’ll help but I still will do it. Whatever the theologians say, only God can heal us. We’re not really going to achieve “theosis” in this life. Neither are the ones who say we can. That’s my non-orthodox view.
Too long, I know.
I don't know what to say about the terms I have adopted other than that they give a name and an explanation to what I've struggled with my whole life.
When I used to work in PR, I couldn't advance out of the role I was brought in to do because I simply could not pick up the phone and call journalists to pitch them stories. It would make me so anxious I felt sick.
I've always been this way, but it's gotten worse over time. Working for myself, from home, for the past 12 or 13 years, has given me a sense of isolation and comfort that I am loath to let go of. I hate the bullshit of office politics, the polite lies necessary to assure an employer they should give me the job, the meetings that could have been an email, the inability to ever do what I'm actually good at because that's not what the company is looking for, etc.
I know there's got to be a way out, but I've lost the ability to believe in myself. For four years now I've been trying to build something new, and I am just spinning my wheels. I know that while my range of gifts may be narrow, what I'm good at are things I'm very good at. But nobody else seems to value that in a way that I can make a living from.
If I were 27 or even 37 I'd feel more hope. But I'm 47, and I'm now competing against much younger people for entry or mid-level jobs in the absence of a viable business model of my own. They're cheaper, they're easier to train, and they didn't spend the past couple decades writing cancellable stuff on the Internet.
At home, my emotional volatility makes the people I love feel unsafe. My wife cares about me deeply, but does not feel comfortable enough to be "in love" with me like a husband. I can see the stress my issues cause her. I can feel it. Me being here is making everything worse.
But I have nowhere to go. I have nothing going for me. I don't even have a normal, usable car in my name. (The huge family van is in my name, but it's about to get repossessed because we're several months behind on payments, and it's unusable to do anything practical because it's so big, and the gas mileage is so bad.)
I want to be different. I want to heal from the traumas I never addressed, and figure out how to live with the neurotype I have that keeps me from being able to do normal tasks that other folks find relatively effortless. But I'm in a pressure cooker that never lets up. I don't have time to figure things out, get my attachment disorders sorted, overcome my codependence, etc.
Everything has to happen now, now, now!
Being smart and self-aware can be its own kind of curse. You know you're fucking up and falling apart, but you can't seem to do anything to get it under control.
It's like everything in your life has been thrown in a pressure cooker and it's about to explode and you are so overwhelmed that you don't know where to start. Are you still seeing a therapist? Someone who understands and has dealt with complex situations like yours? I have to agree with another poster in regards to your work situation I feel that dealing with this will calm things down and provide purpose and for you to feel less helpless and obtain a clearer mind. If you have contacts that can get your foot in the door it will make a huge difference and you will then be able to piece by piece work on yourself and your relationships/ life
No therapist, no job prospects, no idea how I'm going to pay the rent in two weeks and I'm panicking. So much pressure cooker that my attempts to just do the stuff I'm good at feel like swimming with lead weights.
My domestic situation is untenable. It constantly drags me down. I'm weeks away from my 22nd wedding anniversary and I don't see any point in celebrating, because it's basically over, barring some miracle.
I've been dancing around this atomic bomb in the center of my life for a long time, because nothing is official yet. But I can't unbreak what is broken, and seem too structurally-limited to ever win her back. My dysfunctions have grown to the point where I am not able to provide any kind of stability or emotional security. I am falling apart in real time, and she is having to hold it together on my behalf. She has empathy and compassion, but cannot love me like a spouse. I'm lonely and hurting and lost. My entire world has come apart in the past five years and I can't seem to find my way out of the dark.
That is very hard. Sending grace to you both.
Hi Steve
I can feel your pain in this comment and it truly breaks my heart to see another human being under so much stress and pain. I'm not sure if the US has free counseling like Australia does for low income earners but if there is any around you should look at reaching out even just to talk.
Tears.
I’m not a writer but I’ll try to add something later.
Hi Steve, I don't have much to add to the excellent comments below (I especially agree with what "Shoe" said. Buying into much of what current "experts" say can be seriously debilitating, I think).
As a more positive recommendation, have you ever thought about writing a book on the Catholic Church from both an historical and personal perspective? Not just Substack posts, but a book. So much of what you say would resonate with many, many people. And importantly, I'm almost sure it would sell. It might sell big. You should really think about it - your posts on that subject are just superb, and speak for so many.
Whether you do or don't, hang in there, and may better times come soon!