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chodgson625 t1_j9kdwvs wrote

Don't let the bad thoughts go round and round in your head endlessly. Audiobooks. Podcasts. Games ... anything that allows you to do what you do but engages your mind. Try and get really lost in your work maybe? Start asking your Uber clients for stories and compile them?

It's a cliche but time will fix you before long. A year from now you'll look back and this and think "wow thank god that happened"

Coping strategy from my old blog

Though we regard ourselves as striding forward into the future with the past behind us, the ancient Greeks thought of us as walking backwards into the future, with only the past visible as we leave it behind. As a variation on that I have a mental exercise that I try on drunken depressed friends I call Retrospective Fatalism.

In Retrospective Fatalism everything you did wrong in the past was always going to happen that way. Fate. Or God. Circumstance or human behavior, whatever, there never was any way to escape that fate. It was always going to happen.

Your future - now that's different. "Nothing is written" said Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, and that has to be true. Mistakes you make in the future are completely your responsibility, particularly if they are repeats of stupid behavior you made in the past. But as they become the past... they were inevitable.

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