I need to get this off my chest, I’m having a tough day guys. I’m 30 years old and I’ve got nothing to show for it. I still live with my emotionally toxic family, have no romantic partners, no children, no house, hardly any money, no education. On most days, I don’t think about these things and I just put my head down and move on with my life. I have been suffering from depression for decades and I am receiving help for it. But today was a difficult day.
I ran into one of my friends from secondary school. We spent some time catching up and by the end of it, I wanted to cry. See, I was okay at one point in my life. I was doing well at school and was at the top of many of my classes before depression hit its peak and crushed me completely. Today, my former classmates are doctors, lawyers, IT professionals, teachers, and investment bankers. Some are even married with children. I was from a SAP school, nearly all my schoolmates are successful. Whereas I dropped out of school, have a dead-end job that barely pays, and don’t seem to have much of a future. My highest education level is O levels. I’ve tried going back to school many times but would drop out each time due to the mental health issues that were unfortunately debilitating for me. I’ve not stopped though, I will be doing my A levels in 2023 once I’ve saved enough money to enrol somewhere. Yet it all feels utterly pathetic and it feels like my life has been a massive failure. I will be a 32 year old doing A levels.
Comparison is the thief of joy, one of the first few things I did almost a decade ago was actually deleting all my social media . I lost touch with most of my friends from school and didn’t know how any of them were doing. Every now and then I would receive updates from the few people I was in touch with but I would try to keep my head up and not let it bring me down. I’m happy for all these people, they are good people. It’s not their success that is bringing me down, it’s my own failure, and the magnitude of my failure which becomes so clear once I compare myself to my peers, that’s crushing me. I don’t know how my life ended up here.
For years, I believed that things would work out for me. I believed that it’s not my timeline but God’s timeline, I would tell myself that I can’t follow the timeline of the world. There are so much uncertainty in the world, someone could have all the success in the world and die tomorrow. I had this almost delusional optimism that things would be okay, I believed that God had a plan. Today, I find myself in tears, thinking that there is probably no God. There is no plan. I’m alone. By telling myself that it was going to be okay, I was just consoling myself. The reality is that I got left behind in life, my life will never be the same as my peers’. I have to make peace with that. There is also a chance that I may never be okay. I may never recover from my depression either.
CNY every year, it’s the same questions from my relatives. Everyone is disappointed and ashamed of me. My life has been a failure to them. I don’t blame them for seeing it that way. I used to tell myself that it’ll be okay someday. I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t see myself recovering, leaving my family, having a family of my own, successfully get into uni, having a better job. I don’t see any of it happening. Depression might be clouding my view or maybe this is the reality.
I just needed to tell someone this, thank you for reading. Tomorrow will be a better day, but today, I just need to lick my wounds.