Just wondering in a general sense. What was the lowest point of your life? By any metric, I guess, that you choose to measure it. The point, or period, during which you found yourself most depressed or hopeless or sad or frightened or powerless. How long did it last? When / if it did end and you managed to climb back out of the hole, was it something you yourself did about it, or was it something that just seemed to happen or some element of luck or act of god? And then, in your life since that period, do you feel you recovered entirely from the low point? Or did you suffer damages either material / physical or psychological from which you feel you'll likely never recover?
Interested to hear how far down folks have sunk, and if / how they managed to fight back up again.
I'll start. Honestly my last ten years has felt like one very long low point. Obviously a spike here or there to permit me to keep going, but overall I can't point to anything in the last decade which has failed to leave me further diminished somehow. I am not on the streets, my health is good, and I have no legal troubles or debt, but I have suffered a tremendous collapse in self-confidence and the ability to believe things will improve. A sense of powerlessness and hopelessness has soaked into me so that now I feel if I ever do manage to climb out of the hole, it will require some hand of god scenario because I do not believe there is anything that I can do to effect a change in my own life, except for the further negative. I do worry that even if I am able to move past this period, I'll never fully recover from what it's done to my ability to believe in myself and trust my own judgement.
Unfortunately I don't have yet a post-low-point story of how I managed out of it or what it's like on the other side.