Dear Erika:

Having read a reply you wrote to another member earlier this month and your post on this thread, this is the information you provided: you are 26, currently unemployed and living with your family. You had a full time job for years, “with another PT job and school on the side”. Two months ago you quit that full time job because you were “overwhelmed, wanted a change, and could no longer afford the expensive city” where you lived, and you wanted to “start doing something different and exciting”.

You view yourself as “an extremely passionate, kind, resourceful person and all I want is to add good into this world” (and your reply to the other member does show all these things), but since you moved and live with family, you went “from being very busy and productive to absolutely nothing… struggling with intense anxiety and low mood”. You are “too unfocused and overwhelmed.. unproductive and indecisive”.

You are being medicated for ADHD although you were not diagnosed with it. You are “emotional beyond belief- every issue in the world from poverty to climate change hurts me to my core… I feel everything so deeply, I know I can put it to use.. but I can’t get anything done”.

You want to go to graduate school but you aren’t focused enough to apply. You get excited about this or that potential job or plan, but you get overwhelmed in the process of “writing emails, making phone calls, writing about myself, getting documents in order.. researching jobs… I try and I try but I either end up distracted, bored, overwhelmed, anxious, frozen or confused”.

“When I push harder I become panicky… Every year the career and school world feels more complex and harder to navigate. Feeling like I don’t fit into this world makes me feel small, useless and sad”.

My understanding of your situation (and please let me know what you think of it): I assume you moved back to your parents’ home/ family of origin recently, having left the expensive city where you lived. it may very well be that “this world” you mentioned above, is your home-of-origin. You are back to that world of your childhood, feeling “distracted, bored, overwhelmed, anxious, frozen or confused… small, useless and sad” just like you felt as a child, more days than not.

As a child you were sometimes excited about life as all children are, hearing the “call of the wild”, wanting to go out and play and later, go  out and do great things in the (bigger) world. But there was also fear and hurt and sadness that stops you from following that call of the wild.

You wrote that every issue in the world from poverty to climate change hurts you to your core. I think that it’s been issues in your smaller world, your home of origin, that hurt you to your core. And this hurt has been reactivated now that you live with your parents/ family of origin.

“I feel everything so deeply, I know I can put it to use”- and I think you can put it to great use, and it is exciting that indeed you can. But first you have to lessen that anxiety and hurt and sadness by becoming more aware of how it really was for the child that you were, in that smaller world where you lived.

“Self-assured people get remembered in interviews, network better because they have nothing to lose”, you wrote in your reply to another member. Becoming more aware of your childhood experience will make you one of those self-assured people who get remembered.

When we resist the pain that’s been there for so long, it is because we fear losing ourselves, as if we will collapse if we feel again like we felt then. But when you do face that old pain, after you do, you have nothing to lose, and you can move on and able to follow that calling of the wild.

anita