Depression

Banging genitals together is even more of a novelty when married imo.

Marriage has it's ups and downs. Knowing that I have someone who is on my side and will support me and - for whatever mad reason - actually like me sometimes, is nice. But also sometimes I just need five bloody minutes, for the love of god.

All I know is when the wife and son are out the house for more than a few days (visiting my folks normally when I can't get the time off), I start to forget how to do basic things like cook, dress, switch lights on at night etc. I need them and couldn't really function without them. They keep me sane, but also drive me insane.

It's ups and downs. I'm sure I do her head in far more than she does my head in.

Exactly

Aye distance helps. I'm convinced it's the time apart that's just as important as the time together for a marriage to even out!

Do you sometimes lose your sense of identity in your specific case, Dougs?

That's quite interesting, I suppose from my angle I've been doing anything and everything that I want to do for a while now within the confines of my own lesser responsibilities compared to yours. I do sometimes wonder how I'd be if I was going to marry and someone and change all of that as well bring all my bullshit and baggage with me as well, despite my best efforts to work on myself and learn from experiences. I mean truthfully I haven't been the model boyfriend in past relationships but at the same time I haven't been with the best people.

Can't even get in the mood to play ER. Fuck's sake.

I know you're not in good spirits but I hope you get some kind of resolution man. Thinking of you.

My OCD/ADHD is flaring up in weird ways at the moment and my usual coping strategies don't seem to be working much. It's mostly harmless stuff but hoping it doesn't escalate.

Current behavior includes:

If I start watching part x of a film series or get some wind of it in some way, I have to watch all of the series. And "watch" is a fuzzy term, I don't pay attention and some of the time I'm not even in the room, it just has to play through, and if it doesn't, I feel generally uneasy. At the moment I'm vaguely stressing about whether I need to include Rogue One and Solo in my Star Wars replays, and whether or not I should bother with the TV shows.

Dwelling on buying stuff I have no real interest in, only because it's lodged into my brain in some way. For instance I just bought WWE 2K22 despite not watching wrestling in some 30 odd years, only because I had the Helena Sell meme lodged into my head and then I found out they have Mr T as DLC. It's almost all I've thought about for the past couple of days.

I think it's because of stress, some stuff has gone down at work recently but it's all been pretty minor. Just can't seem to engage my usual coping activities of mindfulness and rechanneling the mental effort though.

Actually that might be part of it, we recently redid several rooms and the game room is still waiting to be organized, with everything all over the place, so my usual hobby outlet has a big old roadblock of effort in front of it. Struggling to invest the energy in going through it and setting a painting area and the game table back up though. It’s all just big old ball of “ugh, what’s the point?” mentally right now.

It's been a tough time for a lot of people for a long period of time so whatever you're struggling with at the moment is understandable. I hope you're able to find the energy to move through things

I'm a strong believer that for most people the idea of being in control is really important (whether you are or not, and to what level, is unique to the individual). On a world scale there's been some pretty uncontrollable events dominating the discourse for over 2 years now. The added stress it creates naturally makes it very challenging for people to have the capacity to process everything else that also happens that they might usually have been OK to manage or cope with.

A common analogy we're taught in Mental Health First Aid is the idea of the Stress Bucket. Trying to understand how full yours is and what fills it up is an exercise in beginning to understand when you need to stop letting things come into the bucket so it doesn't overflow. Ideally everyone would have a good tap on that bucket (coping techniques) to keep it from getting too full but sometimes life doesn't work like that. With covid and now the Russian war on Ukraine its natural that people's buckets are more full than they would have been before these things happened.

Or in much shorter terms, be kind to yourself. Everyone has been through a lot over the last few years and lots of people aren't great at giving themselves time to rest and heal.

Sounds like you've been able to stay open minded, reflect on your actions and adapt and grow where you can. Which is amazing and I hope you're able to be proud of yourself for that

Understandable, I think it can be hard to open up on lots of things and I think truly taking a compliment requires that too. To accept something nice about yourself also exposes the parts of you that might get hurt in a different situation. If people's words can effect you when positive then it risks they can do the same when negative.

That said, what you've described about reflecting on behaviours you're not proud of and growing from there is a tough thing to do and not everyone succeeds. So for what it's worth, that's great to read and thank you for sharing something that I can imagine is a tough reflection.

Do we count? Here right now.