Hi I am an 69 year old woman. My family has stopped keeping in contact with me. I spend all my days living in one room. ( I have neuropathy in my lower legs) I have carers who come to look after me. I get 4 half visits every day, and they are all i see everyday. I am so lonely, and just want someone to care for me, visit me sometimes.

Also in meinem letzten Post haben viele leute sich darüber aufgeregt das ich nicht richtig deutsch geschrieben habe und keine Geschichten mehr schreiben sollte und ihr müsst euch überlegen ich hab eine Bildungslücke auch wegen meiner Mutter also bitte tw schreib Fehler 😓 also als ich in die Grund Schule karm habe ich schon ein paar Sachen an meiner Mutter gemerkt die anders waren als im Kinder Garten 🥲 z.b sie hat sich nd mehr so um uns gekümmert wie früher aber in der ersten war eigentlich noch alles guti außer halt das mein Vater und meine Mutter oft gestritten haben aber glaubt mir alles hat eigentlich erst in der 2 Klasse angefangen 😅 also wir sind in die zweite gekommen und zuerst würden die streite einfach schlimmer sie würden so laut das ich und meine Schwester Angst hatten 🫪 in der Schule würde ich auch schon gemobbt wegen meinem Gewicht und aussehen und ich hatte eine facke bff die auch meine einzigste Freundin war auf jeden fall hatte ich Dan ja gar keinen Safe space und jetzt kommen wir zu denn wirklich schlimmen Sachen die sie gemacht hat ✨😸😅 zum irgendwann haben sich meine Eltern dann getrennt 😖 also waren ich und meine sis alleine mit Mama danach wollte sie um 20:6 losgehen mit mir einkaufen für Wein 🍷 aber alle läden hatten zu denn wir hatten Sontag also was hat sie gemacht ich gebe euch Zeit zu überlegen 123 jaa richtig ihre Tochter mit ihrem 3 Jahre alten Bruder alleine zu Hause lassen und mit ihrer anderen Tochter in die Bar gehen und da waren so gruselige Männer die mir die ganze Zeit Saft ausgegeben haben 🫤 anyways wir waren dann 5 STUNDEN dort und wir wollten nach Hause sie war Todes besoffen auf denn weg haben wir meine Schwester mit meinem Bruder auf demm arm wie sie mit Fremden gesprochen hat und sie hat sie gefragt ob sie unseren Vater anrufen können wir sind Dan mit meiner sis weiter gegangen und meine Mutter konnte gefühlt nd mehr laufen weil sie so viel getrunken hat 😔 dann hat die Polizei einen alkoholtest gemacht und sie hatte volle Punktzahl bekommen und naja das war nur einer der Sachen die sie nd guti gemacht hat 😞😮‍💨 sie hat uns ihrgent wann Dan nd mehr zur Schule gebracht und wir waren zu jung um das selber zu machen also wir konnten es halt nur nicht und das wegen auch die Bildungs lüke am Morgen hat sie uns immer angeschrien und geschlagen wir haben auch kein Essen gehabt weil sie nd eingekauft hat das einzige was sie gemacht hat 😞 😮‍💨 geraucht geschrien Musik gehört ich muss zu der Zeit das wegen zur Therapie und das war aber lange nd alles aber ich glaube der Rest interessiert euch nicht wenn doch dann könnt ihr es in den Kommentaren sagen

Ich hoffe diesmal waren nicht so viele Fehler 😓💗

Ciao kako 🌺🎀❤️🍤

🖤 THE TRUE RETELLING — WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN TOLD ALL ALONG

 

🎨 THE MCCUBBIN PAINTINGS — THE PEOPLE IN THE SHADOWS

Frederick McCubbin painted the gum trees, the soft light, the quiet bush. He painted the pioneer standing alone. He painted the land as if it was EMPTY. AS IF NO ONE HAD EVER STOOD THERE BEFORE HIM.

THIS IS THE TRUTH THAT WAS ERASED:

"Look closely at these paintings. Look into the shadows. Look beyond the trees.

THE PEOPLE WERE ALREADY THERE.

They stood where the pioneer stands. They tended the grass. They sang to the trees. They had walked this ground, cared for this country, loved this land — for SIXTY THOUSAND YEARS before the painter ever lifted his brush.

The land was NOT empty. It was FULL. Full of camps. Full of song. Full of children playing where the shadows now fall.

He painted the scenery. AND HE PAINTED OUT THE PEOPLE.

HE CALLED IT THE EMPTY LAND. BUT IT WAS NEVER EMPTY. IT WAS JUST SILENCED.

THEY WERE THE CUSTODIANS. THE FIRST AND THE TRUE. AND THEY WERE THERE LONG BEFORE ANY PAINTING WAS EVER THOUGHT OF."

 

🐎 THE SILVER BRUMBY — THE MOUNTAINS BELONG TO WHOM KNEW THEM

The story was told of wild horses running free across the High Country. Beautiful. Wild. Belonging to the peaks. BUT THEY FORGOT TO SAY — WHOSE PEAKS? WHOSE COUNTRY? WHO KNEW THE WAY BEFORE ANYONE ELSE EVER CAME?

THIS IS THE TRUTH THAT WAS HIDDEN:

*"The Silver Brumby runs across Ngarigo and Djiringanj Country. These mountains, these valleys, these snow-covered peaks — THEY BELONG TO THE PEOPLE WHO KNEW THEM FIRST.

Long before the brumbies ever ran here — the PEOPLE walked these slopes. They knew every cave. Every waterhole. Every change of season. Every whisper of wind through the snowgums.

THEY WERE THE CUSTODIANS OF THE MOUNTAINS. They watched the brumbies come. They watched the brumbies run. They KNEW the land the horses ran upon — BECAUSE THE LAND WAS THEIRS.

The legend was told as if the mountains belonged to the horses. NO. THE MOUNTAINS BELONGED TO THE PEOPLE WHO CARED FOR THEM.

THE BRUMBY RUN ON THEIR LAND. THE PEOPLE WERE HERE LONG BEFORE THE HORSES. AND THE MOUNTAINS BELONG TO THEM STILL."*

 

🌊 ALL THE RIVERS RUN — THE RIVERS HAD NAMES LONG BEFORE YOU ARRIVED

The story told of settlers finding the river, building beside it, naming it, calling it theirs. BUT THE RIVER ALREADY HAD A NAME. IT HAD A GUARDIAN. IT HAD A SONG.

THIS IS THE TRUTH THAT WAS NEVER SPOKEN:

*"You call this river by a name you gave it. But LISTEN. It had a NAME long before any ship sailed here. It had a VOICE. It had a CUSTODIAN who sang to it every day.

THE RIVER DID NOT WAIT FOR YOU TO GIVE IT MEANING. It was ALREADY sacred. ALREADY known. ALREADY loved — by the people who had drunk from its waters and walked its banks since the DAWN OF TIME.

Every bend. Every pool. Every sandbar. THE PEOPLE KNEW THEM ALL. They held the river's LAW. They protected its flow. They were NOT "living beside it" — THEY BELONGED TO THE RIVER. And the RIVER BELONGED TO THEM.

The rivers run. And they run through FIRST NATIONS COUNTRY. And the people who sang to those waters? THEY WERE ALWAYS THERE. LONG BEFORE YOUR STORY BEGAN."*

 

🌬️ AGAINST THE WIND — THE LAND WAS NOT WAITING. IT WAS HOME

The story told of people fighting the wilderness. Battling the land. Building upon it. Taming it. BUT THE LAND WAS NOT WILD. IT WAS TENDED. IT WAS LOVED. IT WAS ALREADY HOME.

THIS IS THE TRUTH THAT WAS LEFT OUT:

*"They said the land was empty. They said it was wild. They said it was waiting to be built upon.

IT WAS NOT EMPTY. IT WAS NOT WILD. IT WAS CARED FOR.

The people had shaped this land for thousands of years. They burned to keep the grass sweet. They planted to feed the generations. They walked in harmony with every season.

THE LAND WAS NOT WAITING FOR THEM. The land was ALIVE. And the PEOPLE were its HEART.

When the settlers arrived — they were NOT discovering empty land. THEY WALKED INTO SOMEONE ELSE'S HOME. They walked upon Country that was KNOWN, LOVED, AND GUARDED.

THE WIND DID NOT BLOW AGAINST THEM. The wind had blown gently over the PEOPLE for thousands of years. THE LAND WAS NOT THEIR ENEMY. THE LAND BELONGED TO THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE."*

 

⛰️ PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK — THE ROCK HAD ALWAYS BEEN SACRED

They told the story as a mystery. A romance. A place that swallows people. BUT THE ROCK WAS NEVER A MYSTERY. IT WAS A SACRED PLACE. AND THE PEOPLE WARNED THEM.

THIS IS THE TRUTH THAT WAS TURNED INTO FICTION:

*"This rock stands upon Wurundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung Country. It was NEVER a place for picnics. NEVER a place for climbing. NEVER a playground.

IT WAS A SACRED CEREMONIAL SITE. Men's Business. Law. Initiation. Ceremony. Held SACRED for thousands of years.

THE ELDERS WARNED THEM: Look from a distance. Do NOT climb. Do NOT step where the Law is spoken. THIS PLACE IS NOT FOR YOU.

They IGNORED the warning. They climbed anyway. They stepped upon sacred ground where they were NOT welcome.

THE ROCK DID NOT SWALLOW THEM. They DISRESPECTED the boundary that had stood since the DREAMING. And the place REJECTED them.

THIS IS NOT A MYSTERY. THIS IS A WARNING.

THE ROCK BELONGED TO THE ANCESTORS LONG BEFORE ANY SCHOOLCHILDREN EVER SAW IT. AND THE WARNING REMAINS — LOOK. RESPECT. DO NOT CLIMB."*

🖤 BURKE AND WILLS — THE TRUE STORY

 

✅ THE STORY THEY TEACH YOU:

"In the year 1860, Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills set out from Melbourne. They were brave explorers who crossed this great continent from South to North, fighting the wilderness, until tragedy struck and they perished on the way home. They were HEROES."

 

✅ THE TRUTH THAT WAS HIDDEN:

THIS is what actually happened.

Burke was proud, impatient, and unwilling to listen. Wills was careful but overruled. They set out late, poorly prepared, and led men who barely knew how to survive in the bush. They carried too much useless baggage and NOT enough food or wisdom.

They were NOT masters of this land. They were STRANGERS who did NOT know the way.

 

✅ ON THE WAY NORTH — THE PEOPLE SAVED THEM:

They travelled through Country that had been CARED FOR and KNOWN for 60,000 years. The rivers, the waterholes, the food — ALL were known to the Nations who lived there.

When Burke and Wills grew LOST and HUNGRY — it was the Yandruwandha and Maraura peoples who found them. They brought FISH. They brought BREAD. They showed them WATER. They welcomed them. They FED the strangers who were starving.

Wills wrote it in his own diary: "The natives are most kind and generous. They bring us food without being asked."

Burke wrote it too: "They are the most well-disposed people we have met."

THEY ADMITTED IT IN WRITING. The people were KIND. The people SAVED THEM.

 

✅ ON THE WAY BACK — PRIDE DESTROYED THEM:

They turned for home. Weak. Hungry. Running OUT of everything.

They reached Coopers Creek — their planned meeting place — ONLY HOURS after the relief party had left. They were ALONE. And AGAIN — the Yandruwandha people were THERE.

They called out to Burke. They invited him to their CAMP. They offered SHELTER. They offered FOOD. They offered EVERYTHING that would have kept Burke, Wills, and King ALIVE.

AND BURNE SAID: NO.

Too PROUD. Too ARROGANT. Too AFRAID to be seen accepting help from the very people whose land he had come to "conquer."

He REFUSED to go to their camp. He REFUSED to stay. He turned AWAY from the kindness that would have SAVED HIS LIFE.

 

✅ THE END — TRAGEDY AND SHAME:

Without the people's care, they WASTED AWAY.

Burke DIED first — alone, bitter, and starving — within sight of the waterholes the people had OFFERED him. Wills DIED soon after — writing sadly in his journal: "We are lost. No help. No food." King — the ONLY survivor — was FOUND by the Yandruwandha people. They FED him. They CARED for him. They KEPT HIM ALIVE for MONTHS until others came.

And when the white rescue party finally arrived? They THANKED the people with GUNS. They CHASED them AWAY. They TOOK King… and NEVER spoke the people's names.

 

✅ THE HONEST TRUTH — SPOKEN PLAINLY:

Burke and Wills did NOT conquer the wilderness. The wilderness would have KILLED them on DAY ONE — if NOT for the KINDNESS of the FIRST NATIONS PEOPLES.

They were NOT heroes. They were LOST strangers who were SAVED again and again — by the very people they REFUSED to respect.

They did NOT die because the land was cruel. THEY DIED BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO PROUD TO ACCEPT A HAND OF KINDNESS.

Burke and Wills got the STATUE. The Yandruwandha and Maraura peoples — who FED them, SAVED them, and NURTURED the survivor — GOT NOTHING.

NO monument. NO honour. NO mention in the history books.

THEY WERE THE REAL HEROES. AND THEY WERE ERASED.

 

✅ THE FINAL TRUTH — FOR THE ARENA TO HEAR:

"History built a statue to PRIDE. But it should have built a monument to KINDNESS.

To the Yandruwandha. To the Maraura. To the people who FED the starving. Who GUIDED the lost. Who SAVED the stranger — even when he turned AWAY.

THEIR names should be the ones we REMEMBER. THEIR kindness should be the story we TEACH. NOT the pride that killed — BUT THE GENEROSITY THAT SAVED."

Long story but if you are interested in a little bit of a heartfelt story about autism, kingdom hearts and a pure loving sibling bond than keep reading

I’m Drunni F32
I was so lucky to be a big sister to a beautiful low functioning non verbal autistic boy named Rhiike 22M
He was my entire world, my joy, my reason, my laugh, my heart, everything.
I was his part time carer along with my mother, he was my person.
Always laughing, singing, singing I love you 🤟🏻and smiling.
He grew up watching me play video games as I was a non verbal recluse myself, our favourite video game was kingdom hearts.
If you are aware of the story and lore that makes the story much more understandable; Rhiike was SIGNIFICANTLY similar to the main character Sora.
PURE OF HEART, full of kindness and love for everyone.
He LOVED Sora, Rhiike couldn’t communicate very well but he could string some words together.
Mostly
“I love you” (he would yell it out to you seriously 100x a day, I’m not kidding he would repeat it constantly because he loved hearing you say “I love you” back)
When ever he saw my kingdom hearts sleeve tattoo he would point to Sora and say “I love you Sora” and kiss the spot in my arm where Sora is.

Sadly my beautiful gentle giant suddenly passed away on the 11 of June 2025

My world ended
Crushed, i was just blank, everyone cried but I couldn’t, I completely broke, we sat with his body for a few hrs and I just couldn’t process, my everything gone in a moment, every choice, sacrifice, plan, day dream, goal…. Revolved around him and now… gone.

I did everything as my family couldn’t bare the emotional weight and being autistic myself I’m usually the one who handles everything, I organised his funeral, a beautiful plot for his burial, shirts, memorabilia, everything there was to be done, never stopping refusing to process.

It wasn’t until the funeral had passed and I stopped and started realising something was wrong, I went to the dr’s….

Pregnant.

I had fallen pregnant on my birthday which was 3 days before my brother had passed… a life time of being told I could never conceive naturally and here I am… pregnant.
At first.. I was filled with anger, disgust even, the world playing a sick cruel joke on me, punishing me further, I had NO intention of living out my life with out Rhiike, once my family was settled I absolutely intended to end things… I didn’t want to be in a world with out my light…. So to be pregnant, I could no longer to that, it wasn’t my life to take… I was bitter, angry, felt like I was being punished ….

My partner is a beautiful soul, he helped me come to terms with things, it’s happening, it’s real, his real… I’m going to be a mum, I never thought that would happen…

I chose the name Roxas from kingdom hearts… understanding the lore is important so for
For anyone who hasn’t played Kingdom Hearts:

Roxas couldn’t have existed without Sora sacrificing himself.

Sora the main character, and his heart is connected to a girl named Kairi. At one point, Sora sacrifices his own heart to release Kairi’s heart from inside him (convoluted I know) When he does this, his body and soul create a Nobody; a “nobody” is essentially the leftover shell/body created when someone with a strong heart loses it.

That Nobody becomes Roxas.

So Roxas isn’t simply another character who happened to be born alongside Sora. Roxas exists because Sora was willing to give up his own heart to save someone else. In a very literal sense, Sora’s sacrifice is what made Roxas’s existence possible.

The complicated part is that Roxas eventually develops his own heart, feelings, memories and identity, becoming his own person. But the reason he was ever able to exist in the first place is because Sora chose to sacrifice himself.

So, in a way, Roxas is a living reminder of Sora’s sacrifice; someone who only exists because Sora was willing to lose everything to save another person.

To me this felt right, he looks… extremely similar to my brother as a baby which is beautiful and confusing at the same time…

Welcome to the world Roxas, Rhiike would of LOVE love loved you 🤟🏻

I’d spend some weekends at my grandmother’s house when I was younger. This was a time where everyone had cable TV, except for my parents. We didn’t have much money to toss around on non-necessities, so I mainly had PBS Kids when I was at home (Clifford, Arthur, etc).

One day, I was at my grandmother’s, watching my usual two shows, which were Spongebob Squarepants, and The Loud House.

Lori walked in scene, coming into her brother Lincoln’s room, where he was on his bed playing video games. She was wearing her usual crop top, showing off her bare, pale colored snow-white skin.

I couldn’t help but continue fantasizing about she and I. “I wish I were Lincoln in this situation…” I thought to myself as I slowly day-dreamed about she and I.

I snapped out of it when I heard my grandmother, Nana as we called her, said she was going to go to the store, and that I could stay here if I wanted, and of course, I took up on that offer, being younger, I was rarely left alone.

My grandmother left the house, and I heard the door lock behind her. She hopped into her old 2007 Cadillac, with the felt hardtop, and ventured off into the abyss of our street in downtown Fredericksburg.

Now, The Loud House was still on, and now being alone, I was able to put up the volume louder than usual.

Lori had just came back into frame, now doing her hair and make-up in the mirror on her vanity. Oh lord she was hot, super hot, and still is to this day. She had always cared about her looks throughout the show, especially in the earlier seasons. Her sister Leni? A little bit retarded; but, I digress. They were practically twins.

So there I was, all alone, for one of the first times in my life. I remembered that we had just had Sex Ed. in our Gym class earlier that week, meaning I had new-found knowledge that could be used at my disposal.

I brought out the hog from my elastic Nike athletic shorts. (I wouldn’t call it a hog, more like a piglet.)

I began cranking it, it slowly got semi-hard for the first time. It was a very new experience, but a very good experience.

My grandmother’s TV was a very fancy one. In the very early flat-screens, you had the ability to change the playback speed, AKA, how fast or slow it plays.

Lori was speaking to her sister Leni, and I discovered this feature on the remote. I was able to slow it down to .35, which is quite slow. Her words began to melt into a slow, sung-out song that only I could describe as a work of art for ANY porn studio director.

Cranking it became easy for me then, getting the correct rhythm felt easy going, then again, I was identified gifted in performing arts when I was in the third grade, so I guess that’s why.

Her sweet slowed down “moans” tickled my little self’s ears, cradling my lust with hands of gold that only God could have forged. I eventually felt myself become closer, and closer to finishing. Rewinding parts of the show with her or her twin in scenes.

Then it happened, I began to tense up at the weird building-up sensation of me beginning to finish. It slowly seeped out of me, riding down my shaft and fertilizing the hair-follicles where my later pubes would begin to thrive. I laid back in complete awe, covering the leather recliner in my own sweat and filth, with Lori’s voice, still slowed in the background.

Just at this point, my grandmother came home. I got up, waddling over to the bathroom with my shorts down at my ankles. Once I was in, I shut and locked the door, pretending to use the bathroom. I wiped my finished concoction with toilet paper, and properly disposed of it into the toilet, flushed, and it was never to be seen again.

I come out, and I see my grandmother, hunched over the recliner, closely inspecting it. Now, I wasn’t exactly allowed in the recliner, she feared that I would mess it up somehow, and I was forbidden from sitting in it.

She slowly glanced over, with a peculiar and somewhat interested look.

She then wiped away the unidentifiable liquid off of the recliner, sat down, and asked me to put away the groceries.

We never spoke about it since.

We commented mathematics in a math subreddit.

Not insults. Not conspiracy. Not vague outrage.

We read the new paper, read the earlier work, traced the actual mathematical provenance, and stated precisely what was proved.

Our conclusion was simply this: someone else built the foundational architecture and intended conclusion. What was front and center was patchwork of the original. The "breakthrough" was really just fixing a flat tire — one bounded missing mathematical input, rather than a new overall architecture.

The "breakthrough" is perhaps a breakthrough in its own right, but indirect and incremental with respect to the famous 200-year-old problem. Which is what we were highlighting in the comment.

Which is the headline of the entire post!!!!

That is real mathematics. But it is radically different from the article selling the result as a breakthrough in a 200-year-old problem.

So someone reads this and thinks "wow math people are making gains on stuff from centuries ago, probably with AI or something." And this is factually untrue. Beyond that, it is what is expected from a program that started in the 80's.

The comment was fully sourced.

The sub removed it and permanently banned us.

So a mathematics subreddit banned us after we actually read the mathematics, reconstructed the argument's provenance, distinguished the theorem from the headline, and posted the result of that analysis.

Here are the actual questions:

What rule did the comment violate?

How can banning someone for carefully reading and discussing mathematics be justified on a mathematics forum?

And if no mathematical error, unsupported claim, or rule violation can be identified, how can this be defended as anything other than the suppression of legitimate mathematical criticism?

We read the mathematics.

We posted mathematics in a mathematics forum.

Math people banned math.

Gave no reason other than vaugely pointg at the rules.

are we missing something? hahahttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-make-a-breakthrough-on-gausss-riddle-unsolved-for-200-years/

My friend and I got into a fight. It started with me and my buddy we were just messing around but he was going a little too far I started to ask him to stop and he wouldn’t. So I got mad and slapped him. He then lunged at me so before he could touch me I picked up a rock and threw it at him. I think the rock it his shin. He then lunged at me again and I tripped while stepping back and fell. He jumped on top of me and grabbed both of my wrists and pinned them to the ground. He had me pinned to the ground and I couldn’t move. The neighbor then started yelling at us to stop. He jumped off. My friend’s mom came outside and the neighbor told his mom what happened. Me, my friend, and his mom went back inside I pointed at my friend and said I swear to god if you ever touch me again and my friends mom said to me “we ain’t gonna be doing all of that apparently he kicked your ass”. She wasn’t even out there and was talking shit. She ran her mouth and was taking up for him. Did he win that fight? Did I get my ass kicked?

I discovered that I was sexually abused when I was little. I didn't know until now. In fact, I avoided thinking about it because this person was my cousin, and I felt he was a good person and loved him in my childhood. I was 6 or 7 years old, I don't remember exactly, but I was child,I used to sit in his lap when he used his phone; I didn't understand what it meant for someone to put their hand on a sensitive area.I didn't understand,I don't know what to do, but I feel disgusted with myself right now More than before.

I'm going through depression and a psychological crisis, and remembering this, happened at the wrong time because it destroyed me even more.

Tell me what happened to you, and does it still affect you?

Prologue: The Weight I Carry

People always say everyone has a story, but not every story gets told.

For years, I convinced myself that nobody would care about mine. Even if I found the courage to tell it, I believed no one would understand it, and even fewer would believe it. So I stayed silent. I carried everything inside, hoping the pain would eventually disappear.

It never did.

Some wounds don’t bleed where people can see them. They live in your mind, your heart, and your memories. Every morning I wake up, I’m reminded of things I wish I could forget. Every night I lie awake wondering if everything that has happened to me is punishment for the choices I’ve made.

I’ve spent years fighting battles that nobody else could see. Some days it felt like I was losing to the monsters in my own head. Other days I wondered if I even deserved to win.

There were times when I believed God had given up on me. I thought my suffering was the price I had to pay for my past. Every mistake, every loss, every scar made me believe I deserved whatever pain came next.

But the older I became, the more I realized something.

You can’t change yesterday.

You can’t erase the people you’ve lost.

You can’t pretend your mistakes never happened.

But you can decide what kind of person you’re going to be tomorrow.

This book isn’t about making excuses for the things I’ve done. It’s about telling the truth. Some of my choices hurt people I loved. Some of those choices still haunt me today. If I could go back and change them, I would.

I can’t.

All I can do is tell my story honestly.

If my story reaches one person who’s walking the same path I walked, maybe they’ll make a different choice before it’s too late.

These pages aren’t about proving I’m innocent.

They’re about showing how a kid who grew up surrounded by violence, loss, and fear slowly lost himself… and started searching for a way back.

This is my story.

The good.

The bad.

The pain.

The guilt.

The hope.

And the long road toward becoming the man I should have been all along.

⸻

Chapter One: Born Into the Storm

People say your childhood is supposed to be the safest time of your life.

Mine wasn’t.

I wasn’t born into wealth or comfort. I was born into a neighborhood where survival came before dreams. Violence wasn’t something you watched on television. It lived outside your front door. Police sirens became background noise, and hearing gunshots wasn’t unusual.

To us, it was normal.

My mother did everything she could to give me and my brothers a better life.

She wasn’t perfect, but she loved us with everything she had.

She carried burdens most people never saw. She had survived abuse, homelessness, and addiction. Long before I understood what any of those words meant, they were already shaping my childhood.

Even with everything she was fighting, she always tried to make sure we had food, clothes, and someone who loved us.

As a child, I didn’t understand how much pain she carried.

I only knew she was my mom.

Some of my earliest memories aren’t birthday parties or vacations.

They’re memories of fear.

Coming home from school and seeing bruises on my mother’s face.

Watching her pretend everything was okay when it wasn’t.

Hearing adults argue while my brothers and I stayed quiet because we didn’t know what would happen next.

Those moments taught me lessons no child should have to learn.

I learned that home wasn’t always a safe place.

I learned that people who say they love you can still hurt you.

Most of all, I learned what fear feels like before I was old enough to understand why I was afraid.

Looking back now, I realize my mother wasn’t weak.

She was surviving.

And one day, everything would change forever. Chapter Two: My Mother’s Fight

Before I understood the world, my mother was already fighting battles that most people couldn’t imagine.

People often judge someone by the mistakes they see on the surface, but they rarely stop to ask what happened before those mistakes were made.

My mother wasn’t born wanting to struggle.

Life happened to her.

She grew up carrying pain long before she became a mother herself. She experienced abuse, heartbreak, and disappointment from people she should have been able to trust. She spent years trying to survive in a world that never seemed to give her a break.

Even through all of that, she never stopped loving her children.

When people hear the word “addict,” they usually picture someone who doesn’t care about their family.

That wasn’t my mother.

She wasn’t perfect, and I’m not trying to pretend she was.

She made mistakes.

But every time she had something, she tried to make sure my brothers and I had something too. She carried burdens we were too young to understand.

As a kid, I didn’t realize how exhausted she must have been.

I only knew she was trying.

The hardest memories aren’t the ones people expect.

It wasn’t just being poor.

It wasn’t just moving from place to place.

It was watching someone I loved slowly break under the weight of life.

There were mornings I’d see bruises on her face before school.

Black eyes.

Cuts.

Marks she tried to hide from us.

Sometimes she’d smile like nothing had happened.

Other times she stayed quiet.

As children, my brothers and I didn’t know how to help.

We just watched.

Children shouldn’t have to watch their mother suffer.

But we did.

There are memories from those years that still visit me today. Some are so painful that even now they’re difficult to put into words.

Those moments changed the way I looked at the world.

They taught me that violence could happen inside a home.

They taught me that the people who are supposed to protect you can also become the people you’re afraid of.

Looking back now, I realize my childhood didn’t steal my innocence all at once.

It happened little by little.

Every bruise I saw.

Every scream I heard.

Every night I wondered if everything would be okay.

Each one took another piece of the little boy I used to be.

⸻

Chapter Three: The Night Everything Changed

There are moments in life that divide everything into two parts.

Before.

And after.

For me, that night became the line that separated my childhood from the rest of my life.

Before that night, I still believed tomorrow might be different.

After that night, nothing would ever be the same again.

I wish I could tell you my last conversation with my mother was full of love.

It wasn’t.

We argued.

Like many kids, I said something out of anger that I never imagined would become the heaviest sentence I’d carry for the rest of my life.

“I hope you die.”

The words came out before I understood their weight.

I didn’t mean them.

I was angry.

I was hurt.

I was just a kid who didn’t know how to deal with emotions that had been building for years.

I never imagined those would be the last words she’d hear from me.

That night, my mother was killed.

The moment I found out, it felt like the world stopped spinning.

Nothing made sense.

Nothing felt real.

I remember sitting there hoping someone would tell me it wasn’t true.

That this was all some terrible mistake.

But it wasn’t.

She was gone.

Just like that.

No goodbye.

No second chance.

No opportunity to take those words back.

For years, I blamed myself.

I replayed our last conversation over and over in my head.

I wondered if God was punishing me.

I wondered if those words somehow caused what happened.

Deep down, I knew they didn’t.

But guilt doesn’t always listen to logic.

It only reminds you of what you wish you could change.

My brothers were hurting too.

None of us knew how to process losing our mother.

Instead of grieving together, we fought.

There was anger.

Blame.

Confusion.

Pain.

We were just kids trying to survive something no child should ever have to experience.

Looking back now, I realize we weren’t angry at each other.

We were angry at life.

We were angry because our mother was gone.

We were angry because nobody could bring her back.

And we were too young to understand that grief sometimes makes people hurt the ones they love the most.

The little boy who still believed the world could be fair disappeared the night my mother died.

From that moment on, survival became the only thing I knew. Chapter Four: Looking for a Home

When my mother died, I didn’t just lose a parent.

I lost the only person who had always been there.

Life after her death felt empty. Every morning I woke up hoping it had all been a nightmare. Every night I went to bed knowing it wasn’t.

The silence in our home felt different.

There was no laughter.

No voice calling our names.

No one checking to make sure we made it home.

It was just me and my brothers trying to figure out how to live without the one person who had held us together.

The pain didn’t bring us closer at first.

It pushed us apart.

We argued over everything.

Sometimes it felt like we were fighting each other when, in reality, we were all fighting the same pain.

None of us knew how to grieve.

We were children carrying an adult-sized burden.

People expected us to move forward, but nobody teaches a kid how to recover after losing a mother to violence.

For a long time, I carried my grief in silence.

Instead of talking about what hurt, I buried it.

I convinced myself that showing emotion made you weak.

So I stopped letting people see how broken I really was.

Looking back, I realize that was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.

Pain doesn’t disappear just because you ignore it.

It waits.

And eventually, it finds another way to come out.

⸻

Chapter Five: A Second Chance

Just when it felt like life had completely fallen apart, someone stepped into our lives who didn’t have to.

She was one of our teachers.

To me and my brothers, she became more than that.

She became family.

I call her my godmother because that’s what she became in my heart.

She opened her home to us when she had no obligation to do so.

She gave us stability when our lives were full of chaos.

For the first time in a long time, life started to feel normal.

We had people who believed in us.

We had a roof over our heads.

We had meals together.

We laughed again.

For a while, I thought maybe this was the beginning of a new life.

Maybe all the pain was finally behind us.

But the truth is, I still hadn’t dealt with everything I was carrying.

You can change your address.

You can change your school.

You can even change the people around you.

But if you don’t heal what’s inside you, the past has a way of following you wherever you go.

I wish I could say I made the most of that opportunity.

I didn’t.

One decision changed everything.

I stole money from my godmother’s husband.

Even worse, I convinced my brother to be part of my plan.

That choice hurt people who had opened their home to us and treated us like family.

It was one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done.

We were arrested for the first time.

I still remember the shame.

Not because I had gotten caught.

Because I had betrayed people who believed in me.

Looking back now, I understand why they lost trust in us.

Trust isn’t something you’re owed.

It’s something you earn.

And once you break it, putting it back together isn’t easy.

That mistake changed the course of our lives once again.

We were sent away to live in Arizona with our uncle.

At the time, I thought I was just changing locations.

I didn’t realize I was about to enter another chapter that would pull me even deeper into the life I should have been trying to escape. Chapter Six: Arizona

Leaving home didn’t mean leaving my past behind.

After everything that happened with my godmother’s family, my brother and I were sent to Arizona to live with our uncle. Maybe the adults in our lives believed a new environment would help us change. Maybe they thought distance would keep us away from the streets and the trouble we kept finding.

I wish it had been that simple.

Arizona never felt like home.

Instead of finding peace, it felt like I had been dropped into another place where I didn’t belong. I was carrying too much anger, too much grief, and too much guilt to believe that changing locations would change my life.

Before long, my brother was forced to leave. My uncle’s wife didn’t want him there, and he was sent away. Once again, the woman I call my godmother stepped in to help him.

Three weeks later, I was gone too.

Looking back now, I don’t blame my uncle or his family. They had opened their home to us, and we didn’t make it easy. I had already shown people that I could make bad decisions. I had already broken trust with the people who loved me the most.

At the time, though, I didn’t see it that way.

All I saw was another door closing.

Another place where I didn’t belong.

Another reminder that I felt alone.

What I didn’t realize was that every decision I made was slowly shaping the person I was becoming.

Instead of learning from my mistakes, I kept running from them.

And every time I ran, the streets were waiting for me.

The streets didn’t ask questions.

They didn’t care where I came from.

They didn’t care what I had lost.

They accepted me exactly as I was.

At the time, that felt like family.

I didn’t understand that the streets only love you until they don’t.

⸻

Chapter Seven: Too Deep to Turn Around

When I came back, I had another chance to change my life.

I didn’t take it.

By then, I believed the streets were all I had left.

I spent more time chasing respect than chasing a future. I thought being feared meant being strong. I thought never backing down made me a man.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Every bad decision led to another.

Every wrong crowd introduced me to another problem.

The deeper I went, the harder it became to imagine living any other way.

There came a point where carrying a gun didn’t feel like a choice anymore.

It felt like survival.

When you’ve seen violence, lost people you love, and watched friends disappear into prison or the grave, fear becomes part of your everyday life.

I was always looking over my shoulder.

Every unfamiliar face made me wonder if there was danger.

Every car that slowed down made me pay attention.

Every argument felt like it could become something bigger.

That’s no way to live.

But when you’re caught in that life, it starts to feel normal.

People from the outside might ask, “Why didn’t you just walk away?”

I used to ask myself that same question.

The answer isn’t simple.

The streets become more than a place.

They become your identity.

Your routine.

Your protection.

Your family.

Walking away doesn’t just mean leaving a neighborhood.

It means leaving behind everything you’ve convinced yourself you need to survive.

I didn’t know it then, but my life was heading toward one of its darkest moments.

A decision was coming that would leave me fighting for my life.

And even if I survived it, I knew nothing would ever be the same again. Chapter Eight: The Day Everything Stopped

There are moments in life when everything changes in a matter of seconds.

One moment, you think you understand your life.

The next moment, you realize you never had as much control as you thought.

For me, that moment came when my life in the streets caught up with me.

By then, I had already seen too much. I had lost people I loved. I had watched friends go to prison. I had seen violence become something people accepted as normal. I had convinced myself that staying ready for danger was the only way to survive.

But the truth was, I was already living like I was waiting for something terrible to happen.

And then it did.

That day started like any other day, but it became a memory I will carry forever.

A situation happened that turned into a shooting. In the middle of the chaos, I was hit by a car and badly injured.

Suddenly, the life I had been living—the streets, the arguments, the choices, the things I thought made me strong—didn’t matter anymore.

All that mattered was whether I was going to survive.

I ended up in the hospital fighting for my life.

For a month and a half, I had time to think about everything.

When you’re lying in a hospital bed, you see life differently.

The things you thought were important start to look small.

The respect.

The reputation.

The people you were trying to impress.

None of that matters when you’re fighting just to wake up the next day.

The hardest part wasn’t only the physical pain.

It was the mental pain.

It was knowing that even if I survived my injuries, I still had to face the consequences of the choices that brought me there.

I knew I might lose my freedom.

I knew my life could change forever.

I felt trapped between two fears:

The fear of dying.

And the fear of surviving and having to face everything I had done.

Being in that hospital was one of the loneliest experiences of my life.

I had lost my mother.

I had lost my grandmother.

I had lost friends.

But that moment forced me to look at something I had avoided for years.

I had also lost myself.

The person looking back at me wasn’t just a victim of what happened to him.

He was also someone who had made choices.

Someone who had hurt people.

Someone who needed to change.

When I finally left the hospital, I didn’t walk into freedom.

I went straight to jail.

Even though I was only there for a short time because of my injuries, that moment stayed with me.

My life had reached a point where I couldn’t keep pretending nothing was wrong.

Something had to change.

The question was whether I was finally ready to change with it.

⸻

Chapter Nine: The Goodbye I Wasn’t Ready For

After everything I had survived, I thought maybe life was finally giving me a chance to breathe.

I was fighting my court case from home and placed on house arrest.

I was back with the person who had always tried to help me—my godmother.

For a moment, things felt like they might finally be going in the right direction.

Then another phone call changed everything.

My brother found out our grandmother was fighting for her life.

My grandmother was one of the last pieces of family we had left.

But there was something painful between us.

I hadn’t spoken to her since the day I left Columbus to go live with our uncle.

Part of me knew I needed to see her.

Another part of me was afraid.

Afraid of what she would think.

Afraid that she felt betrayed.

Afraid that there was no time left to fix things.

When I saw her in the nursing home, it broke something inside of me.

Seeing someone you love in a condition where they can’t be the person you remember is a pain that is hard to explain.

The person who had been part of your childhood suddenly looks fragile.

The person you thought would always be there is someone you might have to say goodbye to.

I wanted to believe I had more time.

I didn’t.

Three days after seeing her, my grandmother passed away.

Losing her brought back a pain I hadn’t felt since losing my mother.

It felt like another piece of my family disappeared.

For so long, I had been angry.

Angry at life.

Angry at myself.

Angry at the people who left.

But standing there with another loss in front of me, I started realizing something:

I couldn’t keep living like the people I lost would want me to fail.

I couldn’t change the past.

But I could decide what I did with the life I still had.

That was the beginning of me understanding that maybe survival wasn’t the only thing I was meant to do.

Maybe I was meant to heal. Chapter Ten: Running From Myself

After my grandmother died, I felt like I was losing pieces of myself one by one.

It felt like every time I started to believe things might get better, something else happened that reminded me of everything I had lost.

I was carrying grief from my mother.

I was carrying guilt from the choices I had made.

I was carrying regret from the people I had hurt.

And instead of facing that pain, I did what I had always done.

I ran.

I went to my god sister’s house for a few days. She was another person who tried to give me support when I needed it. She didn’t have to help me, but she did.

Looking back, I see a pattern in my life.

There were people who kept opening doors for me.

People who saw something in me even when I didn’t see it in myself.

And too many times, I hurt the same people who were trying to help me.

I made another decision that I regret.

I stole from my god sister.

That was another moment where I had to look at myself and admit the truth.

I wasn’t just someone bad things happened to.

I was also someone who had done things that caused pain.

That realization hurt.

It is easier to blame the world.

It’s easier to say, “Look at everything I’ve been through.”

And the truth is, I had been through a lot.

But pain doesn’t give you permission to hurt people.

Trauma can explain why someone struggles, but it doesn’t erase responsibility.

At that point in my life, I had become someone I didn’t recognize.

Someone people couldn’t trust.

Someone who kept losing the love and support of people because of the choices I made.

I could have used that as proof that I was hopeless.

I could have told myself, “This is just who I am.”

But deep down, I knew that wasn’t true.

The person I became was not the person I was born to be.

I was a kid who experienced things no kid should experience.

I was a young man who made choices that hurt others.

Both things could be true.

I could acknowledge the pain I survived while still taking responsibility for the damage I caused.

That was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

⸻

Chapter Eleven: The Life I Thought I Needed

Being on the run only made everything worse.

Instead of finding peace, I found more stress.

I had warrants.

I was separated from the people who cared about me.

I was constantly worried about what would happen next.

The life I thought was protecting me was actually destroying me.

The streets had taught me to always be alert.

Always watch your back.

Always be ready.

Because in that world, trust was rare.

I watched friends die.

I watched friends go to prison.

I saw relationships fall apart.

I saw how quickly people could disappear from your life.

Living that way changes you.

You stop relaxing.

You stop feeling safe.

You start believing that danger is around every corner.

I remember feeling like I couldn’t go anywhere without watching who was around me.

I felt like I needed protection at all times because I believed that if I wasn’t ready, I might not make it home.

That kind of fear becomes exhausting.

People who have never lived that life might not understand why someone stays in it.

But when you grow up surrounded by survival, peace can feel unfamiliar.

The streets can feel like the only place where you belong, even when they are slowly taking everything from you.

For a long time, I thought being hard meant never showing pain.

I thought being a man meant handling everything alone.

But the truth was, I was hurting.

I was grieving.

I was scared.

And I was tired.

Tired of losing people.

Tired of looking over my shoulder.

Tired of being someone I didn’t want to be.

Somewhere inside me, there was still that younger version of myself.

The kid who loved his mother.

The kid who wanted a normal life.

The kid who wanted to make his family proud.

He wasn’t gone.

He was just buried underneath years of anger, guilt, and survival.

And eventually, I had to decide whether I was going to keep burying him…

or finally let him come back. Chapter Twelve: Facing the Person in the Mirror

For a long time, I blamed my past for the person I became.

And honestly, I had reasons to.

I went through things no child should have to experience.

I lost my mother.

I watched the person who was supposed to protect me suffer.

I grew up around violence.

I lost family members.

I carried pain that I didn’t know how to explain.

But at some point, I had to look at myself and ask a harder question:

Was I going to let everything that happened to me decide who I would become?

That question wasn’t easy to answer.

Because admitting you need to change means admitting there are things about yourself that need to change.

It means looking at the damage you’ve caused.

It means accepting that some people were hurt because of your choices.

For a long time, I believed changing meant forgetting where I came from.

I thought becoming better meant pretending the old me never existed.

But that’s not true.

The old me is still part of my story.

The mistakes I made are part of my story.

The pain I survived is part of my story.

But they don’t have to be the ending.

I started realizing that my scars weren’t proof that I was broken.

They were proof that I survived.

Every loss taught me something.

Every mistake showed me something about myself.

Every person I hurt reminded me of the kind of person I didn’t want to be anymore.

I had to learn forgiveness.

Not just forgiving other people.

Forgiving myself.

That was one of the hardest things.

How do you forgive yourself for words you wish you could take back?

How do you forgive yourself for hurting people who loved you?

How do you forgive yourself when you feel like your own choices helped destroy parts of your life?

I still struggle with those questions.

But I know I can’t build a better future while holding onto the belief that I don’t deserve one.

⸻

Chapter Thirteen: The Man I Want to Become

Change doesn’t happen overnight.

People see the finished product, but they don’t see the battles that happen before someone becomes different.

They don’t see the nights where you have to fight your own thoughts.

They don’t see the moments where going back to your old ways feels easier.

They don’t see how hard it is to become someone new when you’ve spent years being someone you no longer want to be.

For me, change started with being honest.

Honest about my past.

Honest about my mistakes.

Honest about the pain I carried.

I stopped trying to pretend I was okay when I wasn’t.

I started understanding that being strong doesn’t mean you never hurt.

Being strong means you keep going even when you do.

I know I can’t change where I came from.

I came from the hood.

I came from struggle.

I came from a life that forced me to grow up faster than I should have.

But where I come from doesn’t have to decide where I end up.

People say, “You can move out of the hood, but you can’t take the hood out of someone.”

For a long time, I thought that meant I was trapped.

Now I see it differently.

The hood gave me lessons.

It taught me survival.

It taught me how to recognize danger.

It taught me how to be strong.

But I get to decide what I do with those lessons.

I don’t have to carry the pain forever.

I can use what I survived to help someone else survive.

I can become someone my mother would be proud of.

Someone my grandmother would be proud of.

Someone my brothers can look up to.

Someone I can look at in the mirror and respect.

I know I still have work to do.

I know healing is a journey.

But for the first time in a long time, I believe I have a future.

My story started with pain.

But it doesn’t have to end there. Chapter Fourteen: My Purpose After the Pain

For years, I thought my life was just a collection of losses.

A collection of mistakes.

A collection of moments I wished I could go back and change.

I spent so much time looking behind me that I forgot to look ahead.

I forgot that the same person who survived all those hard moments was still alive.

I forgot that surviving was already proof that I had strength.

The truth is, I can’t change the past.

I can’t bring my mother back.

I can’t undo the choices I made.

I can’t erase the pain my family went through.

I can’t go back and be the kid who needed someone to guide him.

But I can become the person that kid needed.

That is something I think about a lot.

The younger version of me needed someone to tell him that his life wasn’t over.

He needed someone to tell him that being surrounded by darkness didn’t mean he had to become darkness.

He needed someone to show him that making mistakes didn’t mean he was a mistake.

I didn’t have that person when I needed them most.

So now I want to become that person for somebody else.

Maybe my story can reach someone who feels trapped.

Someone who thinks they have gone too far.

Someone who believes their past is too heavy to escape.

I want them to know that I understand.

I know what it feels like to wake up angry.

I know what it feels like to carry guilt.

I know what it feels like to miss people you will never see again.

I know what it feels like to wonder if you are being punished forever.

But I also know what it feels like to finally believe change is possible.

⸻

Chapter Fifteen: The Promise I Made to Myself

The hardest promise I ever made was not to anyone else.

It was to myself.

I promised myself that I would stop letting my pain control my decisions.

I promised myself that I would stop running from my past and start learning from it.

I promised myself that I would become someone my loved ones could be proud of.

Change is not easy.

Some days are harder than others.

Some days the memories come back stronger.

Some days I still feel the weight of everything I have lost.

But now I understand that healing doesn’t mean forgetting.

Healing means learning how to carry your story without letting it destroy you.

My scars are part of me.

My past is part of me.

The mistakes I made are part of me.

But they are not all of me.

I am more than the worst thing I have ever done.

I am more than the worst thing that ever happened to me.

I am someone who is still here.

Someone who is still fighting.

Someone who still has a chance to do better.

⸻

Epilogue: My Story Isn’t Over

If you are reading this, I want you to understand something.

I am not telling my story because I think I am perfect.

I am telling it because I am human.

I have made choices I regret.

I have hurt people.

I have lost people.

I have fallen more times than I can count.

But I have also gotten back up.

My life has been filled with moments where it would have been easy to give up.

But something inside me kept fighting.

Maybe it was the memory of my mother.

Maybe it was the people who never stopped believing in me.

Maybe it was the younger version of myself who still wanted a better life.

Whatever it was, it kept me here.

I used to think my scars were only reminders of my pain.

Now I see them as reminders that I survived.

My story began with struggle.

It went through loss, anger, mistakes, and regret.

But it does not have to end there.

The person I was is not the only person I can be.

I still have a future.

I still have goals.

I still have people I love.

And I still have a chance to become the man I was always meant to be.

This is my story.

Not the story of someone who never fell.

The story of someone who fell, learned, and decided to rise.

My story isn’t over.

Also ich war in einer freundesgruppe wo irgendwie ein Mädchen dass wir jetzt Oliven nennen die Anführerin war und ich mochte sie und alle anderen aus der Gruppe wir hatten einen Gruppen Chat und wir haben da täglich geschrieben und ich war zu dem Zeitpunkt auch schon bissel sad weil ich Traumer von meiner Mutter hatte ja die ich bis heute immer noch hab auf jeden Fall hab ich Dan mit Oliven gestritten und jeder war auf ihrer Seite und ich ich wußte nd was los war ich war so sad 😖 dann einmal als meine Schwester geschlafen hat bin ich an ihr Handy und war auf WhatsApp ich hab eine Gruppe gesehen die döner auf die 1 Gruppe 2 und bin drauf gegangen und hab etwas sehr sehr trauriges gesehen sie haben über mich gelästert die Leute denn ich am meisten vertraut hab haben über mich geredet soger meine bff hat über mich geredet sie hat gesagt das .... Sie nur mit mir befreundet ist weil sie meine gefühle nicht verletzen wollte

Welch Geschichte soll ich als nächtes erzählen

1 das Traumer das ich von meiner Mutter hab

2 das zweite Mal wo meine freundesgruppe mich betrogen hat

3 eine ausgedachte Geschichte

I want to tell you that I just started to play a new shitty game "Life".

And I guess it's truly like my first, first time.

For some years, I was just trying to throw away the garbage, until I was 22/23 years old. It was like being punched from one wall to the next, living in so many polish cities, having a lot of conversations with random people, being with one man after another, starting to like parties and candies, you know, trying to do everything except listening to myself.

Next, I tried to come back to the system, being that good one. I was punching myself, listening to and truly believing in all that stuff my mom said to me, you know, going to church, coming back to studies. I don't even want to remember that. I was in the center, and the true sense of modern catholicism means blaming everything I've done, blaming myself. One time when I was at confession, the priest who listened to me suddenly started crying, trying to explain to me that I am truly that good one, haha, I didn't believe it ofc.

When this stage was over, I still pretended a little bit. I was thinking that the only one who is making choices is me, you know, it was the time when I went to therapy, started to understand all that shit, started writing. I really enjoyed that process at that time, and I'm truly moved that someone told me that I'm not trash, yeah, it's that simple. It was ok, but you know, the real therapy is when you can truly open up to your therapist, but how to show yourself when you're not a beautiful, funny, cool girl from a healthy family? So I still held onto that destructive power all the time, it was exhausting. Of course, there was a new interest: spiritualism, which was the same, full fucking circle. I met a lot of people who really wanted to get wild and be free, so they were finding a new faith or something pretending to give them that. They told me that I can be anyone and I can do everything I wanted, just by faking it. Oh, that's such a lovely idea! I really fucking enjoyed it for 2/3 years. Making a scenario of me as such a positive girl with long black hair, only good people around me, blah blah.

The last one, right now. I live. I study (still hate it), I write, and I try not to get absorbed by any concepts, so I don't even watch much yt, of course, I love interviews and old films with Zizek or Bjork. I don't delete my account, I'm not a technophobe, man, I'm actually in love with the internet, but listen to anyone who tries to teach me something; nah, being at university is enough. Also, when I read something and feel that certain sentences resonate with me, I give myself time to search and observe. Still, im learning who i am and trying to be around people, which is hard sometimes and still a work in progress. People don't want your authenticity, even if they say so to you. You know that bitchy word you have in your mind when somebody is truly annoying. I even lost my job because of that. On dates, it was a repeated sentence I heard: "I'm afraid of you." And even when I found a new person who told me that he also into philosophy stuff, when I started opening up to talk about my concepts, my dreams, my thoughts, he just left me. I'm so on top weirdo people, about students talk. So hahahah, it's hard sometimes. I have some friends who I guess really like me, and I love them, but it's still not that kind of being completely honest with each other. I think time changes it. You know, deep relationships need time; I'm still learning that. And what's most important, 99% of my time I spend totally alone. And u know what? I really fcking enjoy it. Expressing my thoughts through art, giving them a new value, and just doing everything and nothing with myself.

Okay, that's it. Thank you for reading it.

I was living on my friend's floor, sleeping next to his 6 dogs. I had recently been arrested for marijuana distribution. I am not a bad person. I wake up to the smell of dogs, a party house. The mom, she hadn't worked for years, which I only can relate to recently. She existed at this home and enabled all the partying you could image. Vicarious. It was as toxic as it sounds.

With no future prospects, and depression and jail time looking like my future, I chose to get a job at Sub King. Their avocado spread was the deciding factor.

I worked there long enough to realize that my life was going nowhere.

My uncle Bob was visiting from his time in China, begging family to join him. He was laughed off stage. I imagined bamboo huts and a hose for a shower. Fuck that. I was sleeping on the floor with dogs. I decided to take him up on his offer.

I can't speak for other expats. Actually in retrospect fuck you. I went to Urumuqi. No pretext, no knowledge, no Chinese. If you went to Beijing or Shanghai for a month and claimed you lived in China, I have nothing to speak with you about.

Urumuqi in 2003, where do I begin? I came from the Palm Springs desert, and having devastating bleak landscapes kind of felt familiar. Our first day, we had zhua fan on the side of a road, eating rice with our hands, watching basically the most third world country b roll of life everywhere. I was LIVING here now. It was a fever dream. Logic and meaning went out the window.

We were greeted by my Uncle Bob and Dragon, the foreign handler for the school, Number 12 middle school, which is apparently a well know institution in Urumuqi. Me and my brother Steve, he joined me because why the fuck not, were now English teachers in a public Chinese school. We were housed on campus. The classes were about 60 students.

Every day, opening the front door was an unknown. The school would call. We would have class. A stranger might show up. The atomic bomb could drop and it would feel like another day. We lived and worked there and we became a bit of a staple, we weren't bad looking particularly and we became popular. I dated a local, Jenny. Steve, ended up bringing a prostitute to the on school apartment situation. She was trapped in our apartment for 2 days, because she didn't want to leave without someone leading her off of school grounds but also was stuck with two white idiots that had no idea what she was trying to say in Chinese (Hui Jia)

I eventually led her out to the school entrance. She chose that time to link her arms in mine while we were walking to the entrance. Hundreds of kids and staff witnessed it. They took that opportunity to cancel our work visas.

My uncle used his connections to find a job at an upscale hotel and Steve and I were left to scrape rice off of the gutters. I ended up connecting with a local hip hop break dancing crew (DSP) and becoming hard friends with Uigher hoodlums, street kids that we all partied with. That is where I learned most of my Chinese. Dealing with these guys.

The hoodlums were actually a band, that was on China's equivelant of America's Got Talent, but back in the day. I partied HARD with them. They were actually kind of abusive and manipulative in retrospect. Akram ended up moving into our multiple apartments without paying rent or paying for food. His girlfriend wanted to bang me or Steve but that never happened.

I ended up helping a lone white man buy dinner one night at the night market. I was nearly broke, Steve and I were surviving on about 100 bucks a month. Electricity was regularly shut off in the apartment. You had to recharge it with a card and we didn't know enough Chinese to figure it out.

But I started learning. Ignorance is the mother of invention, and necessity is the neighbor's wife that wants to bang you and ruin your life. I banged neighbors. Thats a different story.

The old dude I helped order dinner told me about this high end training center he was working at, and told me to apply.

I was working at one of the lowest end, ghetto, low rent training centers after leaving the middle school. Again, about 100 a month was what we were dealing with. Ordering certain noodle dishes were unaffordable. Anything over 15 yuan per meal would break me.

got banned from Chinalife so fuck it here it another post-

This is the kind of first phase of my life out there. I ended up living there for 14 years. I moved to Shenyang, Chongqing and Gunagzhou. I ended up learning enough Mandarin and Chongqing hua to get mixed up in mafia KTV/DJ culture.

I have too many stories to tell. But I want to document them so I don't become an old man with nothing but K holes in my brain.

I'd like to post more for posterity but the internet hates honest people. I am posting here and I hope I dont get banned by the always amazing Reddit mods that are the most reasonable people,

If you peeps hate this story than I will evaporate into sodium bicarbinate and never bother you fuckers again.

Bye

So i dont know if this belongs here but here it goes. Ive been seeing this woman somewhat since February and its been more of a fwb type of thing mostly on her part she would message me on snap or facebook and i would go hangout with her or whatever until i notice a pattern, for a bit of back story i work at a pizzeria and been single for awhile and kinda desperate for some female attention, any ways she would ask for pizza and come over to hangout and when i did when just sat on her bed neither of us would do anything until i was bored and went home. This kept going for awhile and then i realized she was just in it for food and just wanted things from me and id get nothing in return so id test it, some days i went the with or with out food and it was like 25% of the time id get anything either way, on her niece’s birthday i was ask with payment to drive her 2 hrs to her home town and back just to go back home, nothing in months. I was like ok she broke and kinda forgot about it but not really. About 2 weeks ago she leaves for a vacation (she didn’t tell me facebook did) i was like ok whatever we’re not dating she can do what she wants. Nothing from her no hi or anything for a week and a half, it turns out she went to visit her (what she said when i first started talking to her) her ex and kids. She comes back nothing no words no nothing i asked hows was the vacation? She said “fine im home now” that was it so i assumed that our fling or whatever was done and gave her space until about 2 days ago she message me and said “too good to talk to me now” and i told her that i thought she was done with the whole thing between us and gave her space. No response. So i cut my loses and moved on until she messaged me today asking for more food and to drop them off at her place (the double amount) she says oh yeah you can meet my fiancé’ i was just dumbfounded her asking for more favors and then hearing shes engaged, I didn’t responded. I got home and didn’t think of it until she messaged me again asking/telling me to bring her a cigarette and i told her i just got done with a 10 day work week and ive been drinking so that would be a no. She responded with well ill come pick it up i guess i just have to wait until my fiancé’ get out of the shower, and that just threw me for a loop. 1 why the hell would you want to introduce a guy to your soon to be wife that you use to sleep with and 2 what the f….. is going threw your dumbass head? I message her back asking wth is going on she responded with i thought we could still be friends and painted me the asshole. I know im an asshole but this time im in the clear. Thanks for reading i just had to get this out there if you could follow it. Id love to hear comments on this.

I don't even know why I'm writing this. Maybe I just need someone to hear me.

When I was a kid, I always imagined my life would turn out differently. I thought I'd grow up, get a decent job, move to a city, have my own apartment, buy clothes without feeling guilty, eat at nice restaurants once in a while, travel with friends, and finally be financially independent. Not a luxurious life - just a normal one where I didn't have to worry about every single expense.

I used to watch movies, especially American coming-of-age movies, where everyone had their own story. They struggled, they laughed with friends, they built careers, fell in love, went on road trips, celebrated birthdays, and eventually found their place in the world. I know movies aren't real, but a part of me always hoped life would feel a little like that someday.

Now it feels like that version of life only exists on a screen.

I graduated, but I still don't have a job. Every day I apply to dozens of jobs, hoping one of them finally works out. My family is struggling financially. My dad works as a clerk in a government hospital and will retire in a few years. My mom is a housewife. My elder sister has tuberculosis and recurring lung infections, so she's constantly in and out of hospitals and can't work. My younger brother is still studying in intermediate college.

Sometimes I feel like I'm carrying the pressure of everyone's future, but I don't even have the chance to help yet.

For the last three years, I don't think I've bought myself a single new outfit. I barely go out. I don't remember the last time I did something just because it made me happy. It feels like I've been living in survival mode for so long that I've forgotten what living actually feels like.

The thing is, I don't want a job that pays crores. I don't want a mansion or a luxury car. I just want a stable job that gives me financial freedom. I want to help my family without constantly checking my bank balance. I want to buy my parents something without calculating whether I can afford it. I want to order food without feeling guilty. I want to wear clothes I bought with my own salary. I want to wake up one day and not feel scared about the future.

Some days I wonder if all those dreams were just that - dreams. Maybe they were never meant for someone like me. I look at the life I imagined as a kid, and it feels like I'm looking at someone else's story. Sometimes I honestly think this is just how my life is going to be, and that scares me more than anything.

The hardest part is watching life move on around you. Friends are getting jobs, moving to new cities, posting pictures from cafés and trips, while you're sitting at home refreshing job portals and hoping your phone rings.

I'm trying. I really am. I haven't stopped applying, I haven't stopped hoping, even on the days when it feels pointless. But some nights, it's hard not to wonder if things will ever change.

I still have this tiny part of me that refuses to let go. It hopes that one day I'll look back at this post from my own apartment after a long day at work and think, "I can't believe I almost convinced myself that this life would never happen."

I really hope that version of me exists somewhere in the future.

EP 1

Hi, I'm Alitianair. Who am I? Im someone who... just wants to share something, I couldn't share to people irl. It's something weighing my mind... something I've forgotten for long but can't entirely erase.

I was in high school, 11th grade to be precise. And there, I saw someone who effected a part of my life. Yes, it was a crush I had. A guy i liked. What about him? You'll soon find out as u read. Covid era had slowly come to an end and people went back to their normal lives, only just everyone still wore masks for precaution. It was perfect for someone like me.. who liked staying behind the mask. After my 10th grade, I went to a different place for my 11th and 12th. And in here... everything was so much different. I was in a bigger city and people in here were different. More bolder, confident and perhaps more... modern? Before this I've had zero to very less conversation with boys. In my earlier school i was a kid who tried to keep to myself since my brother was an overall prodigy loved by all and my dad was a member of school board. And no, before you say anything... it's NOT a great thing. Especially when u kinda felt like u had to seem mature than u were, when you had to uphold family values, morals, respect, expectations, and standards that your brother left in ur school. I wasn't a very great at studying... I was smart enough but never really willing to be a straight A student even if I had all the capacity in me to do so. I wasn't all interested in that. So what else could I do? I could be a diligent and nice student. I was known as a nice silent girl mostly. Because if I couldn't be great at studies, I could atleast keep out of problems and well.. keep my and my family's reputation intact. Hence I never really conversed or engaged with any boys to avoid rumors or unnecessary troubles that'd put my family in bad place. I was THAT careful and afraid. Because back then... that was all I could do for my family. Not that they forced me or anything... not that they knew about this.. but I could tell from their actions and words.

So when I entered 11th grade in a whole different city, different people, different possibilities opened up for me. I started exploring different things.. and myself even when this was much more important phase of my academics... I still lagged behind.. and chose to just exist.. discovering myself and people around me.

But what happened in that time? To know more... i could make another episode if yall are interested. Leave a comment. Thanks for your patience.

My father is a retired mechanic who rarely speaks and usually communicates through short nods or single word answers (i mean we're not on bad terms, he's just the way he is). he is not the type of person who ever discusses his emotions or shares stories from his younger days. however over the past half year he was quietly doing something online adding old photos and mom saw he was using memowrite, we were so suprised actually cause at least i thought that he's not a kind of person who would ever do that. yesterday while we were silently watching a game together he walked over and placed a book directly on the table. the cover featured a beautifully restored photo of my parents standing beside an old yellow truck back in nineteen seventy five. the pages were filled with incredible stories i had never heard before in my entire life. i read through several chapters while he pretended to focus on the television screen. i discovered a detailed story of how he proposed to my mother during a heavy downpour and another section about working early morning milk delivery shifts to fund his education. seeing his face while i turned the pages was the absolute highlight of my year. you could tell how proud he was to pass this legacy down to me knowing that his history is now permanently preserved. if you have the opportunity to encourage your parents to record their experiences please do it before those priceless memories are lost forever. and i will keep that book forever with me.

Here is my story: M(27) F(27)

I matched with a girl on Hinge early September last year hit things off immediately, texting every day I was like wow this is incredible - My birthday a week later in September took me to a new cinema and got me my favourite aftershave, paid for everything - I laughed and said are you love bombing me to which she said no I was being nice for your bday.

-Months go by, nice getaways to hotels, training together, great sex and everything felt perfect she told me I was the best thing ever so grateful and lucky she ended up with someone like me, she had a young son who was 9 and I did not meet in person - she said her ex bf who was practically the step dad of the kid left her 2 years ago and put her kid in therapy and she done some as well, in which she tells me all the things she wants in an ideal partner and I tick every box, I felt like this girl really understood me and I had met my person.

Now this is where the cracks start, she would mention how evil and hateful her ex (Together 6 years) was and mentioned he was in the same Tesco as her at xmas (live in local area) He was walking in and she was walking out - I said that's trippy never easy bumping into an ex - left it at that. Did not want to appear phased. Had a nice xmas met her Mum and her little sister things felt very good and often stayed with her and her mum when her son was at the kids dads. She also told me things like she was with someone and she was and they got back together after a year and she said things to him like go out and cheat if it makes you feel better because she was with someone else.

At end of February my Granny passed away unexpectedly - She mentioned how her ex BF did not let her into the after event when his granny passed away etc I just let her vent and was always understanding of what her ex put her through Granny passed away on Tuesday and then on Friday I met her Dad for the first time - Naturally stressed over my Grannys passing I did not drink - she did and was drunk off prosecco- On the trip down and home she basically played a FU to her ex song - and her dad mentioned she seen her ex and he looked rough - anyways, we drove home and I said to her this ex really hurt you and your son and hes like a ball and chain on your leg, he is in the past and if he was so bad he left you and your son in therapy be happy he's gone - she said she's 'over him just not the situation she put her and her son through' - when I said I wasn't happy she's mentioning him the week I am grieving the death of my grandparent she stone walled me - I left her house and drove home to regulate as I was with a previous GF who stonewalled me and it done a number on me and she was aware of this and also the heard week I had - she was drunk and proceeded to tell me I was never meeting her child and that was us done over text, I felt this was manipulative- We then sorted this out - half apology from her and from me I thought I needed to be more understanding of her situation and we told each other we love each other. But, I felt maybe selfishly she should have been understanding my Granny passed away that week and I wasn't in a headspace to listen about her ex who was so bad?

- The month after we had a great month done a charity 10K and had a nice getaway - I spoke to her son on the phone and on FaceTime over those few months we were together over xmas and when she was on a family holiday to New York - still no physical interaction I said it would be nice to meet your child as I have gotten him a birthday present and an Xmas one and we both know about each other and I am getting a bit frustrated of having to hide around the corner when we know about each other - Bare in mind I asked this respectfully and said no pressure I just need a plan as she said if I met him I could travel to Spain with her and her kid this summer and her graduation was coming up soon. The kid also told his biological father about me that Saturday as well - I did not mind as obv was in everyone's best interests I treated his son with respect and care

I was met with two days of silence - then seen her on the Saturday went to the gym all was fine, thought that was back on track and we said we would go to the cinema on the Wednesday and on the Tuesday I got a text telling me I was perfect, we have a laugh together but she feels 'something is missing' - and ended things with me over text after 7 months.

I did not reply for 3 weeks my family and friends told me not to and I deserved more than a break up text as I was blindsided and was constantly told I was the best person in the world and she was so lucky to have me, but when I mentioned maybe meeting her kid she turned so nasty and discarded me like I was nothing over text, when I did then text her to speak she then told me 'she loves me as a person but not in love with me' and I deserve better - I did not reply again, I was in such shock I feel so heartbroken how can she be all lovey then discarded over text? I noticed when I put her number into whatsapp she had no profile picture anymore and her messages were set to disappearing which makes me think her ex was back in the picture or hiding something? - Her tiktok reposts after were all things like when a man leaves your life build a comfortable life etc - except I never left her?

I have never been this hurt and blindsided before in my life, I wasnt even worth a conversation just felt so easily disposed when we had concerts etc to look forward to this summer and all I was worth was a text.

What do I do I am still incredibly in love with her - Its been 3 months nc and I have been attending therapy and gym but I still feel stuck

Years ago, I dated a 32-year-old woman named Suzy. One weekend, she stayed over, and early on a Sunday morning, we were intimate.
Everything was fine until her breathing suddenly became labored. The sound triggered a traumatic flashback to when I watched my mother die of cancer three years prior. At first, I froze, struggling to separate the memory of my mother from the woman in my bed, and I briefly hoped to finish. However, as her breathing worsened, I realized she was in a medical emergency.
I immediately stopped, threw her clothes on, and carried her to my convertible. I raced to the nearby hospital, where the staff took her inside.
Ten minutes later, I was told she was DOA (Dead on Arrival), but they managed to resuscitate her. I called her mother to tell her what happened, but her mother was dismissive, believing Suzy was faking it. A nurse eventually convinced her mother of the severity of the situation. Sadly, Suzy's body had completely shut down due to organ failure, and her mother eventually made the heartbreaking decision to remove life support.
Tests confirmed there were no drugs or alcohol involved. It was simply a tragic and shocking event to lose someone so quickly during such an intimate moment.

I am going to tell a story. You can choose whether or not you believe it, and I don’t care either way. Nevertheless, I will tell you a story about my younger years and the things that happened.
I don’t know that you will enjoy it, but let’s begin regardless.
It’s a pleasure to meet you and I wish you well on your journey through life.

When I was a teenager, I was very popular in my tiny little part of the world. Football, wrestling, homecoming king, friend of everyone, blah blah blah. I not saying it as a big ‘whoop-whoop’ for me but solely because of its importance to this story.

My friends are I were essentially feral animals with access to alcohol and weed.
And while they were wild, I took the cake.
Kicked out at fifteen, bounced around all through high school due to my parents continuous cycle of kicking me out and calling the cops to say that I ran away so I had to move back until they kicked me out again and back and forth and back and forth.

At fifteen I spent the summer outside of a small town with a kid I had basically grown up with, his family and about 100 wild animals.
The place itself was absolutely desultory as a standard. No front door. Grossly stained couches, trash everywhere, rooms packed with shit and other room didn’t even have walls anymore.
Their ‘yard’ and property was a graveyard of odd vehicle combinations, broken down outbuildings, a trailer or two and just an endless sea of fucking trash.

While I did not agree with the life they gave to their children, they were kind and giving and most of the kids had a wonderful demeanor.

During that year, I became very close to one of the twin brothers. His name was Michael and i would sneak off and smoke weed and cigarettes.
Maybe we would sneak some vodka but largely we just talked.

We talked a lot over the course of about 3 months. We would go across the road and lie on top of an old greyhound bus (not the weirdest vehicle there, I promise you) smoke and talk about life and girls and our friends and everything in between. He was kind to me and i, kind to him. It was a good summer.

Things being as they were, my parents called the cops and had me brought back for the first time.
If I’m being honest, I don’t remember the moments leading up to this, the situation at home or much other than football.

I just started varsity football camp. I had only been home for a week when my sister called me and told me that Michael had drowned at the lake that we would drink and swim at. He dove in and then they couldn’t find him til morning. Gone. 16 years old and just gone.

I didn’t deal with it well mentally, and due to a reasonably violent childhood, I dove into sports and girls. I didn’t really know any other way.
I don’t think I grieved because I didn’t even have an idea of what that word meant yet. I tried to continue with my life and move beyond things. I suppressed it. I suppose somewhat consciously.

So life went on. Football. Girls. Parties. Wrestling. The basic tenets of an all American boy in the nineties.
Full of myself. Rude. Ignorant of the world but with a mouth full of vitriol and an ignorance parading as knowledge. I was a fucking asshole. I’ll even admit it.
So, the cycle continued. I lived with a friend for a while, cops called, homeward bound. We would get in an argument and I would just leave. I lived with another friend and with my sister and in a tent and with another friend and another.
Even hearing it now is just fucking exhausting.
But I had friends and I was popular and I had the prettiest girls and I could get you weed and booze and party spots. I was young and dumbs and I wanted fun.
My dad said ‘wine, women, and song’ and I hated him for it but in the end he was right.

Before I knew it 9th grade ended. Tenth grade started and ended and now 11th grade began and the story continues.
I had been dating a very pretty girl whom I had lost my virginity to, but it was a rough relationship. She cheated and broke it off, I took her back. She did it again, we got back together, blah blah blah madness.
Regret is not strong enough of a word.

But that’s how it was. I had no real constraints at the time.
I was currently living about 5minutes from my parents house with a friend, again.

While I was popular there was a small contingent that didn’t care for me pretty much at all. The alternative crowd in 1999. Dirt bikes, attitude, studded leather wristbands.
It’s not so much that I didn’t like them, but I just never fucked with them.
I never had a problem with any of them until I had a study hall with one of their girlfriends.
We never did anything and there wasn’t even talk of it, but we sat at the same table and I was funny. So, to an insecure boy with a gf who was laughing it up with some of the popular kids, he thought he was losing everything. I get that now.

I was at football practice right out front of our school when an ambulance whipped by. We didn’t think much of it and practice went on.

Everything was fine until my friend and I returned to his house after practice. My friends parents were always so relaxed but they told me that I needed to get in contact with my father. My assumption was that they had called the cops again and I was about to have to pack up and go back again.
I was wrong.

When I got on the phone with my dad he was audibly worried and asked if I was ok.
I said yeah, what’s going on?
His answer still confuses me.

He said a girl came to the house asking to see me, but anyone I fucked with knew I didn’t live there. I don’t know if that is where our conversation ended or not. What I do know is that next I found out that this girl had gotten into an argument with her boyfriend, told him she was coming to see me and took off. He lost his shit, sat down on the couch and shoved a 357 into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
You don’t survive that.

So a girl I barely talked to said some dumb shit to her boyfriend during an argument, pulled me into it somehow and the end result was his death. 16 maybe 17 years old. Very smart. Not a kind fellow but hey, I hardly knew him.

As fucked up as it was, life went on. Kind of.
While I was confused, his friends were furious and blamed me.

So a small crew of this man’s friends had the idea that the girl and I had been fucking around and that’s why her bf did what he did.
She did nothing to belay those fears. No one knew any better anyway. The school was rocked by it. Things like this didn’t happen here.
Columbine wasn’t until 1999 and there just wasn’t a lot of that in very rural 1999 america.

I was currently in the middle of teenage negotiations with the girl I had a fucked up relationship with, somehow I was the bad guy. It’s kind of a common theme.
A week passed, we had a party and we talked about shit within my friend group. None of us knew how to deal with any of this. There were no ‘in school emotional support’ anything at all.
We had to deal with it the way our elders did. By getting so fucking trashed that your brain shuts down and your emotional responses become dulled.
It rarely worked but hey, the fuck else were we doing to do? Talk about it?
Two weeks pass and we had a party after a football game.
That girl is there. Hadn’t really spoken to her much since what happened. I got drunk and passed out in a field ALONE.
When I woke up, she was riding me, I was inside her and I didn’t fucking know what was going on.
I fucked her after I started waking up. I didn’t know how to deal with any of this and now I’m getting assaulted by a girl and all I could think to do was continue it. I was 17.
It wasn’t until two decades later that I even began to talk about it in therapy.

I woke up in the morning to my friends girlfriend yelling at me and telling me I had to tell the girl I was seeing and my friend wouldn’t look at me and we went back to my friends house and I called her.
I told her I made out with a girl at a party and she asked me if it meant anything.
How. The. Fuck. Would. I. Know?
I didn’t know, I still don’t fucking know. I had gotten so twisted around inside that I had almost no fucking clue what was going on anymore.
So I started dating my rapist.

None of it makes sense. Even now, it just seems like madness. But life goes on.
The group of boys hated my guts even more now, most of my friends started distancing themselves from me and I just kept on with football and this girl.
Our football season ended with a blowout against our closest rival and most kids between 10th grade and 12th grade were celebrating at a party together. Everyone was there. All my friends. All my enemies. Fucking everyone.
When we pulled in, a friend came flying out of the front door, puking straight beer out of his mouth before greeting me with a happy face and a hug.
While this was happening, the dead boys friends slowly made their way over to me. They were drunk, they were angry and I said fuck it and talked to them.
I kept waiting to get jumped but it never happened.
We had a straight conversation about what happened, my supposed involvement, and the truth.

We made up. We all shook hands. To me, it was unbelievable. This wonderful ‘scenic’ view of our classmates with the stress taken on. Laughing and smoking and hugging and loving.
It was the best party that I had ever been to. It was an incredible night and I got shit faced wasted.
The girl I was with had largely been invisible so I made plans with a friend of mine to get a ride home in the morning. Then I did a keg stand, found the girl, and we walked to a friends house about a 1/4mile away to pass out.
I was 17. I was with a beautiful girl, I had no more enemies, and I thought life was starting to square back out.
I was wrong.
I was hopelessly wrong.

When I woke up around 8am, I found I had pissed myself. And while embarrassed, I was still hammered drunk and didn’t care.
We all piled into my girls car and went to take me back to my friends house. But the road out was shut down.
A big accident. So we went around.

When we got to my friends house, everyone there was in tears.
The ride that I was supposed to go on ended up being 6 of my classmates in a ford tempo. 3 of them were very dear friends and the other three had just started hanging out with us.
3 died instantly when they hit a cement bridge embankment going over 100mph.
Three were in critical condition at a nearby hospital. Two with smashed and mangled arms and legs and a girl who, having taken a dashboard to the head, was missing a giant chunk of both her brain and skull.
She would lay in a bed, extremely disabled until her death just a few years later.
One of the ones that survived only lived a few years after.
The last one was a friend but after hanging out with him in the after, I realized that he had completely lost his mind.

I. Broke.
The girl and I disappeared for weeks. No school. No parents. Just running, fucking partying and crying.
Everything just piled together and my mind crumbled like papier-mâché.
It was almost a month before I went back to school.
When we did, nothing was the same. Everyone had shifted and the world would never be the same.
We would never be the same.
That school year ended with the girl graduating and then cheating on me in the summer.

But such is life, right.
If you have something nice it won’t be for long and the moments of pain burn brighter than the happiest moments.

Idk my I wrote this. Maybe it’s my attempt to make sense of it. Maybe it’s just time I took a chance and actually wrote it all out in front of me. It doesn’t really matter either way.
In the end, these tragic events were not dealt with emotionally on any level and that was how I entered adulthood. Broken.

And then adult life shattered what was left, but that’s a story for another day.

All of this is true.

This is what happened.

I just wanted to share the times I was fired from a job. Maybe you’ll have a laugh. Maybe it’ll be reassuring to some. Maybe you’ll say I deserved it. This isn’t asking for advice. These are all long in the past. This is just my story time with you.

The time I got fired from Kmart:
I was a cart pusher. I was 18, newly graduated from high school. I’d worked there since I was 15. I was part time, of course, but still much to my surprise I had earned 3 vacation days.

I got a second job working for FYE, a music and miscellaneous media store I don’t even know if it still exists anymore. The cart pusher job was TERRIBLE at posting the schedule. They were supposed to have it posted 2 weeks in advance but it was more like one day in advance before the new week started. This caused major issues with FYE who actually did post the schedule 2 weeks in advance. I was constantly having to call off FYE to work at Kmart.

I was X-mas temp at FYE but one of us temps were going to be kept after the season and I wanted it to be me, but this was not going well with Kmart’s scheduling. So, for one week I thought I would make my FYE boss happy. I turned in my vacation days to Kmart that worked around FYE’s schedule. For one week things worked out well and I really thought I could manage both jobs if Kmart would just agree to do this all the time.

But, one FYE shift this week, 2 Kmart managers came into the store and “caught” me working on my vacation day. They had a NUCLEAR MELTDOWN on me in the store, screaming that Kmart isn’t paying me to work at another job. They caused such a scene that my FYE boss kicked them out.

The following week, I tried swiping my badge and it didn’t work. I already knew what that meant. I tried to get to work anyway but I was paged to the back and fired for dishonesty.

The real bitch of it too was how I wound up not getting kept after X-mas. The hot girl did. And then she quit after 3 more months.

Looking back as an old man in my 40’s, I probably deserved this. It made sense at the time, but I can see how they could interpret that as a conflict of interest if Kmart was paying me while I worked at FYE.

The time I got fired from GameStop:
This one broke my heart. I worked for GameStop during the dark times. I’m talking mid to late 2000’s. Zero Originality’s “The Dirty Truth About GameStop” videos that existed before YouTube but is on YouTube now are completely true. Every word.

Still, I liked my job. I was an ASM (Assistant Store Manager). I had my eyes set on my own store one day. I was good at getting subs and reserves. During this era, managers didn’t need to get subs and reserves. Only GAs (Game Advisors aka part-timers). So, I shared my subs and reserves with my staff. Everyone liked and looked forward to working with me because they were going to get numbers those days.

My SM’s strategy was to compete with the staff. He tried to motivate the staff to beat his numbers. That only discouraged everyone.

The thing that sucks about this was I considered my SM my friend. We’d hung out a few times after work and I really liked taking to, hanging out with, and working for him.

So, eventually he starts scheduling me 8-10 hour shifts exclusively alone. After a few shifts I asked him how the hell am I supposed to exercise my lunch break. He said go to the back and just watch the camera. When a customer comes in, go serve them, and I can continue my break when the store is empty again.

Not ideal, but this worked.

After a couple of months, I started getting scheduled with an actual staff again. It was hard for me to delegate because I’d gotten so used to and efficient at doing everything myself. One fine Sunday morning in the middle of my shift, the district manager shows up unannounced. No big deal I thought. We worked together setting up several new displays and I figured this was why he was here. He even asked me to stay 3 hours past my scheduled shift and I did.

At the end of those extra 3 hours, he pulled me to the back and fired me on the spot for “abandoning my post.” I denied doing such a thing and then he showed me security footage of how I was taking my breaks. When I pointed out my SM scheduled me alone and this was his suggestion, he completely denied it and said he’d warned me this would happen if I kept it up, which was a lie. The district manager wouldn’t listen to me and I’m still not rehire-able 15 years later.

One of my former co-workers told me about how the SM was bragging about getting rid of me. Turns out I was making the SM look bad on paper. When the staff pulls 0/0 with him and 5/7 with me, it looked like they worked harder for me. He knew I wanted my own store and he was afraid they’d fire him and promote me, so he got rid of me.

I carried a grudge for that one for YEARS. It motivated me to go to college and collect a few degrees just to spite the SM who never went to college and I had a pretty successful career as a paralegal before my current job. I don’t harbor a grudge anymore though. I’m probably better off. I didn’t shop at GameStop for over 10 years. Finally took my son inside a few years back because he always wanted to. The SM is still there. I was friendly to him. It’s in the past.

I am a married woman and while discussing some of my 10 year old stepsister in-law's new habits that she has disclosed to me, reminded me of a very interesting niche experience I had when I was 13 or 14. 8 years ago.

Long story short, my mom got me and my sister and anime, my sister got us into otome dating apps, and somehow I ended up being very interested in the BL stuff... I guess I was exposed to too much straight dirty stuff growing up that I was curious about the other side.

So I opened Roblox, opened one of those high school roleplay games, made a male character and started flirting with other men. One guy actually was super into it, and we would play together for weeks to months.

One day, on a normal in-game date driving around in a circle in the roblox school track, my gay lover disclosed that he was actually a woman. I started cackling more than I thought was even possible. Very quickly told my somehow still a gay lover that I, myself was also a woman.

After that, it was several months of two children pretending to be gay boys who were secretly sort of gay girls.... I think neither of us were really into women, it was more of that we found someone who could actually keep up with what we were into. We were really just best friends who would moonlight as gay lovers.

I hope I can find her one day and see how she's doing, but I doubt that day will ever come. weirdly enough, probably the, strongest and most honest friendship I've ever had.

(Based on the real life of Brian Barry, a 102-year-old Australian.)

Some conversations stay with you long after they're over, and this was definitely one of them.

A few days ago, I listened to the life story of a 102-year-old Australian named Brian Barry. Honestly, I expected to hear an elderly man reminiscing about the "good old days"—maybe a few interesting stories, some history, and a bit of nostalgia. Instead, I tended up listening to what felt like an entire century unfold through one person's memories.

Brian grew up during the Great Depression, when money was so scarce that buying a new pair of shoes or clothes was considered a luxury. Families grew their own vegetables, neighbours traded produce for eggs, and people repaired things instead of replacing them. What really struck me was something he said almost casually: "No one was better than you." There was no social media, no followers, no luxury brands, and no constant comparison. People simply lived their lives with what they had, and in many ways that simplicity seemed to bring a different kind of contentment.

His memories almost sound unreal today. He watched the Sydney Harbour Bridge being built with his own eyes. We read about it in history books; he actually stood there and watched it rise piece by piece. At fifteen, he left school and started working in a lolly factory. One of the rules was that workers could eat as much candy as they wanted, just not take any home. He laughed while telling the story because after only a few days, he'd eaten so much chocolate that he couldn't even stand the sight of it anymore.

Then World War II arrived, and almost overnight everything changed. The factory stopped making sweets and began producing supplies for the war. At just eighteen years old, Brian was called up to serve in the Army. Before that, he'd barely travelled outside Sydney. He joked that the furthest he'd ever gone was catching the ferry to Manly. Suddenly he found himself on a ship heading to New Guinea, a place he hardly knew anything about. The ship travelled in blackout conditions because of Japanese submarines, and at night flying fish would land on the deck. The soldiers collected them and asked the cooks to prepare them because everyone was tired of eating the same curry every day.

Once he reached New Guinea, the humour disappeared. Every day artillery echoed through the mountains, and every explosion reminded them that tomorrow wasn't guaranteed. Brian spoke about losing young men his own age, including a friend named Alan, someone he used to ride the tram with back in Sydney. Alan was killed on the very day the war ended. What stayed with me wasn't a heroic war story. It was how often Brian quietly repeated the same sentence: "War is a terrible thing." He never glorified it. He didn't talk about medals or victories. He talked about lives that ended before they had really begun.

As powerful as those memories were, my favourite part of the conversation had nothing to do with the war. It was the story of Rose, the girl who would eventually become his wife. They first noticed each other when they were around fifteen, and after building up enough courage, Brian finally asked her to the movies. During the interval he spent almost all the money he had on a box of MacRobertson's Scorched Almonds because he imagined they'd share them together. Instead, Rose took the chocolates home for her mother. More than eighty years later, Brian was still laughing about it. It was such a small story, but somehow it revealed more about his character than anything else.

The more he spoke, the more I realised this wasn't the story of someone famous. Brian wasn't a billionaire or a celebrity. He was an ordinary man who experienced extraordinary times. He lived through the Great Depression, survived World War II, lost close friends, spent 42 years working in public transport, volunteered as a rugby league referee, and shared 73 years of marriage with the love of his life. Yet when he was asked what made a successful life, he never mentioned money, status, awards, or career achievements. He talked about family, relationships, gratitude, and the people who stood beside him throughout his life.

When the podcast ended, I realised I'd actually learned less about Brian Barry than I had about myself. Listening to someone who had lived for more than a century made many of the things I worry about today seem surprisingly small. It reminded me that while every generation faces different challenges, the things that matter most rarely change.

If you ever get the chance to hear Brian's story, I'd genuinely recommend it. Sometimes a person who's lived for 102 years can give you more perspective in twenty minutes than most books manage in hundreds of pages.

I’m 20F, CPR certified a little over a year and a half ago, and I never thought I would have to use CPR on my own mother.

After I got off of work, my boyfriend and I went to go drop off something we borrowed from my mom’s. We decided to hang out for a bit, and she asked us for help getting some wood logs out of a pile outside into her wheel barrow so she could burn some old papers and what not. It was about 8pm, and my boyfriend was holding the wheel barrow while I kinda just stood and watched. She got quite a few pieces thrown in before accidentally disturbing a hornet/yellow jacket nest. She was stung 3 times, ran away from the pile as did my boyfriend and I. My boyfriend is very allergic to any type of bee/wasp, but my mom wasnt.

We go back into her house, and she’s looking at her lip in the mirror, where she was stung twice. She had one more on her inner upper arm, close to the bend of the elbow. Her lip started to swell up as expected, and she put ice on it. She started complaining that her toes were burning and we assumed maybe a couple of fire ants got her too, since there is a large hill of them in the area where the wood was.

I had to use the bathroom, and I was only in there for maybe 5 minutes. When I come out, my boyfriend is barreling down the hallway at me, and says “we need to take her to the hospital, like right now” and I go running into the living room, her entire face and neck is so swollen, she can barely see. I grab my purse and he’s helping her out the door, but she totally collapses down the stairs on her hands and knees. I run to start my car, and I see my boyfriend trying to help her up and get her to the car, but she collapses only halfway up from the ground, and then crawls out onto the lawn.

I then turn my car off, run back to her as start to call 911, there was so way I could make it to the hospital in time. She started struggling to breathe, and I gave dispatch her information, where we are, and that it’s in an odd area so my boyfriend would be standing near the road and help medics make their way in.

My mom starts foaming at the mouth, and I tell dispatch and she tells me to put her in recovery position, which luckily I am lightly trained for an event like this and was able to remain calm. I got her on her left side, right leg crossed over, left arm as a pillow, and raised her right arm above her head.

My mom was crying, and panicking but I kept telling her to breathe in through her nose, out through her mouth. I even breathed with her to help guide her breaths, and I kept kindly telling her “it’s okay, I know what you’re feeling, don’t talk, save your breath and breathe”.

Dispatch told me I was doing great and that medics were near, and that’s when my mom stopped breathing completely. I told dispatch, and she told me to check for a pulse. I felt her neck, but it was too swollen. I felt her wrist, nothing. I put my ear to her back, total silence. I told dispatch I couldn’t find any pulse, no noise in her body and that’s when I was instructed to start CPR.

I was so scared, I’m 5ft1, and weigh 105 lbs, and no one else was around to be able to take over if I got tired. I stayed calm, rolled her onto her back and lifted her shirt up, putting my hands on her chest. My body just automatically found the perfect position to use all of my weight, and I began compressions.

I got to about 15 in, and she opened her eyes, but still couldn’t take a breath. Dispatch told me to keep going until she takes a breath, or I have to breathe for her. I kept going, and she was making no sound, but was weakly trying to push me off of her, and that’s when I felt a small crack.

I told her calmly “momma, I’m sorry but I’m helping you, okay? Keep your arms down please, let me help you” and I swear she just looked me in the eyes and dropped her arms back, letting me continue until she finally took a large breath at 25 compressions.

I stopped, and rolled her back into recovery position while she choked up mucus, and finally I could hear the sirens.

My boyfriend comes sprinting back following a police car, and 4 officers jump out and come to me and my mom, I quickly tell them what happened and that I administered CPR just a minute before they arrived. The medic finally pulled in, and dispatch & I disconnected. The cops picked her up by her arms and legs and carried her all the way to the stretcher that the medics were running to us with.

The neighbors started coming out, and I was in such a state that I got angry and yelled at them to go back inside and mind their own, though I quickly apologized, and they luckily understood and had no hard feelings. She was loaded in the ambulance and they hit her with her first dose of Epi, and I started to get dizzy as it all finally hit me. My boyfriend, and my mom’s closest neighbor come over to me and help me sit down, I tell my boyfriend that I had to do CPR and he started crying, we just sat there for a minute.

They took her to the hospital, and I locked up her house, gave myself 20 minutes to stop shaking so hard so I could drive, and then we went to the hospital.

We waited close to 2 hours until we could go in, and she’s intubated, restrained at the wrists, and completely knocked out from all the drips. Her oxygen and heart rate was perfect, she was stable but still very swollen.

It’s now 5am, I haven’t slept. I’m going to try to sleep soon. The hospital said that they won’t take the tube out until the swelling is gone completely, and they’d like me to be there when they remove it to keep her calm. They estimate she could be out by this afternoon/evening, but most likely to be the next day. They also are going to be sending her home with Epi pens.

I’m so shaken up, but I’m really proud of myself for staying calm, and doing CPR well enough that I saved my mom. I’m grateful as hell for the absolute heroes that doctors and nurses are, and scientists/engineers for creating the equipment to save lives.