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Mental health and shame

I have had a rough time for the past month. I’m currently struggling with something that I can’t help but describe as a profound sense of aimlessness and feeling like my life prospects have dwindled away. I realized recently I do not want to go to university, and since I have been told my entire life that that is the only way I could ever succeed in life, now I feel like I am doomed to a life of dependance and deprivation and financial hardship even though I am still young and living relatively well with the help of my parents (who I am so thankful to and thankful to Hashem that they are well off) because otherwise I would be probably doing even worse.

This despair has also gotten worse due to loneliness. I am so thankful that I have my best friends who are absolutely lovely and my community, but apart from them I feel like with the outside world I have had to be on the defense for so long about what I believe and how I have chosen and continually choose every day to live and continue living as an orthodox jew.

We have had bad rifts in our extended family. Essentially every meeting with family feels like walking on landmines because every single branch of the family has their own opinions and (what seems like completely different realities) and no one can agree on anything. This has also caused my defense to be super high all the time, especially after someone tried to justify the harrassment directed at my local community. I am just so tired.

This exhaustion has caused me to just feel like I would just want to rather sleep and not do anything. I feel like I labor for every single breath I take and would sometimes just want to lay still and motionless until the end of times. I see how I am causing my parents to worry and I feel like a burden all the time to everyone and myself.

I really started spiraling a couple of weeks ago when I broke shabbat. I felt sick to my stomach and just paced around the apartment and recited tehillim for the 9 minutes until shabbat ended and right after I fixed the clock that caused me to think shabbat was already over. Then I started to really feel like I am completely underperforming in the fulfillment of mitzvot which makes me feel even guiltier and more dissapointed and ashamed.

I do not feel any types of urges to harm myself, but the mere feeling that I should just give up trying to pursue anything overshadows everything, especially eating. I feel like I am locked in my own mind with a murderer, or more accurately I feel like I’m in a moving car with an unconcious or just an unqualified driver.

I am going to seek therapy, but at the same time I feel like I really need to talk to my Rabbi. I am just so afraid that if I do so, I will be only seen as a mentally damaged girl and ruin my prospects of a shidduch, forever.

Has anyone else felt like this? Am I being reasonable at all or am I insane in my way of feeling about this.

submitted by /u/AccurateBass471
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Source: Reditt

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