EPTIf you are a depressed/anti-social/"introvert"/anxious/unsure person then you might get a lot out of this. I think a lot of people who really read what I say might learn something.
By the age of 16-18 I was very depressed. I felt extremely lonely, sad, ugly and unfulfilled.
I had terrible skin, the worst acne and peeling dry skin in the school, very heartbroken and sad to the core. People called me a zombie, referred to me as "spotty" or "pedo" (for liking a younger girl), I still remember one guy saying to my face "God you're so fucking ugly".
I had some close friends, but I felt completely downtrodden by them and so miserable, made fun of constantly. I didn't know I was depressed at the time. I ran away from home for a few hours when my mother hit me for being moody and staying on the computer too late (for the 1000th time). She asked me if I was on drugs at one point. My parents just didn't quite realise what I was going through - and neither did I. I would go to the bathroom at school every day to put some water on my face to try to hide some peeling skin around my face. I didn't know about moisturizer at the time. I remember some girls saying to me, "Why can't you smile properly? You're such a freak, you can't smile properly".
Roll on some time, I'd become an alcoholic. From the first time I tried it, I loved alcohol with such great elation. It was a potent force. Nothing on god's earth was more invigorating than getting drunk & high and chatting, posting, watching comedy and playing community games on the internet.
I failed 3 years of university drinking and smoking weed, wasting away my father's money. I loved every minute of it, though I felt awful ignoring my parent's phone calls and missing deadlines. I was living in a complete fantasy world. I still think it is crazy giving 18 year olds £3000+ money and sending them off to live by themselves. I lived like a millionaire those 3 years, drinking and smoking myself to unconsciousness most days in my room without a single care in the world (barring those occaisional phone calls and jolts of realisation that I had better do some coursework at some point). I remember one week I ate nothing but Ferrerro Rocher chocolates alongside endless weed and Lambrini alcohol. I racked up 150+ days playtime on a text-based MMO and watched Family Guy episodes 5x each.
Alcohol/weed & internet was everything I wanted from the world (tho I was still heartbroken) -everything I hadn't gotten - in a bottle.
Roll on some more years.
I was banned from TLnet.
I was booted from LP.net.
I was banned from my online game, all characters deleted (some with 30 days of hard playtime).
Online friends had blocked and deleted me.
I was banned from visiting a good IRL friend because of the drunken noise I'd make.
I was banned from using a part of the house to get drunk in.
My parents divorced and I wasn't there to even lend my little finger in support of my mother.
I screwed up an amazing chance in the poker world.
I was less than 69kg in weight at 6'2 and working a terribly miserable and terribly difficult job at minimum wage.
And at age ~22-23 I developed an intense, crippling, ongoing anxiety disorder.
I first noticed the anxiety attacks when I was posting garbage and beginning to get banned frequently from TLnet. I would wake up, hungover, the next morning with this searing, outright fear. You all know the feeling, or will know it at some point. Like butterflies in the stomach before a stage performance. Or more accurately, when you know you've done something direly wrong and have to face up to the consequences. A intense anxiety, sick to the core with it.
As time went on I found I was having this anxiety/fear problem after every night that I had gotten drunk. And I couldn't stop drinking. I was gulping down ~21 units of cider 3 times a week. I would drink til I blacked out every time without fail. It was my hunger, my elation - the sheer unstoppable delight of the thought of getting drunk.
Accordingly, my anxiety became a daily torment. At my difficult, exhausting, miserable job I spent every day in absolute agony. I just couldn't stop drinking, and I began to hate myself and my suffering more and more and more.
By the age of 25-26 I had managed to get myself back to a university to start all over. I'd cut down my drinking by living with a girl I liked. This was good and bad - good because I so wanted to make her love me and so started trying - trying - to work on my behavior - bad because of the further endless heartbreak that it did bring. Suffering after suffering.
At this 2nd attempt at university I really was a changed person already. I hated myself so fucking badly and was doing absolutely everything in my power to change, to cut the drinking, to make myself a real person at long long last. To become attractive to the girl I was in love with. But I couldn't do it. I would drink, the searing anxiety (which, I approximate, would last for 2 weeks for each time that I drank) would remain. The heartbreak was killing me, the anxiety was killing me.
I started to go out drunk in public, sometimes with a guy in my class, sometimes by myself. I almost got arrested telling off some police for bothering us. I had someone walk away with my phone I'd given them. I went one morning to the uni theatre hall and pretended to be an acting professor and was escorted away by security. I started blacking out, finding myself pissing in a bar garden with people all around and no idea how I came to be like that, or yelling at strangers like a madman and minutes later being asked what the hell I was doing by my friend without realising I'd even done it. I started pissing my own bed frequently. I was getting older, my mind and body were shutting down, the anxiety and fear disorder gripped my heart every day.
It was about this time that I joined the TLHF fitness thread and was attemping to go to the gym as a way to make myself not want to drink. After working out at a gym, it is vitally important that you allow your body to recover - to sleep well and eat well and not drink. From the way I'd lived my life until then, I had absolutely zero concept of doing things for the "long term". Yes, I'd been a poker player, but I had no concept of "studying long-term yields a good job" or "working out long-term yields an improved physique", and I'd never gotten anywhere with the girl I was in love with (tho I tried so hard and was trying not to drink already because of her). I just had no concept of "long term discipline/results"; absolutely zero self-discipline.
All I knew was I was inexplicably and intolerably compelled to get drunk. And I guess I first realised that such a thing was possible by reading the TLHF thread. It gave me hope. I remember at one point for 2 whole weeks I ate nothing but mince beef mixed with kidney beans. Another time I was drinking milk nonstop - I drank 5 litres of milk in one day. I very slowly got just the slightest taste of what it was like to be on the road to accomplishing something (that would be, putting on some weight, muscle or not I didn't care).
I fled to stay with an alcoholic/druggy friend, fractured my foot during a blackout the first day I got there, got fired from a job, moved house again and ended up watching SC2 streams 24/7 in a room alone, heartbroken, emotionally destroyed, still with some sad hope left in me as again I managed to get out some sessions in a gym and every so often somehow manage to walk past a shop rather than buy alcohol from it. It would take every single ounce of willpower and most often I would spend 5-10 minutes standing in the shop deliberating, fighting, battling with myself, before losing and buying a load. But I was still trying, I hadn't given up.
When I heard the girl I loved had moved city, I packed my bags, took the ~£100 in my bank account, took another £70 government "emergency loan", and went down half the country with no plan other than "to find somewhere to live". I stayed in a hotel for £20 then the next day went knocking on random doors all day until I found - perhaps by miracle - someone who would let me stay on government "housing benefit" (meaning he wouldn't get any form of rent for many weeks) and with a £100 deposit.
In this new city, listening to David D'Angelo tapes, living some days off nothing but cheese, I managed to get another job and continue my fight against alcohol addiction. I was getting better. My self hatred and hatred for alcohol was increasingly strong, and the more I challenged it the easier it began to be to not drink. I turned to doing codeine painkillers as a substitute (still I couldn't get ahold of weed), which let me survive longer and consider myself and try to keep the anxiety disorder at an arm's length. Things were not great, but it really was like I was battling to create a new life for myself. The new job was the same as my older one, exhausting, miserable; I got closer to the girl I loved and we spent more time together, and though I still couldn't be attractive to her nomatter how I tried, I knew that I was improving and understood my own plight a thousand times better than before, which gave me strength, because I could see my potential; I had hope in myself at last.
I moved house (now paying for it 100% myself) to be next to a gym and eventually got the courage to get myself a new job within walking distance from my house. I ended up in hospital mixing codeine with alcohol, and consequently cut down on both of them even moreso. Work was insanely challenging and miserable, but I had the gym now. I was doing my utmost, working on my discipline. I made so little progress in reality but to me it was everything - it was more than I'd done in the whole past 10 years of my life!
I went a whole year without drinking. I was still insanely miserable. Completely depressed, like I was sinking into the floor. I would laugh and enjoy the company of a few people at work, but I had absolutely no life, no friends, just a lonely miserable existence with nothing but an aching back (from either work or fucking up at the gym) and the occasional recreational painkillers to keep me company.
People at work would try to cheer me up, but I just couldn't respond. People would say things like, "Smile!", and however much I wanted to, I couldn't. With the issue of alcohol fading ever quickly into the past, this old issue of depression and being able to smile at people resurfaced in my mind.
Remember at the start of this passage, where I describe some girls saying to my in highschool, "Why can't you smile properly!?". From that early age I have not been able to smile in a natural way. My constant, innate depression and anxiety from that age left me with absolutely no concept of how to consciously form a smile.
I remember sooo many times throughout my life where instead of being able to smile normally, I have sort of half screwed up my face in a "i want to smile" extremely worried and sad-looking mess. Even some times when things are genuinely funny I have not been able to form a smile. I wanted to so much but I just didn't know how to shape my face. I had such poor muscle memory for it. I could laugh at Family Guy, and laughed so much by myself in the early days of drinking, but my ability to control my facial expression and shape it into a communicative smile was completely non-existent.
Up until 4 days ago, the concept of being able to use my own facial muscles to smile at someone voluntarily has been completely and utterly alien to me. I have been completely unable to do it.
I like to watch America's Next Top Model, because I love watching how people can control their bodies to make themselves look confident and attractive. It intrigues me how someone can do that. But I never really understood how to learn it.
I watched one of the girls in an episode approach a line-up of male models. "Smile!" she barked at one of them, and he smiled. "Smile!" again, another guy went from no-smile to smile in an instant.
In another episode, the photographer was commenting on a girl, "I can't work with her if she doesn't know how to smile with her eyes on demand."
I started practicing in my webcam, as if I was looking in the mirror, trying to raise one side of my mouth and see what I looked like. Well, it looked okay, it felt bloody weird though.
I work in a shop now, like the solo cashier in a major newsagents in a main town, and get to see so many people come in and flash this "fake", controlled smile at me. It was incredible how they could just use their facial muscles like that to suddenly become attractive and powerful and communicative. It was so curiously alien to me - the strangeness of it, to be able to do that thing with your body, to have such control over your face.
And with greeting people or being greeted at the cashier like that, I realised just how insanely, direly important it was for me to also learn that strange ability. I realised how people would flash a smile at me and then become put-off, upset, miserable or even hostile towards me when I didn't return it. I would try - my usual way since I couldn't smile - of nodding a greeting, or speaking a greeting or trying to be chatty to alleviate their feelings, but I could see people perceiving me in a poor light and thinking I was miserable, rude, unattractive, unresponsive to their smile. I would have girls attractively smile at me and then their smile turn upsidedown as I didn't respond! I would get people - as usual - saying "Smile! Everythings okay!" to me, trying to make me smile back! And my communication suffered with other members of staff - as I tried to make (rather dry, british) jokes or comments they would take offense or misinterpret my humour, since I could not say it with a smile or a twinkle!
And with this I finally put two and two together. This total inability of me to control and produce my own facial expressions, my smile, has been a massive, unknown barrier for me in communicating with other people. It was the missing link. The link that connects the "hi" with the "how are you", turning people's perception of my sentence from a dull, lifeless, even rude and nonchalent offmark into a sparkling and powerful expression of myself.
Four days ago I learnt how to smize. I came to work straight from a crazy session at the gym, completely dazed from the exertion. I looked in a mirror and realised my expression was uncharacteristically alive and focused. My brow was slightly frowned, but my eyes were sparkling; I looked focused, almost devilish. I realised that I was in that muscular position - my eyes were locked into a smile - the smize (as referred to on American's Next Top Model).
I spend the whole goddamn day focusing my heart out on maintaining that smize. The minute, barely perceptible muscular configuration, the slightest of squint with the feeling of brightness and knowing. I found that, from that position going into a real smile was easy as pie - the eyes were already locked into the smiling position so turning it into a full blown (subtle) smile was just a case of saying or hearing something a little amusing. I couldn't believe it, I really couldn't.
It's been another 3 days at work since then and the effect on other people has been immediate. Some people lock onto you with their own smize. One girl kept coming back for several seconds, I felt like I was melting her. I feel so fucking competent. I can say whatever the fuck I want because it gets sent and received with a sparkle. Chavvy/manly people don't mess with you, because they see a deadly focus and life within your eyes. Instead of looking worried and feeling worried because I look worried and can't make any other expression than that, and getting picked up on it by insensitive, unknowing people, I feel almost playful.
Well, I'm not so great at it yet, especially when tired (when I think I look more like im squinting with a headache than looking sparkly), or when a super attractive girl comes in (when I still freak out and crumble). But at least I now know I have some expression on my face. People have told me in the past (not being nasty about it) that I have dead eyes, expressionless and lifeless, or simply look afraid and distressed.
But now I know how to control my facial muscles (namely my eyes - I have to work on/experiment with the actual smile/mouth still, and of course other expressions!), its literally like a whole new world has opened up to me. Like when I stopped drinking and discovered the concept of self-discipline and long-term goals. Or when I finally realised that attractive qualities in a man go far beyond "being nice and having fun with her". It really is a happy new year.
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