Wall of text.

Single male in mid 20s.

A couple of years ago, I was with a company, working a likeable but mentally demanding job.

In a conversation with an employee, I commented on one of our deliverables as being bad. The employee immediately said that of all the people, I should not be the one saying such things. I provided my justification for saying it, and the incident was over, or so I thought.

But later that night, a huge amount of guilt appeared – it seems my mind not only rejected its own justifications, but also believed in the other person’s judgement of me. It seems that “of all people” was the part which hurt the most (along with the “should” as the second most), being singled out as the worst and the most immoral among the 7 billion people, who will, as the phrase presumes, will not do what I did. The next morning, the guilt returned, this time with so much force as to prevent me from getting up from my bed – literally. The mind was heavy with guilt; my body went limp and my mind would not let me get up. Never had I experienced such an incapacitation.

I called my family (who lived in a different city). It took 2 hours with them on the phone before finding enough strength to get up and carry out the daily routine and get ready for work. I was extremely afraid and anxious of going to work, after feeling like the worst employee and the worst human. Once my family promised me to remain on phone for the rest of the day, it became a bit easier to head for work. The day went on the phone, with my staying out in the nearby park for as long as possible. This was the start of a very difficult period – regular calls with my family, *every* day, multiple times and at odd hours, were required to help me stay afloat.

I felt angry towards that employee for ‘singling me out and shutting me up’, and towards myself for shooting myself on my own foot. It was becoming very difficult to carry out even the routine tasks of dealing with normal people, buying food and other items, and just carrying on a normal life. Work, and general commercial, social interactions became too difficult to perform without listening for hours to the encouraging words of my family.

After a year and a half of a highly stressful period, I crumbled and left that job, but without any reconciliation, feeling like a false person who had ‘harmed’ my employer. Since the stress about a mentally demanding job too was a factor, I decided to go for further studies as a proper means of employing my skills. A few people who knew of my leaving the job without a backup job in line, called me stupid, which might be a correct assessment.

I moved back with my family, hoping to begin studying and hopefully enter a college again to reset my career. But back here at home, as the reality of what happened caught up with me, panic attacks around losing the job, and bouts of anger against that employee, my employer, and myself began surfacing. Thoughts of suicide became stronger. These overran any ideas of rebuilding my future. Giving into the negative narrative, my conclusion was: my life is now officially and properly destroyed.

I chose to visit a medical professional (I did not want to go for medication ever, even while still holding a job), who provided me with medication, for schizophrenia, which robbed me of sleep and accelerated suicidal thoughts. I was able to mentally witness and experience my sleep leaving/being-‘robbed’ away from me; it began with a strange ability to consciously detect myself falling asleep, and then degraded into a complete inability to fall asleep. The medication also accelerated suicidal thoughts, to the point when I had to incessantly speak out-loud the sentence ‘I want to live’ for hours, in order to prevent my mind from bullying me into committing suicide, while constantly being compelled, by the medication, to walk incessantly and quickly within the house (think of a man babbling and walking quickly).

Stopping the medication gave rise to withdrawal symptoms of involuntary, full-body tremors, of an increased urgency to die and, slightly less scary, of feelings of nausea just before eating. Lunches and dinners were preceded by my mind’s forcing me to feel nausea. Fortunately, those feelings were just feelings – the stomach did not actually push up anything. Attending to these feelings were a must before my mind let me put a morsel in my mouth. The medication had to be continued, despite its side-effects.

Troubled with them (the side-effects) and angry at the psychiatrist’s suggestion of institutionalization for remedying them, I left him and approached another doctor, requesting him to help me pull this medication off of me. The necessity to speak and walk incessantly did disappear gradually. But, despite doctor’s increasing the dose of the sleeping pills to 4 times the current dosage (2 pills instead of 0.5), sleep still eluded me. Fear of the night was present, as its hours had to be passed tossing and turning, with the fear of damaging myself or of dying from the consistent lack of sleep, by my side.

The new pills were not without fault. They gave me abnormal headaches – aches spread superficially across all of the surface of the head. They also made me verbally aggressive. In a manner, this was my trying to fight back with words, having never done such an act before, but my verbal and inappropriate attacks were upon unsuspecting, normal, friendly people.

The situation began worsening with the thought that, since I was now becoming mentally incapacitated even under medication and since being without a job, my future holds misery and possible poverty and homelessness if institutionalization were to become necessary. Finally, after 3 months of joblessness, afraid that I will commit suicide without work, I requested the same employer to take me back, providing a reason about serious personal situations requiring me to abandon my pursuit of studies. They did take me back.

Although re-employment provided me with a temporary financial relief while I continue to be on medication, the old unreconciled feelings of ‘being wronged’ by the judgement of a single person arose, plunging me further down into the depths of my disease. I continued to deliver service to the company, while tolerating the daily headaches and building up sleep debt. It would take me 1.5 years to be completely off any medication and be able to fall asleep without any aid. The anger, the stress of the job, and the tendency to verbally attack anyone (including close family) whom *I perceived* as threatening did not disappear, though.

Present day: The dependency on the medication is no more, after having forced myself to gradually come off of it. Sleep occurs but not soundly – dreams appear daily and they are always about my being alone in trouble. They either wake me up early (as they did today) or continue through the early mornings until it actually is the time to wake up. The head is always heavy during the day, with mild to severe headaches. They become severe only due to lack of sleep. A pain reliever helps for a few hours of the day, in that case. These few hours are the time of feeling normal without the heaviness, and actually with the ability and motivation to carry out my tasks. During the rest of the time, the mind remains cloaked in heaviness.

A third professional was consulted a few weeks ago, but the skin developed allergic reactions to the medication. It had to be stopped within a couple of days of taking it.

Unable to sustain myself, I have become overly dependent on my family to an abnormal extent – like a child. Thoughts of leaving the job are again gaining strength. I am somehow still the same person who ‘harmed’ or can unconsciously cause ‘harm’ to my employer. Unable to fight back the guilt, unable to see myself as a deserving person. These feelings arose from deep within the mind. Conscious use of words is necessary in order to quell them, but the mind says that I do not even deserve to do that. Since childhood, my mind has always had trouble with speech – I was the mute, shy, fearful kid. Being surrounded now by people who are required to spend most of their job speaking, is another factor adding to my problems. Reading/Writing are easier for me than listening/speaking. Speech has been exhausting, and attempts to speak always frustrate me, as converting the nonverbal understanding into speech has been difficult. Thinking is done nonverbally under the assistance of the written word, and remembering is done in terms of mental images of characters read.

Sometimes, without my control, angry statements like “they (the company) DON’T WANT us here” or “how could you spend so much effort for THEM” are muttered involuntarily. The image of that employee appears in my mind frequently and automatically, bringing along with it the anxiety and the guilt. My abilities to concentrate and to study have diminished. Appearing for interviews is an impossible task, as is caring for myself. Instead of applying for another job, the mind says it is better to leave the current job. This is now becoming a cycle of leaving – the mind wants to leave this job as a means to ‘settle the score’ for my defection, but once out of job, the same mind is sure to panic and to want to die.

The similarity (of actions of doing or speaking something considered ‘evil’ by the world) between my incident of being singled out and the incidents with Justine Sacco, and others, seems to place me in the same lineup with them. The hate that was and is being directed at them, by association, also becomes meaningful for me. I am also in hiding, in a sense, as they are/were. The mental health problems are similar. The big difference is: in my situation, I became the self-righteous mob which lynched me.

The statement ‘I want to live’, which had been forgotten for a year, was tried again today, and oddly, it did work, in that it filled me with encouragement, but… for leaving the current job.

Ajahn Brahm’s talks used to bring me peace. Now, they do nothing for me. Mere reading about the 4 noble truths would put my mind at ease, but not so anymore. It seems that my damages are too severe to allow me to live as a monk – a life which did seem worth experiencing in the past, precisely because the teachings did affect me then. Had I been trained in Buddhism (or even basic life skills), the situation would have been not so severe, I believe.

TheHeartOfTuxes on reddit says being angry is a way of defending an idea of myself. On speaking the statement “I no longer have to defend myself”, some sense of relief does wash over me, but it was short-lived.

The “checklist of cognitive distortions” document lists 10 distortions – they are all present in me :(.

Medication, to which I was opposed, did eventually cause additional harm. The mind is no longer pristine.
I want to recover the ability of being impacted by the teachings of the Buddha. The reason they are no longer effective on me is unknown. With medication failing and the teachings ineffective on me, it is becoming difficult to find a non-violent way out.

What meta-teachings can help me become receptive again to the teachings of the Buddha?
Besides professional help, how else can I help myself?