I had no job, no money and no family. I was young and had no identity documents, and was knocked back from government services because I couldn't prove who I was. I took the first safe shelter I could. With the benefit of many years experience, I know there were other options but at the time it seemed like the only option. There are ways of accessing help without ID, but I didn't know where to look.
It was a small, dodgy outbuilding at the back of someone's property. It was clad by nothing but tin. The wind would lift the rusty roof up and slam it down with a deafening crash for hours at a time. No insulation, no services of any kind. I slept on an old mattress, just laid on the floor. It had a slope to it and the springs were poking through. I had a single, sweat-stained blanket.
I lived there long enough to experience both an unusually cold winter and a heatwave. I remember the sound of the frozen grass crunching beneath my feet. It was the first time I'd ever experienced temperatures that low, having grown up in a hot climate.
The owner would occasionally let me use the facilities inside their house, but only ever during the day when it was unlocked. They gave me enough food to survive which they'd leave outside for me. We'd have a very brief exchange maybe once a week. Apart from that I had a total absence of social interaction. The property was isolated if you didn't have a car - which I did not.
It was a trap. It seemed better than the streets, because I had relative safety and a roof over my head. But it also left me totally unable to change the situation I was living in. I couldn't go anywhere to find help, I couldn't contact anyone. I didn't want to leave because the alternative seemed worse. I was stuck.
The owner had meant well. They had their own mental health issues and, even if they had been high-functioning, they had no idea what to do. They were a hoarder and the inside of their home was somehow filthier than my "living" space. The situation was a result of the contradictions between their heartfelt desire to help, their own anxieties and other mental demons. They were trapped too, in their own way, and had barely more contact with the outside world than me.
Isolation destroys your mind. You can't think straight, you lose your ability to solve even basic problems. You become paranoid. You hallucinate. Your memory is obliterated, not just for the period of the isolation but the memories formed before and after too. I had to piece together a time line of major events in my life from a couple of years before and after from little scraps I kept.
I lost my inner monologue during that time. The voice in your head. My thoughts became sensations and movement, like water being poured into a network of branching channels and spreading amongst them. They'd remain that for years and even more than a decade own it's still not the 'same'.
I was almost non-verbal at the end - finding even a few basic words, to say "yes" or "no" to a question was exhausting. My manner of speaking is not the same as it was and my accent isn't quite like anyone else who was born here. For at least a year later I was still losing time, hours or days, and was unsure of how I got there.
I was aware I was losing my mind throughout the process. I'd try to force structure and logic upon what I was processing but it doesn't work. The information you're receiving is already corrupted, then it gets further twisted in your mind. There is nothing more terrifying than being trapped in your own mind.
Eventually the owner, in a more lucid moment, managed to get mental health services to come out. I felt so betrayed at the time. I was terrified of them, unfamiliar faces after so much time alone. I was deeply ashamed. I'd come to realize this act saved me, but I hated the owner for it at the time.
Shit, that was tough, I hope you're fine now. Accepting help is pretty difficult sometimes.
Wow what a read. Thanks for sharing your experiences and perspective.
Being sexually assaulted. I feel like in terms of things that are top tier awful experiences I would probably rank any unwanted sexual experience worse than pain or death.
I've been manipulated by people. I was of age though and kind of too depressed to care because I live in a shitty small town. My sexual manipulation wasn't as bad as some other stuff people go through though. I've been manipulated hard in a non sexual way. So many kids go through shit some adult literally can't even fathom. It's sick. Even as an adult people don't get it.
I remember an older guy that weighed probably 250 laying on top of me doing stuff and I couldn't move. He shoved poppers in my face. I was so depressed and dead feeling back then I didn't care. I felt like I was in a movie. looking back that person obvious would get me liquored up and have his way. It hurts to know someone would actually act like that in real life. On the other side of things... No regular people in my life gave me a minute. No one cared for me. It's fucked to think that same guy did more for me than regular friends or family. Everyone else would have just sat back and watched me and egg me on to kms. Because everyone else I knew were just naive, entitled, and privileged.
That is terrible to read, I hope you are doing better now though
Testicular torsion. As a teenager, I woke up early in the morning with the worst back and stomach pain I had ever felt in my life. I remember thinking I might be sick, vomiting, then passing out from the pain. My parents found me later that morning because I was delirious and moaning. They took me to the hospital and it was fixed.
Just kidding! My parents are shit bags so they told me I just had the flu and I was being dramatic. After my testicle swelled up to over double the size later that day, they called our family doctor who said I probably had a hydrocele and he'd look at it when he got back from vacation. For the record, mine was textbook testicular torsion, my doctor was as idiotically negligent as my parents.
The pain again became excruciating that evening and I was exhausted from lack of sleep, so I started yelling and demanding my parents take me to the hospital, which they did the next morning. There was TV to be watched, they couldn't bother with taking care of their children. The ER determined my testicle was quite dead. Surgery was scheduled for that evening and I've had one testicle since. Get fucked, mom and dad.
Your parents suck.
Agreed. I'll never understand why people who don't actually want children have children.
Free senior caretakers.
Pretty expensive way to get free labor
You think logic applies to those folks?
Also may they play the long inflation game :p
Damn, your parents were S+ tier assholes.
I don't have children, but I have niblings and my heart goes to my throat every time they fall down or get a bruise, I can't even imagine letting my child stay in pain for anything.
I hope you're better now.
I met a homeless guy once and we talked. He told me about a time when at the train station there was someone laying on the ground, in the winter, nearly dying in front of a Cash Terminal.
People just stepped over him and were annoyed, while that person nearly died. He told me they had surveillance footage though and many of them where sued for denial of assistance.
The same guy had a huge fresh wound in his face. He was at the train station seeing 4 people attacking a single person. He went to them to see what was going on, had a weird feeling and turned around, someone smashed him in the head.
That was 4:00 in the morning, in the Winter at about 4°C. He woke up at 10:00, nobody helped him, and he nearly died.
He went to the hospital on his own to get stitches. A paramedic gave him his reflecting orange jacket, so that nobody would ever overlook him again...
Also told me how people would shit and piss directly next to where he had to sleep.
Nobody deserves to be homeless. This is so fucking sick.
I'll just go with a tame one (Edit: I have a lot to pick from and most are really hard to put into text due to the trauma)
My firsthand experience with police brutality
For context I was 15 at the time and still in highschool
When I was homeless I slept on some benches in my hometown and one night I slept on the bench behind the local library because it was one of the few that was covered and it was raining that day.
I was woken up by being tazed by a police officer.
He was screaming and I couldn't do a damn thing because I was getting tazed.
After finally falling off the bench he stopped but was screaming that he could kill me and leave my body in the woods (the town is basically right on the border of a national forest) and no one would find me.
He was screaming that if I didn't leave he would.
I took off like a bat out of hell.
He followed me with his car from a distance for a while before finally taking off in a different direction. When he took off I stopped walking down the streets and made my way to my school through less conventional means and slept there that night under one of the buildings.
Edit 2: For anyone curious, I was homeless for 8 years. I've got a nice place now and I'm back on my feet.
That's awful. I've seen some cops tuck their tails. It's just a paycheck for them or even worse a power trip like you're case.
Are you American?
Yup, I'm American
Small Town cops are a special kind of power tripping bastard
Basically think of an area that is really red already and then the people who are those people's bullies become cops
I had a old boomer call for my hanging when I was a teen.
I'm brown. I am minding my business at a store. some boomer said I should "Remember there's cameras in this store." Like wtf? I said, "Those cameras are for you."
And before I know it, he's flipping out calling me a thug and that I'm lucky to be alive because in five minutes, he can have his friends lynch me.
Security guard came over and immediately took the Boomer's side. And told me to either leave or cops will be called.
Welcome to America.
Yeah I believe. It's pretty much like that where I live. But now it's the LGBT community.
It's cool how we're just a pop politics leverage tool. /S
They fuck up the youths lives before they can even understand life.
My mom brags about how she likes black people better then the "removed" and "removed". It makes me want to kms sometimes.
Lived through and ethnic cleansing genocide. I always laugh when western keyboard warriors start talking about how war is "needed" or "coming" and larping out their movie fantasies. Real war is nothing like TV. Its hell all around. There are no victors in war. Everyone loses.
War is sometimes needed; it's a necessary response to aggression. The genocides in Bosnia? Without a war, they would have murdered all the Croats. One of my teachers in school was a survivor of the Bosnian war, and her family absolutely would have been killed had they not gotten out. Without the Allied forces waging war against the Axis, Jews in Europe would have been completely eliminated.
The option to war is to curl up and hope that you can survive the bear mauling you.
War is never needed though, is my point. Yes unprompted aggression deserves a response (I'd never advocate for just laying down and taking the fascist boot), but war itself only produces destruction, broken homes, and broken families.
My comment was more about those who have not been through an actual war but romanticise it. There is nothing romantic about it.
I think you're missing their point a bit
True true. Even though I do express my feelings like that sometimes. It's more expression that should be transfered to art.
Most likely society's response to the time I was sexually harrassed.
Like it wasn't straight up rape, but I got touched in bad places and boundaries disrespected. I was 16, the girl doing it to me was 16 too. To this day I have no idea if she was into me or if she just got off on how I'd completely bluescreen whenever she did it as a powertrip.
So anyway, being a teenager and certified "good kid", I didn't fight about it, I just knew I hated it. So I went to the adults in my school for guidance... And got laughed out of the principal's office. Because "I was a boy, of course I liked it and I had only gone to the principal as a way to humblebrag".
Got a similar reaction from the other teen boys.
So anyway it took me 10 full years to even start opening myself back up to human touch in general, as I spent that decade terrified of human touch in general.
I'm sorry
I was doing some work with an academic center that provided continuing education for the teachers and caretakers at orphanages. We always worked with local administration or charities who would educate the administrators and caretakers on how to maneuver the legal system in their country, while we provided the technical training and education resources. The goal was to get the children trained in a trade skill so they could support themselves when they got out. The areas we were working in were often remote and never in good areas, but the teachers and caretakers usually tried, they just didn’t know what they were doing and needed a little help. But at least they were trying.
By this point I had worked all over latin America, and a handful of countries in Africa. All of these people and cultures were different, but you could tell they tried, and the people in the villages and towns respected, and in many cases helped those that tried. Honestly it was some of the best and most rewarding work I have ever done.
I’m saying all of this because back in 2008 I ended up seeing an opportunity to go to Russia and do the same type work. I thought I’ve never been to Europe or Asia, sure that sounds exciting. Expecting to see the same thing I had seen in 18 other countries by this point. People in rural areas who saw a need and stepped in, now they just need training.
Instead of a rural town or village, we ended up in Kostroma, a city of a quarter million people. We find out from our contact from the Ministry of Education, that children are usually kicked out of orphanages at 14 as they are no longer profitable. At that point we should have immediately started asking questions, alarm bells should have gone off, etc. But it was the first day in a new country, we’re still getting to know our contacts before we start training. So there’s still some cultural unknowns, could be a translation error, any number of things.
While we’re doing our training, the teachers and caretakers were very standoffish, much more than we were expecting, but whatever, we’re the new people. They also have very strict times of when we have to be out of there. Makes sense, end of the work day, you’ve got kids to take care of, we get it.
We stayed too late one night and we found out the reason why the kids could become, “no longer profitable.” Evidently all of the orphanages in the area would sell kids for a night, and when they got too old, people didn’t want them, so they got kicked out. When we found out, obviously the first thing we did was try and report it. But we were told by both our contacts from the Ministry of Education, and the police, that’s just how they do business. If the kids want to eat they have to work.
We broke our contract with the Ministry of Education stating what we witnessed and left. Don’t know if anything has changed, but I’ve not been a fan of Russia ever since.
That's fucked up. One of my "inlaw" relatives had a brother that went through that in America back in the 60s early 70s. They were both orphans. I wonder if she went through a similar experience and doesn't talk about it. Humanity is dark... Probably for more than people expect.
You can thank Pizza Man Gorby and Yeltsin and the other fucks of that whole crowd for it
When I was 12 I hid under the couch while my Grandpa violently beat my grandma to death over the course of about 6hrs overnight.
I'm so sorry you had to experience that. I've experienced some wild things as an adult and had/have a hard time with it. I probably wouldn't have made it as kid. It's hard enough as an adult... The extreme confusion and betrayal is all consuming. Then you have to live day to day around people that have no idea of how real life can get.
What?! where is grandpa now?
He died of Covid in prison in 2020 after serving 20 years of his life sentence, thank God.
He had been fighting for parole and never got it.
He was a psychopath and very well could have hunted us down for putting him in jail.
Going with my father to figure out how we would clean up the bathroom my grandfather attempted suicide in as I didn't think it was something he should do on his own (it was my maternal grandfather but still...). I was right. It made every horror movie look tame. However, it was so terrible that there wasn't much we could do other than phone crime scene cleanup and stay out of their way while they earned every single penny of their fee.
Blood?
who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
I'm 62 so this happened a long time ago. My mom didn't like novacaine so she found a dentist who didn't use it (I found that out later as an adult). For whatever reason I had 15 cavities one year. I couldn't stand it but somehow I got to the last day of many and I just couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't willingly open my mouth for that pain, I just couldn't.
The dentist took that hooky little metal instrument dentist's have, held it near my cheek, and said, "If you don't open your mouth, I'm going to go in RIGHT. THROUGH. HERE." Those last three words were punctuated by him poking my cheek with that little hooky instrument; once for each word.
I opened my mouth in the worst fear and feeling of abandonment I've ever felt. I now need nitrous and my wife holding my hand to get through a cleaning. Dr. Fryer. A sadist.
People don't understand how much they break people sometimes. I'm sure I've done it too without realizing. I wish there was a way past it but I guess it's just life.
Public school. Everyone hated me, I never made any close friends, I was almost killed by my classmates more than once. One time I was pushed down the stairs another time I was shoved in front of an oncoming bus. I've become permanently depressed and have deep trust problems because of it. Years later when I was holding someone I loved in my arms as we fell asleep watching something together I realized that I felt happy for the first time in my life. Before then I had felt amused, vindicated, or excited but never happy. It's such a strange thing to realize that you've never been happy once in your entire life and had just never realized because you had no way to know what you were missing.
I relate to your feelings. In my twenties I took a small dose of mushrooms and had that same epiphany. It actually lasted for a few years and I was hopeful but then people still fucked with me. Now I'm back to being numb constantly. I hate when there's a school shooting or some kid whyling out and society actually has to ask why? Society creates the people it hates.
Kidney stones. Supposedly mine were tiny but it felt like hot nails being dragged across my skin. I was in pain for hours until the doctor gave me some pills so I could relax and piss out the stone (grain of sand). It was such a relief.
The largest I've passed was about 4mm. It's the most painful thing I've ever felt, and it took weeks to work its way through, even with the Flomax. Crying, moaning, writhing on the bed in pain, pissing blood. Malicious looking little thing. Looked like the ball on the end of a morning star. I passed two of those at once one time.
One tiny stone had me calling an ambulance. I thought my appendix had burst or something. I passed it later that day, and I almost missed it it was so small. Evil little bastards.
I had a 6mm one for just over two weeks. There were times when it just got stuck and that wasn't too painful. Then it would start moving again and it was agony with no warning.
My first child was born during those two weeks and, thankfully, the stone stayed put during the birth.
Aww yeah, kidney stones suck. I'm glad I could mitigate them by becoming vegetarian and consuming less salt. Doesn't work for everyone though. Which kind of stones did you have?
Racism. I've been called racial slurs for not just my race, but other races. I've been profiled by police. I've watched my boss not only allow racist remarks made by my coworkers for no reason (eg: working like a hard-R) but laugh along to them. People judge Tarantino's movies for excessive use of racism but I think they're the most honest depictions of American culture.
Same for me in but with homophobia. Family friends and co workers. People act like LGBT people are free... They aren't. I've dealt with more than just jokes. Life is hell. Good luck with your journey.
I'm sorry for what you've gone through. While things are getting scary, know that you're not alone and there are many of us willing to stand up against your oppressors. We'll make sure that bigotry becomes a thing of the past.
We're so sorry people are making you go through that. Know that you have allies. Both of you.
It doesn't matter if you are a minority, people will always find reasons to exclude you.
Being a child with an ear infection, rather than take me to a doctor to get antibiotics, my parents had my grandmother come over to pray for me and she told me that Jesus was my physician. I just remember wondering why my physician wasn't fucking doing anything about it.
Shit parents, shit grandmother. Hopefully they're not past of your life anymore.
Attending the funeral of a family member every single year multiple times until I was about 18 ... and then sporadically on a regular basis since then.
I'm Indigenous Canadian and I grew up in a small community and from the time I was a baby, I attended a funeral of someone I knew at least once a year and usually two or three times a year until I left home.
At first as a kid, it was weird ... then as I grew older it was disturbing because every time I saw a dead body, I realized ... some day that's going to be me, my life will end and I'll no longer be here. At about eight years of age, it was quite an existential crisis because it scared the shit out of me for about a year. After that, it became terrible to attend funerals, then sad, then felt like nothing ... I could no longer feel sad, afraid or anything .. I no longer really cared and became apathetic to it all.
I now accept death ... I hate it, I don't like it but I accept it but it took seeing a lot of dead bodies for me to get to this point.
I haven't been to as many funerals as you have, but several course family members have died.
I hate funerals.
The best funeral I've ever been to wasn't a funeral. Instead, the family got together at the daughter's house and just visited for a few days. Then next spring, on what would have been their birthday, everyone gathered to memorialize them, and spread their ashes.
That was a much nicer way of handling it, in my opinion.
Did some volunteering at some old folks homes and a hospice.
The hospice had people who were literally trapped in their own bodies. Bedridden and unable to move their arms, legs or even speak. They communicated yes/no by monotone grunting(two for yes, one for no.
Person was fully conscious and aware. Just unable to act on the outside world.
That's so horrifying. People who oppose euthanasia are sadists, extremely stupid, or both.
Being robbed late at night on a deserted street fucking sucks.
Yeah even just having shit stolen from you feels so rapey. It sucks.
I'd probably avoid describing it as rapey since that word has a specific meaning - but it absolutely felt like a violation.
In this specific case my phone was stolen while I was moving luggage, I felt a hand drag my phone out of my chest pocket (and, for reasons, I really dislike unexpected physical contact) and then two folks fled on a scooter in front of me. My phone is pretty fucking worthless except it had a few gigabytes of photos I hadn't been able to backup... it felt like a futile and pointlessly destructive act.
This thread really makes me appreciate how good I have it...
I survived a drug induced coma and since then my brain just misses a lot of cells. I once had a pretty high IQ and nowadays I can be happy I remembered to take my pills in the morning. The most I can do is a low level sysadmin job, for everything else I basically lack the brains.
It's not really something I have experienced in a past tense, I experience this shit every single day. Hate to be ridiculed for my bad memory especially. My coworkers don't know that and regularly make fun of me.
Oh man, that sounds terrible. It's one thing to be at that intelligence, but to know you used to be smarter and just ain't anymore sounds horrifying. Can I ask is it a memory thing or do you legit feel less intelligent?
I don't only feel less intelligent, I am less intelligent. My IQ dropped about 20%, which is noticeable by everyone including me.
The most annoying thing is that it feels like my brain is underclocked. Some Ritalin helped for a while with that but I had to stop taking it because of the risk for sudden death in conjunction with my other meds and conditions, which is something I wouldn't like to experience.
However even with enhancing drugs I still am not the 80% which my IQ test says, I feel more like half of what I used to be. It's really detrimental to self worth knowing that I used to be smart and now I'm "just average" even though years of therapy told me it's OK to be average.
I can imagine! It's like an athlete getting lame. They can still function but not at the level they're used to. Others might not be able to understand this loss as they see them just being on their level
It’s like an athlete getting lame.
Oh wow, that's a pretty cool analogy. Stealing that :D
Others might not be able to understand this loss as they see them just being on their level
They even sometimes tell me how smart I am and that… triggers me even more. Bitch, I'm dumb, if you think that's smart you really offend me. Deep down I know that they mean well and think they're giving me a compliment, but it still stings.
I was looking for a spot to watch my brother go by in his first Ironman while he was dieing at the hospital.
Omg what happened to him? If you want to share.
They say he didn't fall off of his bike,because he didn't have any scrapes or scratches. So at some point he didn't feel well and got off of his bike and sat down. Someone saw him fall over and a off duty officer, that was helping with traffic, started CPR. He died at the hospital. I was trying to find him with the Ironman app,and looking at Google maps. It got to a point where I thought that the Ironman app wasn't working because his marker wasn't moving,and I was getting frustrated. Had a spot picked out and just as we got there a nurse called me and told me what happened as far as they could explain. Still not sure what exactly happened because I wasn't able to go to that meeting. And now I'm too afraid of bringing it up to those who were. It was just this past year in Madison. He was my older brother and he is the latest. My father, step-dad, one of my best friends, and now my brother. I have lost almost all of my father figures in 5 years. Having a large family is a blessing and a curse.
I send you my compassion...
Living through fall of communism in USSR and the start of capitalist era. One of the memories I have from the period is when food shortages started happening. All the families in my neighborhood would end up lining up at the store early in the morning like black friday, and then the store would just wheel out a cart with whatever they had that day, and people would rush in to grab it. Me being a small kid at the time, I could squeeze between people and get to the cart quicker than my parents. So, I was basically risking my life being trampled to death just so I wouldn't starve that day.
TLDR: fuck capitalism.
My brother is a veteran, and when he came back he started "self-medicating" with meth to treat his PTSD. He was constantly on the verge of crisis and making violent threats (carefully phrased to not be actionable). At the time, I was working at an Amazon warehouse, at times doing 60 hours weeks, and at the time I was on Facebook and if I got off work and wanted to check it, he'd see I was online and if I left him on read it would be a whole thing. I described it as being a 911 operator on call 24/7. I basically wrote him off as dead to me, but my parents wouldn't and that was the worst part. I remember visiting and we tried to go out for dinner but then he texted my mom with another crisis and now she's in tears again, like always. It was constant. And he'd accuse them of all sorts of stuff, my mom still had one of those phones you had to press the button multiple times to get a letter and if she had a typo he'd accuse her of doing it on purpose. All he did all day was be alone with his thoughts, going through the same cycles, shooting up meth and absorbing whatever crazy right-wing bullshit he was listening to.
My parents are pretty well off and they were there for him. They tried to check him into all sorts of mental hospitals and rehab, but he'd check himself out early. There was an incident early on where he checked himself into the VA and they tried to cut him off Xanax cold turkey, which is potentially life-threatening, and he responded violently. This put a flag on his record which made it difficult to get him treatment later, and he was also careful to phrase his threats ambiguously enough to not be institutionalized.
It was pretty clear to me that this was only going to end one way, and at one point I thought about going up there and killing him myself, before he could hurt an innocent person. But the cops kept a watch on his house until it happened and he took a gun and led them on a car chase to somebody's house, pulled a gun on them, and got shot in the arm. When I heard it happened, I didn't know if he'd live or die and didn't care, I was just relieved that it had finally happened and that nobody else got hurt. He went to jail for a bit and that got him off the meth so he's doing better now.
What really gets me about it though is how easy we got off, though. Compared to the people on the other side of the war, the people actually living in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, countless civilians. The children terrified of sunny days because that's when the drones fly. How many times over do you have to multiply the pain and suffering I felt when I saw my mother's face in tears to get even an inkling of the suffering inflicted on those people?
And it's all just out of sight, out of mind. We went to war and people hardly even noticed, everybody just went about their lives as normal like it wasn't even happening. People don't even give a shit about veterans killing themselves on the daily in VA parking lots and waiting rooms because they can't get care, they sure as shit don't care about brown people on the other side of the world that the news treats as subhuman. And now, Bush gets rehabilitated on Ellen and the libs expect me to vote for Biden. It's absurd how little people care about all the people they murdered.
Yeah I talk to people about that idea it's so sad how much they don't care.
I was a delivery driver once, I loved the job. Until they made us follow their crappy routing system called "ORION". Problem was you can't implement it in real world settings. Since we were forced to follow it, I argue it put our personal safety at risk due to increased turns and overall time driven. Quit because I'm not dying over it. But it was the most frustrating, hellish thing I ever had to do.
I was 6 miles into a very technical mountain bike ride, when I fell and broke my collar bone. No one had any cell service. Hiking out of there was pretty hellish.
Do you still ride?
I went mountain biking for about a year after that, but then I switched to road bikes exclusively. I found myself focusing way too much on every rock and root while mountain biking that I just couldn't enjoy the ride anymore.
Alcohol withdrawal after months of insane 24-7 drunkeness. I was in a pretty bad place for a number of years. I've gone through withdrawals like this multiple times, usually when I was passed out and woke with no booze just after the legal cutoff for sale at night. There is nothing worse feeling on the planet. No illness or injury (that I've experienced) can compare.
I drink but don't really get hangovers anymore. I think a medication I'm on has that effect.
Because before the medication I would get bad hangovers, extreme agonizing depression and lock jaw. Even just a few drinks would leave me depressed for a week.
I'm trans, so, that's one thing
More recently, I suffered from some pretty severe sleep deprivation as a result of a bout of insomnia. Hallucinations, micro-blackouts, the world stopped operating in a way I could understand properly. I would never, ever wish that upon my worst enemy and I hope I never experience it again.
Insomnia sucks. I'm glad it got better for you.
Depression and gender dysphoria. It's not very dramatic nor fast-acting, it just ate away at me for a decade until I was sure I wasn't gonna survive the next few years.
The fear of death doesn't go away, it just starts to seem like the least terrible option. And it's one thing when you get those impulses to do it, but it's even scarier when you feel calm and levelheaded and still feel you should do it.
It is a dramatic thing. Growing up gay in the 2000s in a small narrow minded town basically broke me and my essence. It's an undeserving hell built by ignorant people.
Good luck with life. Hopefully things get better with society.
I started HRT recently and it feels life changing.
Went under to have my wisdom teeth removed and I swear I was in hell for 5 seconds. All I could see was faded yellow and orange and I was hearing screaming.
I got shots before my teeth extraction. Don't dentists offer that where you got yours done? I would've just refused otherwise because even with the drugs I could feel the tools scrape against my skull or tissue or whatever.
I've heard pregnant women don't get anaesthetic because it was dangerous for the baby.
They do offer it, but there was something about my case that didn't make me eligible.
I don't know about "evil" because I don't really subscribe to the Christian good vs evil. Yeah there are people out there who do terrible awful things, but generally speaking the most "evil" things come as a consequence of our amoral decisions.
We decided in the US that cars should be the primary method of transportation back in the 50s in order to stimulate the growing car manufacturing industry. That decision now results in nearly 50,000 people a year dying in car accidents.
We are not much different from the Mayans sacrificing victims in order to bring rain. We do the same thing, but for a different ideological purpose.
This is, in my opinion, much more dangerous and harmful than "evil". Sadists come and go but institutions and ideology remains.
Having said all that, I've been robbed & beaten. I've been through heroin addiction. I grew up as an illegal immigrant.
All of those ultimately shaped who I am today, but there were definitely difficult moments. Life is complex though and I think "evil" had nothing to do with the most traumatic and painful events in my life.
Not sure, I'd have to say it's a tie between having my hometown sunk into chaos by the classic tabloid treatment, accidentally contributing to the first human tragedy of someone close to me I've had to hear about, witnessing my only friends' families tear apart by legal forces, assault and stuff at the psych ward, being kidnapped once, and overall people targeting me for various reasons.
American?
Not natively. Which part seems like an American thing?
Most of it. Ime America is lawless and law and order is just there for show and power leverage.
I didn't know kidnapping and psych ward assault of all things were expectable in America.
They're not.
I don't understand what is meant by "Classic Tabloid Treatment". Is it like slander about the town, or like when tourist spot shows up in newspapers and there's crowds of people that show up in town?
More like the first thing you said. It got complicated, but that sums it up.
My ex
dating in general
Marriage. Don't get married. I am not kidding. Tie yourself inextricably to someone and discover hell.
Getting downvoted in the Fediverse.
Out of curiosity and bc I wanted to know what kind of person would comment this, I took a look at your profile. Honestly, I'm mostly just confused. Mostly you seem like an asshole but your politics are an enigma to the extent that I am assuming you to simply be contarian.
I had no job, no money and no family. I was young and had no identity documents, and was knocked back from government services because I couldn't prove who I was. I took the first safe shelter I could. With the benefit of many years experience, I know there were other options but at the time it seemed like the only option. There are ways of accessing help without ID, but I didn't know where to look.
It was a small, dodgy outbuilding at the back of someone's property. It was clad by nothing but tin. The wind would lift the rusty roof up and slam it down with a deafening crash for hours at a time. No insulation, no services of any kind. I slept on an old mattress, just laid on the floor. It had a slope to it and the springs were poking through. I had a single, sweat-stained blanket.
I lived there long enough to experience both an unusually cold winter and a heatwave. I remember the sound of the frozen grass crunching beneath my feet. It was the first time I'd ever experienced temperatures that low, having grown up in a hot climate.
The owner would occasionally let me use the facilities inside their house, but only ever during the day when it was unlocked. They gave me enough food to survive which they'd leave outside for me. We'd have a very brief exchange maybe once a week. Apart from that I had a total absence of social interaction. The property was isolated if you didn't have a car - which I did not.
It was a trap. It seemed better than the streets, because I had relative safety and a roof over my head. But it also left me totally unable to change the situation I was living in. I couldn't go anywhere to find help, I couldn't contact anyone. I didn't want to leave because the alternative seemed worse. I was stuck.
The owner had meant well. They had their own mental health issues and, even if they had been high-functioning, they had no idea what to do. They were a hoarder and the inside of their home was somehow filthier than my "living" space. The situation was a result of the contradictions between their heartfelt desire to help, their own anxieties and other mental demons. They were trapped too, in their own way, and had barely more contact with the outside world than me.
Isolation destroys your mind. You can't think straight, you lose your ability to solve even basic problems. You become paranoid. You hallucinate. Your memory is obliterated, not just for the period of the isolation but the memories formed before and after too. I had to piece together a time line of major events in my life from a couple of years before and after from little scraps I kept.
I lost my inner monologue during that time. The voice in your head. My thoughts became sensations and movement, like water being poured into a network of branching channels and spreading amongst them. They'd remain that for years and even more than a decade own it's still not the 'same'.
I was almost non-verbal at the end - finding even a few basic words, to say "yes" or "no" to a question was exhausting. My manner of speaking is not the same as it was and my accent isn't quite like anyone else who was born here. For at least a year later I was still losing time, hours or days, and was unsure of how I got there.
I was aware I was losing my mind throughout the process. I'd try to force structure and logic upon what I was processing but it doesn't work. The information you're receiving is already corrupted, then it gets further twisted in your mind. There is nothing more terrifying than being trapped in your own mind.
Eventually the owner, in a more lucid moment, managed to get mental health services to come out. I felt so betrayed at the time. I was terrified of them, unfamiliar faces after so much time alone. I was deeply ashamed. I'd come to realize this act saved me, but I hated the owner for it at the time.
Shit, that was tough, I hope you're fine now. Accepting help is pretty difficult sometimes.
Wow what a read. Thanks for sharing your experiences and perspective.
Being sexually assaulted. I feel like in terms of things that are top tier awful experiences I would probably rank any unwanted sexual experience worse than pain or death.
I've been manipulated by people. I was of age though and kind of too depressed to care because I live in a shitty small town. My sexual manipulation wasn't as bad as some other stuff people go through though. I've been manipulated hard in a non sexual way. So many kids go through shit some adult literally can't even fathom. It's sick. Even as an adult people don't get it.
I remember an older guy that weighed probably 250 laying on top of me doing stuff and I couldn't move. He shoved poppers in my face. I was so depressed and dead feeling back then I didn't care. I felt like I was in a movie. looking back that person obvious would get me liquored up and have his way. It hurts to know someone would actually act like that in real life. On the other side of things... No regular people in my life gave me a minute. No one cared for me. It's fucked to think that same guy did more for me than regular friends or family. Everyone else would have just sat back and watched me and egg me on to kms. Because everyone else I knew were just naive, entitled, and privileged.
That is terrible to read, I hope you are doing better now though
Testicular torsion. As a teenager, I woke up early in the morning with the worst back and stomach pain I had ever felt in my life. I remember thinking I might be sick, vomiting, then passing out from the pain. My parents found me later that morning because I was delirious and moaning. They took me to the hospital and it was fixed.
Just kidding! My parents are shit bags so they told me I just had the flu and I was being dramatic. After my testicle swelled up to over double the size later that day, they called our family doctor who said I probably had a hydrocele and he'd look at it when he got back from vacation. For the record, mine was textbook testicular torsion, my doctor was as idiotically negligent as my parents.
The pain again became excruciating that evening and I was exhausted from lack of sleep, so I started yelling and demanding my parents take me to the hospital, which they did the next morning. There was TV to be watched, they couldn't bother with taking care of their children. The ER determined my testicle was quite dead. Surgery was scheduled for that evening and I've had one testicle since. Get fucked, mom and dad.
Your parents suck.
Agreed. I'll never understand why people who don't actually want children have children.
Free senior caretakers.
Pretty expensive way to get free labor
You think logic applies to those folks?
Also may they play the long inflation game :p
Damn, your parents were S+ tier assholes.
I don't have children, but I have niblings and my heart goes to my throat every time they fall down or get a bruise, I can't even imagine letting my child stay in pain for anything.
I hope you're better now.
I met a homeless guy once and we talked. He told me about a time when at the train station there was someone laying on the ground, in the winter, nearly dying in front of a Cash Terminal.
People just stepped over him and were annoyed, while that person nearly died. He told me they had surveillance footage though and many of them where sued for denial of assistance.
The same guy had a huge fresh wound in his face. He was at the train station seeing 4 people attacking a single person. He went to them to see what was going on, had a weird feeling and turned around, someone smashed him in the head.
That was 4:00 in the morning, in the Winter at about 4°C. He woke up at 10:00, nobody helped him, and he nearly died.
He went to the hospital on his own to get stitches. A paramedic gave him his reflecting orange jacket, so that nobody would ever overlook him again...
Also told me how people would shit and piss directly next to where he had to sleep.
Nobody deserves to be homeless. This is so fucking sick.
I'll just go with a tame one (Edit: I have a lot to pick from and most are really hard to put into text due to the trauma)
My firsthand experience with police brutality
For context I was 15 at the time and still in highschool
When I was homeless I slept on some benches in my hometown and one night I slept on the bench behind the local library because it was one of the few that was covered and it was raining that day.
I was woken up by being tazed by a police officer.
He was screaming and I couldn't do a damn thing because I was getting tazed.
After finally falling off the bench he stopped but was screaming that he could kill me and leave my body in the woods (the town is basically right on the border of a national forest) and no one would find me.
He was screaming that if I didn't leave he would.
I took off like a bat out of hell.
He followed me with his car from a distance for a while before finally taking off in a different direction. When he took off I stopped walking down the streets and made my way to my school through less conventional means and slept there that night under one of the buildings.
Edit 2: For anyone curious, I was homeless for 8 years. I've got a nice place now and I'm back on my feet.
That's awful. I've seen some cops tuck their tails. It's just a paycheck for them or even worse a power trip like you're case.
Are you American?
Yup, I'm American
Small Town cops are a special kind of power tripping bastard
Basically think of an area that is really red already and then the people who are those people's bullies become cops
I had a old boomer call for my hanging when I was a teen.
I'm brown. I am minding my business at a store. some boomer said I should "Remember there's cameras in this store." Like wtf? I said, "Those cameras are for you."
And before I know it, he's flipping out calling me a thug and that I'm lucky to be alive because in five minutes, he can have his friends lynch me.
Security guard came over and immediately took the Boomer's side. And told me to either leave or cops will be called.
Welcome to America.
Yeah I believe. It's pretty much like that where I live. But now it's the LGBT community.
It's cool how we're just a pop politics leverage tool. /S
They fuck up the youths lives before they can even understand life.
My mom brags about how she likes black people better then the "removed" and "removed". It makes me want to kms sometimes.
Lived through and ethnic cleansing genocide. I always laugh when western keyboard warriors start talking about how war is "needed" or "coming" and larping out their movie fantasies. Real war is nothing like TV. Its hell all around. There are no victors in war. Everyone loses.
War is sometimes needed; it's a necessary response to aggression. The genocides in Bosnia? Without a war, they would have murdered all the Croats. One of my teachers in school was a survivor of the Bosnian war, and her family absolutely would have been killed had they not gotten out. Without the Allied forces waging war against the Axis, Jews in Europe would have been completely eliminated.
The option to war is to curl up and hope that you can survive the bear mauling you.
War is never needed though, is my point. Yes unprompted aggression deserves a response (I'd never advocate for just laying down and taking the fascist boot), but war itself only produces destruction, broken homes, and broken families.
My comment was more about those who have not been through an actual war but romanticise it. There is nothing romantic about it.
I think you're missing their point a bit
True true. Even though I do express my feelings like that sometimes. It's more expression that should be transfered to art.
Most likely society's response to the time I was sexually harrassed.
Like it wasn't straight up rape, but I got touched in bad places and boundaries disrespected. I was 16, the girl doing it to me was 16 too. To this day I have no idea if she was into me or if she just got off on how I'd completely bluescreen whenever she did it as a powertrip.
So anyway, being a teenager and certified "good kid", I didn't fight about it, I just knew I hated it. So I went to the adults in my school for guidance... And got laughed out of the principal's office. Because "I was a boy, of course I liked it and I had only gone to the principal as a way to humblebrag".
Got a similar reaction from the other teen boys.
So anyway it took me 10 full years to even start opening myself back up to human touch in general, as I spent that decade terrified of human touch in general.
I'm sorry
I was doing some work with an academic center that provided continuing education for the teachers and caretakers at orphanages. We always worked with local administration or charities who would educate the administrators and caretakers on how to maneuver the legal system in their country, while we provided the technical training and education resources. The goal was to get the children trained in a trade skill so they could support themselves when they got out. The areas we were working in were often remote and never in good areas, but the teachers and caretakers usually tried, they just didn’t know what they were doing and needed a little help. But at least they were trying.
By this point I had worked all over latin America, and a handful of countries in Africa. All of these people and cultures were different, but you could tell they tried, and the people in the villages and towns respected, and in many cases helped those that tried. Honestly it was some of the best and most rewarding work I have ever done.
I’m saying all of this because back in 2008 I ended up seeing an opportunity to go to Russia and do the same type work. I thought I’ve never been to Europe or Asia, sure that sounds exciting. Expecting to see the same thing I had seen in 18 other countries by this point. People in rural areas who saw a need and stepped in, now they just need training.
Instead of a rural town or village, we ended up in Kostroma, a city of a quarter million people. We find out from our contact from the Ministry of Education, that children are usually kicked out of orphanages at 14 as they are no longer profitable. At that point we should have immediately started asking questions, alarm bells should have gone off, etc. But it was the first day in a new country, we’re still getting to know our contacts before we start training. So there’s still some cultural unknowns, could be a translation error, any number of things.
While we’re doing our training, the teachers and caretakers were very standoffish, much more than we were expecting, but whatever, we’re the new people. They also have very strict times of when we have to be out of there. Makes sense, end of the work day, you’ve got kids to take care of, we get it.
We stayed too late one night and we found out the reason why the kids could become, “no longer profitable.” Evidently all of the orphanages in the area would sell kids for a night, and when they got too old, people didn’t want them, so they got kicked out. When we found out, obviously the first thing we did was try and report it. But we were told by both our contacts from the Ministry of Education, and the police, that’s just how they do business. If the kids want to eat they have to work.
We broke our contract with the Ministry of Education stating what we witnessed and left. Don’t know if anything has changed, but I’ve not been a fan of Russia ever since.
That's fucked up. One of my "inlaw" relatives had a brother that went through that in America back in the 60s early 70s. They were both orphans. I wonder if she went through a similar experience and doesn't talk about it. Humanity is dark... Probably for more than people expect.
You can thank Pizza Man Gorby and Yeltsin and the other fucks of that whole crowd for it
When I was 12 I hid under the couch while my Grandpa violently beat my grandma to death over the course of about 6hrs overnight.
I'm so sorry you had to experience that. I've experienced some wild things as an adult and had/have a hard time with it. I probably wouldn't have made it as kid. It's hard enough as an adult... The extreme confusion and betrayal is all consuming. Then you have to live day to day around people that have no idea of how real life can get.
What?! where is grandpa now?
He died of Covid in prison in 2020 after serving 20 years of his life sentence, thank God.
He had been fighting for parole and never got it.
He was a psychopath and very well could have hunted us down for putting him in jail.
Going with my father to figure out how we would clean up the bathroom my grandfather attempted suicide in as I didn't think it was something he should do on his own (it was my maternal grandfather but still...). I was right. It made every horror movie look tame. However, it was so terrible that there wasn't much we could do other than phone crime scene cleanup and stay out of their way while they earned every single penny of their fee.
Blood?
I'm 62 so this happened a long time ago. My mom didn't like novacaine so she found a dentist who didn't use it (I found that out later as an adult). For whatever reason I had 15 cavities one year. I couldn't stand it but somehow I got to the last day of many and I just couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't willingly open my mouth for that pain, I just couldn't.
The dentist took that hooky little metal instrument dentist's have, held it near my cheek, and said, "If you don't open your mouth, I'm going to go in RIGHT. THROUGH. HERE." Those last three words were punctuated by him poking my cheek with that little hooky instrument; once for each word.
I opened my mouth in the worst fear and feeling of abandonment I've ever felt. I now need nitrous and my wife holding my hand to get through a cleaning. Dr. Fryer. A sadist.
People don't understand how much they break people sometimes. I'm sure I've done it too without realizing. I wish there was a way past it but I guess it's just life.
Public school. Everyone hated me, I never made any close friends, I was almost killed by my classmates more than once. One time I was pushed down the stairs another time I was shoved in front of an oncoming bus. I've become permanently depressed and have deep trust problems because of it. Years later when I was holding someone I loved in my arms as we fell asleep watching something together I realized that I felt happy for the first time in my life. Before then I had felt amused, vindicated, or excited but never happy. It's such a strange thing to realize that you've never been happy once in your entire life and had just never realized because you had no way to know what you were missing.
I relate to your feelings. In my twenties I took a small dose of mushrooms and had that same epiphany. It actually lasted for a few years and I was hopeful but then people still fucked with me. Now I'm back to being numb constantly. I hate when there's a school shooting or some kid whyling out and society actually has to ask why? Society creates the people it hates.
Kidney stones. Supposedly mine were tiny but it felt like hot nails being dragged across my skin. I was in pain for hours until the doctor gave me some pills so I could relax and piss out the stone (grain of sand). It was such a relief.
The largest I've passed was about 4mm. It's the most painful thing I've ever felt, and it took weeks to work its way through, even with the Flomax. Crying, moaning, writhing on the bed in pain, pissing blood. Malicious looking little thing. Looked like the ball on the end of a morning star. I passed two of those at once one time.
One tiny stone had me calling an ambulance. I thought my appendix had burst or something. I passed it later that day, and I almost missed it it was so small. Evil little bastards.
I had a 6mm one for just over two weeks. There were times when it just got stuck and that wasn't too painful. Then it would start moving again and it was agony with no warning.
My first child was born during those two weeks and, thankfully, the stone stayed put during the birth.
Aww yeah, kidney stones suck. I'm glad I could mitigate them by becoming vegetarian and consuming less salt. Doesn't work for everyone though. Which kind of stones did you have?
Racism. I've been called racial slurs for not just my race, but other races. I've been profiled by police. I've watched my boss not only allow racist remarks made by my coworkers for no reason (eg: working like a hard-R) but laugh along to them. People judge Tarantino's movies for excessive use of racism but I think they're the most honest depictions of American culture.
Same for me in but with homophobia. Family friends and co workers. People act like LGBT people are free... They aren't. I've dealt with more than just jokes. Life is hell. Good luck with your journey.
I'm sorry for what you've gone through. While things are getting scary, know that you're not alone and there are many of us willing to stand up against your oppressors. We'll make sure that bigotry becomes a thing of the past.
We're so sorry people are making you go through that. Know that you have allies. Both of you.
It doesn't matter if you are a minority, people will always find reasons to exclude you.
Being a child with an ear infection, rather than take me to a doctor to get antibiotics, my parents had my grandmother come over to pray for me and she told me that Jesus was my physician. I just remember wondering why my physician wasn't fucking doing anything about it.
Shit parents, shit grandmother. Hopefully they're not past of your life anymore.
Attending the funeral of a family member every single year multiple times until I was about 18 ... and then sporadically on a regular basis since then.
I'm Indigenous Canadian and I grew up in a small community and from the time I was a baby, I attended a funeral of someone I knew at least once a year and usually two or three times a year until I left home.
At first as a kid, it was weird ... then as I grew older it was disturbing because every time I saw a dead body, I realized ... some day that's going to be me, my life will end and I'll no longer be here. At about eight years of age, it was quite an existential crisis because it scared the shit out of me for about a year. After that, it became terrible to attend funerals, then sad, then felt like nothing ... I could no longer feel sad, afraid or anything .. I no longer really cared and became apathetic to it all.
I now accept death ... I hate it, I don't like it but I accept it but it took seeing a lot of dead bodies for me to get to this point.
I haven't been to as many funerals as you have, but several course family members have died.
I hate funerals.
The best funeral I've ever been to wasn't a funeral. Instead, the family got together at the daughter's house and just visited for a few days. Then next spring, on what would have been their birthday, everyone gathered to memorialize them, and spread their ashes.
That was a much nicer way of handling it, in my opinion.
Did some volunteering at some old folks homes and a hospice.
The hospice had people who were literally trapped in their own bodies. Bedridden and unable to move their arms, legs or even speak. They communicated yes/no by monotone grunting(two for yes, one for no.
Person was fully conscious and aware. Just unable to act on the outside world.
That's so horrifying. People who oppose euthanasia are sadists, extremely stupid, or both.
Being robbed late at night on a deserted street fucking sucks.
Yeah even just having shit stolen from you feels so rapey. It sucks.
I'd probably avoid describing it as rapey since that word has a specific meaning - but it absolutely felt like a violation.
In this specific case my phone was stolen while I was moving luggage, I felt a hand drag my phone out of my chest pocket (and, for reasons, I really dislike unexpected physical contact) and then two folks fled on a scooter in front of me. My phone is pretty fucking worthless except it had a few gigabytes of photos I hadn't been able to backup... it felt like a futile and pointlessly destructive act.
This thread really makes me appreciate how good I have it...
I survived a drug induced coma and since then my brain just misses a lot of cells. I once had a pretty high IQ and nowadays I can be happy I remembered to take my pills in the morning. The most I can do is a low level sysadmin job, for everything else I basically lack the brains.
It's not really something I have experienced in a past tense, I experience this shit every single day. Hate to be ridiculed for my bad memory especially. My coworkers don't know that and regularly make fun of me.
Oh man, that sounds terrible. It's one thing to be at that intelligence, but to know you used to be smarter and just ain't anymore sounds horrifying. Can I ask is it a memory thing or do you legit feel less intelligent?
I don't only feel less intelligent, I am less intelligent. My IQ dropped about 20%, which is noticeable by everyone including me.
The most annoying thing is that it feels like my brain is underclocked. Some Ritalin helped for a while with that but I had to stop taking it because of the risk for sudden death in conjunction with my other meds and conditions, which is something I wouldn't like to experience.
However even with enhancing drugs I still am not the 80% which my IQ test says, I feel more like half of what I used to be. It's really detrimental to self worth knowing that I used to be smart and now I'm "just average" even though years of therapy told me it's OK to be average.
I can imagine! It's like an athlete getting lame. They can still function but not at the level they're used to. Others might not be able to understand this loss as they see them just being on their level
Oh wow, that's a pretty cool analogy. Stealing that :D
They even sometimes tell me how smart I am and that… triggers me even more. Bitch, I'm dumb, if you think that's smart you really offend me. Deep down I know that they mean well and think they're giving me a compliment, but it still stings.
I was looking for a spot to watch my brother go by in his first Ironman while he was dieing at the hospital.
Omg what happened to him? If you want to share.
They say he didn't fall off of his bike,because he didn't have any scrapes or scratches. So at some point he didn't feel well and got off of his bike and sat down. Someone saw him fall over and a off duty officer, that was helping with traffic, started CPR. He died at the hospital. I was trying to find him with the Ironman app,and looking at Google maps. It got to a point where I thought that the Ironman app wasn't working because his marker wasn't moving,and I was getting frustrated. Had a spot picked out and just as we got there a nurse called me and told me what happened as far as they could explain. Still not sure what exactly happened because I wasn't able to go to that meeting. And now I'm too afraid of bringing it up to those who were. It was just this past year in Madison. He was my older brother and he is the latest. My father, step-dad, one of my best friends, and now my brother. I have lost almost all of my father figures in 5 years. Having a large family is a blessing and a curse.
I send you my compassion...
Living through fall of communism in USSR and the start of capitalist era. One of the memories I have from the period is when food shortages started happening. All the families in my neighborhood would end up lining up at the store early in the morning like black friday, and then the store would just wheel out a cart with whatever they had that day, and people would rush in to grab it. Me being a small kid at the time, I could squeeze between people and get to the cart quicker than my parents. So, I was basically risking my life being trampled to death just so I wouldn't starve that day.
TLDR: fuck capitalism.
My brother is a veteran, and when he came back he started "self-medicating" with meth to treat his PTSD. He was constantly on the verge of crisis and making violent threats (carefully phrased to not be actionable). At the time, I was working at an Amazon warehouse, at times doing 60 hours weeks, and at the time I was on Facebook and if I got off work and wanted to check it, he'd see I was online and if I left him on read it would be a whole thing. I described it as being a 911 operator on call 24/7. I basically wrote him off as dead to me, but my parents wouldn't and that was the worst part. I remember visiting and we tried to go out for dinner but then he texted my mom with another crisis and now she's in tears again, like always. It was constant. And he'd accuse them of all sorts of stuff, my mom still had one of those phones you had to press the button multiple times to get a letter and if she had a typo he'd accuse her of doing it on purpose. All he did all day was be alone with his thoughts, going through the same cycles, shooting up meth and absorbing whatever crazy right-wing bullshit he was listening to.
My parents are pretty well off and they were there for him. They tried to check him into all sorts of mental hospitals and rehab, but he'd check himself out early. There was an incident early on where he checked himself into the VA and they tried to cut him off Xanax cold turkey, which is potentially life-threatening, and he responded violently. This put a flag on his record which made it difficult to get him treatment later, and he was also careful to phrase his threats ambiguously enough to not be institutionalized.
It was pretty clear to me that this was only going to end one way, and at one point I thought about going up there and killing him myself, before he could hurt an innocent person. But the cops kept a watch on his house until it happened and he took a gun and led them on a car chase to somebody's house, pulled a gun on them, and got shot in the arm. When I heard it happened, I didn't know if he'd live or die and didn't care, I was just relieved that it had finally happened and that nobody else got hurt. He went to jail for a bit and that got him off the meth so he's doing better now.
What really gets me about it though is how easy we got off, though. Compared to the people on the other side of the war, the people actually living in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, countless civilians. The children terrified of sunny days because that's when the drones fly. How many times over do you have to multiply the pain and suffering I felt when I saw my mother's face in tears to get even an inkling of the suffering inflicted on those people?
And it's all just out of sight, out of mind. We went to war and people hardly even noticed, everybody just went about their lives as normal like it wasn't even happening. People don't even give a shit about veterans killing themselves on the daily in VA parking lots and waiting rooms because they can't get care, they sure as shit don't care about brown people on the other side of the world that the news treats as subhuman. And now, Bush gets rehabilitated on Ellen and the libs expect me to vote for Biden. It's absurd how little people care about all the people they murdered.
Yeah I talk to people about that idea it's so sad how much they don't care.
I was a delivery driver once, I loved the job. Until they made us follow their crappy routing system called "ORION". Problem was you can't implement it in real world settings. Since we were forced to follow it, I argue it put our personal safety at risk due to increased turns and overall time driven. Quit because I'm not dying over it. But it was the most frustrating, hellish thing I ever had to do.
I was 6 miles into a very technical mountain bike ride, when I fell and broke my collar bone. No one had any cell service. Hiking out of there was pretty hellish.
Do you still ride?
I went mountain biking for about a year after that, but then I switched to road bikes exclusively. I found myself focusing way too much on every rock and root while mountain biking that I just couldn't enjoy the ride anymore.
Alcohol withdrawal after months of insane 24-7 drunkeness. I was in a pretty bad place for a number of years. I've gone through withdrawals like this multiple times, usually when I was passed out and woke with no booze just after the legal cutoff for sale at night. There is nothing worse feeling on the planet. No illness or injury (that I've experienced) can compare.
I drink but don't really get hangovers anymore. I think a medication I'm on has that effect.
Because before the medication I would get bad hangovers, extreme agonizing depression and lock jaw. Even just a few drinks would leave me depressed for a week.
I'm trans, so, that's one thing
More recently, I suffered from some pretty severe sleep deprivation as a result of a bout of insomnia. Hallucinations, micro-blackouts, the world stopped operating in a way I could understand properly. I would never, ever wish that upon my worst enemy and I hope I never experience it again.
Insomnia sucks. I'm glad it got better for you.
Depression and gender dysphoria. It's not very dramatic nor fast-acting, it just ate away at me for a decade until I was sure I wasn't gonna survive the next few years.
The fear of death doesn't go away, it just starts to seem like the least terrible option. And it's one thing when you get those impulses to do it, but it's even scarier when you feel calm and levelheaded and still feel you should do it.
It is a dramatic thing. Growing up gay in the 2000s in a small narrow minded town basically broke me and my essence. It's an undeserving hell built by ignorant people.
Good luck with life. Hopefully things get better with society.
I started HRT recently and it feels life changing.
Went under to have my wisdom teeth removed and I swear I was in hell for 5 seconds. All I could see was faded yellow and orange and I was hearing screaming.
I got shots before my teeth extraction. Don't dentists offer that where you got yours done? I would've just refused otherwise because even with the drugs I could feel the tools scrape against my skull or tissue or whatever.
I've heard pregnant women don't get anaesthetic because it was dangerous for the baby.
They do offer it, but there was something about my case that didn't make me eligible.
I don't know about "evil" because I don't really subscribe to the Christian good vs evil. Yeah there are people out there who do terrible awful things, but generally speaking the most "evil" things come as a consequence of our amoral decisions.
We decided in the US that cars should be the primary method of transportation back in the 50s in order to stimulate the growing car manufacturing industry. That decision now results in nearly 50,000 people a year dying in car accidents.
We are not much different from the Mayans sacrificing victims in order to bring rain. We do the same thing, but for a different ideological purpose.
This is, in my opinion, much more dangerous and harmful than "evil". Sadists come and go but institutions and ideology remains.
Having said all that, I've been robbed & beaten. I've been through heroin addiction. I grew up as an illegal immigrant.
All of those ultimately shaped who I am today, but there were definitely difficult moments. Life is complex though and I think "evil" had nothing to do with the most traumatic and painful events in my life.
Not sure, I'd have to say it's a tie between having my hometown sunk into chaos by the classic tabloid treatment, accidentally contributing to the first human tragedy of someone close to me I've had to hear about, witnessing my only friends' families tear apart by legal forces, assault and stuff at the psych ward, being kidnapped once, and overall people targeting me for various reasons.
American?
Not natively. Which part seems like an American thing?
Most of it. Ime America is lawless and law and order is just there for show and power leverage.
I didn't know kidnapping and psych ward assault of all things were expectable in America.
They're not.
I don't understand what is meant by "Classic Tabloid Treatment". Is it like slander about the town, or like when tourist spot shows up in newspapers and there's crowds of people that show up in town?
More like the first thing you said. It got complicated, but that sums it up.
My ex
dating in general
Marriage. Don't get married. I am not kidding. Tie yourself inextricably to someone and discover hell.
Getting downvoted in the Fediverse.
Out of curiosity and bc I wanted to know what kind of person would comment this, I took a look at your profile. Honestly, I'm mostly just confused. Mostly you seem like an asshole but your politics are an enigma to the extent that I am assuming you to simply be contarian.
You brought that on yourself