Happy New Year, you guys! This past year may not have been the best or the kindest to us, we have all suffered and endured a lot. But we made it through, and we're all living to see another year. I know that on this forum, that's not a desirable place to be; it's dreadful when you're suffering and I'm not even totally happy about it. But within this group where most of us have made a vow to try our best to live in spite of our circumstances and feelings, I'm so proud and happy to be standing alongside you all in a brand new year! Not to be sentimental, but I think the best and probably most unexpected gift that last year gave us was each other.
@HighFlight, thank you for being such a wonderful friend to us all, for making yourself available to our plights, and for offering all of your words of encouragement as well as wise advice. Thank you, also, for all of the sacrifices that you make in your real life that may go unseen by others. Maybe you won't have a "9/11 moment," but I hope that this year will bring at least a little bit of peace to you. Maybe recovery can be possible without some big moment to precede it, but maybe acceptance of our situations can be recovery, too.
@sadwriter, you had a really difficult go at it this year, but I'm so grateful that you're still with us! Thank you for listening to us, for offering your understanding or advice, and for keeping the thread alive with your triple posts sometimes, haha. It's been wonderful to hear about your progress. I'm sure that you're an inspiration for a lot of us in this thread to keep going and I'm so proud of you for every step you've made, whether it was a step forward, a step back, a big one or a small one. Thanks for sharing it all with us, and I hope that your heater's been fixed by now!
@lita-lassi, I hope that you spent your holidays around your loved ones. I hope that your family and friends kept you warm and wrapped up in all of their care. I hope you've found a reason to smile and a place to relax away from that awful person. And most of all, I hope you're at least closer to getting your stuff back! This year, that chapter of your life is officially coming to a close and you'll be able to have a new start. I wish nothing but the best for you, always!
@ColorlessTrees, I hope that you've been enjoying the holidays with your fiancé and his family. I know it must be exciting, or maybe even a little challenging, being in a brand new country. But I imagine that you're making a lot of amazing memories with your loved ones and that makes me really happy. Thank you for being somebody that I can relate to, and for your kind and caring words when I needed them. Here's to your new start this year, I hope that everything goes well with moving and getting settled in the coming months, if that's still something that you guys are doing!
@Cloud Busting, I'm also really happy that you're still with us. I know that this year may have been especially hard for you, too, but you survived it, and you've even gained new and valuable perspectives through your experiences. Thank you for sticking around to share them with us, for helping us brainstorm through our issues, for your lists, for your positive attitude, and for not letting me be the only person in this thread that makes very consistently long posts! We haven't heard from you in a while, but I hope that you are doing well or at least okay during a season that is understandably hard for a lot of us.
@ijustwishtodie, I know you're not completely on board with the being alive thing, but I want to thank you for exploring your options and feeling safe enough to weigh them a little bit with us. The purpose of this support group thread has never been to convince you to live, but I'm happy that you're considering it at all. You're great to have around, you seem very thoughtful about everything and have offered interesting and valuable perspectives; not just in this thread, but in others as well. Thank you for making it to 2024 with us, and I hope that this year brings you peace and some of the answers that you may be looking for, no matter how you find it.
And thank you for watching Bojack! I'm a little curious, did you relate to or see yourself in any of the characters while watching? I always ask this to people who watch it, haha.
@LoiteringClouds, thank you for sharing your progress with us this year. I know that you lost your friend this year and that was surely a difficult thing to go through. But to see you find purpose, even if it was temporary, and seeing you put your all into working out consistently has been really inspiring. I'm sure that it's helped you a lot, as well. I hope you'll see even more wonderful progress this year, and that you'll be a little closer to finding that thing that makes you really want to live.
To
@dazed_dreamer,
@parader,
@chancerlane,
@BurgundySnap,
@Night_Crew,
@SolaceNight,
@cactusflower, cardboard_houses (who has deactivated),
@RenaSrar,
@D1byRam3n,
@eatyouryoung,
@cheese.out,
@Rack.-,
@sadrainbow,
@I Can't Say, and anyone else I may be missing, thank you guys for sharing pieces of yourselves with us throughout the year as well. Having not heard from you all in a while, I can only hope that things are alright for you all. There will always be a space here for your thoughts, if you ever need it.
Here's to surviving the next year! I don't really have any resolutions, this year. I have a few lofty goals that I'm not even sure I want to admit to myself. But this year I'm going to start to try, because I guess I don't have anything to lose except for the life I barely want anyway.
Therefore, it couldn't hurt much to try!
I do have good news, though: I finally cleaned up my apartment! I wanted to do that since September. It feels much nicer for things to be clean and more organized.
Maybe prioritize what's most critical for you, whether that's the alcohol, drugs, job, wedding, general mental health, etc. Instead of dealing with all of them at once, allow yourself some space to focus on one or two of them at a time. Put the others on the back burner for the moment.
You know what? I never actually thought about taking my issues a few things at a time. I'm sorry if you or anyone else in the thread has ever told me to do this before, it seems so simple but all of my issues feel a bit interconnected. I suppose that I don't really see them as individual issues, but they can be.
I've decided to give up the job search for the foreseeable future, as the constant rejection is just something I can't seem to handle. I think it would be best for me to focus on the drinking and drugs (which are the same to me), and probably getting married, because although I don't want to, it's the best option for some potential stability at the moment and instability is a real contributing factor to me wanting to die.
With alcohol, I've messed up here and there, but I've been better about limiting my intake to one drink a day. I think the most I went was maybe five days sober, and I broke that recently when a credit card rejected me and I spiraled into drinking six beers and two mixed drinks in one day. On NYE-eve and NYE, I had wine and two drinks. Yesterday I had nothing! But today I'll probably have one, because this job continues to suck the soul out of me, and accepting the reality of me not being able to find another just feels hopeless. But even in all of the commotion and partying of Christmas and New Years, I've avoided every hard drug that I take. Mostly coke, which has been a challenge to refuse, but now I think I'm probably fifteen days sober.
And when I thought so many times "I'm at my lowest" - it can't get any worse then, right? Or at least, not significantly?
Welcome to the thread,
@dustyrainbow! It sucks that you had such a horrible year last year, but I really do hope that this one will be better. Congratulations on building the life that you wanted, I know that must have took a lot of hard work and a fair bit of sacrifice. But I want to second what HighFlight said; just because we seem to have it all together on the outside doesn't mean that we aren't validly suffering on the inside. And we can still struggle or be ill, even when things may be going "well" and when the reason isn't exactly clear. I've been told in so many ways that people envy me, but I'm about as miserable as a person can be. It's really easy to neglect ourselves and lose ourselves in pursuit of our other interests and while we're attempting to build a life. What you said right here is true, though.
When we're at our lowest, well, the only other place to go is up! If we don't choose to stay there, that is.
Thank you for sharing with us, and I hope that we get to hear from you some more in the future. It's okay to not know what you're looking for, but hopefully, with time, what you're looking for will find you.
Yay for my first long post of 2024!
. May if you try again, you could disarm him first by saying how thankful you are that he's working on the problem and that you understand how tough it's got to be for him. Then transition into how tough it's been for you... Another approach might be to ask him to pay the difference between your average electric bill from before and this month's bill. 
