For me, it used to be my career. Without going into detail, it was a public service type occupation where I could really help people. However, I was battling depression, anxiety, and addiction, and after being hospitalized and jailed multiple times, I lost that career. Even while I was going through all that dark stuff, I felt great at my job helping people, and I feel like I was good at it.
Now, I have a different career that I still feel good about doing, but I can never shake the feeling that I’ll somehow mess this one up too, eventually. My doctor told me I have to be active, so I took up longboarding. I still have bad depression with frequent bouts of suicidal thoughts, but when I’m on a bicycle or longboard, that’s the only time I feel really at peace with myself. I wish I could feel like that all the time.
Do you have things you do that make you feel like that? Like you’re really free?
Yes! I do not have depression, I have ptsd, so ymmv, but I don’t have a great deal of hope in the world and my personal circumstances have, for a long time, been not so great. Bad shit is bad, people are mean, and some of it may not get better in time for me to enjoy it. But every time i think, wow, what the hell am i doing here, I think about the stuff I’m still enjoying or still want to find out or read or hear or get to do. Nothing big or profound, not capital-m Meaning or Greatness or Success or Love, just like - god, this song is a banger. I am really enjoying the crunch of this piece of toast or the moisture in the air today. I really enjoyed that meme, humans are so funny. I love music and poetry and nature and words a lot, and I really like food and spending time inside other people’s ideas/built little worlds. If I am really engaging as much as I can with the really small things - trees, the noises birds make, music, well written paragraphs - then I’m invested in numerous small things that can’t very easily taken away from me, instead of bigger stuff like a particular relationship or a certain life plan or physical health or a certain philosophy. And, it makes it harder for my mind to convince me that I’m not still enjoying my time here, or that I’m not doing anything worth it with my existence, as i really do believe we’re here to get to enjoy and feel stuff that we could not enjoy and feel if we did not exist in the forms we do. Doing things I enjoy as much or as often as possible, and scheduling them in with as much importance as the ”serious” stuff, does a lot to keep me engaged with the parts of being alive that I really like. And when I’m engaged in that way, I’m a bit less engaged with the things that hurt or make me feel hopeless or devalued. There’s a chance what I’ve written here won’t work for you, so i just want to add that I don’t think you should feel bad if it doesn’t. Brains being all different and such. (Feeling bad when things don’t work for me has been a big part of my own experience, so I felt it necessary to add that disclaimer.)