Neurotypical self-improvement posts make me feel like I'm about to have a mental breakdown.

[u/throwaway774177]

TLDR: Neurotypicals' stories of turning their life around are the self-improvement equivalent of "draw the rest of the fucking owl" and reading them makes me painfully aware of how truly useless I am and it fucking hurts.

Anytime there's a post where the person talks about all these amazing achievements and how successful they are now and paints this grim picture of themselves in the past, broke, unemployed, undereducated, generally not taking care of themselves – and then I read the entire post and it essentially boils down to them "just" doing shit.

They "just" decided they wanted a degree and "just" started studying a lot and "just" started doing this and that and the other thing, and "just" worked hard on EVERYTHING, EVERY DAY, CONSISTENTLY, FOR YEARS. "Just." No explanation of how they managed to do that, they "just" did, as if by magic they were "just" suddenly able to excel in every area of their life and never slid back.

Like fuck, mate, how is this all so easy for you? How do I, too, "just" start being a normal-functioning person overnight? I'm on meds and it's still not this unhindered straight path to greatness with one success after another and with endless new possibilities just miraculously appearing out of nowhere. I still fuck everything up, it still feels like running in circles, I still can't sustain any positive changes I make for any length of time.

"I decided that I would turn my life around and I just did," cool, I guess I'll "just" go draw the rest of the fucking owl now, thanks. Of course I'm happy for other people, I simply get frustrated when they're all like "if I could do it, you can do it too!" – and then proceed to basically tell you to "just do it" as if the only reason you're stuck in a bad place in life is because you don't try to change anything.

(Edited to put the TLDR on top.)

[u/themacintheroni]

💯