Mazel Tov! May the simcha be Mashpia on all of us. Refuah Shleime for the baby.

Hi bb,
Gut Voch, I hope your doing fine and not holing up in isolation. We are rooting for you.
Hatzlocha Rabba on your recovery.

welcome back bb we missed you, the forum wasnt the same without you,refuah shelema on the baby!

Thank you everybody. BH the baby is home and seems to be fine. BH I'm still clean.

Trying to straighten out my mental state. Not sure where it's at right now. Nothing crazy, but I'd prefer to be in a better place.

For now, I guess I am holing up in isolation...

Great news about the baby BH. Hibernating season is over. Time to rejoin our society.......

I fell last night :/  I was surprised that I fell before 90 days. But I was expecting to fall day 91. And I "fell" again now. Not sue that it's consider it a fall if I'm not devoted to staying clean

The past few months I've been pretty disconnected from Gd.
Not always davening. Almost never davening with a minyan. Davening shmona esrei lying in bed only because I didn't daven earlier and I don't want to move from my bed.

To be honest, for a number of months (maybe 6) I've been driving away. I know that I need to put work into getting closer and staying clean, and nobody else can do that for me.
However, it seems like I haven't been willing to go that extra mile...

Hang on... Not sure if this post will make sense...

I suppose I could feel worse about my complete lack of self discipline. I'm routinely MZ"L  without really trying to stop.

Running into lots of financial stress. In the past, stress has usually affected me in one of two ways.
Either I completely ignore the stress by shoving it under the rug or I'm completely overwhelmed and I get depressed.
Ignoring the stress would manifest itself by me using a credit card with no way to pay it up.

Otherwise... Depression should not be an option, been down that road and is the worst hell that I've ever experienced.


This is obviously an opportunity for self growth.
That said, I have to be willing to grow. I'm choosing to disconnect from God by not davening in a minyan, or even missing tefillos/tefillin completely.
The proper response in my case would be to somehow acknowledge the stress and use it to motivate me to succeed at life.

I really wish I knew how ppl who are broke survive. I'm so so so lost, dunno wtf I'm doing

Gnite

I feel for you. I'm also wallowing in financial debt, and wonder how to survive.

May Hashem bless you with lots of Parnossah and only success in life, May you be zoche to feel a closeness to Him.

There's this thing called "stress". Stress and I don't have a great relationship. In the past, when stress came, I made believe it didn't exist (by shoving it under the rug). If I understand me correctly, this worked because I was numbing myself to all feelings.
This led to some serious depression.
After spending time in a couple of direct psych wards and dealing with all the *!#= that life threw at me, I started doing much better. BH.
Recently, I've been "ignoring" my financial stress. I think I'm teetering on the edge of a cliff with all sorts of depression at the bottom.
My connection to God is in the dumps.
I haven't been trying to stay clean since June, which is probably why I haven't been here much.
This Shabbos I are some challa Friday night, read PopSci, slept from 11pm? Till around 1pm (14hours) went out for a meal Shabbos day, then came back and slept till some time after Shabbos.

I'm not sure if I've davened any tefillos (ש"ע) since Thursday, till today - I mumbled mincha while driving today. (Just remembered, did the same for shacharis on Friday.)
Not sure that this is the appropriate forum to post the above. Sorry if it ain't.


Just a random rant

The point of the above post was to bring out how lost I am.

Sorry to hear how tough it has been. May Hashem give you parnassa and yishuv ha'daas. from all your posts it sounds like the thing that keeps knocking you down is finances. If you win the lottery, please share the winnings with others in the same boat.

HHM,

Here's some winnings from the lotto. One of Hashem's many generous gifts from Yom Kippur:

Some thoughts from Yom Kippur:  When we daven  אשמנו בגדנו...  על חטא שחטאנו.... How on earth am I doing teshuva on behalf of another Yid?

The answer I always heard is very simple: we are all one.
But what does that mean?

When Hashem created us, he took a "piece of Himself" and made it into a neshama. He then split that neshama into millions of pieces and put different pieces into different bodies. 

Now comes Yom Kippur, the day we invite all the sinners to join us before we start Kol Nidrei, because we need ALL of us to daven together in order for our prayers to be whole.  On this day, there's a special koach that Hashem puts in the world. We can connect to one another through our soul. We don't have multiple souls. It's all one soul. That means, if there's a Yid that's completely lost and disconnected, but we want his tefilla, what are we going to do?

He's not going to shul and he's not gonna daven, so how do we include his tefilla? We can daven for that Yid, if we realize that we are all the same. The only difference is our bodies, a mere technicality.  So if "my soul" and "your soul" is the same soul, when "I" say  על חטא,  if I have in mind to connect to a part of my neshama that's currently in another body, and I'm "davening from there" that's what is actually happening. The physical body that "my" neshama is in, it's just one branch" of our collective neshama. 

We are one. You is I. I is we. We is him, is her, us, etc. We are all one soul.  A gut kvitell to the all of you/me/us!