There’s one thing in your post that I haven’t seen you mention yet it’s all over the place: depression.
I don’t know anything about you but this post, and I’m not a professional, but from very painful personal experience I’m almost sure you’re severely depressed, maybe even to the point where you need hospitalization.
Depression fucks with your head. It makes you not-do things you’re looking forward to and you don’t understand why. It makes you unable to see anything positive. You cannot get out of it without help after a certain point, and you cannot trust your own thoughts anymore.
These days, after years, I’m better. For me it’s never going completely away, but I recognize patterns, I know how to break the spiraling (and most importantly, no one shames me for how I’m doing it anymore) and I can say " this sounds like depression speaking, let me do something else and return to this thought tmr and see how I feel."
But it took years of therapy and several months of hospitalization. If you’re at the point where your outbreaks scare your family, maybe it’s time to look into that.
Another thing: depression in men is critically underdiagnosed, because most docs look for physical reasons if a man comes to them with symptoms of depression. If you haven’t been diagnosed yet, it may be that it didn’t occur to your doc, maybe because you’re masking well or because he’s just not used to seeing men with depression.
However you go on, I wish you all the best. I hope that you can find a way, with or without meds, to live in peace with your brain.
My logic was always, if == is equal, then for >= we replace one of the equal signs to denote that it doesn’t have only be equal but can be both.
But that was probably also influenced by languages where == means the value is equal and === means value and type have to be equal for the comparison to be true. If you compare “5” and 5 in those languages, == will be true and === will be false, since one is a string and one is a number.
At the end of the day, those signs are arbitrary conventions. People agree on them meaning something in a specific context, and the same thing can mean different things in different contexts. A in English represents a different sound than A in Spanish, and sometimes even in other dialects of English. Thinking of out like that helped me to keep the conventions of different programming languages apart.