Are You Stuck in a Rut? Get Inspired

We all go through a rough patch and struggle to see the end - take 5 minutes and inspire yourself.

In 2010, I met a girl. We fell in love quickly, she moved in quickly, we got engaged quickly. Between the engagement and the wedding (at which point we had known each other 13 whole months), I quit a job out of severe depression, my car got repossessed, her engine went unaffordably unrepairable, we got evicted, and we had to move in with a horrible roommate in a temporary house that was being sold and we were basically just paying utilities to watch the place.

We got married and within weeks, had to move again because they sold the house so we moved in with the elderly mother of a mutual friend. Turns out she was bipolar and she took us in during a manic phase. The depressive phase kicked in and she subsequently hated us but refused to say anything, so she just decided not to turn on air conditioning anymore which mean the house never got under 80 even at night. Not the best conditions for trying to find a new job which, at that point, I had been in and out of minimum wage retail hell jobs for months and my wife was working a part-time deli position at a grocery store.

One night, we have a huge fight with her and she tells us to get out. We are now legitimately homeless and facing the prospect of living out of the car we were borrowing from a friend. We have no family within miles and we can't afford to leave the city because we can't give up their car nor the little income we have. Two other friends take us into their already tiny house where their twins share a bedroom and they sleep in the living room. They give us a futon mattress in their storage room.

One week after that, the wife of the friend couple breaks her leg so we extend our stay to help take care of her. A couple of weeks after that, my wife falls and breaks her elbow (no insurance, of course) which means her job is gone. It takes about a month but I find a new part-time job, she recovers enough to get her part-time job back, and we move into a craphole extended stay motel. A couple of weeks there and bedbugs send us to a slightly better but still extended stay hotel.

Over the next year, we discover just how poor you can be and still have a roof and a bed. Food stamps only go so far and my church pantry helped. We live in 200 square feet and grow to hate each other. We didn't have sex the last nine months we were together. My job is getting better, more hours, a couple of raises, a promotion. She quits job after job because she's undependable and inconsiderate.

The last straw is a story I've told here before, that we bought two pizzas from Aldi (one supreme and one pepperoni). I had a hard day at work and was desperately looking forward to eating that pizza as I'd mostly been living off ramen and chef boyardee. And I get home (to the hotel) and she's eaten my pizza. Not because there wasn't other crappy food in the house but because she wanted it.

A few weeks later, I told her we don't work as a couple and we need to go our separate ways. She agrees but she can't move out because of the cost, so we, separated, continue to live together for a couple of months. Eventually I just let her know she needs to find another place to live because I'm paying the majority of the hotel bill and I'm tired of supporting her. She moves out. I spend the rest of that year coming home to an empty hotel room. Depression is a bitch.

I meet someone. We are dating for a few months and we move in together (her lease was up and she took pity on me, a TLC-style scrub). The next two years are okay. Some really fantastic moments. Some really awful ones. We break up (and stay roommates), she goes back to her emotionally abusive ex. He lays on yet another last straw and they break up. We get back together. We break up again (and stay roommates) and she goes back to him.

During this time, my job is getting better and better. I've gotten several promotions, I'm making good money (not great but enough). And then I get the job that changes my life.

In 2015, I apply for and get a position in Baltimore with a software company. It's the most money I've ever made in my life. It's a paid relocation so I have the chance for a fully fresh start. I move. It's really hard the first month but I meet someone. We start dating. About 11 months after we started dating, I move in with her. One year later, I get a car for the first time in seven years. My job is amazing. My girl is amazing and we're getting married next year. My home is amazing. My car, simple and featureless as it may be, is amazing. MY LIFE is amazing.

I am astounded every day when I think of living in that sweltering bedroom in that old woman's house, when I think of my ex-wife screaming at me for just trying to help her bathe with a broken arm, when I think of scrambling to move out of a bedbug infested shithole hotel room, when I think of walking around my old city like a zombie because my depression wouldn't let me see anything but gray.

My rough patch lasted anywhere from two to five years depending on when one considers I came out of it. And now, at nearly 33 years of age, I am happier than I have ever been in my life and there's only up from here.

I don't know how rough your rough patch is right now. I can tell you, when I got locked out of my hotel room because the card key wouldn't work and I had to climb in the window on Thanksgiving night, you couldn't have convinced me of anything other than "my life sucks." And I don't know what's in your future. You might have a marvelous turnaround like I did or your life might just keep sucking indefinitely. But I can tell you this: I appreciate every last ounce of my happiness now, infinitely more than I ever could have had I not had the life I've had. Short of living on the street itself, I know what homelessness is. Short of going more than a day or two without food, I know what hunger is. And I most assuredly know what depression is.

And I know that all of these things can end. I can't say they will, but I know that they can. And I hope you end up a few years from how looking back on whatever now is and marveling at how far you've come. I won't even tell you to not give up. Go ahead and give up if you feel you need to. Resign yourself to the suck you're dealing with and get through it. Push through, hating every minute of it. And ignore any trite "it's always darkest before the dawn" crap that others shove at you because that doesn't help you now. All you need to do right now is make it another day, and then another, and then another, and that I believe you can do.

Hindsight would have told me to do a couple of things:

• Go see a therapist / counselor / psychiatrist. If you have a job that has the Employee Assistance Program available to it you can get six free sessions per year with a therapist. I took advantage of it only after a panic attack ripped me apart, but I should have went in earlier. If you don't have that as an option, there are some chat / webcam options for relatively cheap.

• Take all that extra depressive time and channel it into something useful. Go take free online classes, go learn a language, go learn to code. Anything that puts you on the other side of it a better person.

• Make some friends. This is damn near impossible, but post on your local city's Reddit subreddit to see if any trivia team needs an extra body. It's a great, generally free ( or food-cost only) way to get social and make friends.

Good luck.

Extracted from Reddit user u/baltinerdist