I would like to add a description (details), but it would be a very long text.
In short: I have depression, multiple chronic illnesses, C-PTSD, ADHD (btw, I could treat it with Adderall/Adderall XL, but there all drugs are banned, even for medical purposes), no money to rent on my own, poor physical and mental health, some basic things I don’t have money for, I don’t have a computer and it seems that my laptop will soon broken…
I can’t go to a psychologist because… the quality of education and medicine in this country is terrible, and it’s dangerous to say “everything” here, my mother recently worked, but now she’s left without work and starts doing some kind of crap, she was the one who brought in the income until this time; she feeds me fast food. In this country everyone doesn’t give a sh*t about each other, I am surrounded by “broken” people, this is a country full of cynics, sociopaths, and narcissists (consider mentally ill… and genetically defective, apparently).
Like this… I am spoiled, my life and my future are spoiled.
…the army of my moronic country has killed thousands of peaceful Ukrainian civilians, foreign media have been writing for a whole year that this country wants to start a war with NATO in 2025.
I’m really sorry, I don’t know what to do… I constantly live in stress, anxiety, with a feeling of hopelessness, depression, I’m procrastinate a lot…
Normal people, in principle, do not live in this country. My mother does not consider me to be a person, as, in principle, most ruSSians (these mad dogs) treat each other.
Your English language is excellent, is that something you can use to your benefit? Think teaching, translation, document services
Guys, I can understand pretty well what is said in the text in English, but I am not good at listening and speaking English. I can form sentences a little, but I sometimes make serious mistakes, such as putting the tense wrong.
I used an online translator to write the text in this thread.
English is notoriously one of the hardest languages to learn. Don’t worry about getting the tenses wrong. People do that all the time who are conversationally fluent speaking English as a second language. Any native English speaker won’t be phased by it, and can easily tell what you’re saying.
If someone said they maked a mistake, I wouldn’t be confused. If someone said “I was going to the mall yesterday” any native English speaker would know that you meant “I went to the mall yesterday.”
Consider that your mental health situation might be giving you some tunnel vision making it easy to rule out viable paths forward. Honestly, if you can read and understand this response, I would say you are generally fluent. At least with reading and writing.
When mental health is flaring negatively, we have a severe negative attention bias. When things are bad enough, someone could give you the actual perfect solution, and a depressed brain will latch on to the small details that make it sound not so good, and rule it out to be not viable. This is just something that anyone struggling with mental health needs to become aware of.
I believe “I was going to the mall yesterday” is perfectly grammatical. It’s in the past continuous tense, if I’m not mistaken, and it would generally be used to describe something we were doing when something else happened.
Replace “going” with “walking”, and you have the first sentence in someone’s story about, say, the dinosaur attack they witnessed on the way to the mall.
Since I was a kid, I was always told that English is one of the easiest languages to learn. I learned it primarily from movies, shows and videogames. School wasn’t very helpful in that regard. My usage of the language is almost exclusively for listening and reading, I speak in it very sparsely. Nobody in my vicinity uses it. So I wouldn’t consider myself to be fluent because I have no idea how my conversation with native speaker would go. If I catch myself, I try to think in it every chance I get.
I agree that English is the easiest language, there are fewer rules than in Russian. And the difficult ones, it seems to me, are Arabic and Chinese
English can be difficult for western Europeans because it is the mutant child of both Germanic and Latin based languages that picks and chooses which words and rules to use at random.
Every (almost) language uses words and rules at random compared to what you grew up in. It’s jist how human brain works IMO.
I’ve messed with Spanish, Italian, German, and Swahili. It is not my opinion that these languages are more difficult to learn than English, even with the reduced pronouns and gendered nouns.
I think you’re doing great.
… yikes. That must be hell.
You speak fluent English, any markets for that kind of skill in that area? Could teach maybe?
Unfortunately, the time-honored tradition for people in your situation is to keep your head down, keep quiet and be careful. I imagine you probably already knew that though.
They do, it’s just that like you they’ve learnt to be careful about what they say, and to be selfish because they need to survive.
Or they once cared, but life ground them down, so they sought escape in alcohol or whatever. Obviously, this is by design. If people were open about being unhappy about their country, this would threaten the government. Not that this helps, but maybe it’ll help you feel less alone.
I can’t help you with work, but reading, tv, gaming and podcasts can be a great help when you don’t have access to mental health services.
Fiction allows you an escape from your daily reality. English language fiction allows you to learn the language Non-fiction allow you to work on your issues. Not as good as therapy, but better than nothing. If concentrating on long texts is a problem, try listening to audiobooks.
Eg. a good book about PTSD is The Body Keeps the Score.
Oh, and obviously get a VPN and pirate everything, even if it’s for your own safety.
I smiled reading your comment.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I already use a VPN, but piracy is bad tho
The book you recommended is about PTSD, but not a C-PTSD, so I think if it’s make sense…
I’m a trauma therapist, The Body Keeps the Score is very good for C-PTSD. You should also read Gabor Mate’s books and watch his interview with Tim Ferris on YouTube. It’s called Dr Gabor Mate on trauma, addiction, Ayahuasca and more. Read Richard Schwartz work around Internal Family Systems Therapy. He did an amazing interview with Rich Roll called Multiplicity of the Mind.
There’s a lot of really good content online if you can’t access a therapist. You want to start with making sure you can self regulate and self soothe and build from there. Somatic exercises will help you.