feeling empty

[Tubbs]

i'm just feeling totally empty. no matter what i do, what i accomplish i just feel empty. I've had money cars a huge social circle a loving girlfriend, ive had all of those things people say would make life better, but it never did. i was a very successful dealer for a few years. My ex and i were the go to people, if it got you high i probably had it, and i got great deals, and didn't return those deals to the clientele. i made more money dealing than alot of people ever dream of, whatever i wanted i had. i never felt satisfied, none of it meant anything to me, i wasn't happy. I started doing coke to try and feel something, it worked for a while, when it stopped i started shooting. i actually got clean after my ex and i split up. i spent a year totally numb, nothing mattered, all i wanted was to feel something, i thought about suicide alot, sat with a gun in my mouth a few nights.

fast forward to now, 2 years after i fell back into drugs, im clean again, and totally empty again. anyone else feel like this?

 

[Mafioso]

I can definitely relate, we have pretty similar backgrounds/occupations. I thought I had a lot of friends while I was dealing, my phone was ringing all day and I was seeing around a dozen people every day. I knew some of them were just acquaintances but a handful of them I would hang out with, go to parties, and do other things with. Since I quit and got clean I only still talk to about 5 of them.

There was never enough for me either, as long as I saw a way that I could move more, profit more, or saw others bigger than me I wasn't content.

I'm at about 6 months now, and looking back I realize that I wasn't truly passionate about anything I was doing. A lot of my motivations were rooted in jealousy and insecurity. I felt like because many of my old classmates were establishing careers and families that I had to at least make more money than them in order not to be irrelevant. I had basically stopped playing music, which has been my dream and main passion since I was 15, in order to focus more on selling. I felt like I had nothing in common if they weren't actively involved in the game and wasn't really interested in spending time with someone who wasn't on the same path as I was. I looked at people who worked retail type jobs as chumps. If they weren't earning they were a waste of time. My overall mindset was very negative.

I've been trying to focus on happiness and contentment rather than success and money. At this point in time, I'd rather fail at trying to achieve my dreams rather than succeed at something I don't really care about. I'm trying to deepen my personality by developing a stronger sense of humor, becoming better at conversation and more involved in my true passions, like music. I see more reward in struggling to help others rather than stepping on others to succeed, and that is a major shift in world view for me.

It's cliché, but it really is the simple things that matter. I wouldn't recommend it, but a good way to tell who is your real friend is whether or not they come visit you in jail and/or rehab. Finding people that want to be around you whether you are failing or succeeding is hard but is the thing that brings me the most joy I realize.

What types of things do you enjoy doing? What would be your dream job if they all paid the same? How long have you been clean this time?

I think some of the feelings are caused from all the drugs, but social and environmental factors also play a big role.

 

[Tubbs]

i was about the opposite. none of the people i called friends when i was dealing were users. hell none of them even knew i was dealing, my ex was getting her RN and her dad was loaded so they just thought daddy took care of her and her old man. i haven't been a full on dealer since 2014, i'm 3 months clean off meth now was starting to deal again, saw where my life was going and made myself quit.

Really i like doing anything i can lose myself in doing, i enjoy mindless work. ideal job would probably be warehouse work, thats what i had gotten into in the short period i was clean. love working on cars too but that leads to me getting high

 

[herbavore]

Maybe you are suffering from what so many other people do in this culture: acute existential pain. I'm not trying to be funny, I think it is real. The lives prescribed for all of us usually do not make but a fraction of us happy or fulfilled. And it can be a lonely feeling when you realize that you have to chart your own individual course. There are no road-maps and half the time you will have people telling you to grow up and get down to the business of living the empty adult life that was set out for you. My son (almost 30) comes home and works until he has enough money to go back and volunteer. It engages him on a profound level so he doesn't mind doing manual labor or waiting tables or whatever he can do to raise the funds he needs to go back. You cannot believe how many in my extended family say, "When is he going to grow up and settle down?" Meanwhile, in the next breath, they complain bitterly about their own lives.

But that really is the key. You have to ask yourself, "what means something to me?" What do you care about? If you cannot think of anything that you care about then that probably means you have lost the relationship to yourself that you so naturally had as a child. Now you have to heal that depression, and it can be hard to do when you are in the thick of it, but I have found the best thing is to take small positive steps out of your old ways of thinking. Most of us hold ourselves so tightly in check because of the way we think we have to appear to others. Anything that you can do to get yourself out of your head and engaged in something--it could be a long walk, taking up a creative pursuit, pursuing interests that you used to have that may have been shoved away as non-productive. Personally I like mindless work, too, as long as I have outside stuff going on that I feel challenged by. When it is just mindless work and coming home to my own head, that is a recipe for depression for me.

 

[Tubbs]

thank you herbavore. you really do give amazing advice. i honestly think you may be right. some days things don't seem quite so bad others i have time to sit down and get lost in my own head, which is a very bad thing.

 

[Xorkoth]

love working on cars too but that leads to me getting high

Just out of curiosity, why does working on cars lead you to getting high? Seems like if you love it, that could be a great choice of something to focus on.

Personally I realized after I got off opiates a few years ago that the thing I was missing, the thing I loved the most as a kid, was music. So now I focus all my extra time outside of work focusing on music, I'm in a band and I play 3 or 4 hours a day most days, write music, play shows, etc. It fills me up in this way that nothing else does, I wake up every day excited about it. I can't even tell you how much it helped. I had to overcome some self-defeating stuff to get here, but I'll never go back.

Maybe you are suffering from what so many other people do in this culture: acute existential pain. I'm not trying to be funny, I think it is real. The lives prescribed for all of us usually do not make but a fraction of us happy or fulfilled. And it can be a lonely feeling when you realize that you have to chart your own individual course. There are no road-maps and half the time you will have people telling you to grow up and get down to the business of living the empty adult life that was set out for you. My son (almost 30) comes home and works until he has enough money to go back and volunteer. It engages him on a profound level so he doesn't mind doing manual labor or waiting tables or whatever he can do to raise the funds he needs to go back. You cannot believe how many in my extended family say, "When is he going to grow up and settle down?" Meanwhile, in the next breath, they complain bitterly about their own lives.

But that really is the key. You have to ask yourself, "what means something to me?" What do you care about? If you cannot think of anything that you care about then that probably means you have lost the relationship to yourself that you so naturally had as a child. Now you have to heal that depression, and it can be hard to do when you are in the thick of it, but I have found the best thing is to take small positive steps out of your old ways of thinking. Most of us hold ourselves so tightly in check because of the way we think we have to appear to others. Anything that you can do to get yourself out of your head and engaged in something--it could be a long walk, taking up a creative pursuit, pursuing interests that you used to have that may have been shoved away as non-productive. Personally I like mindless work, too, as long as I have outside stuff going on that I feel challenged by. When it is just mindless work and coming home to my own head, that is a recipe for depression for me.

Such a great post, some really good advice in here. Yeah, my girlfriend struggles with feeling empty and worthless. It's largely due to her family too. She works random low-wage jobs and then goes to California for 2 months a year to trim buds and make half of her money for the year or so. She really enjoys that part, and not so much the rest of the year's work but she has things that make her happy, like gardening, hiking/camping, and me and her friends. Yet her family is always hounding her about "growing up and settling down". It affects her so much, it really pisses me off because they're just concerned about her, they mean well, but they can't seem to see how much it's hurting her. And it's been happening all along so it's pathological now. Her dad had this really specific idea for what would "be good for her", and he's pretty controlling. He told her he wouldn't pay for college unless she went into art history and got an art history degree. She hates art history, but she did it, and now she has a useless degree. College was so painful and stressful for her because of this that she refuses to ever go back. She really wanted to study biology and go into wildlife conservation. She's really passionate about that, but she will not allow herself to believe that it's something she could do, she feels like it's too late for her (even though she's only 30). It's really painful to see. Meanwhile her dad keeps pressuring her and acting like she's just lazy or something. And the most ironic/aggravating thing is that he hates his "standard" work life too. It's like people just think that's how life is, like "welp, you're an adult now, it's time for life to suck just like it does for the rest of us". But that's insanity, life doesn't have to suck. You just have to figure out how to emerge out from underneath all the societal expectations and find what you love. If you are doing what you love, even if you never "make it big", you'll be happier than most of the people that "make it big" because doing what you do is its own reward.

Your son is lucky his mom is such a badass, herby.

 

[Tubbs]

being around that kind of stuff is a trigger for quite a few of my painful memories. i love the work, but i hate the memories. and i haven't been able to separate the memories from the work. that was one of my reasons for getting high was to try and run from those memories.

 

[Xorkoth]

Is there anything else you love doing? That's a bummer that the work you love is painful for you... I hope you can get past that. Are you in therapy, or have you done therapy before? It can help...

 

[Tubbs]

i love being outside. thats really my only solace, i love hiking, the quiet serenity of being alone in the woods is the only thing that really brings my mind any peace anymore. I am actually looking into therapy, trying to ease my mind into the thought. A bad childhood has left me with some major trust issues, so its kind of hard for me to trust someone with my innermost thoughts. i'm trying to ease myself into the mindset that it will help me, even if just to get some of those old memories that i've tried to block out off my chest.

 

[Mafioso]

i was about the opposite. none of the people i called friends when i was dealing were users. hell none of them even knew i was dealing, my ex was getting her RN and her dad was loaded so they just thought daddy took care of her and her old man. i haven't been a full on dealer since 2014, i'm 3 months clean off meth now was starting to deal again, saw where my life was going and made myself quit.

Really i like doing anything i can lose myself in doing, i enjoy mindless work. ideal job would probably be warehouse work, thats what i had gotten into in the short period i was clean. love working on cars too but that leads to me getting high

I started off that way but as I got further involved it became impossible to hide and found it more beneficial to network and associate with others on the same path. Having a secret life can be very isolating. It makes it hard to truly connect with others when there are large parts of your life you are keeping to yourself.

Do you enjoy the physical aspect of mindless work or is it more that you find completing tasks to be rewarding? or is it more just staying busy?

That's unfortunate that one of your passions triggers addictive behavior or thought. Hopefully you can work through that, my passions are what have kept me out of trouble for the most part. Maybe try to find work that allows you to be outside or in nature. Every time I go hiking in a national park I'm always amazed by the trails that have been built. Always thought it would be cool to build trails and bridges in a national park, would imagine something like that would be therapeutic.

Trust issues are very common among people with substance use disorders, I think holding emotions in and hiding emotions is something that drives us back to drug use. If it helps at all, therapist and others in similar professions are often bound by confidentiality laws so disclosing things you talk about in a session is illegal and unethical for the most part. If information is shared, identifying information must be omitted so people can't tell that it is you. I had a fairly traumatic childhood myself that I don't like talking about in detail. Opening up about my experience with a counselor has really helped me to understand my own emotions and has given me perspective. I don't feel as much anger about things now, instead I try to understand why things happened and how troubled others must have been. Overall, I feel more in control and less like a victim of circumstance.

 

[Tubbs]

i think alot of what helped me stay under the radar and be able to hide that other side so well was i never really acted like an addict. i've always been good with words and im also pretty naturally athletic, so when i started losing weight because all i was doing was iv coke, people just saw how active i was, and figured i was overdoing the workouts.

And the thing with the mindless work is partly physical, but also like you said just being busy. i am looking into therapy it's just going to take a while to convince myself that i can trust anyone

 

[Mafioso]

Yeah a lot of my family had a hard time believing that I did anything besides smoking weed. Addicts are some of the best liars ime.

Hopefully you can find a therapist that meshes well with your personality. Having a lot of past experiences in common really helped me to be able to trust and appreciate my counselors perspective. Had he been some straight laced square bear I don't think his words would have had as much impact. My psychotherapist had never gone through shit and was so out of touch with my experiences it was really difficult to even have a conversation. She would talk bad about drug addicts and dealers, which is just ironic considering she was the director of an inpatient facility and without people like us, she would be out of a job...

Don't be too discouraged if you run into a few bad apples or counselors/therapists you struggle to relate to. A girl who was at the same rehab as I was told me some good advice when I was venting to her about the therapist one night, basically it was to try to take the positive out of the message, regardless of who delivered it and how it was delivered. I wish I could remember the words she used, but basically said we are here for ourselves, to improve our own life, focus more on yourself rather than others.

Have you ever worked construction? It can be a pretty rough field at times, and really depends on the company you work for, but the thing I enjoyed about it was the physical challenge and being outside.

 

[Tubbs]

i've never done any union work, but i have done some roofing in the past. would actually like to find somewhere hiring to do roofing again. right now im trying to focus on putting money back so i can establish myself somewhere away from where i'm currently staying, i grew up around here and i feel that to get better i'm going to have to get away from here. also thank you your advice really does help, and it gives me comfort to be able to relate to someone

 

[Xorkoth]

Moving away to a place I loved from where I grew up, and building a life here, has been a great thing for my overall level of happiness and satisfaction with life. Some people can stay where they came from their whole lives, but some people, I think, really need to get away and do their own thing, and meet people as the now-you instead of everyone always having known you. It helped me to find out a lot about who I am.

 

[Tubbs]

That's exactly my thought. i'm nowhere near the person i was 5 years ago, hell even last year tbh. i keep having these dreams where i'm walking down a street, its night and the lights and signs are shining bright. this rural living is too slow paced for me anymore. i lived on the streets of st. louis for a year in my teens and honestly even though i was in the depths of addiction and struggling to not be eaten alive by the city i did have some semblance of mental peace. i feel like the city is where i'm meant to be, but it cant be st. louis, i've got too many old contacts running around

 

[Mafioso]

Yeah I'm actually currently saving up so I can move out of my hometown as well and into a bigger city. I think it could be beneficial to be in a new area for the sake of getting a fresh start. I want to be in a fresh area where I'm not reminded of my mistakes. I get surges of adrenaline when going down certain streets and past certain exits on the freeway. Takes me back to when I was carrying loads. It's not so much a matter of wanting to escape temptation, more so that I want to have a fresh start. Drugs are everywhere and problems will follow me wherever I go, I know this. I don't think I'm trying to escape my problems, I'm looking for new opportunity and new faces.

Have you put any applications out? I used to get really anxious applying for jobs because I knew I couldn't pass a drug test. A lot of things just seem so much simpler now that I'm clean.

 

[Xorkoth]

Yeah in my case I moved to a smaller, but much cooler, town. Personally I hate big cities, they make me anxious (I grew up in the suburbs of one of the biggest). But they're exactly what some people want. I moved to a small but growing city that is full of artists and musicians and has an awesome culture, and is surrounded by incredible nature everywhere, most beautiful place I've ever been I think. Those are the things that are important for me, but whatever you're drawn to, go with that. The most beneficial parts for me were getting out of the concrete jungle, because I've never felt right so removed from nature, and making new friends and building a life for myself that is totally removed from my family and people I've known since childhood. I got to define myself in a way that was entirely of my own choosing and over time I was able to shed a lot of my insecurities because I didn't have people and places always reminding me of who I was when I was younger. My quality of life is so much higher than it was, whenever I go back to my family to visit, I realize how much better I feel where I live than I did when I lived there. It's kind of overwhelming to uproot at first, I regretted it for a little while but before long I was really thankful that I did it.

 

[Tubbs]

yeah i grew up in a town of 900 people , really the only upside to it was we had alot of land behind our house. so im actually looking at smaller cities, preferrably out west, this cold weather almost kills me anymore.

 

[Tubbs]

goddamnit i hate pictures, i came across one of the love of my life and myself smiling, looking so damn happy. i keep hoping that this is just all one big nightmare, and that i'm going to wake up and she be there next to me. it almost feels like this is all some huge cruel joke, i was having a decent day for once.

 

[herbavore]

Aww, bp, I'm really sorry. Don't give in to the temptation to see everything as ruin, though. You have been through a lot. You have a lot to heal from. You will find love again when you are ready for what love asks of you. Love asks you to love yourself first--to be comfortable and accepting of yourself, to be emotionally self sufficient to the point that you can give freely and without fear. You are working on bettering your life through bettering your relationship to yourself. You've talked about your childhood and trust issues. These are so difficult to sort out and even see, let alone heal. Be patient with yourself and learn from the past. I mean it when I say I know you will find love again. Why am I so sure? Because you are obviously a loving and kind person. You just need some time to focus on you and what painful parts of your past need attending to.