Days when life feels hopeless

Despairing Daredevils! Graham here.

I’m having one of those days today. A day when my life feels essentially doomed. 

On days like this there is usually one specific culprit. One thing on my horizon that’s threatening to ruin my life completely - not just for the foreseeable future, but for the rest of my time on Earth. 

Today it’s an old favourite, a difficult thing that’s been fucking with me for two solid years. 

But lately I’m also wondering if Doomy Days like this are entirely what they seem. Is it just about whatever big, difficult thing is going on right now? Or is it something more than that, something about why I’m so hung up on the concept of ‘ruining my life’ in the first place?

A familiar foe 

Today it’s my voice that’s got me feeling like I’m doomed. 

Specifically, the vocal challenges I’ve been having - on and off - for the past two years, ever since getting knocked in the throat. 

For whatever reason, that seemingly innocuous injury turned into a swallowing problem, then vocal issues. Two years later I’m still mostly unable to sing (something I used to do for a living). And it hurts to talk most of the time, which makes me really fun at parties (or any situation involving the reasonable expectation of human speech).  

In short, it’s the kind of thing you can live with, but which also leaves me often thinking this ride sucks and I’d like to get off now.

‘What’s the point?’

Much of the time, I manage to stay relatively chipper about it. There’s a chance it’ll get better, and even if it doesn’t, I have ways of dealing with the scary prospect that I might never have my old voice back. 

But then a day like today comes along and all those defences stop working. I am swimming in the fear and worry, lost in worst-case scenarios with every waking thought.

That tight, heavy sensation I feel in my throat becomes more than just a reminder of the injury. It’s now an inflection point for my whole worldview. A physical manifestation of a fault in reality itself. Or at least, my reality.

And I find myself wondering not-so-chipper things like, ‘if this is how it is now, what’s the point?’

But the thing is, I’ve felt this way before…

I’ve felt this way before, regularly in fact - and not just about the vocal thing. 

I’ve felt this way about the chronic nerve pain I’ve been dealing with for almost five years now. (Another seemingly innocuous injury turned chronic. In retrospect, one was probably enough?) 

And I felt this way all the way back in my early 20s, when I thought I’d fried my brain completely from one bad drug experience.

Each of these experiences has led me - time and again - to days like today. Days when I wonder, ‘if this is how it is now, what’s the point?’

And that repeating pattern has got me thinking. 

A revealing thought

My waking thought this morning was particularly revealing. I'd had one of those nights full of dreams in which I was anyone but myself, inhabiting various different people in a series of increasingly dire, non-sensical predicaments. 

(What do you mean you haven’t brought the sheet music with you? HOW WILL THE BATS KNOW WHAT TO SING???)

When I first woke up, I kept my eyes shut. I knew I was awake, but for the smallest moment, I wasn’t sure exactly who I was yet, and the truth is, I didn’t want to know. My first thought of the day was something like…

Ugh. I can’t remember who I am yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be pretty…

Now, maybe this is simply the result of feeling a little ground down by life lately. But maybe it speaks to a deeper, underlying attitude to life? A tendency to see my life as just another non-sensical, and therefore meaningless predicament, before I’m given any further information.

Like that old joke of the overbearing mother who sends a message to her adult children. ‘Start worrying. Details to follow.’

What makes a life worth living? 

I’m not suggesting my current struggles aren’t significant. I mean, I often think they shouldn’t affect me as much as they do, but as I have to keep reminding myself, chronic pain and loss of function is no small thing.

Sometimes it’s the in-between things that pack the real existential punch. Things that are clearly difficult, but not quite the full catastrophe, and therefore eat away at you quietly, their full impact often unseen and hard to explain.

But it also seems like these difficult things that have come my way are all circling around the same big soft spot.

The question that has long been a particularly loud one for me, and for many of you who read this newsletter. The question of what makes a life worth living.

And to be completely honest, for me that question is usually posed the other way around, with all sorts of ideas about what makes a life not worth living. In my case, on a day like today, it’s the idea that a life with chronic discomfort isn’t worth living. 

Which, in my more objective moments, seems like a bit of a leap.

So, where is that idea coming from??

The need to ‘get it right’

There’s something someone said to me recently that was so bang on, it made my shoulders drop about a half mile. 

“You really feel like you have to get it right, don’t you?”

Yes! I do! All the time! HOW DID YOU KNOW?

They didn’t even need to define what the ‘it’ was, in the phrase ‘get it right’. It was simply understood that, for me, the ‘it’ is everything. That’s what they were naming: this feeling that’s driven me for as long as I can remember. The need to get everything right. 

This applies equally to my life - making the right choices - as it does to dealing with the consequences of those choices, or the other things life has thrown my way. 

Major mental health explosion in my early 20s? Well I’d better figure out just exactly how to deal with that then. 

Chronic health stuff in my 30s? Time to research and attempt any and all possible solutions, all at once.

The fear of getting it wrong

This need to ‘get it right’ has brought all kinds of great things into my life. It’s why I ended up working in mental health, and then making Big Feels - because I was already thinking about this stuff minute-by-minute every day, so why not see if I could be of some use to others in the process?

But then there’s the flip side of the need to get it all right: the fear of getting it all wrong.

That’s the fear that magnifies the already difficult life stuff, and makes it feel not just difficult but all-encompassing. Life-ruining.

The fear that says if it’s not perfect, it’s perfectly screwed.

It’s why I can be having a good run, really in a good groove with my meditation and vocal exercises and mindfully relating to my pain, and then all of a sudden… feel like it’s all absolute bullshit. 

It’s the flip side of that motivating, ‘get it right’ energy. The confronting realisation that if it’s not enough, even all this hard work, then it’s worse than doomed. It’s meaningless. 

(Ouch.)

Watching this dynamic 

I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing, to want so badly to get it right. It’s just something I’m slowly becoming more… aware of? 

I’m slowly learning to deliberately notice how this dynamic unfolds. How the drive to ‘get it right’ can be both a strength and a major source of additional pain.

I’m still working this one through, but I suppose that’s the takeaway for me, at this point. To see these doomy, hopeless days for what they are. The flip side of that strong desire to figure it all out once and for all.

It’s out of my hands

When you’re primed to get everything right, there is nothing more challenging than a situation you can’t control - especially one you still think you might be able to control, if you could just figure out the puzzle.

So this vocal thing is bound to make me a little bit crazy. As I come to the end of this day, there’s something useful in acknowledging even just that.

And I’m also getting better at noticing what’s happening, earlier in the piece. Today may have been one of those ‘days’ I’ve had a million times before - but today of all days, I was at least a little bit more aware of what was going on.

And on a day like today, that’s something.

Do you have Doomy Days?

I'd love to hear a little about how this dynamic looks for you. Click here to let me know.

Contributing members can read more on Doomy Days over here on Patreon, along with a bunch of other members' takes on this experience.

Feedback on last issue

Finally, I got heaps of feedback on the last issue, re: navigating your big feels with your partner. Plenty of you relating hard to the idea of being 'in a flap', and not knowing how to communicate that fact until it's passed.

This comment from Katie really captures why it can be so helpful to have shared terms with your partner for times like this.

“Yessss! Figuring out the language for the thing! I had to do that in an ongoing way with my partner. When I am in what you call a flap I often can’t talk or explain, so we developed the language of “pause”, as in, “I need a pause”. 

That relieves the need to explain or figure out the thing while my nervous system is wildly activated, which in turn removes that meta layer of distress that comes when you’re already distressed but you think you’re making it worse because you can’t explain. Also, when I boil over and need to disappear to self regulate, he knows to let me do that for twenty minutes or so then come find me, because I won’t be able to talk about it in the moment but usually will afterwards."

Yep! Thanks to all those that wrote in xx