@posts 2335,7,9,2341,3, et al.
I sort of need to side with Mark on this one.
Not the part where he was talking to you like you're hurting for money. That was annoying and I'm with you on that. And not the part where he seems to be talking like he's got all his problems worked out and tries to compare that to your life. I don't like that either.
But when you talk to/about people who live with massive internal challenges that most of the rest of us don't, you have to think about what it's like to have extreme psychological/neurological/emotional stuff going on that doesn't integrate easily with the world and how it works, or even with your own basic (optimal) functioning. And you can't. At least I don't think that most people who are basically mentally healthy can begin to have any semblance of a deep understanding of that experience.
So imagine instead a massive weight, permanently strapped to you, kind of awkwardly placed partly over your shoulders and upper back. It's so heavy sometimes you can't walk fully upright - you sort of have to stagger. You're exhausted, overwhelmed by it. And imagine that it has pointy things sticking out where it makes contact with your body. So in addition to the exhaustion, you're in pain. Some of the pain might be chronic, some of it might hit you out of the blue at varying frequency, knocking you on your butt, manifesting in ways that make people around you come to uninformed judgements about you, mostly deciding it's appropriate to look down on you.
Ok, so you go through life with this heavy, jagged thing bearing down on you. There are meds that sometimes render it a little lighter and take a little of the edge off the pointy parts, but not 100%, AND the meds create their own problems that can be worse than the original problem. Not always, but they might knock you out, or create new problems (smaller rock, but now all your pockets are full of little pebbles that throw off your balance, etc.) And there's therapy, which is good, except when it doesn't help or makes things worse, and it takes a big chunk out of your life, your emotional energy, your focus, your time, maybe your money, none of these things are unlimited resources.
And yeah, you live like this and there's a good chance you can't function well enough to work in a full-time paid job, or maybe you could but you can't convince anyone to hire you, or to modify a work situation so that you could function with that big rock on there.
If that were your life, and you managed to get yourself to the store to pick up groceries, if you managed not to scream out in pain and frustration on an hourly basis, if you managed not to regularly get into explosive, unresolvable conflicts with the people around you, if you found some productive/positive things to do with your time and managed to do them consistently, if you managed to avoid falling into the vortex of sleeping all day and crying all night, if you managed to stay on top of the accounting side of paying your bills (yes, not the earning part, but at least the management of your budget and execution of payments), and manage to stay somewhat positive in the face of all you live with, of your struggles, of the judgements of people around you, and so many other things I can't even list here,
you could take some pride in that.
And you'd be right to.
No, Mark is not in medical school. He's not working a million hours. But imagine what he could do if he didn't have that thing on his back, its sharp tentacles in him? I feel a little bad to do this, because you did help me when I needed it. And I think that the comments that spur your responses are genuinely frustrating. But the things you choose to go after when you go after him, and the way you do it, they make me think that (especially as an aspiring doctor) you need to work on your compassion and to develop a broader sense of what it means to have some successes in life.
But if you can't get that, at least get this: any person who lives with severe mental illness knows *plenty* about stress.
Medications, dedication, psychiatrists, therapists, focus and determination.... BOOM.... wonders. Shouldn't assume people are mentally stable and hunky dory when they might not be.
I have worked too damn hard to work away from that crap.
