Trying to figure out the absolute worst feeling is like exploring uncharted emotional territory. Everyone’s compass is different, shaped by their own experiences and feelings. Still, there are some feelings that many people can agree are really tough. Let’s take a closer look at these shared challenges and acknowledge that even though our experiences may vary, some feelings are universally difficult for all of us.
Suddenly becoming homeless and having nowhere to go. When it happened to me, I was lucky enough to have my car though I had no AC during a heat wave in summer. The feeling of having to debate losing your animals and belongings because they’re under someone else’s control, is a sickening feeling. I was lucky and was only homeless for a couple of weeks. Many others aren’t and have it much, much worse. I only had a taste.
Being a gifted kid in school and 10 years later, all of the praise, promise, and potential isn’t there anymore
When you get rejected from a job, that would flip your life around in every aspect.
Falling out of love is the most terrible feeling I’ve ever been unfortunate enough to know. Building a life with someone, dating forever, and being “that couple” that everyone looks up to, loving so hard it hurts. You can close your eyes and paint the perfect picture of them smiling. Maybe that time you went swimming, and you kissed in the moonlight, sleeping with patterns from the blinds streaming just so across her face. You know all her moles, all her scars, and the story behind them. You imagine what your kids will look like. Think about what their names will be. You have this idea of growing old together, of getting married and kissing their beautiful face on the altar. You’re just so ready to live, to go on this adventure with someone who has been your whole life. You PLAN. Together.
And then your interests and ideas slowly change, so subtle at first, you talk less, the honeymoon is over, and you realize you’re still just a kid at heart, trying to grow up and become YOU. They are becoming THEM. But these paths don’t match up with the ones we planned. All these plans, the imagined children, the make-believe wedding, even the stupid thought of being old and holding her hand on the bus. Everything, even the silly insignificant possibilities, is just gone. They can’t exist anymore. They’ll never happen. It’s over.
And everything else is just memories or things that will never happen. You can’t touch it, live it anymore. You know it couldn’t work, but it still haunts you every day that those… possibilities are no more.
Having nobody to speak my deepest thoughts with. Days come and go, people come and go, but nobody has been close enough to know me entirely. It is, maybe, because I don’t let them close to me. The ones I have allowed close to me have all hurt me so deeply that I have yet to recover from them. Maybe it is the fear of betrayal and hurt that may stab me again. At work, I do my work good enough. My manager is happy with my punctuality, deadlines, and decent work. But how do I do that after a heartbreak or the fact that my parents quarrel every now and then? My manager thinks I have a happy personal life. Heck, even my best friend thinks I have a stable personal life. Because they don’t know. I don’t tell them. And it’s the worst feeling ever.
The feeling of loneliness arising from having nobody to speak my heart to and that depressing assumption that nobody cares about me sometimes makes me wonder why I am fighting so much. Why perform so well at work? Why put on this happy face? Is there any day in the future when I can be happy? As days pass by, that flame of hope grows dimmer.
I am a fighter, but how much longer can even a fighter fight? Life just wins, sometimes.
Being in a vivid dream for what feels like years. Building bonds with people in that dream. Growing accustomed to the environment. Then waking up confused because it was just a dream, and you just lost everything.
I’m not sure how you are going to pay rent for the month.
I had the luxury to be a stay at home Mom until I was 41. Never developed a career, have no real defined skill set. Hubby ran off with a stripper and left the kids and me with no child or spousal support. He’s 1000 miles away, while I slog in factories as a temp for about 14k a year. Kinda hard to fight in the legal system with my pay. The state couldn’t find him to make child support demands. Texas is big, and I gave them (my state) his home AND work address. Give your Momma lots of love. This stuff is brutal and soul-crushing. Landlord left a letter today. Trying to figure out how not to start the new year with an eviction. Being poor with my kids has been the worst 4 years of my life so far. I hate it for them.
Two words: Broken tooth.
Somehow, I managed to split a tooth in half. It went from slightly throbbing to absolute torture in a matter of a couple of weeks.
I went to three dentists, and only the third one managed to see the damage. He just glanced at the x-ray and said, “Son, I can’t even imagine, what you went through” (I joke you not!).
I will never forget the night before my appointment. I woke up every 10 minutes because I felt the immense pain streaks, gnawing through the tooth nerve. One Ren and Stimpy episode comes to mind, the one where Ren stops brushing his teeth, and the tooth beaver chews through the exposed nerve endings. Yeah, I cannot watch that cartoon anymore.
Also, on the day of my appointment, I walked to the dentist (it was a 5-minute walk).
I have walked the walk, man. Barely. When the pain hit, I couldn’t walk straight. Nearly fell down just from the sheer amount of the magma burn feeling, like a thousand hot needles were inserted into my brain.
Thank heavens the tooth was extracted shortly after that. Never felt better in my life before and after. I still have the tooth as a memory trinket in a drawer.
Screw waterboarding. A broken tooth is the end of it all.
Brush your teeth, kids.
That sinking feeling when you think you’ve lost your phone or wallet.
I COMPLETELY DESERVED THIS AND AM UTTERLY ON MY KNEES WITH GRATITUDE EVERY TIME I THINK ABOUT THIS BECAUSE I DID NOT HURT ANYONE ELSE, BUT:
Driving home from the bar, about a mile from home when you see the blue and red lights flashing in your rear-view mirror. The absolute feeling of horror, doom, and self-loathing wash over you all at once. The blood just instantly drains from your face, and all you can do is grip the wheel, scream “f*ck” as loud as possible, and get yourself ready to fail a roadside sobriety test.
However, this experience led me to really think about how much I was messing up everything because of alcohol and am now working with a sponsor and have just gotten 9 months of sobriety under my belt.
When you relapse with an addiction, or when you’re about to relapse and you know you don’t want to, but you can’t stop yourself. It’s like you don’t have control over your own body, but at the same time, are completely conscious of what you’re doing. It’s like you’re enslaved to the worst version of yourself.
Had a consultant stick his fingers under my kneecap and wedge it up through a tear in my skin to check for tendon damage once. Wasn’t the best feeling.
From my own experience:
Feeling like your mind is slowly slipping out of your control. To go from a person who was able to remember the faces of kindergarten classmates after 25 years to not remembering pictures that you took of your children last weekend at her first t-ball game, or not remembering the t-ball game at all. Constantly letting people down because you can’t remember to do even the simplest tasks like making a phone call or asking a question. Very little gets committed to long term memory these days. Nearly half of all interactions I have with people that I am asked to recall something result in me admitting I don’t recall. That number goes up well beyond half if the thing was from less than 2 years ago. Walking around in what can only be described as a dream state because of brain fog. The fog can feel so thick that simple questions start mild panic attacks while I scramble to formulate a coherent response. I used to be a jovial, generally outgoing person, but now I prefer to keep to myself because I’m afraid of interacting with people. Can they tell I’m losing my mind? Can they tell the point I’m trying to make isn’t quite made because I couldn’t hold the thought long enough to form a complete thought? Can the people who know me tell me that I’m losing it? Is it just me?
The headaches, the headaches, the headaches. I don’t know where the headaches come from, but they must all be related. The headaches used to come and go, but now they never really go, sometimes just dulling down. Actually, they never really come, either. Headaches seem to be ever-present.
My executive function (the command and control of the brain) has fallen so far from my old self that I am not able to take on complex thought activities. I used to write policies and opinions as an expert in my field. Develop complex strategies with multiple steps, triggers, and contingency plans. Now I can’t read a page of text without stopping 20 times to re-read, refocus, or gain control of my eyes. It takes hours to write a 5 sentence response email. The information isn’t stuck in my head. The filing system in my brain is so jumbled up that the files aren’t ever available for recall. (I won’t remember it later)
All of these symptoms combine to make me Feel like I’m losing control of myself. I was always a cerebral person, often lost in thought, contemplative, deep thought. Now I just get lost. They all seem to move as a team building up each other and strengthening as a group as my mind gets weaker. I might end up mentally absent long before I die. I might not remember my child’s first dance recital. I might not remember my wedding day. I might remember those things. I don’t know. But it is a real possibility that my mind goes, and the slow creep of this possibility into my world is absolutely the worst feeling.
I was going to say wet jeans, but then I started reading other responses, and now my emotions feel like wet jeans.
When someone else tries to erase with a pencil that has no eraser left, so they just scratch at the paper with the metal end. shudder
Story time.
Where I live, it gets pretty cold in the winter, so I wanted to configure my bidet to spray out warm water.
A plumber was over for some other stuff, so I asked him how one would go about switching the inlet source. Once he was gone, I got to work, and half an hour later, it was all set up. Soon after that, I left for this party and got pretty drunk.
When I woke up the next day, I switched on the hot water for a shower, and soon after that, it was time for one of those ridiculous dumps that are known only to those who have spent a whole night drinking whiskey and eating kebabs.
Everything was coming along swimmingly until the bum spray came into play. I’d completely forgotten about my experiment the previous evening, and as I pushed the lever thing on the faucet, I felt its pipe heating up. A bit too much. There must’ve been half a second between that and me realizing what was about to happen. This water was somewhere around 80℃/ 175℉ and heading at a high speed towards my unsuspecting butthole. I barely mustered an “OH FUU….” before it hit. Imagine getting sodomized by lava. I really can’t explain it in any other way.
I couldn’t bear to look, but for a while, it felt really weird down there. I’m pretty sure everything that existed in the general vicinity of my butthole got singed, and my taint was tingling in a way that I’d never felt before, which was kind of interesting.
I’m still kinda hairless over there, which I’m sure will turn out to be a good thing once I get over the mental scarring.
When you eat something spicy, and you poop it out, and you get spicy butthole.
Pulling ice out of the freezer and one of the cubes falls on your pinky toe. You just stand there in shock. Time slows down, and you wonder how you get there and out from the background of your time-lapsed tunnel vision. Enya – Only Time fades in from the distance, and just as you’re accepting your fate, that little ice cube crushes down on your toe. You scream, and the camera pans to a different view. Sweat starts to appear between the spaced-out exterior visions of you contemplating life.
Also, when you need to take a massive poop in a public restroom, and you know it’s going to be loud, and someone else is in there, so you have to hold it in.
Accidental OD. So I used to be on two medications that looked A LOT alike. One was a mild neurotransmitter. One was a powerful anti-psychotic. Guess which one I accidentally overdosed on, thinking it was my mild little neurotransmitter?
The feeling of dread when I realized I’d taken the wrong medication and HOW much of it I’d taken was scary. Thankfully my spouse got me to the ER, and I was ultimately fine, if not shaken up. I use a pill organizer now.
Withdrawal is also a special kind of torture.
I can assure you that multiple pulmonary embolisms and severe pneumonia at the same time were pretty rough. I would avoid that where possible.
The worst feeling I’ve ever had was just after I drank some Emetrol. Now Emetrol is basically sugar water that you drink to settle your stomach. But my wife has a habit of drinking directly out of the bottle, and it had been around 6 months since she bought it, drank out of it, and set it on the bathroom counter. So I basically drank from a bottle of random God knows what bacteria.
I can’t even describe how awful of a feeling it was, but it happened immediately. It was like being hit in the stomach with a baseball bat made out of fear while someone threw cold, dread-flavored acid in your face. I think I went blind for a moment. I say I think I did because the sensation I was experiencing was so intense I honestly couldn’t process any sensory input. It was overpowering. I was positive that I was going to die.
I have no idea how long I collapsed on the bathroom floor while feeling all this. It was probably only a few minutes, but as I said, I didn’t really have any sensory feelings, and that extended to things like feeling the passage of time.
But when I came back, I DID feel less nauseous, so there’s that.
I had this cat for years. He was a chubby sweet boy who had a distinct meow. I had him for over half my life. I had to put him down this year because cancer was killing him. I still hear his meow at random times, and I’ll think to go look for him for a split second before I remember he’s gone. Maybe it’s nothing compared to losing a soulmate or something, but that cat helped me through my own battle with cancer, and I’d been with him so long that it felt like I’d lost an arm. There’s this piece of me missing. It’s getting better, so I don’t do this much anymore, but I miss the little fatty. He lived a good long life, though. 16 years is a good run for most cats.
Washing your hands without rolling up your sleeves.
Someone taught my wife once a trick to get away from an attacker where you kind of compress their fingernail into the finger.
She tried it on me once (I wasn’t attacking her), and I can confirm that is the worst feeling ever.
Boredom without motivation to do anything.
You don’t feel like going out, playing video games, listening to music, etc. You don’t feel like doing anything, but you also want to do nothing, so all you can do is wait as time slowly passes by, and it’s time for you to actually eat dinner or call your parents.
It’s not the worst feeling ever, but holy crap, is it one of my least favorites.
Broke my back during an accident a few years ago. Made a full recovery, but the night after they put chapstick-sized screws in my back to hold it all together remains the most painful and miserable experience of my entire life.
Woke up from surgery thinking, “This isn’t too bad”, and then entered the depths of the underworld a few hours later when the anesthesia faded. Fun fact: There’s a limit to how many painkillers they can give you right after you’ve been under complete anesthesia. They increased the dosage the next day, and I was alright, but that first night was something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
Head on while riding a motorcycle on the way to work. Drunk made the wrong turn onto an exit ramp. I took the roof of his car almost completely off. Three months in the hospital, multiple surgeries, and three more months of physical therapy to walk again under my own steam. Use a cane, can almost forecast the weather by what hurts. Both legs, hips, back, left shoulder. Hurt all the time. Sleeping is my only release from the pain. Just glad to still be here. I love my wife & two sons.
Then, my father-in-law (stroke) passed suddenly, then in rapid-fire order; my mother-in-law (stroke), my dad (heart failure), my younger brother (was in a coma for 30 some years- respiratory failure), my eldest sister-in-law (cancer), and then my mom (massive abdominal infection-36 hrs start to death).
Just kind of numb to folks dying around me right now. Been through the stages of grief, but just don’t have any more care to give.
When someone is on your computer on your account and using your web browser watching YouTube on your account.
Being left out of something by your friends.
Imagine being told by everyone what a great person you are, from the ladies what a catch you are, how funny and intelligent you are, etc., only to be rejected by every woman you ever go for and constantly have your “friends” give you reasons why they can’t hang out only to find out that they did exactly what they didn’t want to do with you with someone else on the same night.
I am at a point where I have two friends, one of whom is on the fence, and I am at peace with this. I just assume I’m cursed not to have any true connections in my life. Video games, shows, movies, books, they get me by. I’m in my 30s, so doing things like dating and making new friends is infinitely harder than it was while I was younger, so I think I may have given up on trying. I also know that my two remaining friends will be gone from my life the second they find romantic interests because that is just how it goes.
I’ve never had true best friends, and my only “relationship” was a year-long affair with a girl who lied about being in love with me just to have regular sex while her husband was in Afghanistan. That was a nice reveal the day before he got home lol I laugh because if I don’t, I’ll go insane lol.
All of this really comes full cycle back to everyone always telling me I’m so great, but if that was truly the case, why does everyone always have a reason NOT to spend any time with me? It’s not like I won’t go out of my comfort zone and do their things. I tend to ONLY do other people’s things because, god forbid, we do any of my interests. Yeah, this is a bit of a rant at this point.
Many years ago, the Army fitness test. 9 miles running and walking, carrying 35lbs in 1 hr 50. Lost the skin on both heels. The medic sprayed Zinc Benzene on. I was crawling up the treatment table to get away while he was following with the aerosol. Another bloke lost pretty much the soles of both feet. They took him back to the block in a wheelchair. How he managed for that first day, I don’t know.
Terrible route, on camp on tarmac predominately.
The moments after you wake up from one of those really good dreams. One of those dreams where everything is how it used to be, that certain person is still in your life, still alive, nothing has fallen apart yet, where you dream you’re happy. It’s in the seconds you wake up when you come to the realization that it’s not the reality that you’re waking up to.
Me and my mum were always very close, us against the world. We defected to east Germany together, and although she always struggled, she nevertheless gave me everything a child can wish for.
When I was 8 years old, she got diagnosed with cancer for the first time, but she fought it with all her strength and beat it.
Over the years, she got diagnosed with cancer again…six times. Each time a different variant. 3 years ago, she was in a hospital because she was so weak, the cancer had worn her out, and the doctors wanted to feed her up because she had lost so much weight and was supposed to undergo surgery for a laryngectomy.
In my mind, she still was this strong woman who would beat this cancer again…but then one evening, when I quit work earlier to visit her, a nurse told me to prepare.
“Prepare for what exactly?” was my answer, and then it hit me just how serious the situation was and how little time there was left. I spent the whole evening with her. She was on morphine, very sleepy, and not really there, if you know what I mean.
It didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to spend time with her. But then, just for a brief moment, she became focused and told me how much she loved me and how grateful she was that I took care of her for the last 9 years, abandoning my studies and working several jobs just to provide for us. I told her that I would do it all again, that I would always love her, and that she was the most important person to me and was the best mother a child could hope for.
Soon after that, she asked me if I would visit her again the next day, which I affirmed. She fell asleep after that, and I went home. It was a long day, so I fell asleep on the couch. Two hours later, I got the call that she died in her sleep.
No words can describe how I felt. To make it short: I didn’t leave my bed for 3 weeks straight, I didn’t eat properly, and I didn’t care for body hygiene and so on. Lots of “friends” who turned their backs on me when I needed them the most. I lost the drive to do anything.
But now I’m better. I’m still sad, and I miss her every day, but I got a stable job, a brighter perspective on life, a wonderful girlfriend who I love with all my heart, and some very good friends who I can count on.
Sometimes we think that we simply can’t go on, but don’t go that way. You will always find something worth living for. Life is just too precious.
Working yourself to death for an organization that promises a promotion after X time and training completed then hires an external candidate with a chip on her shoulder, no education or experience, and then you are expected to train her. Quitting the job you loved and were so passionate about and leaving behind your beloved colleagues.
getting your feet tickled and telling them to stop and them not stopping and then getting incredibly angry and kicking them in the face and having to sit there, embarrassed, feet still aching from their tickling, while in silence while you think about everything you’ve done wrong.
I’d always been a good student and ended up doing my undergrad at a competitive, top-ten university. However, I was all too aware at the time that I came from a relatively easygoing public high school, especially when compared to some of the crazy private secondary schools that had held many of my fellow students to a much higher standard. I went into my undergrad feeling like I had to work extra hard to come up to speed, and to some extent I was right.
I felt crazy underprepared for first-year chemistry, in particular. Studied my butt off for the first exam and left the test feeling a bit unsure of my performance but somehow confident that I did at least okay. We got our results back a week later as we were leaving the lecture, and at the top of my sheet, it said 54%. I had gotten the worst test result ever from my very first college exam. The nausea I felt was crippling. I’ve seen a lot of crap over the years, so this was by no means the worst thing I’ve ever gone through, but there was something this did to me that ripped from me any sense of intellectual validation that made the worst feeling I’ve ever felt. It was like everything I had ever proudly achieved, my entire self-worth was based on life in easy mode and that I didn’t deserve to be up there with all these real smart kids. I was shattered.
And the next lecture, they shared class metrics on the exam. Turns out the average was 48%, and due to the abysmal performance of everybody, and the massive influx of emails the professor received, they retroactively graded everybody to a curve. That was subsequently the biggest feeling of relief I’ve ever had.
It was the professor’s first year teaching this class.
Funny, though, how none of that had any bearing on my future.
Needing to cry but not being able to.
I lost two of my puppies this May. Rottweilers, at one-year-old, within one week of each other. One had been sick a while; the other was so healthy that two of us had to pick his dead body up. I’d delivered them with my own hands; they were two of a litter of eight, the only two to survive because I refused to let them die too. I didn’t cry because everyone else was, and someone had to keep their head on right.
My adopted stray tomcat died a month after that. Got hit by a car crossing the street. My mom was heartbroken. I couldn’t cry in front of her.
My oldest cat went into renal failure the same month. She was paralyzed from the waist down soon after and slowly deteriorated over the next few months. She died last month, my sweet, sweet girl. I’d found her and her siblings when they were less than a week old. I had her for ten years. She passed, and I went and buried her myself because my family didn’t want her to go alone. They came and stood by, completely shattered. I didn’t dare cry.
I’ve steadily lost touch with every friend I was close to over the past year. The two who know how I’m struggling are geographically too far away to even talk to regularly. The rest have all shown sides to them I didn’t know. I needed to cry every time. I needed someone to just listen, even if nothing else. There was no one. The last time I practically begged my best friend of five years to spend the day with me because I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself, and he lost his temper with me, saying that it ruined his mood just because I was in a bad one. He actually screamed at me on the phone to learn to deal with my problems myself and hung up. I sat on the bench outside my workplace for a few hours, too numb to move. Then I went home.
I didn’t cry. I couldn’t cry. About a month ago, things finally began to look up a little. I met someone and reacted with him so positively that I was hopeful, after so long, that something good could come my way. It didn’t. I’ve spent the last few days sitting up most of the night trying to figure out how to cry this out, but I just want to scream, scream all of this out, and it won’t work. I need to cry so badly that I feel like I’ll implode, but I can’t cry.
How about roaches?
I ignored some faint “scritching” noises in my head while I was reading in bed one night, assuming it was the pillow tag making noises as I shifted around.
Nope.
A 2-inch roach crawls across my chest a minute later, so close to my face that it took my vision a second to focus in on it and another second for my brain to process the appropriate degree of girly screaming that was to follow.
Constant, unrelenting itchiness.
I had a medical condition that caused this once. I dug deep gouges in my skin with my fingernails. I had to be drugged to fall asleep and still woke after 2 hours. When I did wake, I’d be covered in blood from scratching in my sleep. That is the worst thing I have ever experienced.
The worst feeling I ever had happened when I was 15. I am 19 now. So this was four years ago, in 2018.
I walked into McDonald’s (I really wanted to get a Big Mac). I went to the counter and saw the cashier was a pretty cute girl. I put on my best tough guy voice, “Hey girl, what’s up?” I said.
“Welcome to McDonald’s. What can I get you?” She replies I was worried she hadn’t realized how dominant I truly was, so I put my arms up and let out a mighty roar, “BIG MAC”
“Sorry, we’re all out of Big Macs” (they were all out of Big Macs) i was really disappointed, so I just walked out and went to Burger King instead.
I don’t like Burger King. I walk into Burger King. “Give me a whopper I say to the cashier. I get a whole whopper. I am euphoric.
This may sound stupid, but I’m adding it because it’s how I feel right now. Tonight I was reorganizing my bookshelf and found my old scrapbook I’d attempted to make. Had a couple of family photos in it. I found a picture of me and my parents. It was probably my 4th or 5th birthday. I have the BIGGEST cheesy grin on my face….I’m 24 now. Seeing how happy I was broke my heart. Because I know what happened in the years after, and I know that happiness and light in my eyes would leave thanks to my dad being an alcoholic for half of my life. It’s a gut punch knowing I couldn’t stay that same happy girl. I want that back.
My daughter, when she was 3, played hide and seek in a clothing store. My heart dropped, and she hid from me for 8 minutes, which felt like hours. She jumped out yelling, “Haha, Mommy, you didn’t find me!” I held her and cried. Those 8 minutes were the worst feelings I have ever experienced in my entire life.
The feeling of forgetting, and I don’t mean forgetting to get something at the store, but when you forget a whole day or week. For example, when getting blackout drunk, you just suddenly come to, don’t know where you are or what even happened. This feeling got much worse for me after my first seizure. When I came to, I was in my bedroom, had no idea how I got there, started freaking out, yelling my mom’s name, asked her what happened, then found out a day and a half had passed. That whole day and a half was just gone. I just felt horrible. Still have seizures to this day that cause me to forget portions of that day (either an hour or something, just blacked out and forgot what happened.)
I once honked my way into a funeral procession because I thought they were just drivers not obeying traffic laws. Once I realized what I had done, I got the heck out of the procession, parked for a while, and cringed myself into oblivion.
I’d say the worst feeling is something close to that.
I have gallstones, kidney stones, and stomach ulcers…one worst day that I get maybe 2 or 3 times a year is one of those happy little troublemakers in the gall bladder like to go on a hobbit-like adventure and get stuck in the tubing of another organ.. like my liver or my pancreas … service to say the pain is crippling. I am rushed into A&E and kept for 2 to 4 days on pain meds, unable to eat, drink, or move due to severe pain… and I am only 36.. been waiting nearly 3 years for the surgery that will stop this…
Not being allowed into the hospital to see your grandfather pass. We had to sneak me past security at 11 pm, so I could be there. There was a limit for visitors because they didn’t want my grandpa to get Covid… while on his deathbed. He passed at 11:25 on October 1st 2021. He was more of a father than a grandfather to me. I miss him so much.