Hi Care,

I have been where you were at – I had to take responsibility for my family’s finances and my mom’s happiness at roughly the same age as you. My father never left, but he was never there. He is sitting maybe a metre away from me as I type but he might as well be on another planet.

I have felt what you are feeling and still do. I’ll present a possibility to you below for why you might be feeling this way. And you let me know if that doesn’t feel right for you and we can go from there.

I went over your previous post and you mentioned you were good at studies. Is being a teacher the peak of your potential? I am not looking down on teachers but where I am from teachers are overworked and underpaid and it is not intellectually stimulating. You seem to have taken this job to take care of others but in that process you may have suppressed your own potential. And the depression and anxiety could be stemming from this – depression because you feel you don’t have the safety net to shoot for the stars and are locked in to this profession and feel trapped? – thereby restricted by the highs and mostly lows it offers. And the anxiety from feeling financially insecure. If your job triggers stress, you feel you have to endure it and the consequences of not doing well are devastating for you, so it causes anxiety. You might have been an overachiever in the past, but this might be the opposite end of that spectrum for you.

Regarding the hole you describe every few years – I think the hole is always there, you just feel it’s presence more strongly when the outside world is backing you into isolation. Could this be possible? Is it absorbing the good things or simply temporarily outshining them. Do the good things in you reappear?

Can you describe to me this hole? What are you feeling in your body? Does the hole signify something missing? What do you think is missing in your life? From your previous post – you seemed to have spiralled into feeling insecure after someone rejected you – which is common for all of us. But, is there a part of you that knows what is missing and is strongly seeking it out? You seem to point to self-confidence and lacking boundaries as causing this hole – why is that?

Lying to your therapist can be fixed easily – decide if your therapist can’t handle it or if they don’t like you, then you will find a new one. That can help with being brave and honesty.