If there's one thing I learned upon reflecting over my battle with depression it's this: YOU NEVER FACE IT ALONE. Being the loner I am, I hate to admit this but isolation is the worst thing you can do to yourself during depression. I'm not saying go out, be social, and party. Talk to someone who loves you and is genuinely interested in your well-being. Don't go to this person looking for understanding - no one will ever truly understand. But go looking for love, support, and a shoulder to cry on.

And I also hate to admit this, as it took me a year to accept this, but don't leave professional help out as an option. Even if you're a private person, you'd be amazed at how you are able to reveal yourself to a counselor or therapist. They - the good ones, at least - have this way of making you feel comfortable and secure in their presence, allowing you to open up about unhealed wounds.

I hope you get the healing that you're searching for

 

... shit dude, I’m sorry.

This is something I went through, and it’s something I struggle with from time to time. It’s also something I have come to accept and learned to see that it is something that is transient. Things change and allow yourself to grow, to get better. In my less than glorious moments I have made the mistake to allow them to define me. And that’s what it was, a choice to accept something as a defining point of my identity. We all make mistakes. One of which is to let things that no longer matter define us.

Permanence is a western notion. I don’t think eternity is something that is permanent; it’s something that will forever keep on changing. Moses cast the commandments in stone; we look to printed texts as authority regardless if we speak of law, religion, academia or company policy. The contract is binding. The contract is sacred. Nature doesn’t work this way. We are born, we live our lives, have children and we die. Species and societies evolve and people grow in understanding, hopefully but not always for the better.

My question to you is, do you see yourself as permanent? A finished product of your genes, environment and history of accumulated events or do you see yourself as a thinking and feeling individual capable of choice and self creation? History is history. Identity is the sum of your thoughts and values, your understanding of yourself, other people and how the world works, your interpretation of personal and social history, a choice of the numerous roles and personality traits you have assumed in your life, or the traits you might wish to try. Identity is subject to change, do you want to write those changes yourself or to have them written haphazardly by circumstance.

Everything else is habit. It will require effort, but if there’s something for which I feel a strong conviction it’s that choice does exist.

 

No worries. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas...

 

I'm really sorry to hear about what you are going through... I do wished there is something I could say to help you with this.

Having said that, I think what I can do is share about my own experience with depression. I had a very tumultuous teenage years where i struggled with social anxiety(Bad childhood), low self-esteem(I was overweight) and video game addiction (I was escaping from reality and the little "accomplishments" in gaming satisfied my craving for validation). It went on to bleed over to my early twenties before i finally got out of it. And getting out of it was an excruciatingly slow process and it took me years with lots of baby steps. That meant breaking down little problematic aspect of my life and confronting it. I got out of it through sheer determination, a mindset that was willing to get "out", lots of inspirational story reading and confiding with my friends. The key for me was not trying to solve everything at once (Baby steps).

I practice self-compassion. I know it sounds cliche but I keep reminding myself everyday I've got to treat myself well the way I treat others. That meant no self-criticism, no self-berating and no self-hatred. Of course this is easier said than done, sometimes i still struggle with it and I do have bouts of melancholy - when this happens I go to places with open areas such as the park or the shore.

One thing that helped me with realizing my self-worth was finding things I was good at to do. I'm almost 100% sure we all have our strengths and when we play into that, we realize there IS something in us that is worth being proud of. This could be anything from having a good sense of humor to being math genius or something. I'd like to think God was fair when he made us.

Hope this helped!

 

I used to be severely depressed and still do have this problem with self-loathing. But in my attempts to overcome it I gathered a lot of information and potential problematic behaviour oon my part that I wasn't aware of and that may circle all these feelings of having no self-worth - kind of like a snowball system.

Like a lot of people here already mentioned, you really need to take a look at how much you empathise with yourself. Do you try to talk yourself out of feeling bad for yourself, when something really bad happened?? I don't request self-pity as a good way to empathise with yourself, don't get me wrong. But I used to talk myself out of bad feelings or tried to rationalize why I don't have a reason to feel bad, even though, if you took a look at my problems objectively, the things happened to me just downright sucked!
You've got the right to feel bad, isolated, alone, etc. Totally okay, so give yourself the permission to do so. Especially us sensitive ENFPs need time to process our feelings or we may surpress them time and time again until it manifests itself in depression/self-hatred.
Also, don't believe in and don't attach yourself to people who aren't taking your problems seriously. This might sound like something everyone knows, so why do I even bring it up? Because from my own experience I can tell you I was able to be so incredibly blind to the ways in which other people talked down on me in the past, when I just seeked for help with my problems ... (often times things that weren't even my fault in the first place and it was easy to prove so too). And also a lot of them tried to talk me out of it or just acted like it was not that big of a problem. If it's bothering you and hurting your feelings so deeply, it is a goddarn problem to you! Don't let other people decide what hurts you and what not. Gosh, I wish I would have taken this advice way more serious when I was younger... but I decided to play the diplomat because "you need to see other peoples point of view too, they just don't get it and it's not their fault" What? Not their fault they were being a stupid, inconsiderate ass towards me when I really needed some help and assistance?!)
What I'm basically trying to say here is: Try to find out if you keep holding onto friends who are invaldating your problems, because you may not be aware of it so much, but on a deeper level this also hurts and someday may manifests into self-hatred. So get those out of your life or set boundaries with them, if you happen to have such people around you.

I also tend to take criticism very personally, which angers me sometimes. It can hurt very much. But everytime it hurts now, I try to remember that I'm not perfect, and most of the time I'm already aware of these blind spots and even working on some of them, sometimes succesfully, sometimes not very successfully. However successful you are with working on your blindspots, the truth is, none of us is perfect and that's totally fine. And I for one need to remind myself of this from time to time.

Learn to believe in yourself, even though you're not perfect. This is very important, because if you ever want to get better and evolve as a person - it's almost impossible to do that when you don't believe in yourself. So first step, believing in yourself, then you'll succeed and this will help you love yourself more... and will help you gain confidence.

Sorry for rambling. I hope you can get something out of this.

 

Sometimes I feel bad about myself. But then I look at ordinary people and I feel like God.

I often feel bad about lack of great artistic skills. Lack of both dedication and fine motoric skills to get them.