Longest post ever

Hey, I'm really surprised to have read this from you.
I don't want to give the impression that I am gaying out on here or anything, lol, and I don't say this kind of thing real often
but, I always noticed your picture, and thought what a good looking guy you were. You stand out on here, because you look like a cool guy, regular, friendly, manly and very confident. A lot of the pictures of guys I see on here, not to offend, are kind of...sleezy I guess the best word would be.

Reading your posts, I've always gotten the impression that you are intellegent and funny, and wanted to private message you a few times.

I don't know where all this is coming from, but maybe it shows you, that out own and other people's peceptions of us are very different.

I'm really sorry you are going through this depresion stuff?
Have you been treated profesionally at all for it?
Or tried herbal therapies, st. Johns wart, ect?

Here are my steps for feeling better about you.

Take care of your body.
1)Eat fruits and vegetables. 10 each day!
2)Drink 8 glasses of water, and no soda.
3) Build up to walking 45-1 hr per day over the course of 6 months - start out with 10-15 minutes. Daily walking, especially during daylight hours, and where wide views are possible cure depresion in many individuals.
4)Consider a light weight lifting circuit type routine. Excercise is a huge stress/depression releiver for men, as well as a social net for a lot of us. No matter what your fitness level, you'll meet a lot of cool guys. A gym is a fun encouraging environment, but you can do it at home to, just push ups, sit ups, ect.
5)Get 8 hours of sleep a night. Up to 10 is ok for some people. Sleep at night, get up in the morning. The earlier you get to bed, and the earlier you wake up in the morning, the better you feel. Try it.

Take care of the rest of you:
1) Read often, and read encouraging books, (inspiration, religious, health and fitness), and colorful photgraphed magazines - for example, national geographic, or about travel, cooking, home and nature.
2) Stay away from negative stuff on Tv(violance, sensationalism, the news horror, most sci-fi, gossip, tv dramas) and watching tv too late into the night.
3) Have a healthy attitude about sex. Never think that you don't deserve the kind of relationship you want. Try to avoid "hook-ups"

Focus on helping others, instead of your own problems/past.
Get involved with a church, freecycle.org, go back to playing the trumpet, volunteer for meals on wheels, or whatever interest you.

You might want to check out these traditional and accepting churches
www.elca.org The Lutheran Church
www.rca.org The Reformed Church
www.ucc.org The United Church of Christ

Also Check out www.bragg.com
and read the Bragg Healthy Lifesyle
Patricia Bragg's Father, Paul, was Jack LaLane's guru, as well as the originator of Health Food stores. It helps a lot

Thanks for sharing

I'm always amazed when people can open themselves up and share things with hundreds or thousands of people who they don't even know, I believe it shows a great deal of desire to be confident on your part.

I've personally dealt with mild depression in my own life, but I've also been very close to a number of people suffering from sever clinical depression, and I can tell you, there is hope!

I'm afraid I can't give you a map of how to get to the other end of the tunnel, but I can assure you that there is a light there, and that the light is pretty bright just a few steps further down the path.

I would urge you to see a doctor, and talk to them about social anxiety, and ask what they might be able to do for you, or recomend you do to alleviate the symptoms, you'll be amazed the difference just treating that one aspect of what you've described will do for you.

Unfortunatly depression is a dark inward spiral, and right now, all you're seeing is the spiral in, towards a dark, and non-descript center, that you percieve as the ultimate end, you can break out of it, but you've got to change your perspective to do so.

An example of how the inward spiral catches us: you where able to find partners and dates earlier in life, but now you find yourself unable to do so. your inability causes you to lose hope of doing so. your lack of hope greatly reduces the effort you put into it. your lack of effort almost assures that you won't acomplish your desire, therefore re-inforcing the belief that you can't.

Deep depression causes us, in spite of our hearts desires, to continue to give into self destructive mindsets.

Be encouraged, your feelings are VERY real, but they are not an accurate guage of reality.

Find help, please seek a professional, they can do more for you than you might imagine.

I leave you with this, atributed to Nelson Mandella at his innagural speech:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,
our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves,
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we're liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

You are an amazing person, don't be afraid to be yourself, and let all the parts of you that you like, shine!

MattBrick had really good advice, but the most important one that I sussed out was to start an intense workout regimen, fuck walking... start interval training. You will lose the weight that must be in your body, cause your face is skinny. You will have a better seratonin release and uptake pattern. Dopamine levels will improve, and you will be flooded with endorphins for hours after your workouts. I have lost 33 lbs. since February doing this. Most importantly stenuous intense exercise will build a more efficient system of capillaries to allow for nuerogenisis to start taking place again, the cessation of this process is the problem with the lo grade depression and anxiety disorders you and countless others have. Move that body!!!

I would like to talk to you about this. What I have to say would take so much space, that I'd prefer to say it, not type it. May I call you? Or can we use a voice-over-ip program? Give me the answer the next time you're on Yahoo, please.

We do care about you here. You are ours. And this is your online home.

Tallguypns:

We've discussed depression online here recently in ways that I think are very useful. I encourage you to look over those threads because they help clarify that it is not a result of the "external conditions" or, in most cases, one's past history. It is a medical condition needing medical intervention.

Your long post is most interesting and I do not discount it, but the incidents in the start don't seem to add up to the conclusions at the end. It doesn't seem a particularly crappy past. Except for the odd incident with the kid's gang in Houston, it seems almost textbook for a gay man who struggled with his identity. (Generic description of a gay man, pretty boys excepted: Lonely childhood and adolescence until finding an apptitude for the arts and intellectual companionship through that outlet. A few relationships that ended badly when young, shallow partners moved on for variety's sake. Still finds it easier to connect through intellectual means than by flashing a hot body.)

I'd bet that you have the cause-and-effect backwards in most of your post. You are not depressed because of a disappointing sex and social life, but rather you have less sexual and social interaction than you want because you are depressed.

I am out of my area of expertise, but there are many members here who have direct experience with these issues and can really be of help. Like others, I enjoy your posts, see all evidence of a really great guy, and wish you the best. I hope you will consider that this may well be a chemical issue, not a self-esteem one. Keep us posted. You deserve, and can have, a happy life.

I appreciate all the responses, and I intend on answering each of you when I have the right frame of mind and the time to do so.

I feel that there is so much more that I need to say to justify who I am to you, but, as I feared with what I've already written, it would just be called yet another whining sesssion by tallguy.

I find it encouraging that some of you have offered advice and shown support.

But, true to my own nature, I find it incredibly sad that i've had to have this discussion here. Not because you are inferior people, but because my behaviour is offensive to those who call me an online friend and because I dont have anyone in my real life that I can talk to.

Well, I came back for one more point and found your post.

First, I think it is healthy that you are having this discussion here, not offensive. No one has to read it who does not want to, and those of us who do, know that it makes sense to go where friends are. For many of us our strongest friends are now associated with this site.

You don't need to justify yourself. The point of my earlier post, in part, is that more of us than you can imagine identify almost directly with your situation. We understand that you are not whining, you're reaching out for some help. That is a great thing to do.

Now, the reason I came back this morning is that I keep thinking about your suicidal ideation, and your statement that fear of the other side is what prevents you: Damn right. You should stay afraid. It is the healthiest point in your post. The most important thing my therapist ever told me: Suicide is a permanent answer to a temporary problem.

You have a lot of friends here.

Hey man. Yeah I identify with a LOT of what you posted as well. Other than the clinical depression (though I have gotten close to that a few times too) your life story could be mind, with a few exceptions of course. I do not consider you whiny and never have. Maybe some small-minded or small-hearted people here told you that at some point, but they're wrong. You are only expressing yourself and I think that's a large part of what this board is about, or should be about, anyway. I agree with the guys who've suggested a work-out program. The "Y" should be very affordable for you, and they too offer a sliding scale for enrollment, at least they do here at ours locally. One caveat - get your heart & lungs tested either by the trainers there or by your doctor first. I had a heart valve disorder that I knew about & always kept a good watch on - but many people don't realize they have heart valve or other health issues that could contra-indicate a workout regimen. Best of luck to you, man, and message me anytime.....I'd be happy to talk to ya if you ever need that.

Tallguypns,

I've read through the thread... and in many ways, you remind me of how I was, several years ago. So I found the following really resonated:

Depression sucks. I'm not sure if you're (speaking from a medical perspective) depressed, but it sounds like you might be. It becomes a vicious circle: feel depressed, withdraw, get ignored (because it's hard for people to pay attention to you when you're withdrawn), get more depressed, repeat.

A few years ago, after a particularly painful breakup, I spent some time with a therapist and asked her the same questions you posed in the section I just quoted. And the bottom-line response is - YOU have to take control of your life, and not just wait for things to happen. Nobody is going to show up to change your life. But change your life yourself, and people will show up to be in it.

There's been a lot of great advice in this thread. Join a gym. Start up with music again. Go out more, join a club. Do something you've always wanted to do, but never had the guts to until now. Find out if there's a medical reason for your feeling the way you do, and if there is, get it addressed by a professional. And, I hate to say it, but get off the internet, or at least, spend less time on it (my piece of concrete advice). I had a wonderful web of internet relationships, oh, 10 years ago or so, but none of them were ever going to blossom into a real, in-person relationship. Perhaps few do. The best thing I did was give a lot of that up and make myself go out and meet people who lived near me and had similar interests.

Above all, do things that make you feel good about yourself. Nobody is going to love you unless you love yourself.

Take baby steps at first if you feel you need to. Or go-all out into something that you've always wanted to. Understand that this is a process, and not something that happens instantaneously. But - and please trust me on this - rest assured that this does work. I am living proof.

Feel better. And get on this stuff. Not next week. Now.

Tall---I find it incredibly amazing that you were able to bear your soul in such a transparent way here. As one who himself has had a difficult past and has (now) more online friends than community friends, I can empathize with that, I empathize with your depression (dysthymia) and your struggles with self-image and self-love.

What I want you to realize is that you do have the power to evince change in yourself. As humans we have the power to re-create much of ourselves. You have the strength to do this (it took tremendous strength to write those posts).

Think about beginning your work on the inside (emotional affect, loving yourself, etc.) and with more work there, move to the outside.

We're here for you, handsome.

I vaguely consider myself a Christian, although the reasoned scientific part of my mind tells me there is no god. Pretty hard to be spiritual in a religion that tells you you're going to hell because of who you are.

i dont think there are any sort of stand up workshops in this town. There arent even any stand up clubs. I dont really think that my wit is appropriate for stand up or improv anyway.

I've been making concerted efforts at making friends here, but because of my anxietys and other issues, i've been attempting to do this online on gay.com. People say they want friends, but then insist on a picture. Once pictures are exchanged, they suddenly have no more interest in me. This cycle has been repeated about 100 times with me so far in this town.

I really hope you get back to 100% soon, especially in the brain department.

As far as working out goes....I did that a few years back, and while I lost a few pounds I didnt feel any better about myself.