Struggling with strong depression

Life Health & Fitness
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I am struggling with strong depression, and I feel very much alone.

I don’t know if the depression is driving a wedge but lately, not sure if it’s due to the reduced social opportunities due to COVID-19, I am feeling incredibly helpless, powerless, worthless, and ignored by everyone around me.

I have not a lot of friends, and the few that I do have are just busy, busy, and busy. Can we spend some time together? Sorry busy now will tell you if I have time. Months later, busy, don’t have time, etc… Cycle continues and I’m developing trust issues, that everyone around me must have found glaring flaws but will not tell me however are secretly telling others to avoid me.

Being very short on cash, not even able to afford rent (which is actually not very expensive at all), because I am getting almost no business, isn’t helping because I feel like I am surrounded by people who makes several times more than I could possibly dream of making, but they will not lift a finger to help (or even just give me stuff to do so I don’t feel like I’m mooching off of anyone).

At night, especially after 10pm, it gets worse. What’s worse is people are often asleep at that time so if I cry for help no one will hear you scream in space. I can’t sleep, in fact I need medication to sleep because otherwise, I will stay up the entire night. I have been taking Luxipro but the drugs are doing absolutely nothing to help. I can think of a few drugs that will help but unfortunately they are illegal.

Life is beginning to feel like a grind, just more and more hopeless the older I am. At least in video games like Final Fantasy there are definite rewards to grinding, but in real life it feels like you grind to level 40, and then someone comes along and like the snap of Thanos resets you to level 1 with no items. Except now you have less time to regain all that level but Thanos will come back again should you manage to make level 40, and snap and reset you to level 1. Every week becomes a fight for survival against forces which I am powerless to fight, but the friends around me refuse to even lift a finger. They won’t even spend time with me because their family time is far more important. To them I am an interloper who is to be ignored at all costs.

I have a thought that all some cult has to do is friend bomb me and I will join any cult no matter how evil or draining they are.

I am beginning to believe that we don’t go to hell for not accepting Christ as our lord and savior, or being bad, or whatever religion says happen to bad people. I believe we are in hell. This world is hell. Everyone exists solely for the purpose of inflicting misery upon as many people as they can. Everyone will kill, murder, lie, cheat one another so they can have a ton of money that does nothing for them. The world is like one big prison yard where God does not exist, where the Holy Spirit is spurned. Only the strong survive and the duty of the strong is to kill the weak, make their existence as painful as possible, and everyone else will look at them and say it was their fault that they were weak and exploited. There is no heaven on Earth, Earth is hell. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. You are in the MRT tunnel in the blue line and a train is coming and will crush you into nothing.

I am tired of living… some days I just hope I will get run over by a Food Panda driver rushing to deliver their junk food, or a bus driver who believes they are a NASCAR driver, or a taxi driver who just likes to ignore traffic rules. It will hurt, but it will be over, it will be final. No more trying to scrounge up 10,000 nt a month to pay rent, no more pressure of parents constantly asking why am I not making a ton of money. No more friends who claim to be friends but will not lift a finger to help me, or even spend more than 5 minutes a week to be with me. Especially Christians. They say they love God but have not God in their hearts. They will sit there and talk about Bible wisdom but it’s too much work to take care of his sheep. I hope God say to them “I never knew you, ye workers of inequity”. And if I come up with 10,000 nt this month? What does it do? I have to come up with another next month, and the month after, and it will never end.

I hope COVID-19 will claim me soon… maybe I should find a way for it to… don’t bother wasting a ventilator on me… just give me a fatal dose of Sodium penethol… and let me go.

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Have you considered getting a consistent job to pay rent each month. And do the things you love on the side for now. Until you can build it up and transition into it full time. This is what I found most people doing who are craftsman. Or they apprentice under a master or a few before they can go off on their own.

Hang in there.

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And what would that be??

I can’t teach at a bushiban because I am not white enough.

I can’t work many jobs because my Chinese writing ability is sub par (compared to most people here anyhow).

So that leaves 7-11 which I absolutely hate, or construction work which I lack the muscle for…

And working for a Taiwanese is basically hell anyways. They will make you feel like you ought to be thankful that they are even paying you a meager wage to begin with!! You should be so glad that you are willing to work unpaid during holidays as well.

What would you have me do?

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Find something that pays rent to hold you down. While finding better opportunities. That is what most people do. I don’t know many people who enjoy their jobs. You don’t have the luxury to think about all of that. Problem number 1 is rent. Go from there.

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And I’ll be trapped in that job because I’ll need to work 70 hours a week to make rent. The pay is pitiful. How can I have time to do anything else when most of my time is stuck at work? But of course conservatives all say that. Your damn fault for being stuck in a shitty job.

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You live in Taiwan, I don’t think conservatism is the issue here. Taiwan is a very liberal country in the sense of classical liberalism.

First pay rent. Then think about the next move. You literally don’t have many other options.

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I’m sick of this.

It’s either work shit retail jobs or nothing.

I worked retail all my life. It’s always “no other option, gotta pay rent”. I’m sick and tired of spending the last 10 years of my life working shit retail jobs. I want to climb out of this but it’s not like I got a choice.

But everyone says you have a choice…

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@Taiwan_Luthiers, this is definitely not meant to be flippant, but there are many people now facing the same situation as you are currently. It does not change your situation, but there are families around the world, especially now in the U.S that are facing sudden unemployment with zero future outlook, because the governments, both at the state and federal levels, are offering zero guidance as to when their job security will ever come back. Yet, many of they are fighting on, day by day.
For you, at least (in some beneficial way), you do not have to put bread on the table for others.
Taiwan is lucky as there is no shelter in place. You just have to “suck it up” for lack of a btter phrase and find a job, any job.
Who cares if 7-11 sucks, give yourself a goal of surviving there for 1 month. Try being a simple mechanic at a scooter place. Who cares if you know more than than higher-level colleagues. Just take the paycheck.
Remember, your case is not alone. Most, if not all of us, have had jobs we did not like.
Just keep pounding away, and take it day by day.
:+1:

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What a huge difference skin color makes…

If I were white I could go teach at a bushiban and even if I was incompetent at the job it didn’t matter and you made 50-60k a month easy.

But because I’m not white the best I could ever hope for is 30k. It freaking SUCKS.

And you know all those white guys could all come to Taiwan and get bushiban jobs, even if they were teaching at GVO they still did way better than 7-11 workers.

Could I do translation, maybe even copyediting? Sure… but translation work is just so spotty and I rather do translation than 7-11 because even if translation sucked, it paid way better than 7-11.

Right now I just get about 100 USD a month on average from The Translation Gate… but it’s just not enough. Most works are done within 10 minutes because it’s just translating receipts and stuff for insurance claims. How can I get more?? Even as much as translation sucks I made more in 10 minutes than I do working retail for an hour!

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Upwork?

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I’m not white. My first job in Taiwan was teaching part time. I made around 30k before tax just working around 20 hours a week depending on if I sub or not. It allowed me to do work in entertainment and on to other things. You can definitely do that.

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If I could make 30k working 20 hours a week that would be great, but I tried searching for bushiban jobs and never got it. I don’t know if it was the skin color or my lack of people skills.

I also make way more doing 10 minutes of translation than I do working for an hour at 7-11. I’d have to work 70 hours per week minimum to make anywhere near 30k there!

With that kind of hours you do not have time to do anything else except sleep.

In fact I just got paid 8 dollars US for my last 10 minute translation job. Comes out to about 250nt. No 7-11 will pay anywhere near that. And it’s a demanding job too with all the little stuff you gotta know!!

Edit: I did get paid 100nt an hour by my neighbor (he runs a CNC shop) to load/unload the machine between programs. It’s not steady but I agree to it because it’s not really work. Takes like 2 minutes to unload and reload it. The program takes 20 minutes to run. Pretty much no work at all. In the meantime I could still do work in my shop

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Boots on the ground. I suspect many buxiban teachers may have moved back and not many fresh faces will be coming next term. You just got to hit up as many as possible.

But just to be clear, it’s not particularly an easy job if you are not good with kids. Some people, are not cut out for it. It’s as much class room management as it is teaching.

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Yea, I am not good with kids… in fact I don’t like them. I don’t think I’ll last long there.

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I have done a lot of shit jobs (am currently in a shit job but laid off due to stay at home…and would rather be back at my shit job).

Fact is very few of us get to do what we really want to do in life.
Life can suck…but you will be a long time dead so this is pretty good by comparison.

I still remember one summer camp i went to way back when, when it was just miserable. My peers were mean to me, I couldn’t WAIT for the ten days to be over…but after it was? I started to think it wasnt that bad…I forgot the bad and remembered the good.

LIfe is kinda like that…at the end when we have reached it, it wont be the bad parts that will occupy us, we will remember the good.

Think of the GOOD in your life… HELLA LOT of people have it worse than you right now at this moment.

Depression is serious shit… I have been there, more times than i want to. But keep on truckin bro… You may have an ass of a truck but its what you got, get going.

Oh, I found out a serious spot of depression i got last year was possibly due to my quiting coffee after drinking so much for decades…And that was a chemical thing.

Are you able to join a church? Get involved that way? Right now, if you dont have stay at home, you can do that, but if you are on a stay at home, it double sucks.

I worked for some taiwanese too and it wasnt as fun as it could be, but millions of people work for taiwanese and they manage to make a life out of it.

There are literally millions of people still alive on this earth who would trade places with YOU…YES YOU… so dont let yourself down.

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Church is now online only because of the virus. That’s what’s getting me down because I couldn’t be around people. And also everyone at church just keep telling me how they’re so busy.

That and I’m not just working as a craftsman, I also do side jobs as a translator and supposedly a project manager at the Translation Gate (the company I’ve been getting semi regular work from) has jobs with rather short deadline but lots of volume that I’m about to start…

As much as translation sucks I’ll take that compared to 7-11 any day.

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Life is very difficult, confusing, frustrating right now and the limitations on freedom/confinement are very easy to lead to depression.

It sounds like you are doing very well and self aware, keep up the good work. Nothing wrong with the way you’re feeling, it seems quite normal. I think most people are feeling some version of this, maybe not the religious part but the mixture of emotion/frustration

Are you near a beach with fresh air? that always helps me when i’m in stress mode…

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Xingjhuan is like the ass end of nowhere. No parks, nowhere close to good riverside paths…

My old shop was right next to a riverside path and it was really stress relieving to be able to bike along that all the way to Danshui.

I tried to get to the river side from where I am and it’s not possible at all… blocked by no pedestrian roads full of murderous cabbies.

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Get on a bus and go to a nice neighborhood and walk around? Get on a physical gig and get your body tip top at low to no cost !

IM walking the shit outa my legs nowadays doing 4 to 6 miles a day. Its good to get working on your bod if you can’t work on work.
You make guitars? Can you get a gig in China for one of the makers for Gibson? Fender?

I dont remember all the pieces of the puzzle but you said something like you were raised in USA but forced to be on Taiwan??

Sort of the reverse of me!! I was born on TAiwan and “forced” to be in the USA. .And there is not a day I would not rather have been in Taiwan last 20 years instead of here. Although the USA aint all that bad… But in my dreams Im always in Taiwan…Weird huh?

And I am doing shit jobs here, much shittier than my shit jobs in Taiwan (some of which were pretty good shit).
And the girls here are nowhere nears available as in taiwan. nor the food, nor the fruit.

This place is pretty good but it aint the Taiwan that I knew!

And you are reverse?? Find an American girl and marry her! Get your green card that way and get back to the USA?? I know easier said then done but there must be some lonely ass merican chicks on the rock, mad at all the boys chasing asian *ussy.

ps. I know this aint easy because I tried to latch onto a taiwanese girl, but they are few and very far between over here. And i ended up with an indonesian girl !! Maybe I can retire in Bali? and visit tAiwan? aT least its only five hours away instead of 13 and a half from SFO.

Maybe you can find a canadian chick and live in Canada? Its almost like UsA non?