Does this place depress the hell out of anybody else?

I mean DU.

I feel like I have an addiction to an abusive spouse or something sometimes. I can't stop coming here, but something, every day, makes me feel like shit, whether it's an individual person's nasty post, or an administrative decision that doesn't make sense, or just the general state of the world that I'm confronted with by staying informed.

Is it just me having a downward spiral? Is DU particularly dysfunctional or is it just the way of all things?

I hate it when my safe haven makes me cry.

since the election. I just couldn't handle it any more. I've tried to get back into the political forums and have posted a few times there, but my heart just isn't in it.

Since I've been posting that way I've also minimized the negativity that can be experienced from posting more broadly and I don't generally feel bad from my sessions at DU.

Maybe you should go on hiatus for a little while and join me in the non-political forums. Maybe you just need a break.

For several weeks. I try to stay out of the forums with more negativity, but I get into this obsessive mode where I just can't stop clicking links...if I've gone through everything current in the Lounge, I end up checking out what's going on elsewhere. I need to limit my time online, I think, but I have difficulty doing things that I know make sense. :)

Also, some of the "safer" forums have been the ones to make me crash. I think it may be me, having a thin skin at the moment. I reduced my meds several weeks ago, and I think it was a bad idea. Now I'm afraid to go back to the regular dose, because I start to imagine I'm having a negative reaction of some kind, and that plunges me into a panic attack, which feels even more like a negative reaction, which causes more panic. (I have what I can only describe as an anaphylaxis phobia.) Ugh. I'm a mess.

That is, like Droopy, I've restricted my time on DU to the non-political forums since the election too.

Hate to say it, but there are some real jerks in some of the forums like General Discussion, and I saw what assholes they could be in the weeks right up until the election.

They were mindlessly cheerleading for Kerry, and if anyone dared suggest that it was just possible for Bush to win and Kerry to lose, they would act like good little enforcers and shout down that person.

And, certainly not to say that the media is a bastion of truth and accuracy, but they would parse even the slightest choice of words as proof that the media were "whores" biased against us. The most ludicrous example of that was when there was a headline saying "Obama may trounce Keyes" and someone took the "may" as proof that the media were biased against Obama.

Anyway, all this acting like the left-wing counterpart to Free Republic wasn't productive to our cause at all, and it didn't prepare us for the very real eventual outcome.

I took a two-month hiatus from DU after the election, and then when I came back, I stuck to the Lounge. Now they have all of these smaller groups, and thank God for 'em.

but i keep coming back.

I'm going to take Droopy's suggestion and take a hiatus for a while, see if my mood improves.

Really.

But it's true that this place can be depressing. If it isn't the state of the world in general, some asshat flames me for something trivial and I get my panties in a bunch. I could confine myself to the lounge, but like the above poster, I feel a need to click, click, click, click...and pretty soon, I'm clicking my way into the General Discussion forums where it is not safe to tread.

Then fellow Dems send me e-mails that make me want to curl up into a ball under my bed...sigh.