That Feeling Of Uselessness
Have you ever felt that you’re good for nothing? You question what have you achieved in life and even though you may have a glorious past behind you, your current state of mind reminds you how you aren’t doing anything worthwhile at the present. You think of questions like, are you a good child to your parents? A good partner to your soul mate? A good brother/sister? A good friend? A committed professional? when you get a negative answer to all these you ask the trump question, are you even a good human being?
This feeling is such that it makes you even doubt who you are. You feel that the people closest to you don’t understand you or how you feel. You feel alone. I’d like to believe that everyone goes through this state of mind and also that no matter how good you’re doing you won’t have a confident positive answer to all of these questions at all times. You will always be lacking somewhere or the other. Then why do we ask ourselves this? Because we can’t accept the fact that we can lack. We think we’re doing our best and that should be enough to have a happy life. We forget that we’re human and it’s okay to be imperfect. We forget that life doesn’t work the way we want it to.
There are different stages you go through when feeling ‘useless’.
Anger
Defeat
Sadness
Hope
I believe it starts with feeling angry. Angry with ourselves because of not being able to do something properly. Angry with others for not understanding what we intended to do.
Then comes feeling defeated. With all the anger and trying we accept defeat thinking we were unable to do it. It’s the end of trying and no matter what we do it’s not becoming better. We accept that we’re good for nothing.
With the acceptance of defeat comes sadness. Sadness for giving up and feeling defeated. Sadness which makes us believe we will never be able to do it and there are so many people better than us. We can never match up to them and that we should simply let go. This stage hurts like hell. However, just like it’s the darkest before dawn we get tired of feeling sad and that’s when we think of what can/should we do next. This is the final stage, Hope.
It make take a few hours or days to go through the whole process. It becomes faster when you have someone to help but you don’t necessarily need someone to help, you come through it eventually anyway.
I’m no expert or philosopher. I’m just a human who has gone through this phase quite a few times. What I’ve come to realise is that if I do or had done some things, I could have come out of it faster :
1. Don’t lose hope — I can’t emphasize enough on how important this is. Hope can sail us through any kind of storm and trust me this feeling of uselessness is more often than not created by our own minds. It may not even actually be true but we still feel it, hence it’s safe to say that it’s not even a storm! Hope that things will get better, that you’ll get what you desire. Even if you don’t get something or things don’t get better, just the little hope can remind you of what is going right in your life at the moment.
2. It’s okay to cry — Cry your heart out. Don’t hesitate. It’ll help you feel lighter and drain out some of those emotions.
3. Believe that it’s okay and normal to feel this way — Earlier I thought it was just me. Now, I’ve come to realise that everyone is feeling this. It is as normal as it can get. Accepting it to be normal takes the extra fuss of ‘why does it only happen to me’ away from it.
4. Why should it not be you? Why are you so special? — I’ve had my share of ‘why me? I haven’t wronged anyone then why is this happening to me’. Then one day I saw a widow, who has gone through much worse than I could ever imagine, say — Why not me? Why am I so special? It could happen to anyone right, if it’s happening to me I should accept it and do the best I can in this situation. This has had a huge impact on the way I think now and trust me I feel much stronger of handling things that come my way.
5. Don’t make any hasty decisions or jump to conclusions — The emotions flowing inside us make us say things we don’t mean. They cloud our thought process and we more often than not make decisions or say things that we regret just a couple of hours later. While some of these things can be trivial and correctable but why take a risk of letting some passing emotional state make a change that can turn your life upside down.
6. Know that the universe is not out to get you. The people who love you are not your enemies and are not thinking bad of/for you. This is the most common and the strongest feeling that I’ve felt. It feels like people you trust the most are saying things to hurt you, to make your life miserable. Since you’re in the miserable state, you project your own feelings on what others say. You need to stop and ask yourself — is this what they really want? or is it what I’m feeling about myself right now? or is it the worst thing my mind thinks that they can mean by saying what they’re saying? Instead of thinking of the worst that could mean, think of the best it could mean.
7. Believe that it’s just a phase — Realization of it being just a phase is your path towards hope. Like all other phases in life, this too shall pass. You’ve felt lakhs of emotions in life and you’ve come this far. This will add onto that as another experience and it shall pass. Just like ‘All good things come to an end’ “All bad things come to an end too”.
8. Try to bring some sense into yourself and listen to that good voice inside you which is being pushed away by these feelings — We become big time ignorers to all the sensible talks and things. If only we can separate the problem from us and look at it from a distance, the sensible voice will be clearer to us and help us make wise decisions.
9. Remember the good times and know you deserve to be happy — This may backfire if you’re feeling too sad and remembering good times may feel worse thinking ‘oh those days are gone and not coming back’. The trick is to think if it can happen in the past, it can happen in future as well. If it has happened in the past, there is substance in it and I definitely deserve to feel it again!
10. Indulge yourself in something you like or liked and haven’t done in a long time- I vouch for this one! I was feeling sad just now and I thought let’s write — I indulged myself in writing this post and I feel so much better already! Doing something else takes your mind off things, brings your hormones and emotions to normal. You start enjoying what you’re doing, feel happier and then when you come back to the problem you look at it from a positive perspective.
11. Think of how can you come out of this state of mind without someone else’s help — Not everyone or anyone is going to be available for you at all times. Being alone in situations is a part of life. Accept this and don’t blame people. Think of things you can do alone — listen to music, watch movies, take a walk, read a book, write and the list goes on. Be dependent on yourself and trust yourself to make you happy (I’m trying hard with this one).
It’s much easier said than done. I agree with you on not wanting to do any of these when feeling low/useless/sad etc. I don’t myself but what I’m trying and I’d suggest you to try is to trust and believe in yourself to remind you of all this. Give some power to the good voice in you, let it guide you when you want it the least. Let’s all keep trying, if it doesn’t help we’ll be stuck at the same state of mind, we’re not losing anything. But if it did help, we’ll get to smile, make others around us smile and a lot more.
Originally posted on Quora.