26M, Ukraine. I'm writing because I genuinely don't know what to do anymore, and I'm hoping someone here has been in this place and found a way through.
Some context. I grew up sensitive and emotional, but with an alcoholic father and the kind of "men don't cry" Eastern European culture, I shut all that down by my teens. School and college were unremarkable - introvert, gamer, no ambitions, too shy and indecisive to follow through on anything, including girls.
Then things started breaking, one after another:
At 19, my first relationship ended when she ghosted me while I was working abroad. No closure. That was my first real depression.
A few months later my father died. We'd just started having a real father-son relationship for the first time in my life. His death also dropped huge responsibility on me - we lived in the countryside, my mom had just had cancer surgery and couldn't do anything heavy for almost a year. Overnight I went from gaming kid to man of the family. Weirdly, the responsibility kept me functioning.
I discovered programming, taught myself, landed my first dev job in 4 months, got promoted fast, became the main backend guy. Got in shape, started saving for an apartment. Life felt good again.
Then 2022. Russia invaded. Two of my cousins went to fight. One died. One was captured. For about a year I kept performing because I had a reason - donating to volunteers. After that year, something inside me just switched off. I blamed the job, changed companies, lasted 6 months, same emptiness.
So I tried to fix it the "correct" way. Quit. Took a sabbatical. Fixed my sleep, ate clean, biked 10km a day, lifted 4-5 times a week, got in great shape. Made an in-person friend. Joined a PhD program (also for army deferment). Six months of doing everything right. Nothing changed.
The breaking point was a PhD conference. Beginning of summer. I gave a presentation, got praised, had great conversations with interesting people. I felt absolutely nothing. That's when I really broke. One month of nonstop series, food, porn, and alcohol, gained back 10kg I'd worked 6 months to lose. Then two months just lying in bed counting hours until I could sleep again. Suicidal thoughts daily. I couldn't go through with it, and somehow that disappointed me too.
What broke that cycle was my PhD mentor calling my mom because I'd disappeared. She came over, and for the first time in my life I told someone everything. She said I was being selfish, that everyone in Ukraine has it hard, that I needed to get it together. I understand she couldn't really hear me, but it stung. The guilt did give me enough push to finish my coursework and land another job - good company, good pay.
That was 6 months ago. I'm doing almost nothing at work now. I'll probably be fired soon. I haven't finished my university tasks either, so I'll likely be expelled if don't take any actions.
I've kept therapy as a "last resort", afraid that if it doesn't work, I'll have nothing left. The only thing keeping me going for the last 6 months was not wanting to do to my mother what my father did to us. That thought has stopped working too.
Has anyone actually climbed out of something like this? What helped? I feel like I died that summer and I've just been walking around as the leftover.