The BoostandEthanol Mental Health Shitshow 2024-25 Superseason
It would be naive to think this will be the last time the state of my mental health comes up. But I hope it is. I’m tired of feeling things that aren’t my latest plans for world domination.
I’m sharing this as documentation for myself, and to let others know you aren’t alone. Hopefully by explaining some of the trends, emotions, reactions, and how the mess in my head was cleaned up, I can be of use.
Sorry about how longwinded this is. But I wanted to be all encompassing, maybe to the detriment of this being useful to others, to document the context and ideas I was feeling. The longer I umm and ahh about this, the more I just want to move on instead of reliving it to document it in as perfect accuracy as possible.
In fact, let me start with the only piece of advice I want to give. If you’re in a situation that makes you feel miserable, and you have any alternative option, get out first, talk about it later. Opportunities are endless, life is limited. There’s no use hearing second opinions or debate. Else you’re gambling for unknown, likely low, odds that your shit situation might get better, versus a known fact that leaving is a positive. It’s easy to overvalue advice if you’re already on that slope into some sort of mental disarray. Especially well formed and presented advice from someone you know cares for you. That’s why I think it’s best to act on your own judgement before anyone can sway you.
Now, an abridged version of the last 18 months.
During 2024-01 I began my second attempt to take driving lessons, about five years after my first. I found my instructor disrespectful and would often undermine me. They had a horrible habit of shutting me down whenever I asked questions or probe reasoning. It wore away at me. I reckon I could write a decent length post about all the ways his style clashed with mine. But I’d rather this didn’t become a hit piece on any one person.
Someone else, who I’ll refer to as the third party, is very close to me and someone I value a lot in my life. Third party pressed me hard to stick it out with the instructor when I thought aloud about leaving them and once again holding off on learning to drive. Learning how to cope with people you didn’t like was important.
This attitude from outside, combined with the way the instructor would often fear monger about other instructors being useless which happed to collude nicely with my previous poor experience with an instructor, made me feel like I had to stay with them. That this was the best I would get.
A few months later, many lessons later. 2024-05. My final lesson came when I had a full blown crying breakdown in the car.
I was told to take a turn off the road, which required passing across the path of oncoming traffic. A car was coming the opposite way, so I slowed down, and turned in around the back of it. I did it too close to the car coming the other way, too fast, and because I was using the car coming the other way as an apex, used more of the junction, closer to the pavement than my instructor liked, without preparing for if a car was exiting out of the junction. It wasn’t a good move, I will not defend my driving as a student. We pull over and the instructor asks, “What’s your excuse?” An uncomfortable minute of brain fog passes where I contemplate what is wanted of me. Mostly why I needed to invent an excuse for making an error.
Eventually, I answered, to the best of my memory, “I don’t want to make excuses, I want to be sincere, I want to learn.” I don't think anywhere near as succinct or clear though.
For some reason this made my instructor go ballistic. I think they thought I was taking a conscious decision to drive that way, and my answer was me arguing my right to drive recklessly. They went on a tirade. Strangely, on reflection, their first point was how that answer would flop in court if I were to kill someone. Being called a murderer for making a mistake on a driving lesson stuck with me. They tell me that if I’d said, “I thought that was right,” it would’ve been okay. But saying I didn’t want to make excuses was the wrong way to go about being his student. At some point I curled up into a ball in the drivers seat, and I think I was so overwhelmed I screamed. They then took me out of the car and attempted to point the blame at my parents over why I had such a negative reaction to being called a murderer for making a mistake which harmed no one on a driving lesson.
Clear in the head, the entire scenario sounds comical, but at the time it broke me.
I have a feeling now, in retrospect, that they didn’t want to be associated with me on my test. Through previous lessons the instructor repeatedly emphasised that after so many minor infringements by students on tests, they would have to get reeducation. My best guess is the instructor told me to book a test expecting me to improve instead of plateauing. And after that, they were agitated by my repeated mistakes and general ineptitude behind the wheel. Charitably, the thought of me taking a test stressed them out — but that’s an assumption.
It frustrates me now. It haunted me then. The five months of lessons where I spent every waking minute trying to distract myself from driving because it stressed me out, getting no sleep the night of a lesson over the stress I felt behind the wheel, and then feeling miserable all throughout. It reached a point where I was purposely sleep depriving myself so I could be more relaxed during lessons. The lesson where everything fell apart was one that I’d had a decent sleep because I’d forgotten the lesson was that day.
Hindsight knows everything. I felt off about the instructor from about lesson three, when they chose to lecture me for ten minutes about tyres after I pulled over to the side of the road faster than they were happy with. Instead of teaching about brake application or when to go for the clutch, they told scare stories about blowouts and the price of tyres. Another red flag is how often they emphasised that, unlike other instructors, they wanted me to be ready for the real world instead of just passing a test. The fact they had an impossible to stall diesel and constantly touted how the electric handbrake that applied on its own made it much easier for students appeared to go over their head. Instead of getting out, I stayed long enough to be convinced that I wasn’t doing enough, and my feeling turned from being irritated by how inconsiderate they were to being crushed that they were my best bet and I wasn’t good enough.
These driving lessons dominated my life. I searched for nonstop distractions. Nonstop chatter and music and podcasts and videos. I tried writing a story at one point, and all I could think of was being back in the drivers seat having every twitch of the muscle being critiqued. The constant need for distraction meant I could only approach exams and coursework by waiting until the tipping point where I couldn’t think of anything else. Every other waking moment was dedicated to trying to distract myself as much as possible.
I soldiered on because I bought into the belief that being with someone who made me feel like shit was the way to being better.
I didn’t contact my instructor after the event where they blew up at me, even though my test was booked. For whatever reason, I didn’t immediately cancel my test and attempt to enjoy my life and relax for the first time in five months. Closing into the deadline to get my money back, I finally decide to make the call to cancel and move on with my life. I could always try again in a few years.
Aforementioned third party calls me up, encouraging me not to stop now. Instead of cancelling, they tell me apologise to the instructor. I text the instructor sorry and ask about scheduling a new lesson. The instructor doesn’t want to teach me anymore.
During the period I took lessons I became so snappy and irritable that I dropped friends I’d known for eight years. I’d began to further isolate myself from others. Joy was difficult to come by. After that blowout and the test cancelled, I’d find myself screaming uncontrollably. Often crying. Feeling like I was a danger to everyone around me for wanting to be behind the wheel. Wondering what my purpose was in life when cars clearly weren’t it.
Showers were the worst. I held them off as late into the day as I could bear because it was the only time I couldn’t overstimulate myself with YouTube videos and podcasts. My head would scream at me. Simple things like grabbing a towel, and dripping of water onto the floor, made me feel like a disgrace. I could hear my instructor blowing up at me again and again over how much shampoo I poured onto my hand. It hurt most because my favourite thing to do is to crank up the temperature in the shower, sauna myself, and let my thoughts be free. That wasn’t possible anymore.
The instructor eventually faded away. I’m not sure there’s a strict cutoff point. More like they became quieter and less bothering. But the fugue didn’t clear up.
Another problem was that I get my joy from making things. Now I felt like I couldn’t be trusted to learn or try. I can’t stop myself attempting to work on things, it’s in my nature. That’s why I churned out this website and why I wrote absolute drivel on Racing Heart. If there’s anything even slightly worth processing since the start of 2024, be really fucking impressed.
It’s not that I couldn’t create, it’s that I couldn’t think. Ideas appeared in my head but there was no way to explore them in any detail, and at the slightest struggle, darkness encompassed me until I was back in that driver’s seat being screamed at again. I had no control of my thoughts. The only way to shut them up was to drown them in other voices. I needed nonstop stimulation, which meant my good days didn’t know how to generate thoughts and ideas. I’m still feeling the aftermath of that, but I’m definitely getting better. I was a constant haze of static and white noise where the only channel I could tune to told me I was just going to fuck up again.
My worst episodes were around being too incompetent to do something. Trackmania is one of my usual comfort games, but that’s a game predicated on repeated failure, trial and error improvement. Playing it for any extended period of time was rage inducing, angry at myself for being too stupid to be perfect, not a satisfying mastery of a track. Another odd one was one night reading a magazine, supposedly about how cars worked. It was badly written, one of those explanations that introduces more terms than it explains, but because I couldn’t follow it I was put back into that cycle of worthlessness. I cried all night and the next morning.
This hidden section covers subjects that deserve a content warning, namely self harm and thoughts of suicide. This post is coherent without this section if you’d rather skip it.
I couldn’t control my thoughts for the longest time. The greatest revelation came when I figured out that I could so long as I pictured a scene where I was killing myself. Never before have I felt so overjoyed to imagine myself walking from my house to a railroad line, laying my neck on the tracks, and visualising a passenger train slicing head from body. Or throwing myself into fire. Or acid. Drowning. Going so deep the water pressure caves my skull in.
Self-harm I think has some very specific expectations involving a knife and wrist. I did get close to that, but the majority of my self-harm was by punching or slapping myself, or head butting something like my phone or the bathtub. A bit of me wanted to break things. The phone especially — always in my hand, convenient, expensive. But damn, they build that glass strong. I never made a scratch.
A knife was the most intoxicating way to do it. I used some box cutter type deal. Not particularly sharp, and I did it over the top of my forearm. Because I wasn’t interested in trying to make a move on my life, I just wanted to feel pain, and a bit of me wanted people to notice because I felt I’d finally be taken seriously. There’s a theatre to it. The knife wasn’t so sharp as to make an immediate red stained cut. There was nothing for a while, and then the thin lines drawn across my arm turned red. It felt good to carry that feeling around. It made me smile. It was a giddy high. In fact I began craving that feeling. I was going about my day, feeling overwhelming, wishing for a fix of dopamine and the knife immediately came to mind. That’s when I could clearly pinpoint that a switch in my brain had been flipped, where I only felt good because of bad things happening to me.
I think it’s why I wanted to break things. The idea that not only was I a fuck up, I had a physical sign of my damage. A permanent mark of something I’ve ruined. Because that made me feel good.
A somewhat repeated suggestion was to write a gratitude diary. But I didn’t feel grateful for anything. A healthy body isn’t something to be happy about when I wanted my heart to fail. It’s not the inability to recognise that I had certain traits to be grateful of, the fact that I had them made me feel worse. There’s no ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ when going on feels like the worse option. When making it wasn’t something I was looking forward to.
Euthanasia occupied my mind a lot. Part of the reason I didn’t ever make a move on my own life was that I thought I was inept enough to fuck it up and leave myself as a bigger burden on everyone else around me, so I wished I could hand it over to people who would do it expertly. In general there was a lot of wishing I could remove myself, cleanly, without impacting others.
The biggest progress I had was when aforementioned third party asked me why I felt I deserved bad things. It took some time. I tried talking to AI Chatbots, which had some mixed results. It was nice to just be listened to, but I had to refine them significantly, which in its own way was therapeutic to me. I made some connections, remembered that two years ago I was on top of the world.
This all traced back to being told to apologise to my instructor. That single instruction made me feel like solely I was in the wrong. That I was entirely the problem for reasons beyond my understanding. I’m not sure it was the act of sucking up, or the idea of needing to apologise. I think it was specifically the fact I didn’t know what I needed to atone for. From my perspective, I drove a bit shit, the guy blew up at me.
The instructor and I were a shit match and I should’ve never let it go on past lesson three. But if they said I was being rude, I’d be happy to apologise for that. I’m not interested in making enemies, I hate being the cause of upsetting other people. Hell, a similar scenario where I did snap at my instructor occurred in a previous lesson. Going through a roundabout, I messed up counting the exits. As I drove towards the “fourth” (actually third) exit I thought I was aiming for, the instructor starts yelling and pointing where I need to go. I wish I could remember what I said. Probably some insistence that I was going the right way in a curt tone, finally my frustration with them boiling over. I can’t imagine my tone was polite. And they immediately snapped back at me. I became a weak mess that had to be driven back to the start point. I apologised and booked another lesson anyway because I felt this was what I deserved. Because I felt I had to learn this way. Weeks later, when I hit full breaking point, it ruined my mind to be demanded to apologise.
I can’t decide if it feels stupid or not. Obviously, I had a year from hell. Where I forgot what joy was like. It clearly affected me badly. But for a single statement to have that impact is worrying. Perhaps it was the way I felt I was perpetually underachieving. Frustration at how much I, someone who literally only gives a shit about cars, was struggling with driving. That trying my hardest to keep up and be honest about how little I knew I was doing got me screamed at, called a murderer, and I had to apologise for how worthless I was as student.
Talk about synthesised ego death.
The fact that third party, who touted themselves as my biggest supporter, continually pushed me towards this instructor and then wanted me to apologise when the inevitable blow up happened didn’t help.
I feel the need to be clear. This third party is dear to me. Yet they’re also the fulcrum of this situation. I knew, from the day I booked my lessons, that they would be a problem if I wanted to reevaluate my lessons. My original plan was to never bring up driving lessons, but my hand was forced when I had to reschedule a trip around a lesson already booked and paid for. If I lied to them, or laid down some firm boundaries, or just did what everyone else I talked to was telling me, everything would’ve been fine. But I didn’t, I listened to the person who shouted the loudest. What I got in my miserable, erratic state was hard sales pitches about why I needed to stay with this specific dime-a-dozen driving instructor. It’s utterly batshit in retrospect, but they felt more convincing that whatever foggy gut feeling driven reason I had against their points. This combined with the instructor’s nonstop fear mongering trapped me in.
Throughout the past year I found myself drawn to the third party. Like I had to be in a constant dialogue with them. Only after things had cleared up could I truly disengage with them. Like I subconsciously knew something they said put me in this state. It probably didn’t help things. Being in a brittle state, being whiney and flippant and lost. I was no saint. I hit that person back more times, in more personal ways, venting my frustration at them. I’m not proud of myself. I blew up at them to the point of making them cry too.
I realise in only viewing them through this singular plot thread makes them sound like a villain. This is why I don’t identify them in any way, because I know how easy it is to get carried away with extrapolation from a single story. They’re hugely important to me, and I think after this episode we’ve only become closer. I’m glad we’ve remained strong through all this.
Once I’d made this connection that the mystery apology I had to make was why I was feeling so terrible, I asked them why they told me to apologise. The answer was because they assumed I was just being stressed about the test. They didn’t understand the situation and were desperate to prevent me from burning a bridge with a person who made me want to burn myself. The demand to apologise was purely because they wanted me to sucker up to a person who had wronged me, not because I had done anything out of line, while I took it as I had to apologise for attempting to be a student. Which is all I felt. That somehow, through making a mistake as a student while trying my best, inadvertently offending the instructor, getting blown up at, that I had something to apologise for.
The brain is fascinating. A single piece of information flipped a switch in my head. I was better. It really was as simple as that, a single connection to make myself better. Obviously, it took a year to work what connection, because while a lot of my searching and ranting and venting and loss of control isn’t coming back to me. Although, even if I nailed the issue the day after, I’m sure it would’ve taken some months regardless to process and become myself again.
Previous times where I thought I’d made progress, or appeared okay for other people, was akin to mania. I felt good then. So damn good. So amazing I couldn’t fathom ever being down. This time was different, there was a far less jarring switch. More a comforting realisation about the reality of the situation. And I can remember how I felt and what was going through my mind during those depressive days.
The false positives are frustrating. Repeatedly, every few weeks, I’d declare I was better just to fall back in. It could be the same day. In retrospect, now I’m feeling what it’s like to be better, I was never better. Those were moments of mania. I was flooded with joy but functionally identical. Just as useless and unproductive but I had a smile on my face as I distracted myself senselessly. And of course those around you see the fact you’re smiling and talkative and being a human being again and takes offence when you fall back down. I tried to explain it in the moment as pulling myself together but it wasn’t, there was no conscious effort. I still can’t explain the swings I had.
Everyone around me mistook symptoms for causes. I felt worthless, so I didn’t want to do anything. Everyone around me saw that I didn’t do anything and assumed that was why I felt worthless. A common line of thinking from others was that I needed to walk more or take vitamins or go somewhere. I’m not sure how to get across that general mood lifters which help on a blue day don’t help someone who doesn’t know what fun is anymore. The mental health and self help books I received aren’t written for someone so far down. If anything, it makes things worse. A couple weeks before I was truly better, I’d somehow recovered enough to begin piecing together a video. Then a book was sent to me about confidence and I totally broke down. I felt tense from the day it arrived, and didn’t get out of bed the next.
I don’t hold it against anyone who says these things. The longer I go on, the more I realise that being in these extreme depressive states are rare. Not many people have actually experienced being so far gone, so it makes sense that, by their own calibration and understanding of being down, these suggestions would be useful. Although it does hurt that these suggestions are less, “Do these things to get better,” and more, “Why aren’t you trying harder?” Like they’re searching for a singular shortcoming on my end to blame. After all that, nothing but an actual explanation that I had nothing to apologise for from that third party would bring me out of that state. Everything else would be a lifetime of coping mechanisms.
Now that I’m better, the difference is remarkable. It’s little things like how chocolate bourbons taste good again. Music conjures emotions. I can sit in silence working on a project for long periods of time. Todo lists provide motivation. I don’t need to be distracted, I can distract myself. Already I’ve been making serious progress with various projects.
Written out like this, reading it again and again, I can’t help but feel a little pathetic. Not in a way that bothers me, I know what I felt. But I’m not sure if the severity of it comes across in enough detail. A bit of it is because I don’t want to relive the events anymore than I absolutely have to, especially after having it replaying in my head without my conscious consent for so long. Obviously, everything written out with a year of reflection and time to comprehend and explain the scenario to other people has made it pointedly obvious what I could do different. At the time, to me, it wasn’t clear.
I’ve tried to keep this as anonymous as possible too, which probably doesn’t help explain the magnitude of my emotions. I don’t want to assign blame to anyone for how they acted, or point the finger at others. I can look at how they acted and how that impacted me, but what’s the point in holding it against them? From their perspective I seemed just as frustrating in the run up to the major blowout. I happened to come off worse when sparks flew. I’m thankful that everyone around me during the aftermath, even if they didn’t understand, was accommodating enough to let me be as I worked through this all. So, to reiterate, this isn’t a hit piece about how I was treated. This is just a record of what I felt.
I don’t naturally regret things. I believe we all do the best thing we can in any given moment using the information we have. We can’t control what we find pertinent in any situation, and the past can’t be changed so longing for something different doesn’t help. But in the immediate aftermath of getting better and clearing up, I did wonder what it would’ve been like to carry the momentum I had out of 2023. I don’t anymore, it’s not important. I’ve gotta rebuild momentum now.
I’ll make a bold statement. That’s the worst part of my life over with. I've only got a hillclimb left.
What next? A year of game dev to catch up on. Already, just in the past week, I’ve made a fairly neat system for a clutch in my driving sim. GT2: Beige Edition is a thing I’ll have to elaborate on. I’ve got a couple YouTube scripts cooking, although no immediate plans to produce them. I need to get back into writing consistently. So many books to read!
I’ve missed being me.