I'm sorry about your sister. What does she have? How does she deal with the situation?
Is she religious?
You're right I don't know your situation. I just assumed that it's better than mine. If your situation is also that depressing then how come you're not crushed and hopeless? What if your perception isn't normal? How do you know what the normal way of dealing with such things is?
But I still think that my situation is probably a lot worse than the situation of a regular person in my age. When I look at the people I study with then most of them seem to be happy and unaffected. I wish I could go back to living such a life. But I have lost it all within just a few years. I lost my health and also my hopes and also feel bad for all my false decisions. I could have been someone if I had studied the right thing and pulled it through but my pessimism and depression sabotaged my success. Maybe without it my whole life could have been different. I was simply always scared of failing and of final exams. How can you have strength to study when you fear failing at the final exams and then everything was forsaken?
Or when you feel like you don't have a future anyway because of being sick then where shall you pull strength to keep functioning? Some people can do this but I can't. I'm cynical, pessimistic and quickly discouraged I have always been this way. I really don't know if I could be any different or if a drug had such a power.
She had a seizure a little over a year ago and her stomach contents ended up in her lungs. No one found her until the next morning, and by then she had suffered irreparable brain damage. She's been in a vegetative state ever since. Her husband is going to remove her feeding tube in the next few weeks, and that will be that. The worst part about it is seeing her like this --- she's incapable of communication, and she doesn't seem to be aware of her surroundings (doesn't follow anyone or anything with her eyes), but it still seems like there's some part of her consciousness that's there, and she seems to be in a lot of pain. Her face is always contorted in this awful expression... It's difficult to describe. In my opinion, her husband has waited too long to make this decision, but at the same time, I don't hold it against him. She's his wife after all...
It's really awful. And yes, depressing.
Sometimes its appropriate to be depressed, and sometimes it's not, and sometimes it's difficult to tell if it is or is not appropriate. I'm not a psychologist, so I don't know what they would say, but I can tell you how I see things / what has worked for me, and you can take it as you will.
The first trick is to know yourself. By this, I mean to know what your tendencies are. It sounds like you have this part covered: you know that you have a tendency towards being cynical, pessimistic, and are quickly discouraged. You mention that you are aware that it has sabotaged your happiness in the past.
The next trick is to use what you know about yourself to make a guess about what is going on in the present. Knowing what your tendencies are is helpful to figure out what you are likely to do in the future / what you are doing in the present. For example, you can use what you know about yourself to help you figure out what is going on with your finals: you know that in the past, your pessimism and fear of failure affected sabotaged your happiness because you were too afraid, and ended up making decisions that you later regretted. You can use this information to come to the decision that you are likely too afraid and pessimistic in the present.
This may sound trivial, but it is very important. This is the step where you are figuring out whether or not your perception of things is accurate, or if it is skewed and causing you trouble. At this point,
you may not know how to fix your perspective, but it is critically important to be able to figure out when your perspective of things is in fact resulting in needless fear and anxiety. Again, it is helpful to know what your tendencies in the past have been to help guide you in figuring out if you are doing the same thing again in the present.
The next step is where my opinion comes in: how to cope with stress. I'm sure everyone has a different way of doing it, but I'll tell you what works for me. There's more than one kind of stress, so there's more than one way to deal with the stress. Here's a few:
For some stressful situations, I remind myself that they will not go on forever. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. When they're done, you never have to deal with them again. When you get worked up about a situation like this, remember that it won't kill you to put up with something unpleasant for a short period of time.
For quite a few stressful situations, I remind myself that it is often an illusion to think that a bad result is permanent. In other words, for the vast majority of events that you experience in life, if you fuck them up, you can still fix them later. Here's an example. Suppose you are in college, studying to be a doctor (premed undergraduate). When I was in college, a few of my friends were premed. For these guys, a lot depends on the MCAT exam. It is a single test that greatly affects their chances of getting into medical school. I kept hearing about "double digits" --- as long as you got a score of 10 or greater, you're fine. Well one of my friends did significantly worse than double digits. He was crushed. I remember him saying "What the hell am I going to do now?" He had a bit of a drug problem before doing crappy on the MCAT, and his drug problem only got worse after that. I don't know what became of him; we eventually lost contact.
A few years later, I ran into an old friend from highschool, and she was studying to become a doctor as well. She told me that she didn't get into any of the medical schools she applied to. I reluctantly asked her "what are you going to do?" She told me that she was going to wait another year and reapply. Apparently, there are many things that can make it possible to get acceptance on the second try, including retaking the MCAT or a enrolling in a poost-baccalaureate program (see
Reapplying to Medical School - Health Professions and Prelaw Center - Indiana University - University Division and
Reapply to Medical School - A Second Chance for example). As a last resort, she told me she'd go to some crappy off-shore medical school, but it was still good enough to practice medicine in the US even if it wasn't perfect.
I remember thinking back to my old friend in college. It was a stark contrast between his attitude and this girls attitude. This is a good illustration of "all or nothing" thinking. If you tend towards perfectionism, you can place undue stress on yourself, believing that there's only one good outcome (perfection), when in fact there are lots of sub-optimal outcomes that you can still work with.
I use the example of the MCAT to show that even extreme situations often have a less-than-perfect solution,
but far more often, situations are even more forgiving, and you can often fix a bad outcome by just trying again. This isn't bullshit. People fuck up all the time. You just pick yourself up, and try again, and move on.
None of the above really applies to situations like having parents in poor health. In these kinds of situations, the truth is you can dwell on death regardless of how close death is, because the truth is, death is guaranteed. Death will come eventually. And even if the person you're worrying about isn't really that close to death, they're still going to die. So when do you start worrying? When do you get depressed? Some people say only when someone is terminally ill. Other people say when someone is old. Others still say you should worry about death all the time because you never truly know when it will be the last time that you will talk to a loved one, so you should treat every moment like its your last. Who is right? Can you say so with certainty?
The truth is it is arbitrary. People will die, so you can, if you want, decide that you're going to worry about it all the time. How can anyone tell you that you are wrong to do so? Certainly, I cannot. However, I can say that it's not going to make death not happen. In my mind, the very purpose of worrying is to figure out what you can do to avoid a bad situation. If I worry about getting mugged, I think about what I can do to avoid it, or how I can defend myself it is unavoidable. If I worry about someone I love dying, then I think about what I can do to make sure that they are well cared for so that their health doesn't fail. I'm confident that I'm a smart guy, so I am likely to believe that I can do
something to tilt the statistics in my favor, and often times I'm right. Once I've done this, I've fulfilled the purpose of worrying. After that, worrying performs absolutely no function, and there is nothing to gain from it.
For this reason, I think that worrying is useful until you've exhausted your options. Then its just plain stupid.
Ask yourself if there's anything more that you can do to help your parents' health situation. Once you've done what you need to do, then stop worrying until the situation changes. They're still going to die. But you don't
need to worry until they get sick, or something changes.
Its this kind of purpose-oriented thinking that will help you decide when its appropriate (i.e. useful) to worry, and when its not doing you any good.
Then there's the kind of stress that comes from bad situations that just don't have any good solution at all. Having a disease is one of these situations. Getting in an accident is one of these situations. Some people try to put their faith in God and say that there's a master plan. That does not work for me. Some people say that they've become a better person as a result of such-and-such happening. That does not work for me either. I simply think of how something shitty can happen for seemingly no reason, and your life is just not made better by it. Again, for some the above two strategies are good, but not so much for me.
I suppose you could say that I'm more interested in pragmatism. Something shitty can happen. It's just statistics. But then what? What are my choices? Do I just throw in the towel? Do I spend the rest of my life licking my wounds? Crying about how terrible this thing that has happened to me is? Sure, why not? If it does me some good, I'll do it. In practice, sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself only does good in the short term --- it strangely makes you feel a bit better. I think it is something about the catharsis of getting all that emotion up to the surface. I think its the reason why people cry at all. But then what? Then it stops feeling good, and it just starts to drag you down. How does it benefit me in the long term to sit around and cry about this shitty thing that happened to me? It does not. On the contrary, I'm sitting around feeling sorry for myself, feeling like shit all the time. Does it fix my shitty situation? No.
Now what? I get tired of feeling like shit all the time, and I'm tired thinking about this shitty thing that's happened to me, and I can't see it ever getting any better. Time to kill myself?
That's just fucking retarded.
You can spend time licking your wounds feeling sorry for yourself, or you can spend time doing the things you like to do. The choice is yours. Often times, the shitty things that happen to you don't prevent you from doing the things that you enjoy doing. Sometimes, a shitty thing will happen that will prevent you from doing something you love, but chances are there are still other things that you enjoy that you can still do. Often times, there are still dreams and aspirations that are within your reach, and you can still work towards them. As trite as it sounds, it is still true: you can choose what you want to focus on, and your happiness will follow accordingly. You don't have to believe me that you can actually change the way you feel about your life, but you can't deny that you do in fact still have the power to do the things you still like to do. It may not be perfect (e.g. you'll still see floaters when you're doing what you like to do), but you can still do these things.
That is my approach to these kinds of setbacks. I mentioned to you that a few years ago, I got diagnosed with a genetic disorder. Yeah, it was shitty to find out about it. But after it stopped being "fun" to feel sorry for myself, I just went back to normal life, doing what it is that I like to do, and life moved on. And yes, I enjoy this more than sitting around feeling sorry for myself.
That's my 2 cents. If you don't like my version of coping with stress, there's a hundred other ways to look at things. But once you've figured out that you're not looking at things the right way, you might want to spend some time trying to figure out another way to look at things.
As far as my sister goes, I'm obviously not concerned about being sad in this case. Being sad in this case is not a "problem" that needs fixing. However, if I was still so sad in 5 years that I couldn't return to my normal life, that would obviously be a different story...
] he also started asking me questions about my life and about what I am doing and he looked very concerned. He did not want to dig too deep but from the questions he asked me about what I want to do with my life I knew exactly what he was thinking. He was thinking exactly what I am thinking, too. He also most likely thought that my situation and my outlook do not look good at all. And seeing his concerned face made me feel even more miserable and despaired. That's also why going to a psychologist isn't something I'm keen on. Either he could not help me with his advice or he might reaffirm me in my own opinion that my situation is really totally terrible and then I'd feel even worse and also talking about my problems only drags me down further just like writing about them. Writing this here also drags me down because I try to suppress these thoughts.
