DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  I’m a woman in my early twenties. I work in a small office and go to classes at night to educate myself further. In the little free time I have I am active in a political organization and have a quite high rank there. On weekends I go out with friends because I am easily bored so I always try to busy myself with exciting activities instead of suffering from cabin fever. My interests are politics, culture (including nerd culture of course), traveling, food, etc. Pretty much the only things I can’t get into are sports. I do cardio and go for a run to keep in shape but other than that I really don’t care for the subject matter.

Knowing about my busy schedule you might have figured that my dating life is not really that great. I do have occasional hook ups but other than that it’s nothing but me, myself and I…

I consider myself an attractive woman, I am confident, I have a wide range of interests and I hold high ambitions. So why can’t I find a keeper?

A friend of mine once told me that some guys don’t approach me because my confidence is intimidating and guys like shy girls better. I have no problem with approaching guys and start flirting but some of their egos seem to be too fragile to handle women who take matters in their own hands. Also I was told that I’m too talkative or sassy or feminist or independent or bitchy or opinionated by guys online. And that is really infuriating and also a bit hurtful.

The only guys that seemingly can keep up with my attitude are “jocks” but those relationships fail because of our different interests.

I don’t blame the guys for not wanting to date me. It’s their decision and if I am not what they are looking for then by all means they should find happiness with the right girl.

But all that stuff leaves me wondering… am I too much? Should I change to be more appealing? Should I pretend to be shy and reveal certain aspects of my personality only after some time has passed? Or am I good the way I am and it’s just a matter of not having found the right kind of person yet?

Those concerns sound so unreasonable but I guess I’m just a little uncertain at the moment… I hope you can give me some advice.

Too Much Intimidation?

DEAR TOO MUCH INTIMIDATION: Your problem is a common one, TMI. A lot of women, especially women in their mid 20s who are confident and accomplished, have problems finding men who’re interested in more than a hook-up. In fact, that’s a core issue in Jenna Birch’s book The Love Gap: guys are out their saying they want to find someone who’s ambitious, confident and accomplished… yet they aren’t dating the women out there who meet those standards.

In fact, many of them are doing the opposite.

Part of this is that yes, to some men, the fact that you have so much going on in your life is going to be a turn-off. There are a lot of men who see attention and career achievement as a zero-sum game. Only one of you can really go on to succeed, and at the end of the day… they’re going to choose themselves because men are supposed to be the high-achievers. A woman who’s equally – if not more – successful than they are can feel threatening, even emasculating.

The same goes for women who are confident and forward. If a woman, for example, responds to a compliment with anything other than deflecting or downplaying the compliment, she’s often seen as arrogant. A simple “Thanks!” instead of “oh no, you’re just saying that…” tends to rile up men because she’s not following along with the script. Women, after all, aren’t supposed to be aware that they’re attractive.

And if a woman flaunts gender roles and takes the part of the aggressor instead of passively waiting… well, a lot of guys really don’t respond well to that.

Some of this is societal; those gender roles are still very much in force, even in the 21st century.But some of it is about maturity and how men tend to progress. One of the reasons why women in your position have a hard time finding guys who they work with is because those guys are still in development. Women tend to treat development like a web – working on several aspects of their life at once. Men tend to be lasers, taking things one at a time in order: first they want to develop their careers THEN they’re ready to date. Part of the problem here is that those guys tend to pass up on women they later turn around and realize they shouldn’t have passed up on.

This, incidentally, is why many women will find exes coming back, hat in hand years down the line. They weren’t ready then and didn’t realize what they had. Now that they do, they’re hoping the window hasn’t closed too firmly.

Once you understand where some of these issues come from, TMI, it becomes a question of “what do you do about it?” I mean, yes, you could always try to tone down your personality or pretend to be someone you’re not in order to get a boyfriend. But I question the wisdom in that; the guy who can’t handle you now isn’t likely to be any better able to do so when he finds out that you’ve been hiding a part of yourself. In fact, it’s more likely to cause problems… messily and all over the place.

And then there’s the fact that you likely aren’t going to like guys who prefer the softer, more submissive version of you. That’s fundamentally not who you actually are, and that conflict between  who you are and who you’re putting forth is going to cost you a lot of emotional energy and a string of incompatible boyfriends.

It may well be that your best option is to wait, while guys play catch up and try to get on your level. Or to wait and see if you can find someone who matches up with you now.

Now one thing I will say is maybe reconsider on some of those jocks. The fact that they’re jocks doesn’t mean that they can’t also be nerds; most sports nuts are just nerds in different clothing. And as I’m always telling guys: your interests don’t need to match up perfectly for the two of you to work; they just need to mesh well enough. Even if you two don’t share the same interests, can you try exploring the others’? Can you respect their interests and can they respect yours?

That’s a question only you can answer, MIT. But while the waiting may be frustrating… it’s still better than trying to force yourself into the wrong personality like you’re trying to force yourself into shoes that don’t fit. Finding the right partner can take time, but in the end, it’s worth it.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  My friend B [26F] has rotten luck with men. Some of it is her own doing with her unrealistic expectations of men and some of it appears to be what she’s attracted to.

B has had a thing for 50+ year old men with money for the past 5 years. These men are typically emotionally abusive, ignore her for weeks on end forcing her to chase them, don’t allow her to meet their friends or family, and string her along with promises for more. She typically portrays herself to be a take no bullshit type of person, but as soon as she gets involved with one of these men, all of that goes completely out of the window.

Last time I tried to bring this up to her, she threw it in my face that I’m married and don’t understand her loneliness – and that very well may be true. While I don’t understand what being that lonely is like, I do recognize really poor romantic decisions, and dating guys who make no time for you, force you to always come to them (literally, she dated a guy who forced her to fly once a month for a year to a completely different country and never even tried to visit her in her home city or meet her family, and the only time he actually supposedly attempted the trip, he missed his flight and makeup flights for two weeks straight).

I’m worried about her – these guys that she’s been seeing aren’t up to any good, don’t treat her with any respect, and she either intentionally or unintentionally ignores the signs of emotional abuse and manipulation and makes excuses for their misbehavior. I don’t know how to talk to her about this, but she’s coming up to stay with me in a couple weeks to meet another guy that’s she’s been talking to for three months and she doesn’t even know his last name. Do you have any recommendations for how I can approach this situation with her in a way that doesn’t end up imploding our otherwise great friendship?

On The Sidelines

DEAR ON THE SIDELINES: One of the problems with love is that love’s not just blind, it also tends to put its fingers in its ears and yell “LALALALALALALALALALALA” at the top of it’s lungs.

This is never more evident than when you’re watching a good friend about to go down with the HMS Douchebag for the third time in a row. 

It’s all the more frustrating because, honestly, there’s really not much you can do. Your friend is a grown woman. She’s got agency and the right to make her own choices. The fact that they’re stupid choices doesn’t change that.

The problem is that if you just straight up try to make her see what’s going on and that she’s been riding the jackass train for years, then all that’s going to happen is that she’s going to dig her heels in and double down. Nobody appreciates being told that the guy they’re currently sweating is the latest in a long line of asshats who’s going to chew her up and spit her out, just like the previous dude in the jackass conga line did.

This makes confronting her tricky, because you don’t want her to just ignore you and mess up even harder. The best thing you can do, especially in the wake of yet another car crash, is to sit down with her and try to get her to realize what’s going on. First, you have to see if you can get her to recognize that these relationships were toxic. Exploring the ways that these relationships have been bad for her may help her start to recognize the pattern.

It may also help to work out just why she’s dating these wastes of skin. There’s clearly a common denominator in these relationships besides douchebaggery; there’s something about these guys that appeals to her. Maybe these guys just so amazing in bed that she’s willing to put up with the rest of it. But the more that the two of you can zero in on why she picks these guys in particular, the more that you can hopefully nudge her in a different direction.

But then again, you could also lay all this out for her and still get nowhere. You can lead someone to clues, but you can’t make them think.

Of course, that all presumes that the common denominator isn’t just her and her damage.  There’s every possibility that she has her own emotional issues that leave her feeling like she deserves to be treated this way. And if that’s the case… well, just as she’s the one making those choices, she’s also the one who has to fix things. You can’t force someone into emotional health; they have to decide that. And this is one of the areas where Alcoholics Anonymous gets it right: some folks have to hit rock bottom before they change. And the only thing concerned friends can do is to try to help them limp to the ER afterwards and hope that maybe this time they’ll learn to avoid cliffs.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  I’m a 25 year old guy trying to get back into dating after a few months of hiatus following some unpleasantness with my ex.

Online dating is something I generally don’t enjoy and am not terribly successful at. I much prefer to meet women out in the world, and all my best relationships have started after meeting girls at school or through mutual friends, where we can get to know each other over multiple interactions and get comfortable.

Now that I’ve graduated and settled into my 8-5 life I’m naturally not meeting many single women my age (most coworkers are 40+, and dating coworkers seems unwise anyway).

I do sometimes meet women I’d like to ask out in the world, but they are often working, or on break, or reading, and one of my defining dating faults is my desperate desire not to be invasive or bothersome.

Do you have any words of wisdom about asking working women for their number? I include also reading women because as a book lover myself I’d like to date another but also know being distracted from a great book can be annoying. And I fear few things more than being an annoyance.

Thanks a ton, 

Hesitant to Bother

DEAR HESITANT TO BOTHER: The question you’re asking is a classic example of asking for the wrong thing. HTB.

Hang on, let me explain:

The best way to meet women is, honestly, the way you’re most comfortable with. We tend to bring our expectations with us to whatever method we choose and that inevitably affects the outcome. Expect to badly at cold-approaches and you guarantee you will. If you hate online dating, then you’re not only going to put in the effort or energy required, but you’re going to be miserable trying.

In your case, you’ve had the most success meeting women through warm approaches – that is, striking up conversations with women you’ve already had social connections with, whether it be classmates or mutual friends. This isn’t terribly surprising; that’s how most people meet their partners. It’s lower stakes and not as stressful as trying to approach a stranger in a bar.

The tricky part, however, is after you graduate from college, the pool of people you have those social connections with shrinks like a puddle in the Sahara. And as when the watering hole dries up, causing the local wildlife to wander further afield, when our social circles contract, we tend to look to other ways to meet people.

That brings us back to you, HTB. The issue here is that you’re asking for the wrong advice. Your best option isn’t approaching women at work.

The thing about approaching women at their place of employment is that they’re rarely in a place where they’re looking to meet someone. More often than not, their minds are focused on the needs of the day and they’d really rather get through without too much hassle. This doesn’t mean that you are a hassle, HTB but almost everywoman has a story about guys who approached her at times when she’d just really rather be left alone. When you combine this with women in service-industry professions who are professionally nice – that is, who will be friendly and flirty because it means the difference in a good tip and no tip – then you get folks who’ve been inundated with dudes who think that a smile is more than just a friendly gesture.

So while this doesn’t mean that you are necessarily a bother to them, HTB, the odds of your doing well with this approach are low enough that it likely isn’t worth the time and effort it’ll take. And while there are guys who buck the odds, they come in two flavors: the guys who got one-time lucky and the guys who are skilled, socially. The lucky ones’ success can’t be replicated and the ones who are skilled got there through time and experience.

This is why the best thing you can do isn’t doing cold approaches of women who aren’t giving you approach invitations, it’s to rebuild your social circles. Think about life in college: you were studying, sure, but you were also doing things. You were going to events on campus, you were hanging with your friends, you were going to the places where people were. This gave you the opportunity to meet people in locations and at times when the social contract said “yes, you’re not only allowed to talk to strangers, but it’s encouraged”. You can do that now.

Take the things that you’re passionate about and engage with them in ways that bring you in contact with other people. Check your local alt-weekly for events or get-togethers that strike your fancy. Check Facebook and Meetup.com for regular local groups that you’d like to try out and get to know the people there. And don’t just look to the folks who are attending as potential partners, think a few steps down the line. You may not meet someone you’d like to date just then… but the friends you make at the event may well have friends who are your type.

Approaching your love life this way will make things easier for you in the long run. Because it’s more in tune with your previous successes and your natural inclinations, you’ll not only be more comfortable meeting women like this, you’ll enjoy it more. That’ll help encourage you to keep working at it, instead of letting the frustration of rejection grind you down.

Plus: you’ll grow your social network and meet new and awesome people. So it’s win-win, really.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  I met this girl online and we’re really attracted to each other. Problem is, due to a software issue in the dating service’s location settings (imagine selecting from a list that only has multiple entries of “Washington, United States”) we’re actually located in opposite ends of the country. She knows this since she was the one that approached me – a really happy accident, by the way.

We are about 6-9 hours by train away from each other depending on the rail connection. Neither has to drive because public transport is really good.

I planned a really nice date in a city that splits the travel time somewhat equally between the two of us (Plan A) but she’s currently busy and is unable to devote 4+ hours traveling there. Her official stance on this has been “wait and text”.

Since I have not visited her city before I was thinking of going up there for a weekend (fully announced) and having her show me around town. (Plan B)

Should I execute Plan B? I’ve been keeping it very cool and low-pressure so far and I’m afraid announcing Plan B shows hints of desperation – traveling across nearly the entire North-South span of Germany just for a first date feels like clingy behavior to me.

On the other hand, I really don’t want this to fizzle out over text! We have something really good going over text but small talk only goes so far before it has to be replaced by conversation about shared experiences and actual contact. I feel like I’m on a timer here.

Any advice you could offer is much appreciated.

Best Regards 

A Promising Start

DEAR A PROMISING START: My dude, I am going to save you a lot of heartache: never, NEVER just drop the “Hey, I’m about to be in your city next week, how about you show me around?” on someone when you’re long-distance. That’s going to put a lot of pressure on somebody to be your tour-guide and event coordinator, not just your date, and that’s before we get into the part about how she’s already busy.

You would be far better off getting an invite to come visit instead of just arriving - announced or not. This way you’re not just about to impose on her, it’s become an arranged event that she’s actually looking forward to.

Here’s how you set the stage to getting an invitation: next time you’re texting and talking about how you’d love to see each other, seed the idea of a visit. “Hey, you know I’d love to meet up in person and I’ve never been to $PLACE. How would you feel if I came up?” Now, instead of just announcing that you’re going to be there, you can actually make a date of it. If she likes the idea, you can even incorporate some low-key flirting into making plans: “So if I did come, where would we go? What is one place you think we should see?”

This lets the anticipation build and make things more interesting and exciting, instead of a sudden surprise. This way, when you do get off that train, it’s the culmination of the building of some delicious tension and excitement, not just pressure to perform.

And if she’s not feeling you coming to visit… well, now you’re not out the train tickets and an uncomfortable weekend.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  I’ve been reading to your column for a while now and really like your approach to handling communication within a relationship. I have a question for you as both a perpetual worrier and former long-term single lady. I hadn’t been dating for the better part of the previous 3 – 4 years due to past damage from bad relationships (narcissistic partners, self-esteem and self-image issues, not feeling good enough, etc.). I went to therapy and got a lot out of it: a new job, a new apartment in the city (Chicago), a pet cat and a boyfriend all during last year. It felt like a series of huge milestones and I’ve been having an amazing time with my current boyfriend ever since.

Based on the past advice of my therapist, I tried to hold back on some of the behaviors before that lead me to be too clingy which has helped out tremendously. He has different views than me politically, which I’m trying to factor in towards trying to understand him better and appreciate his history more. (I’m a Democrat from the Midwest, he’s a Conservative from the South who moved up here for work a bit ago.) We have so much fun together and get along extremely well but now that we’re at the 6 month mark, we’re getting accustomed to being at each other’s places all the time and have been considering moving in together. (Convenient as he’s my upstairs neighbor at my apartment. I know I know, it sounds weird but we both thought about it for a while before actively dating in case it would make things weird between the two of us.)

So this is the point where my question comes into play: I get caught in my own head often due to internalized self-doubt towards a lot for things like job interviews, friendships and now this. We say ‘I love you’ regularly, have an active sex life, cook together all the time, are supportive of each other, communicate openly about what’s bothering us, my parents love him and everything. But there’s still that annoying voice in the back of my head that makes me assume the worst and that ‘everything isn’t real’ and ‘I’ll just screw it up sometime soon like I always do by being too needy, clingy, distant, etc’. It’s that awful niggling feeling in the back of your mind that insists on sowing a seed of doubt that keeps building. I wish I knew how to shut it up. I don’t want to assume it’s going to end badly or anything like that, lest it become a self-fulfilling prophecy which will make both of us feel awful.

Is this a standard thing that happens after dating seriously for a while? My last long relationship ended in 2014 so I’m doing my best to break my own past habits to feel more confident and secure.

Thanks, 

Anne Nonymous

DEAR ANNE NONYMOUS: You’ve got two issues going on AN, and they’re both intertwined like mating snakes.

The first is that you’ve had some bad experiences with previous partners, and they’ve left emotional scars. The second is that you have low self-esteem and it’s causing problems.

One of the things that people tend to not realize about issues like neediness is that needy behavior is almost always based around fear. Most of the ways that people act needy in relationships all revolve around assuaging fears and anxieties. This is why, for example, someone with neediness issues will over-commit to a relationship too quickly; they’re afraid that this may be their last chance for love and so they try to lock it in as quickly as possible. Always wanting to be around their partner at all times is born out of the fear that if they let their partner out of their sight for a moment, they might meet someone better.

That’s a lot of what you have going on right now, AN. You’ve been hurt before and you have a hard time believing in your own value, so you worry that your boyfriend will realize he could do better. So on the one hand, you want to cling to him like a lovesick barnacle, lest a good thing get away. On the other, you also recognize that doing so will push him away. So you try to force yourself to not be clingy.

Problem is that the clinginess is the symptom and not the cause. Trying to suppress the behavior is good, but trying to suppress the emotions that cause the behavior makes things worse. The key to actually resolving these issues is to embrace your inner kung-fu hero. As any martial artist will tell you: it’s easier to redirect force than it is to try to stop it. The same is true of negative emotions. Instead of trying to force yourself to not feel or ignore those feelings, you need to do some emotional aikido.

When you’re feeling these emotions bubble up, start by noting and naming them. What, precisely are you feeling? Is it fear, where you’re expecting a specific outcome that you want to avoid, or is it anxiety, where you’re bothered by the uncertainty of a situation? Is it jealousy, where you worry that someone will take what you have? Is it a sense of feeling worth less as a partner than other people? This can seem weird, but simply being mindful of your emotions can help dampen the negative impact on you.

Next: pay attention to the language you use to describe how you feel. Language can be deterministic and the way you talk about things directly changes how they affect you. Don’t say that you are anxious or that you are afraid or jealous; that defines your emotional state as an integral part of who you are. Instead, say that you feel anxious or jealous; feelings are inherently transitory, after all. You never feel one way all the time. Even people who suffer from chronic anxiety or phobias don’t feel them 24/7. Telling yourself that you feel, instead of you are, is a reminder that this is a temporary issue that will pass.

Now that you’ve defanged so much of the impact these feelings have, interrogate them a little. What, precisely, caused you to feel this way? Was there a particular trigger, or did it just bubble up from your subconscious out of nowhere? If it was something specific, then look at it as dispassionately as possible. Is it possible that you are looking at it in the worst possible light because that confirms your anxieties? If your friend were to describe this exact scenario as happening to them, what would you tell them? Again: mindfulness here works to help train you to recognize your triggers and how to tell when you have an actual problem and when it’s just your jerk-brain dripping poison in your ear.

Another part of how you deal with that nagging voice? Trust that things are exactly as they appear to be. Part of how low self-esteem and doubt gets you is that they make it impossible to actually believe your partner when they tell you how they feel. “This compliment doesn’t mean anything, they have to say it.” “They’re only saying that to make me feel better.” Accepting that there are no hidden agendas, that your boyfriend is being honest with you when he talks about how much he enjoys being with you, helps dilute those little drops of poison.

And finally: accept that you’re worth being loved and have a right to be happy. A lot of those negative beliefs come from believing that you aren’t allowed to love or be loved.

One caveat: if you’re still having serious doubts and or obsessive negative thoughts? Then it may be good to go back to that therapist who helped you out before.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  In September of 2015, my girlfriend/fiancee of five years told me that she didn’t see a future for us. We talked, cried, yelled, cried again, talked again, until we finally ended things. I grabbed some things from the closet, packed them into my backpack, put my key on a shelf, and walked out of the door. 

If I’m being entirely honest, this was a long time coming. When our relationship was in its infancy, I made a few major mistakes in the form of talking to other women online in a sexual manner, and even talked to them about possibly meeting up. I never did, but that doesn’t matter. She couldn’t possibly have known that we didn’t, and she would just have to trust my word on it. However, after catching me doing this a few times, that trust had understandably dissolved.

The last time she caught me was a little over a year into our relationship. To this day, I can’t say what caused me to do this. I haven’t done it since. I chalk it up to being some kind of fucked up kink. 

Before I met my ex, I was well on my way to getting a lot of priorities in order. She even helped me reach many of my goals at the time. However, after the mistakes, I couldn’t muster up the motivation to do things. I stopped working out. I stopped putting as much effort into college. Hell, a lot of that effort was used to calm her down most days. Any argument, big or small, could set her off into thinking I may be cheating.

When things ended, I fell into a deep depression. I immediately went out and tried to find a rebound. I found a regretful one night stand, and then spent the next two years seeing neither hide nor hair of a relationship or anything resembling one. I spent night after night huddled onto my bed, binge watching Netflix while eating my sorrows away. I ran out of financial aid, and ended up having to drop out of college. I hopped from job to job, never finding anything that I felt motivated to work hard for, despite normally thinking that any job worth doing is worth doing right. 

Then, I started seeing people again. I had moved in with some roommates, and being around them helped me muster up a bit of confidence. I started seeing people again, and found this one woman who I thought was amazing. We didn’t have a ton in common, but we really enjoyed spending time together. The sex was great, the chemistry was great, but she didn’t want to have a relationship with me. She’d get to points every once in a while where she’d say she was starting to see things happening, but then she slowly stopped wanting to see me. It hit me pretty hard, because it started off really great, but fizzled out way too fast. To be fair, we were spending the night together a lot, but it wasn’t one sided. Eventually, she moved on to another “friend”, and I faded into obscurity.

My car broke down about seven months into starting a the best paying job I’d ever had. Then, I had to quit that job, because I couldn’t make it in to work. I got a job back at a place I used to work at in college, but I ended up needing to move out into a one bedroom with a coworker who bailed on me—and our job—only a couple of months into our lease. Luckily, I had started moving up at work, and I’m now able to pay for all of my bills by myself. Unfortunately, this also means that I can’t afford to save up to get another car.

For the past few months, I had been seeing someone. She was understanding, considerate, and comfortable to be around. Unfortunately, I wasn’t that attracted to her, and the sex was mediocre. It was weird. Even though we had barely started doing anything, it felt like I was at the end of a fading relationship where the passion was gone, and it was like that from the beginning. We talked about things, and she said she wasn’t really feeling anything either. So, we mutually ended things.

It’s been about a month since that ended, and I just can’t motivate myself to date or even get myself into a situation where I could date. I’ve gained back a lot of weight, but I have no motivation to exercise or readjust my diet. I keep meeting women I like, but I have no motivation or confidence to speak to them about anything other than in a casual/friendly manner. I can’t really even motivate myself to do anything except keep up with the basics. I go to work, do my weekly chores, maybe play some video games or binge a show, then I go to sleep. I hang out with friends, but most of them are couples, and the other singles in the friend group are all guys, and I’m not romantically attracted to men. I’m not as depressed as I was, but I’m still deeply unmotivated.

I just don’t know what to do to get myself motivated again. I just turned 31, and I’m worried that if I don’t figure things out soon, then I’ll just be alone for the rest of my life.

Stuck in Neutral

DEAR STUCK IN NEUTRAL:  Y’know SiN, I think you’re in a similar boat to AN up there. You’ve had a lot of shitty things happen to you in rapid succession and it’s taken its toll on you. The problem is, unlike AN… I don’t think you’ve really stopped to process or deal with everything. That’s going to fuck with you.

Now keep in mind that Dr. NerdLove is NOT a real doctor but… a lot of what you’re describing sounds a lot like the symptoms of chronic depression.

Depression is something I’ve wrestled with for most of my adult life, and it took a while for me to realize that I was having a problem with it. One of the mistakes that a lot of people make is that they tend to assume that depression is “the blues” when in reality, it’s often better described as “the grays”. It’s less feeling bad for yourself and more not feeling. You’re drifting through your life like a grey specter. You feel worthless, in the descriptive sense rather than the pejorative. It’s not that you’re bad – though that’s frequently part of it – but that you have no worth. Nothing is worth doing, life doesn’t have any real meaning and you just have no real motivation to do anything. You find a few things to fill the hours, even though you don’t take any joy from them, but otherwise, you just exist.

Part of what’s especially pernicious about depression is that you feel guilty about having it. You look around your life and recognize that hey, things aren’t great, but you really don’t have a reason to be depressed. Since you can’t point at any one thing that can justify those feelings, you feel like you’re doing something wrong. You feel like you should be able to just drag yourself out of it. But you can’t. And so you feel like a loser for feeling bad.

But I’m here to tell you from experience: you really can’t just grit your teeth and dig your way out. You need help. Sometimes that help is talk therapy. Other times that help comes in the form of CBT exercises. And still other times that help means medication. But the important part is getting that help.

You don’t need to be talking to a loudmouth with a blog, SiN, you need to talk to a mental health professional. Don’t worry if money is tight; most therapists will work on a sliding scale basis. If you can’t find someone in your area, you may want to try a service like Amwell and arrange sessions over Skype.

But get that help, SiN. That will help you dig your way out of the hole you’re in and help you find your motivation again.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)