Hopefullylesspretentious said 9 years, 2 months ago:

I also guess I should tell you all my story. Oh well. It’s a bit long winded, and definitely more than a bit pretentious and arrogant. My apologies for coming across that way. Anyways…
The core of who I am is existential anxiety. I’m an agnostic who actually realizes if I don’t believe in god, then I have to accept that life has no meaning or purpose and that humankind are just another species that will die out in a couple million years, so everything is basically pointless. Once you reach that point, there doesn’t seem to be a point to living, leaving me to come up with one for myself. To the awkward, antisocial 15-year-old version of me that figured this out, there didn’t really seem to be anything available, and I sort of drifted into suicidal depression. I was also incredibly socially isolated, on account of skipping a few grades. I was a sophomore in undergrad by then, and my 20-something year old classmates were pretty uninterested in my personal life. After a few years, at the urging of my overbearing parents, I got involved in medical research. 6 months in, I lost a patient who I was supposed to be working on a treatment for, in part due to my own laziness. I still blame myself for her death, in part because I developed an effective treatment for the patient’s condition a few months after they died. I could definitely have had it ready in time if I had taken the work seriously. That failure drove me to change, and I ended up using helping people and improving society to the extent of my ability as a life purpose, because that means that I’m maximizing what worth my life actually has by affecting the most different things for the positive. While that developed, I also slowly started learning how to be affable and make friends with whoever I spoke to. I got to the point that I could talk to a random person on the street and walk away with a job offer. Unfortunately, going from complete isolation to having everyone become friends with easily brought me to a state where I’m unable to form friendships with any sort of depth. A few betrayals along the way definitely didn’t help. I become friendly with everyone I meet, but I’m still distant. I also am emotionally crippled to the point that I’m unable to share any of my feelings. I still haven’t told anyone aside from the psychiatrist who diagnosed me about the PTSD that I’m about to bring up, and when I broke down a few months ago and cried for the first time in 8 years, I managed to hide first, and still haven’t told any of my friends about it. Worse yet, there are some significant problems with the life goal I’ve chosen. It’s completely thankless, repeatedly screws me over, and is dependent on my faith that human beings are worth saving. That faith is not always stable, and whether or not I have suicidal tendencies is based on whether I think people suck and can or can’t improve. Then there’s the fact that I have my own arbitrary standard of how much my life is worth, so my constant insecurity about whether I’m doing enough with my life to justify my existence isn’t easily dealt with. I spent much of the last two years having sex with dozens of random girls and making them fall in love with me because I felt like their collective approval would be enough to make me feel like my life was worth something. It didn’t really work, and eventually I stopped because it was morally disgusting. Not to mention the antithesis of what I want my life to be. Eventually, I found that volunteering as a EMT helped me constantly feel like I was doing something, and I wandered around the Middle East working on ambulances. It wasn’t enough, but it helped. I still don’t deal with losing patients that well. I have a minor case of PTSD from working with that, and I’ve spent a year getting it under control. Overall, though, I’ve found that psychological support is more satisfying. It’s more invested than just tossing a patient into the hospital the second you get there, then speeding off to the next call. Hence me being on this website. Either way, I developed an addiction to working under pressure, and that’s led me to having the sort of goal I can work towards that will keep me fulfilled. I’m aiming to become an acute care surgeon and work with Doctors without Borders. To that end, I’ve taken up a bunch of random hobbies that might be useful, like martial arts, wilderness survival, lockpicking, parkour, knife throwing, and the like. All of it makes me feel like I’m working towards something that I actually consider important, that means something to me. After years of dealing with this kind of aimless depression, having an actual purpose has gotten me back on track. I’m a happy man. There’s certainly more to it; all the drama and relationships that have made up the last few years could fill a book. I walked away experienced, and significantly more cautious about who I open up to, but none of it changed the core of who I am. Fundamentally, I want to make the world a better place, and protect people who need protecting. Having that, and having a specific way to do it, has turned my life around to the point that I’m happy, active, adventurous, friendly, and feel capable of doing anything that I really want to. So, in summary, I’m an overly philosophical, overachieving, emotionally crippled adrenaline junkie with a hero complex. Welcome to my life.