How do you cope with looking at your life and seeing all the weeks/ months/ years spent feeling in pain, not good enough, engaged in self destructive behaviours, hopeless, or generally at sea?

Life is really short and we only get one crack at it. No matter how I can change myself via therapy, there is stuff I can't ever change outside my control.

For example I have a medical appointment on Wednesday that I feel sick about already. The outcome dictates whether I might become very disabled if the illness keeps progressing. It's also invasive and physically uncomfortable and I.****i#g.hate.it.

If I become this disabled, I can't work. If I can't work, I lose my home and haven't a clue what to do. My real mother doesn't even know I have this appointment, because she just doesn't have it in her to ask and keep up with where I'm at. She certainly is no support, she can't help me build a life. I've drained her by being in such turmoil and pain for over ten years.

My therapist is coming to this appointment, and it is great to have that support of somebody being with me. But I want a family. All this wasted time, and years of it stretching out ahead...what is the point? No matter how I change, it doesn't seem like it can ever be enough, not to stop the slide into disability, and subsequent poverty and chronic loneliness.

Is therapy sometimes just a painkiller that offers temporary relief, rather than a cure?

I feel like I have given in finally to heavyweight depression again. I haven't left the house for three days. All I've done is sleep and drink some water and take meds. Though I did cook a little this evening. Can depression make you feel numb and totally devoid of hope for days at a time? I am used to a day of severe pain - sometimes to the point of madness and hurting myself - but then feeling sparks of hope the next day or at least the day after that.