levite

The pragmatic problems, if you're not physically able to drive or otherwise get out of the house much on your own, are hard, but could be dealt with. There are some public services that could help, and if not, there are usually some services run by community or religious organizations that can do something. But I think talking about those things is secondary.

You are suffering from feeling a lack of meaning in your life. Also from clinical depression and a clinical anxiety disorder. But certainly from a lack of meaning. There's a wonderful book by a psychologist named Viktor Frankl, called Man's Search for Meaning, wherein he talks about surviving Auschwitz, and how in the process of doing so, he noted that those who survived were those who made meaning in their lives when life was otherwise not presenting them with meaning. That meaning, he noted, could be anything at all, not just a desire to survive per se, or a desire for vengeance. It could be a desire to cook again, or a desire to see another movie, or a desire to study some favored discipline or musical instrument, or anything else that the people around him were prevented from doing but decided they wished to do, or anything they felt would be a better occupation of their time than what was going on in their lives at that moment.

Don't get me wrong, I stand by what I said earlier: I think you need to find better therapists, whom you have better chemistry with, and I think you need antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. And now I think so even more, because you haven't been abusing pot, you've been self-medicating with it. Marijuana, whether it's legal for the purpose where you are or not, is medication, and can be used not only for the relief of physical pain, but for its euphoric qualities, in order to stave off psychological pain or panic. Which, it seems clear, is what you've been doing-- either both, or the latter. And, BTW, I have no problem with using pot for that purpose: I'm a big supporter of doing so. But what you're dealing with needs something more specific and effective.

But in addition to that, you need to find things that lend meaning to your life. In one sense or another, you're going through something many (if not most) of us go through: something is preventing us from doing things we'd rather be doing with our days, and instead forcing us to do something less meaningful to us, which means we have to figure out how to get meaning into our lives some other way. Sometimes this prevention comes from a lack of talent: for example, when I was a kid, I really wanted to learn to dance. Unfortunately, I am built much like a water buffalo, with coordination to match. Didn't happen. Sometimes the prevention comes from conflict with other parts of one's life: for example, I was trained as an actor, and I loved it; but then I began to be an observant Jew again, and found that, since most plays run on Friday nights and Saturdays, they will not cast someone who can't work those times. So I had to find another career. Sometimes the prevention comes for other reasons; and sometimes, like in your case, it comes from being physically prevented from doing what you would otherwise want to do. But in every case, the answer is to either find ways around it, or find different things that are not prevented. (I'm not, by the way, trying to minimize your pain or challenges by comparing them to my own, clearly less trying circumstances, only to point out that the underlying principle of prevention and alternatives remains constant, even if the degree is very different.)

I don't know what your life plans were before your medical stuff came up. But if those plans are really incompatible with your life now (and you may find on further reflection that, while much harder, they aren't; but then again, maybe they are), then find new ones.

You graduated with four minors. Clearly you are brilliant. You could dedicate your life to learning. Many with physical challenges have done so, and bettered themselves and society for doing it. You could find employment as a researcher.

If nothing else, the acquisition of knowledge can be meaningful as an end in and of itself, if you choose it to be so.

I think if you got the proper help and chose to search for meaning, you would have other options, also-- I just offered the pursuit of knowledge in one form or another as the first solid thing off the top of my head.

You have suffered greatly. But it still seems like there is hope that you need not suffer forever. I have various friends who have survived traumas or congenital conditions of one sort or another and found ways to thrive. I know it can be done.

My own wife survived a brain aneurysm seven years ago. Half the people who have what she had don't live to tell about it. Of the half who do live, more than half end up as vegetables. She went through years of physical rehab, learned to walk and talk again, and still suffers from balance issues, walks with a cane, has periodic nausea and vertigo, and other sundry such physical issues. But she finished her graduate work, became a rabbi, drives again, teaches, and writes, and works, and she plays with our dog, and we travel together, and we have a great, full life, including a terrific sex life. None of which, by the way, she ever expected to be able to do when it first happened to her, and most of which she never expected to happen during the depression she fell into for the first couple of years after. Toward the end of her rehab, she found an amazing therapist who had her go on antidepressants, and it began to go steadily better for her. I met her a little over three years ago, and we were married last year.

It can be done. Whatever you face is survivable, is able to be worked with, can be lived with, if you decide to make it so. I'm not saying it will be easy. But I am saying it can happen.

Think about it. And if you want to talk in private, you can PM me too. Or keep anon, and don't be shy about reaching out here.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)