• chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Xkcd has recurring characters and storyline that are separated but connected. Blackhat is basically an asshole with style character (a classhole). The girl is Danish, the only person to one up him, and them meeting and their relationship is in the “Journal” series.

        A few others are white hat, who isn’t always the same person, as well as Cueball, Mrs Roberts (mother of Lil Bobby tables) and a few others. You don’t need tro know them to get a comics joke, but if you follow the whole work it’s like little Easter eggs you can find.

    • pixeltree@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      It’s stuck in my head as particularly self descriptive the past decade or so and I just wanted to share it

  • NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Realizing I had ADHD and Social Anxiety, and that there are coping mechanisms and drugs to help has me really optimistic.

    Things aren’t rainbows and unicorns just yet, but the rain at least seems to be letting go up.

  • gbzm@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ah, negging. Maybe my depression is healthier than I though, with how much I’ve been negging myself I must fancy myself suite a bit!

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I’d definitely does get better though. It’s full of ups and downs, but hopefully it consistently goes up on average.

    • amazing2@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It doesn’t get better, in fact it only gets worse. You just stop caring and resign yourself to how your life is going to play out.

      Very few people achieve any kind of not sucking at all time let alone happiness.

      Christianity had the right idea — first the toil then the grave. In abandoning the Christian ideals of grace, mercy, and love and replacing them with a litigious approach to interpersonal relationships we’ve created a society in which happiness is all but impossible.

      Everyone’s always talking about rights and boundaries and quantifying everything. But what about your obligations to your fellow man? Oh of course you don’t have any. Nobody owes anyone anything.

      What a way to build a society.

        • amazing2@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          There is no happiness. I don’t know what it is. I’ve always been unhappy. I’ve always just grasped at straws, taking whatever’s being offered.

          Allowing people to walk over me while I had to measure every word. It’s no abuse, it’s just power. The one who needs the other one less is more powerful. And I’m never a person others need.

          I don’t have friends anymore. The last two left two months ago. We had a fight about keeping appointments. I was frustrated and the job situation was bad so I told a friend he’s a spiritual woman. I didn’t mean it in a misogynistic way. Just that as a gay bottom man he relates to people and things in a more feminine way.

          Well he was really offended. He said it was violence and abuse. He sent me a long message recontextualizing the last few years as abuse (mine of him).

          Also he confirmed everything I knew about myself. That people only tolerate me, that nobody really likes spending time with me, that they’re better off when I’m not around.

          All true. I don’t blame him for leaving. I can be difficult. I just wish that maybe he’d given me the respectful consideration of the ending the friendship by being more and more unavailable. Instead the very dramatic way it happened. But it’s clear I don’t deserve even such social conventions.

          • NOSin@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            My fellow human, you’re either depressed, and you should seek help, it will do you great good, or you should start looking into some personal growth wisdom.

            Both aren’t easy paths, but they’re well worth it.

            • amazing2@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I have medication, I am not suicidal, I go to work everyday, I clean my apartment, I feed my cat. I’m not some kind of a burned out wreck living in filth. I am depressed, but that’s just how it is. I’ve made a lot of bad choices in life, with friends, in my career, and now I’m stuck here without a way out.

              Personal growth is an illusion, we are who we are. It’s all determined. You can say it’s God or that it’s a deterministic universe but it’s all the same.

              • NOSin@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Depression isn’t equal to all the things you compared it to, and saying that none of us can change no matter how hard we try, maybe shows that you’re the first obstacle to it.

                I wish you luck and for things to get better.

          • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Well if you guys have been friends for years, then hopefully that’s not something that can break over night. It can be worth trying to salvaging that. He could just be saying that in a moment where he felt emotional, then sobered up a few days feeling regretful and cruel. It’s worth reaching out to see if he’d like to keep talking. Fights between friends is normal, and patching it up is even more important. Some people can’t even maintain friends for years like you did, that’s an important skill on its own. And yeah, all I can do is relate to the last stuff cuz I’m also struggling feeling that way. I have friends, but am in a complicated situation where I can’t be with the girl I’m in love with, and she doesn’t feel the same way, but I’m with her 8 hours pretty much every day so it’s pretty painful. I also lost a promotion to a guy I really hate and have to work under him now, so I need to figure out how to navigate that as well this week. Swallowing your ego and going about things is really hard, ya know. I think we’re both going through that.

            • amazing2@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I don’t know. I switch between being really angry at him for sending me that message in the middle of an episode and for almost crafting it on purpose to hit every fear he knows I have. But it’s important to know that not everything he wrote is bullshit. I can be really difficult to bear when I feel bad, I am prone to saying horrible things like that I’ll put myself into conversion therapy for being gay.

              And I switch from anger to bargaining, thinking that there might be some proper combination of words I could say to him where he’ll take me back. But I don’t think so, the tone was very final. There wasn’t even a “good luck” it was just “I’ve had enough, goodbye.” He also made it clear that he believes there was no friendship between us for a long time and he was only tolerating me.

              I really think there is nothing to salvage. And what kind of a relationship is that, anyway? Where I’m reduced to begging? Even if he would restart a relationship with me, that’s just a recipe for more resentment down the line.

  • Asafum@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    I don’t remember making this comic about myself, but it’s here so I clearly did. Lol

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    A friend once told me that he kept a note on his fridge that asked, “What is stopping you?” I was inspired.

    I have a sticky note on my display with the same question. The answer is ME.

  • agent_flounder@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    A cycle of mediocrity is not an identity or intrinsic trait ffs. That’s wrong on several levels.

    First of all, expectations. We can’t all be Nobel prize winners or cure cancer or whatever else qualifies as excelling.

    And also, if you’re not happy now, chances are achieving great things won’t do it for you either. Usually the people that society ascribes greatness to sacrifice many important things and often are giant assholes (see Steve Jobs as just one example of many).

    Plenty of average people are actually happy without being the supposed top of the heap.

    But if you’re failing to achieve your dreams – or failing to even try to in the first place – it may be due to myriad things one can indeed work on. E.g., it may well be related to a mix of some past trauma, depression, ADHD, or expectations, values, lack of knowledge or skills.

    Assuming you have realistic goals, the only way to guarantee you’ll never achieve them is to give up.