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Comment by pfortuny | Hacker News Reader

I cannot stress the usefulness of:

1) Professional help. 2) Family support (parents?). Are your friends real friends? Can you trust at least one of them with your problems? 3) Give real value to whatever you do that has value. And try to, instead of 'watching movies, lose time, etc...' give true value to 'just relaxing' (some people would say mediation, I guess) without 'doing' anything.

But I cannot help any more.

1) is good, very good. 2) is also key: having something who is not afraid of hugging you and reminding you of the positive things about yourself which you are unable to value now.

I shall pray for you, whoever you are. You can find my mail at my profile (pedro, pfortuny.net) but I guess we live in different time zones.

Hope you make it out of this!

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I suppose that part of the problem is that I hate to talk about my failures with other people. I also hate to talk about successes: I am more of the "see what I have accomplished" kind - I like to show things, not to talk about them. But showing failures is very awkward.

My family and friends are correctly guessing that I am not having a great time, but I am quite dismissive about it. And I manage to avoid talking about it because in general I am quite a positive person, and I still manage to have fun when I am with people (mostly). I have just this very important thing (to me), which is failing and dragging me down with it.

Thanks for your prayers (I am atheist, but thanks anyway). We are geographically closer that what my article suggests, but I prefer to keep it vague.

But showing failures is very awkward.

Agreed. I hate, hate, hate the idea of personal failure... even though I accept that failure itself is a learning process. The fact that one does not succeed is humbling.

But the alternative is worse: concealing your failure to the degree that it leads to a huge fall, with greater consequences.

Sorry for the delay.

Well, as a matter of fact I am quite positive and one of the things I realized when I was depressed was that I was quite good at hiding it (until it reached a point when it was no longer possible) from family, friends etc...

I think I understand what you say by 'see what I have accomplished' but as you realize, a great part of 'depression' is just the inner feeling of worthlessness of all that one does and one needs someone (some people) to support him.

Everybody needs a life apart from what one 'does'. Everybody is worth another person's love, time, respect and support, just because of himself.

I do hope you find help. And try to get a good professional also.

All the best.

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