Depressed after major life change

Pretty much my story too Daniel, I have told this story on a few boards, it is now 1 year 2 months to the day since I too made the biggest mistake of my life and much like you I honestly think I had all of my confidence and happiness due to my identity being from my environment.

My story, I purchased a 1900s street terrace in 2003 for 30,000 it was a a bit tatty around the edges but over 10 years I transformed it into a huge open plan 4 bedroom palace (in my eyes) only problem was the rough area it was in and for some stupid unknown reasons I decided to sell it; I got a lower than expected price for it but still proceeded with the sale, partly due to the pressure from estate agent saying it was probably the best offer I would achieve.

I purchased a 1930s semi and that turned out to be a complete disaster with over 30,000 required in repairs which wounded me, especially as the bank would only release 11,000, not knowing what to do I part exchanged the money pit and bought a brand new home less than 4 months later thinking that it would solve my problems.  It didnt, I still miss my little street house every single day; as silly as it sounds I would swap my new build home back tomorrow if I could only have my old house back.  I have been depressed for over a year now, Ill have the odd day where I will feel ok but quickly spiral into thoughts of regret and ruminating over how good things were in my old house.  For anyone saying snap out of it, or you dont realise how good you have got it etc I would say, you havent got a clue what it is like to live with these kind of thougths.  I have dealt with deathg of both parents and family members walking out of my life but nothing compared to the feelings of loss that this has left me with.  I have tried fixing my new build up, wall papering, painting, putting my stamp on it and it does no good, I never have the feeling that I had in my old place.

I have been through therapy and medication and nothing solves it.  I have no idea when the acceptance stage will come, but most days I just feel miserable, I cannot get the energy to do anything most days and have no enjoyment in doing things which would leave me smiling and happy.

I would do anything to just get back to how I felt before all of this happened, but I really do not think I will ever get back to that level of comfort.

When depressed no matter how intelligent u are, it's too hard to

Work out what it feeing and why. Antidepressants only help to a point

You need counselling. From what u'v said I dont think you need

Antidepressants now. You need to make sense of your life, feelings and

And thoughts. If had depression on and off, mild and severe for

Many years. And I feel that the stage//state it in presently needs to

Talk, get feedback, advice etc. Before it gets worst. A doctor will refer

U to a cpn/community psychiatric nurse or a psychologist through the

NHS. But could be a long waiting list. Other option is private if u can

Afford it. You could buy books/self hell books on depression, anxiety

Etc. But to me, they are helpful, but only if you are mentally strong enough

Enough. Anything worth a try. But I would advice you get councillor

As soon as possible. I hope this helps. Let me know. Mandy

Hi Daniel999 I dont know if you are still following this discussion but hope that you have managed to find some resolution and no longer feel so trapped in the situation.  I recently moved house to another area of a city after having been in the same area for years and am struggling to feel at home either inside or out of the flat.  I have been in a difficult situation before which involved having bought a flat and been at the mercy of neighbours, feral children and a housing association who treated owners like a piggy bank they could dip into when repairs and any major works were happening.  As a female on my own with only one option on the jobs market and not a most inspiring one at that, I felt genuinely suicidal at times and this came to a head in 2012 when they finally agreed to purchse the home back from me.  To be very honest, I do not know what would have happened otherwise or how I would have coped.  Now, having moved recently and this time to a completely different area, am finding it hard to come and go from the place and feel the slightly longer commute is beyond me.  I managed really well for the past couple of months but lately have felt like am trapped inside and can't face going outside and in to the city where there are many people and traffic and noise.  I have been on medication for depression for years and this keeps me going as the desperate melancholy that hits me can feel overwhelming and nauseating.  I hope this won't last and that I will again feel confident and at home in my surrounding area but at the moment, that feels a very long way away.  I miss my friends (although they are not far) and I miss my life as it was and who I was there, it all seemed simpler and manageable and now even the tiniest things feel like a huge problem.  Feel better as am sure you do by now.  Hugs

I just wanted to throw in my two cents worth, even though the OP does not appear to be participating in the thread anymore, I found this forum at random through a google search and have found it helpful and comforting to read everyone else's similar stories here, and it has given me some peace knowing at least there are others out there going through the same sort of situations as myself. My post is extremely long but I figured I would share, in the case that someone out there might find some kind of peace or comfort reading it and seeing that they are not alone out there.

I am located in the US and have recently moved from Northern California (where I am from) to East Texas. Like others here, I thought the move was going to be a good thing for me, yet already I find myself struggling to function each day. My story is this...

First of all I have coped with bouts of depression on and off throughout my life since my early teens, so it is no stranger to me. Most of the time it seemed to come with major life changes such as moving, graduating from school, career changes, along with the usual things that would cause anyone depression, such as my divorce and relationship breakups. The most recent chain of events began two years ago with a job I absolutely loved, that was the last 6 years of a then 15-year-long career. I LOVED my job, I excelled at it, I was one of those rare people who did spectacularly in a hard-to-fill niche that most people didn't even want to try at. I was living in a tiny, old run down rental apartment downtown that I grew to despise over time. But that didn't really matter because I loved my job. It was my life. My boss was awesome, he was a long time colleague and friend, we were both the same age, and had both moved up the ranks without the help of a bachelor's degree, and instead held technical degrees and years of experience to get us where we were. He was the best boss I ever had, and helped me grow and thrive in my work in every way possible. At the time (2014) I was a temporary seasonal employee, and always had been, which meant I had to get re-hired every year and got no benefits other than just my paycheck. He tried to help boost my career and life by convincing the management that my job should be made permanent. He got his wish, but that meant the job had to be formally advertised and I had to compete with others for it.

As is typical for the government agency I work for, I did not get the job I had held for the last 6 years. It was instead given to a person with no experience in my field, yet outranked me simply because he was already permanent. It is apparently much easier and preferable for the government to hire an already-permanent person rather than do the extra legwork and paperwork it takes to make a good temporary employee into a permanent. My boss had to tell me two weeks before Christmas 2014 that I did not get the job. My life went into a tailspin which I am still struggling to recover from to this day. I am by no means a slob and a hoarder, but after being told I was not hired, I quit taking care of my home, quit cleaning anything that wasn't absolutely necessary, quit putting things away. My home turned into a dark cluttered pig pen. I would retreat to my bedroom every evening after work (the only tidy room in the apartment), shut the door, and stay there until rising time the next day.

In a panic, I applied for a job in another district which I had previously worked for years ago and not enjoyed due to bad office politics. I was hired, still as a temporary, and once again hated my job simply due to the same bad office politics which were still present. After that year was up, I applied and was chosen for a permanent job at the beginning of this year (2016) in yet another district of the same agency, where my career had started long ago in the same exact office. The commute was long and hellish, well over an hour, but that didn't matter to me because I was thrilled. I thought it was finally my big break. It was a homecoming, I was coming back to my roots, to the very place I had grown up in that had given me my first job as a teenager, inspired me and begun this career so long ago. I felt I was specifically chosen by not only my employers but by divine intervention to be the one to come back to this place and help fix a huge amount of damage that had been done in the area. I had a long family legacy there. It was simply *meant* to be me there.

I was wrong.

There were even worse politics there than where I had just left. My two closest coworkers were both powerful people with type-A personalities, they treated me like dirt every step of the way simply due to me having spent so much time in the next district over. They didn't like the way things were done there, vetoed every decision I made, treated me like I was stupid and made my new permanent job a living hell. On top of that, the housing market was absurdly high in the area and there was no way as a single person I could afford a new house close to work. So I continued the hellish commute back and forth to my small old rental apartment in the district & town I was not chosen to be permanent in.

In the middle of this year I had reached a point where my bucket was so full of BS that *something* had to change or I was going to lose my marbles. I could not see myself staying in this situation for the next 25 years until I retire without going absolutely mad. When the announcement for an agency job in Texas came across my work email, I thought, "heck, why not?" I am 40 and have no kids or husband, and no reason not to make a big change to something better. My long-passed grandma was from the same part of Texas, and I had lived there previously for a short time in my younger days. So again I felt I was somehow meant to go there. Once again, I applied and was chosen. Again I was thrilled, I was on the up and up, this job would pay me more in a better economy that would be much easier for me to thrive in. Quite quickly and easily, I bought myself a log house on a small piece of land, something I had always dreamed of doing since I was a teen. So just in the past month, I have uprooted my California life, moved myself halfway across America for a new job, bought a home, and thought the whole time everything would finally be awesome and come together as I deserved after all this suffering.

But the same depression demons followed me to Texas, because once again the office politics are mucky and difficult. My new boss is nice and friendly, but also doesn't have lengthy experience as a leader. Hence he tends to dish out work quickly without really thinking much on what he's telling others to do or who is best for it, then quickly disappears into his luxurious corner office, if he's there at all. My direct coworker, who is supposed to be training me, is a retirement-aged man who is resentful of my presence because a much younger, prettier girl with a sparkling personality, who has been at this office awhile, also applied for my job and she did not get it. He had unofficially been training her for it anyway before I was chosen over her due to my long superior level of experience in this sort of work. So two out of the three people I have to share a four-person cubicle with already disliked me before I even had a chance, and my old-man coworker does practically nothing to teach me anything about my new environment and how things are done in this area. I have to ask him tons of questions to get anything out of him, and when I do get an answer, it is almost always practically useless. He always sounds so exhausted and negative with me, I have to struggle to get a full sentence out of him, yet when this other girl comes in the room, he lights up like a Christmas tree and chats up a storm with her. I couldn't care less if they have a good friendship. I don't mean to sound jealous because I'm not. He isn't someone I want to be friends with. But it isn't fair that he treats me like crap and doesn't help me learn simply because his friend didn't get the job. I at least deserve a fair chance at succeeding in this job, and after what just happened to me in my last job, I refuse to allow selfish jerks to sabotage me again. They don't know who they're messing with. This ain't my first rodeo, or even my second. I try to tell myself that every day when I am struggling to break out of my depression funk, that at least my previous suffering has made me stronger and wiser.

On top of the work problems, my home isn't exactly a dream come true either. My employer really pushed me to find a new home quickly, so as to start the new job quickly. Hence I chose a house that was nice but not exactly what I would have chosen had I been given more time to pick something I truly wanted. Though out in the country, it is in a rather suburbanized neighborhood where everyone mows the lawn every Saturday, trims their hedges in perfect rectangles, and has a cookie-cutter life exactly like every other neighbor that makes their long rat-race commute to the big city of Houston, which I don't do, due to my odd government career. I am used to a much more real country life where nobody has to do landscaping if they don't want to, and everyone's life is different from everyone else's, and that's fine with everyone else. Since I am paying for my house all alone, I can't afford a riding mower or a landscaper. Hence I stick out like a sore thumb in my new middle class family neighborhood. I am the odd duck with tall grass and no family. Two neighbors kindly introduced themselves and welcomed me when I first arrived in the neighborhood, yet have never spoken to me since. In the overwhelming bliss of buying my home, I was seeing it through rose colored glasses, and now that reality has set in I see my new home for what it is and know beyond the shadow of a doubt I will not be keeping it for the lifetime of my 30-year mortgage.

I'm not a social butterfly to begin with, and the few friends I had are now all 2,000 miles away from me. It has always been challenging for me to make new friends who are actually good for me. Bad ones are always easy to find. What is left of my family is very scattered and broken. Nobody in my family really has healthy relationships with each other anymore, so that really isn't a place I can go to for any reassurance either. My mom has dementia, and is permanently hospitalized and can no longer speak due to her illness. So I can't even call my mama and cry on her shoulder when I'm having a particularly bad day. I truly am all alone here in this big house I just bought.

In the wacky dark thoughts that come with depression, I have found myself thinking ridiculous things like, "I should have just stayed where I was at and never come here. Maybe I should just go back." That is absurd, because as I just explained in detail, my prior life consisted of a dream job gone very sour and an old crappy apartment I hadn't cleaned in two years. Not only can I not get either of those things back, I don't *want* either of them back. Hence my current reality is what I have for now. I also find myself thinking that after a year (which I am required to stay in this job) I can simply move on to another one and sell my house. Which is probably questionable to the extent that the same misfortune may very well just occur again.

I don't know if I really have the best of advice for how to deal with this sort of major-life-change depression, as I am in the mire of it myself right now. Counseling has helped *a little* in the past, so I am considering it. Antidepressants *never* worked for me previously, and I have adopted a more holistic lifestyle without reliance on pharmaceuticals, so drugs aren't really an option for my life. I know from past experience that regular exercise helps ALOT, so I am planning on doing that when I can actually pull myself up by my bootstraps and make myself do it.

I also consider making changes in smaller steps. Rather than give in to the urge to find a new job and new house right away or as quickly as possible, I can put up with my job for now, and I have resolved to having a confidential one-on-one with my new boss once he comes back from vacation, just so he knows what I'm struggling with at work. I can also slowly but methodically work on improving my house to sell one day so I can eventually at least get into one I actually enjoy, in an entirely different town and neighborhood I will fit into easier. I would gladly put up with a much longer commute again just to be in a home I truly love and want to keep. I can see where it can actually turn into an addiction for some people, constantly moving on to a new place and having no roots. I try to look at my situation from the perspective of how to change it in more small, easier to manage pieces, rather than repeatedly ripping my entire life out of the ground every time something doesn't work. Things might be different after my year is up. The job may get better. Or if it doesn't, I don't mind getting a different one. Having just gone through such a drastic change makes doing it again not seem nearly so scary.

For me, having the right perspective seems to be key. If I look too far ahead into the future, I panic because I don't know how to get to where I truly want to be in my life, and I feel stuck and overwhelmed. But if I focus too much on the here and now, I also panic and get tripped up in my depression because I don't like my current situation. So it seems to help me best just to focus on today and the immediate future, as in the next couple of days, like, "What am I going to do once I get home today? What am I going to do around my house this weekend?" If all I can do on a particular day is make myself get out of bed and shower and go to work, then I tell myself that's okay. Somewhere I read a saying that went, "Let whatever you do today be enough." Small manageable pieces. I look at today and tomorrow, without losing sight of what I want to have in the long run someday. I try to take baby steps toward that goal. That is the best I can do for now.

Again I know this is terribly long… what can I say, I like to write. So if you've read this far, thanks for reading, and I hope it helps someone out there.

Hi daniel

Hi

An update on my recovery from worst depression I've ever suffered from.  In my last post I said how I was applying for employment.  I did cancel several interviews but one job was very attractive to me so I went for the interview.  I am so happy to have been successful and started working in November.  The biggest change is not being at home on my own.  I now meet people at work and this has made me feel part of a community.  I realised that getting a job would be the most positive step I could take but for someone else it will be something else but what ever it is I say go and get it now.  Don't hesitate and don't give up.

Hi Daniel, if it can comfort you, know that what you are experiencing, is psychologically speaking not that uncommon: major life change, especially the relocation issue is a tricky trigger. I have a similar experience, although with some diferences compared to your story. My partner, my 6 year old daughter and I lived well in my loft until my partner pushed me to buy a new old house to renovate completely. After 1 year and 8 months of renovation I completely lost myself with panic attacks. In the beginning I didn't know where it was coming from, but bit by bit the puzzle came together. And it was not only the messy and intense renovation. I thaught it was only the house but in reality there is a deeper underlying psychological process that can be triggered by some events and that are different for each of us. My apartment was my place and I've created it, I could identify me with it. By moving and buying together a house, that in the end maybe I didn't really want, it is complete fusion between me and my partner, and I don't feel safe anymore in that new house. In my case it is also very symbolic building together a house, its a further engagement that maybe I cannot deal with for the moment. I also have been very sensitive to major life changes or moving physically from one environment to another.Now I am installing myself in a separate room (kind of man cave) and I must say that it helps to soften my symptoms: I sleep better and are closer to myself Also when i am reading a book there it calms me down. But i really don't know how it will evolve because in the morning i wake up again with anxiety.The best thing what you can do is always to try to make some moves and to see how you feel in each of these moves. Try to create some (physical) space for your self within or outside the house where you feel comfortable. You need to speak about it with your wife so that you can get understanding because it is difficult to understand for another how you you are really feeling.

Hi,

You wrote your message 3 years ago, how are things with you now?

When I saw the title I immediately felt the need to read your story as I am in a very similar situation. It's been really difficult for me as well plus I am a mother of 2 boys. For myself I had to quit everything, my great job, my house, my friends and my favourite yoga spot, my kids friends and their school and moved out of the province to get away from a narcissist partner. I thought leaving a toxic relationship would be empowering... It's been a year now since we moved into a country log home that my father built but never really finished, he is in phase 1 dementia and I have been experiencing depression and many anxiety attacks just from having to see my father changing and looking at this house thinking how the hell will I find the strength and the money to take care of all of this. Why me?! I became frustrated and victimized myself wondering why I'm the one who had to drop everything when I was the one who made it all happen.

Question for you is and i felt like asking you this right away, what did your wife do to help you during this difficult time?

I guess my answer to you is you were definitely at a crossroad and you felt the grass could be greener, and you took a chance! Nothing wrong with that. We live and learn. You expressed that you felt grateful but lost yourself, same here, i thought moving and gaining my freedom, start fresh and live happily would come easy but within a month I became really depressed and anxious.

Been depressed and lost will disconnect you from the real significance of what life has to teach you. I am a strong believer that everything happens for a reason. That's how I'm able to fonction even with a depression. I try to remind myself that there's a purpose for this and it may take a year or 5, one day I will look back and understand.

I also miss the city... and the pavement!!!

I wonder what you've been up to since. I hope you are in a better place