Dear Katrine Nielsen:

You shared that you “have struggled with severe anxiety, depression and stress at the age of 7”, experiencing various forms of abuse. One of your biggest dreams was to move abroad to London.

At about 29, sixteen months ago, about April 2019, you moved to London, had the best job you ever had, amazing colleagues, friends, your own place and romance, and “for the first time in my life I started feeling like a normal person”.

But “all that has gone due to Covid”.Now, at 30, you are now back living with your parents in your native country, unemployed, have no friends, “back to Square one”, “in a Deep Black hole”, “Sinking in to depression”.

“I don’t know how to keep on fighting when life keeps knocking me down”, you wrote – this reminds me of a simple observation I made long ago regarding ants- how they immediately start rebuilding their nest the moment it gets destroyed. In nature, animals don’t hesitate when what they worked on for so long gets destroyed, they immediately rebuild. What if we adopted this natural, instinctive wisdom?

You asked: “How can I stay motivated and keep fighting when I keep failing?”- accept failure best you can. The world is full of   failures, everywhere- in governments (corruption and dysfunction), in hospitals (ex. medical malpractice), in businesses (failed investments, going out of business), in relationships (divorces), in the kitchen (burning a pie), etc., etc. etc. Everyone fails.

“How do I cope with the jealousy? My friends and colleagues still have a job, and are meeting up with each other in London? When I am at home far away from anybody”?- they currently have a job,  good thing, but they may be failing in their romantic relationships, or their health is failing.. I  hope not. But everyone fails in one area or the other, at one time or another.

Do the best with the life that is available to you now. Maybe doing your best right now is to plan to go back to London and do what it takes to get there.

“How do I stop comparing myself to others? Everybody I know .. are pregnant, buying house and sportscars, completely unaffected by Covid?”- no one is unaffected by Covid. But regarding comparing- instead of stopping to compare, compare yourself to others more thoroughly. For example: when you compare yourself to a woman who is pregnant factor in the fact that you don’t have to worry about bringing new life into a pandemic world. See the bigger picture.

anita

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