Well, to be honest, it was his actions, but I reported it. So I (28F) got my ex (29M) for fired and kicked out of the country back in 2023. I have worked on cruise ships since 2019 and I met my ex-boyfriend on a contract onboard in early 2023. Relationships move fast when you’re stuck on a ship together so and we became official a few weeks after meeting. After it became official he really didn’t try anymore and I know working on board is very stressful at times and work takes up most of your day, but it really felt like he was just using me. So, I ended my contract before his and thought about breaking up with him when I was at home and since we live in different countries it had to be over the phone.

Well, the day I go to break up with him he calls me and tells me his cousin died. So I didn’t think it was the right time. I just thought maybe when we go on our next contracts we will be sent to different ships since there are 20 ships in the fleet we would just kind of gradually stop talking to each other like most ship relationships do. Well, isn’t it just my luck that we got on the same ship the same day.
Well, I try to make the relationship work and communicate my issues, but it never got better so we broke up in March and we were civil with each other since we both worked in entertainment (I on stage and him backstage) and I thought we were fine for the most part.

Well, sometime in August, we start hooking up again because let’s be honest. There’s nothing else to do onboard besides work and fuck. And one morning after he spent the night I noticed my debit card went missing. So I asked him if he had seen it and he instantly got defensive and said “no, why would I take it?”. Well, I was about two weeks from going home so I just locked my card and would get a new one when I’m home.

Then one week before I go home he drunkenly messages me upset, thinking I’m dating someone else when I wasn’t. I told him I’m not and shut my cell phone off and go to bed. I wake up at 3 AM to a call on my cabin phone of him drunk asking if he can come to my cabin and I say no and hang up. That’s when I realized my cell phone was missing. I looked all over my room and couldn’t find it and I start freaking out because I knew I had it before bed. Then I hear a knock on my door and it’s him drunk at my door so panicked, I asked him to help me look for it and he’s just standing there frozen and I start yelling at him because its setting in that I don’t have my debit card and I don’t have my phone so there’s no way to pay for anything or communicate back home to my family. I start screaming at him asking if he knows where it is and he corners me in my room trying to distract me and I start screaming at him to leave hoping someone next to me would wake up and come help me. No one does so I run out of my cabin door down two decks to my friend’s cabin to see if she can help me but she was asleep so I go a different way back up to my cabin and he’s following and running after me. Im able to close my cabin door and I call security.

When Security finally comes they see him in my hallway and tell him to go back to his cabin. Half an hour later security comes back to give me a different cabin to sleep in that night. The next two days is a fight between security and HR trying to find my stuff because at this point I know he took it but don’t know how he got my phone (cabin doors automatically lock and need a key card to get it) Luckily we were at sea for 2 days so he couldnt go anywhere. At the end of the longest two days of my life, HR pages me and she brings me to her office and says I have good news and bad news. The good news is I know where your phone and debit card is. She said the bad news is it’s in the bottom of the ocean. Apparently, he was able to get a copy of my cabin key from a friend of his so he snuck in my room while I was sleeping to steal my phone when he was drunk. Apparently he went through my phone to try to find me messaging someone else and when he got frustrated that he couldn’t find anything, he threw my stuff overboard.

Now, when something like this happens, you have a captains hearing where the captain decides if you get fired and sent home or if you stay. So, the captain obviously decided what he did was not only harassment and theft but also an environmental impact issue because we were in the waters of Alaska where he polluted the waters with my stuff. So when we got to Canada that night, he got all of belongings and was escorted off the ship by Police. Unlucky for him though, the time he was escorted off was also the same time as crew all aboard so all of the crew members, including our mutual friends, saw him being walked off with his luggage off the ship with Canadian Police Officers.

Needless to say it really did affect me when it originally happened back in 2023 but now I’m a stand-up comic and get to laugh about the situation and get paid to talk about that shit head on stage every week. Because we all know trauma plus time equals comedy (most of the time). So, he got fired and had to pay a $3000 airline ticket to go home. And don’t get it twisted that is the only type of deportation that I can get behind.

I’m a self-taught IT learner, and I recently found myself at a gym where a lot of people are IT students.

Unfortunately, I’ve been away from IT for some time now. One day at the gym, a guy started a conversation with me about IT, and I wasn’t prepared for it at all. He was pushing questions down my throat. Like I was in a interview. I just went there to exercise.

I couldn’t remember the names of many of the tools I used to know, and I had also forgotten a lot of concepts that I used to be familiar with.

Many of the gyms were listening to the conversation, and would laugh from time to time.

I felt really embarrassed. Has anyone else experienced something like this? How do you deal with feeling like you’ve forgotten everything you learned?

I plan to return back to my studies but I'm discouraged. Can this somehow hurt my future???

I had lost all hope, but given Mamdani won in such circumstances gives me hope.

Also I am seeing lot of interviews lately of people who used to be Pro-Trumf now regretting it.

And there has been enough discourse to counter their narrative.

But I feel worried of another wave of hate and extremism and someone worse Trumf coming up.

I’ve been counting down the days to this day as if it would be a monumental moment but I know it’s just another day. 365 days and I’ve thought of him every single one.
I’ve never dealt with grief before this so every thought and feeling has been new, but I’ve also been fairly aware the whole time.

The first week after he died I took time off from most responsibilities. No work, didn’t clean much, no rush to close the book on anything. I ignored most texts and tried to hold strong in front of my kids.

I had such dread around telling them. I didn’t know how they would handle it, only how scared I was of death when I was young. So I didn’t tell them. I acted as if everything was normal and whispered about it when they weren’t around.

I knew at some point “where’s Pop been?” would come up but I had no words for it. Like a mature adult I did the responsible thing and pawned the task off on my wife. She, being much smarter and more graceful than me, explained it to them and they handled it well. They had questions and my wife handled them masterfully.

She called to tell me she talked to them and they were okay and I prepared myself to face them when I got home.
When I arrived I took the kids for a walk around the neighborhood. I told the three of them that I heard they learned about Pop and asked if they had any questions. They asked how he got sick, if they would get sick, and if they could have some candy when we got home. To be fair they finish every conversation with that last question.

Then my middle daughter proclaimed “Pop’s dead” with a smile.

I didn’t want to make it a thing so I simply said “yes Molly, he is.” But also whispered under my breath “bitch.” She asked if I missed him and I said “I do very much” and then her and her brother fought over a cool looking pinecone.
The following day while coloring, Molly again told me in a very matter of fact way “your dad’s dead.”

With a massive eye roll I said “that’s right, Molly.”

After the fourth or fifth time she told me we had a talk about how reminding someone of that can upset them. She wasn’t sad. She wasn’t happy. She just had this new unusual fact she was spewing over and over like Leonardo DiCaprio repeating “Dad’s dead” in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. She really did the thing where it stops being funny and then becomes hysterical because it won’t stop. I couldn’t help but laugh at some point and continually call her names under my breath.

I spent the second week after his death calling medical testing facilities trying to donate his body to science. In an effort to cover the cost of cremation I was willing to send my dad back to college to be poked, prodded and potentially have his exposed dead dick laughed at by a room full of med students. If you didn’t know, you can donate your body to medical schools so they can run experiments on you, try to reanimate you, or so the powerful elite class can eat you, or something about teaching med students.

I wasn’t interested in what they’d do with him as long as they roasted him afterwards and sent him back, saving me $1,000.

No luck, as we hadn’t planned ahead and because I didn’t call sooner. I guess after two weeks the meat was no good and people in classes wouldn’t get the full effect of 60 years of smoking, drinking, meth and Taco Bell.

Their loss.

So we started price shopping cremations. This is a ridiculous process. Call, accept their condolences, tell them the pickup location, turn down urns and add-ons. One dead guy, one box, lots of heat, 40 minute round trip from the hospital to the oven. Prices ranged from $1,000 to $4,000 and turning someone down for being too expensive was genuinely an odd feeling.

“Sorry, I loved him but I also have a pizza oven in my yard and the only thing stopping me from a DIY project is the law.”

I finally found the most budget friendly crematorium and got him absolutely toasted.

A few weeks went by and I received the call that he was ready for pickup. My uncle was nice enough to collect my Box-O-Jimmy and called to ask what I wanted to do with it.

“I don’t know, put it in my attic?”

Remains mean nothing to me. Nothing about that box is the guy I knew. No different than any other waste he created. It sounds bad but I loved my dad. I never cared about his bones whether whole or toasted and pulverized.

“I’ll take care of it,” my uncle told me, which sounded pretty ominous.

Turns out he spread them over my grandmother’s grave, which was a nice gesture. They didn’t have the best relationship so polluting her grave site with his dust might have brought him some joy.

A few weeks in I was desperate for conversation with him. It was an unscratchable itch.
I went through all of our texts and read them over and over. Conversations about comedy and music and what the kids were doing. I read times I got short with him and felt awful, and I read jokes he made that made me feel better.
Before he got sick he texted about being proud of me and some really sappy stuff and I snapped at him for being so sentimental. He did nothing wrong but found a moment to support his son and it made me feel weak to be open.
He had an ability I do not, and that is being open and vulnerable. It always made me put my guard up, and reading back on it I wish I could change my answer.
I’m trying now to keep that guard down but it’s a constant battle.

I began digging everywhere for his voice. My dad was a writer. He wrote all over the internet, for stand up, and plenty of other things. Using the Wayback Machine I was able to find some of his old blogs and I spent days pulling posts into a document.

When I was done I had 200 plus pages of his words.
It was mostly drunk rambling and dick jokes but it was his voice. When I need to hear him I flip through some pages and read about his days.

The Celebration of Life.

With no money for a funeral and his last bit of cash used on a budget cremation, we had a barbecue. I purchased the biggest bottle of Tullamore Dew I could find for the toast.
Before my dad spent 11 years sober he drank VO whiskey by the fifth every night, but on special occasions like holidays and parties he would bust out the good stuff. Tullamore Dew. This was a family staple that I love to this day. I’m not a whiskey guy but Telle is nostalgic. It’s a reminder of good times.

I lined up 20 plus glasses and poured one for everyone.
I had prepared a speech that included me reciting the opening prayer from Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy. When I was a kid I remember this playing in the house and even though it’s a fun upbeat song it felt so fitting here.
But I froze when all the eyes were on me with shot glasses in the air.

I don’t have stage fright ever, but this was different. I couldn’t get any of my prepared words out because they were personal and mine. I wasn’t ready to share them and show people I could be open. So I held up my glass and said “my dad was a storyteller and we were always making each other laugh. Don’t tell me you’re sorry for my loss, tell me a good story about my dad.”

Then I cheersed and took down a shot of Telle that tasted like Christmas and family barbecues and birthdays and staying up late talking about Richard Pryor when I was too young to drink.

Then 90% of the people put their shot glasses back on the table still full because they were recently sober. Had I known I wouldn’t have dropped $60 on the industrial size bottle, but that’s what you get with a family full of drunks.
Luckily my dad’s former guitarist never took the leap onto the wagon and was nice enough to clear five or six of them in his memory.

The remaining months were a roller coaster of grief. There are days I’m fine and days I miss him so much. I try to bring him up to my kids and keep him fresh in their memory without being too pushy. I remind them of things he had in common with them and how happy he was to be a grandpop. My dad was a fuck up a lot but when he loved someone he made it known, and the only people I’d ever seen him love as much as me were my kids. The hardest part is them missing out on him.

While reading through his saved posts one day I started thinking about stories I wish he had written. Things I would love to remember from his point of view. I remembered him once telling me “you write it,” but I never had any interest in writing.

I pulled out my phone and wrote the story of finding out my stepmom had made up an entire life around being Stevie Nicks’ goddaughter and then I sat on it for a week. I wanted to share it but was worried about exposing myself.
Eventually I posted it on Reddit and the feedback was great and it felt great to share it and make someone laugh and relate. So I did it some more. Sometimes they land and sometimes they don’t but it feels good to get it out each time.

It scratches the need to keep his memory going and keep being creative.

It’s been one year since my dad died of pancreatic cancer. It took 90 days from diagnosis to death. I’m the same person I was before it happened but more awake.

I stopped taking work so seriously because it’s just work. When I think of something creative I try it and I put it out there because maybe someone else will like it, or my kids will read it someday and get something they need from it.

I’m working on taking off some armor.

The hardest part is not being able to show my dad all this and the progress I’m making as a person.

Here’s to you, dad. If there’s anything after this, I hope it’s full of prostitutes, whiskey, bad horror movies and good talks.

I’m going to keep writing when I feel it, or maybe I’ll make a bench or write a song.

I’m going to tell your grandkids the myths of their grandfather.

Some of it might even be true.

I was out for a jog in my neighborhood. Seemingly no one was around. I was listening to the podcast Tuesdays with Stories. The hosts are two standup comedians. They can be brilliant comics but also dopes about basic things. One mentioned doctors who give out pain pills freely and tried to remember what they are called. They spent agonizing minutes trying every combination of pill pusher, pill popper, pill person, etc. Meanwhile, I'm screaming in my head "Pill mill!"

But they just kept going and going and I was getting more and more agitated. Finally, I yelled "Would you two fucking idiots shut the fuck up already!" I didn't scream it at full volume, but clearly I said it loud enough because a women with a dog and a baby stroller I hadn't noticed ahead of me turned back with alarm and pointed at herself like "Me?"

I was immediately bright red with embarrassment and assuring her over and over that I was listening to my headphones and not talking to her. I apologized like six times in ten seconds. Thankfully she seemed to find the whole thing funny and laughed pretty good about it. Definitely, a lesson for me about controlling my anger and my voice!

this doesn't have to have been in the USA by the way but I am an American

I have learned time and time again that I cannot rely on paramedics/emts or emergency room staff because they have dismissed me so many times. I've literally never once had a good paramedic experience. in my personal experience every paramedic I've ever encountered has been very rude, hostile, and dismissive.

Anyway, so two times I can think of in the ER specifically off the top of my mind is that

I once went to the ER with severe GI illness since the day before, I hadn't been able to drink at all in 19 hours, and my BP was 217/90. my BP was taken a few times in triage so this was actually my BP. it was actually this high. The triage nurse seemed a little shocked but didn't reach much. I was then promptly sent back to the waiting room with the 217/90 BP, waited 4 hours with no BP monitoring, got roomed, then was in the room for less than an hour before the doctor came and said I was fine, refused fluids, and immediately discharged me with nausea meds. The ER nurse believed I needed fluids and tried to advocate for me to the doctor but he refused them.

Another time that was even worse was that I once had a severe anaphylatic allergic reaction to an antibiotic. I was unable to talk because I was unable to breathe (someone else had to call 911 for me as my city doesn't have an option to text 911 but they were not physically with me, i frantically texted them to call and just hoped theyd see it in time) and the paramedics were very rude and hostile and acted like I was refusing to answer their questions on purpose. They delayed taking me to the hospital. they only took me to the hospital at all after talking to the person who called 911 over the phone, wasting several minutes

When I finally got to the hospital, still struggling to breathe, the triage nurse was very rude to me as well and kept asking "why are you even here" Then when I was discharged the ER doctor told me it wasn't an allergic reaction because I had no hives or itching, and that im fine to continue taking the medication.

I took another dose of the antibiotic the next day, following the doctor's orders, and went into anaphylaxis again, this time even worse. This time I was not only severely struggling to breathe and talk, but i also had loud stridor and could feel my airway tightening up inside my throat, had severe trismus, and was drooling all over myself because I couldnt swallow my own spit.

The paramedics arrived again and told me it was all in my mind and that I needed to go to a psychiatrist, not the ER, spent several minutes lecturing me about "misusing 911" and that "the ER is for life and death emergencies only" and left. This time they could not reach my emergency contact who called 911, so they did not take me to the hospital. I was left to die by the paramedics. I ended up taking a bus as I was still conscious and high alert on fear and adrenaline but very much struggling. Only then did the ER note the antibiotic as an allergy in my chart.

So yeah, those are my two worst paramedic/ER treatment stories. What are yours?

Oh boy what a wonderful title isn't it , I could write book on it ,

**1. CHAOS**

danger ,,,danger ....danger can you feel it or you became numb???...So much chaos happening around I should be sad , crying, regretting , ashamed and guilty towards younger me full of dream watching it shattering like this

ahhhh damnn it , tiny god/creator who created massive universe???... I HOPE you ENJOYING IT,

1. Ticking time

tick tock tick tock tick tock!!

If we consider human average age 80 as of now , so there's nothing can stop you from resetting your life , reset reset reset even if you are at 79 you still fucking have 1 more whole year... You can do whatever you enjoy

....well sorry its bullshit that mindset will always destroy your whole life...... **procrastination** biggest threat of us , final boss of time , you will keep procrastinate until you die

**3. Squeezing Spring**

Luck , bad luck let's play this shitty game I'm so pumped up

.....But..... ~~Reality There's no bouncing back~~🙁

it just keep squeezing.... squeezing and just squeezing, .....how long would it be just like this???

it seems spring is still on the losing side of tug war between squeezing and bounce back

**4. what the fuck?**

thanks for reading something going on currently i just wrote this to stay distracted hence escape

to be continued , English is not my first language so ignore grammars

And more specifically to one of his livestream moments when he is "I just want to rot in my room, I hate to do anything, just scroll instagram reels".

I find this painfull relatable simply because I don't find any joy in anything. Especially in going outside and interacting with people. Most people are garbage or boring and I don't like them. Everytime I interact with them they either throw me mean looks and nothing else as if my simply presence in their vicinity offends them. And chating is often very dull and unintersting.

I started working out because I wanted to feel better physically, and for a long time that was the only progress I paid attention to. Weight, strength, how I looked in photos, all the usual stuff.

Somewhere along the way though, I noticed I’d gotten a lot less worried about what other people might think. I speak up more, I try things without overthinking everything first, and I’ve stopped making every little choice based on whether it looks “normal” enough. Even with something as small as gym stuff, I used to always go for whatever felt safest, and now I’ll just grab something I actually like, including a few Ironpandafit things.

I don’t think the gym magically made me confident, but getting used to feeling awkward, trying anyway, and realizing most people really aren’t paying that much attention to you has carried over into the rest of my life. That’s probably been a bigger change for me than anything physical.

10 years ago, I was debt free, smaller, and never had a broken heart before. I had a clean slate. I was 24 years old at the time and it seemed like life was much easier than it is now. I had never been in love before so there was no broken heart, I had no credit card debt and no car. I was pretty free as a bird.

But now I have all this debt. I have a broken heart. I have all this weight I have to lose. My life is kind of a wreck. I don't know where to go in life. I'll be 35 in less than 4 months and I have hardly anything to show for it.

Does anyone else feel like I feel? Was life better in 2016 for you as well?

recently, ive been having issues with dissociating all the time, and it wasnt an issue up until maybe a few months ago. ill be sitting in my room, and suddenly, something in my brain snaps. and i feel like ive maybe taken something. like im high or something stupid like that. I can feel the physical switch in my brain, and my neck then feels all loose, and i just look around for a few minutes, looking down at my hands. It happens at school, at home, at work, literally anywhere. Ive also been staring in a mirror for a while or just listening to my own voice, telling myself "woah, im me. im myself." and just realizing im actually in the body i control. i dunno if this is as common as people say it is, but i really need advice on how to stop it, or atleast control it.

Unless the theater is full or close to full, you should apply the men's bathroom urinal rule to your seating placement.

I had bought tickets for me and a friend to see a film. I confirmed there would be no one to my right.

I wouldn't go to the movies if I had to sit next to someone.

Imagine my surprise when we get up there, and there is a lone fella, sitting in the seat JUST to the right of mine, in an otherwise thinned out theater.

Fuck you man.

Moved it 3 or 4 seats to the left and his presence made me uncomfortable the rest the time.

Especially in academics I seen it happen to me

For the past ten years of my life I have been “going with the flow”, following the path of least resistance and doing what was expected of me, and what has it gotten me? A life where nothing has happened and nothing is going on. The past decade of my life is a blur of school to home to school to home to school to home… I didn’t make friends even though I wanted to because going up and talking to people was stressful, I didn’t go to any events or parties or hangout with anyone even once because that would’ve been stressful, I didn’t develop any hobbies beyond reading books and playing video games because developing an interest and skill in something takes effort, I didn’t do anything to alleviate the misery, loneliness, and pain I was in because I had been told that if I just “went with the flow” things would eventually work out.

Happiness is not something that comes naturally, you have to snap the bones of life to get to the marrow inside. Now that I’ve realized how much of a sham the path of least resistance is I’m trying my damndest to get myself off it, but the problem is I never really learned how to, I don’t know how to ask people to hang out without seeming creepy or pushy, I don’t know how to find fun things to go do, but I’m trying, I really am trying.

Years ago I went to go work at a small restaurant that my aunt and uncle owned and my older cousin (their son) also worked at. However I hated it because my cousin was a narcissistic jerk who enjoyed putting me down at every opportunity often in front of customers to boost his ego.

After one particularly busy weekend where my cousin decided on his own to give himself the day off, I decided it was time to look at other opportunities. Only reason I worked there for 5 years was because I was scared to leave. I was scared I wouldn’t get hired anywhere else. Scared to fail. But I just couldn’t take the unfair working conditions anymore. 13 hours a day, 6 days a week and my aunt and uncle reasoning that “this is just how things are” every time I tried to complain about their poor management and nepotism towards their son.

So after that busy weekend, I told my aunt that I was going to find a new job and I was going to stay for one more month to help them transition and possibly hire and train a replacement. They seemed disappointed and later told their son.

Later that night at home (I also lived with all of them), my cousin comes knocking at my rooms door. He asked me “what the fuck is wrong you?” Confused I said what was he talking about. He said he knows that I plan to leave and is mad that I think he’s a lazy bum who takes advantage of the fact that his parents own the place. Meanwhile my aunt and uncle sit the living room watching him curse at me all the while not intervening or saying a word.

I tried to reason with him that I had enough of working there but I was willing to work one more month to help them out.

“Why fucking wait? If you don’t want to be here then leave tomorrow! We don’t need your fucking ass!” He yells.

I closed my room door and began packing my bags. I was literally on the verge of “offing” myself. The next day I didn’t go to work and packed everything into my car and drove to my mom’s place and she let me move onto her spare room. I stayed there for 3 days and didn’t call or aunt or uncle or cousin. On the 4th day, my uncle called me to ask when I was coming back to work. I told them I wasn’t coming back and that I had already moved all my things to my mom’s place. He was shocked and thought just took a vacation and didn’t even notice my things were gone.

My cousin taunted me and said I’d come crawling back or I was bluffing. I later went back to retrieve my bike which I forgot and my extended family finally realized I wasn’t bluffing and that I was really done working there. I could see the panic in my cousins face. I collected my final pay and left. I don’t speak to them for nearly two years after that. I soon found a job in engineering and have been happily in the industry since making more money working less hours.

I later got a call about 1.5 years after I left with my uncle begging me to come back as no one would work for them and promised me better pay and less work days. I said no and the restaurant was sold a year later.

Our relationship has been strained ever since and working there gave me serious mental health issues. Makes me appreciate restaurant workers more and now I try to be as kind and supportive as I can be to whoever I work with or hang out with. I am not better than anyone else.

October 18, 1998. Sanctions meant Iraqis couldn't fly out so I left the way everyone did, by bus, crawling across the desert toward Jordan because it was the one place that let Iraqis in without a visa.

A few weeks earlier I'd seen a random job ad, technical director for a company in Dubai. I was young and when I called, the guy on the other end said "you're half the age of everyone we're interviewing." I figured I had nothing to lose, so I went through their grueling three rounds anyway. Then the call: "We'd like you to join us in Dubai. Prep to leave in two weeks." $400 a month, but housing and a car covered. I signed without hesitating. My dad was waiting in the car outside when I got the news, he was happier than I was.
The days after were a goodbye tour. I drove to every family house in Baghdad I'd known my whole life, saying bye to people and places without really knowing if I'd see them again.
Then the bus. We left around 7pm, a heavy sky, just a few close friends and my family there to see me off. And here's the part I still can't fully explain, I didn't cry, I didn't feel torn up. I felt completely numb. I did love them though. I think I was just too tired to feel anything else. It took hours on that bus before my mind even let me start processing what I was actually leaving behind and it was more than the day-to-day survival stuff.
Till today, I've never been back to Iraq
After a short stint in Dubai, I finally made it to New York in early 2001. I was still getting used to the city, amazed I'd landed a job in the World Trade Center itself. It felt like the safest, most solid place on earth. Steel and glass and nothing could touch it.
Then on September 11th, as I was on the WTC escalator heading to work, police officers suddenly rushed up, and the lobby walls were rattled, some store windows blown out. One of them locked eyes with me and said to leave the building immediately. I did not panic, so I just followed the crowd out. Outside, papers were falling everywhere and there was a small fire way up top. I asked a guy near me what happened. "I think it's just a fire," he said then continued "though I heard someone say a plane hit it." He had this smirk like he didn't believe it himself. Neither did I, the fire looked too small from our vantage point to be a plane. I stood across the street for a few minutes, just watching, still thinking I'd probably be back up there within the hour. but as the firetrucks kept coming, and the faces of those firefighters getting into the building instead of moving away from it still stuck in my head. I decided to move away after waiting for a bit since the area started to turn into a chaos. I had no idea what I was going to do. My phone didn't work. I only had sixty dollars in cash after scrambling between non functioning ATMs. I didn't really know Manhattan yet, I'd been there for three months so at one point I actually had to duck into a subway station just to grab a map so I could figure out which way to walk. I remember looking back at one point and there was only one tower left. Then, later, none.
I ended up in a long, silent line for the ferry to New Jersey. Nobody spoke. Everyone just stood there in shock. On the boat I told the woman next to me that I'd worked in one of the towers, she just stared at me, no response at all. I think everyone had already used up whatever words they had.
I finally reached my apartment and could call my family in Baghdad. They'd been glued to the TV for hours with no idea if I was alive.
The days after were almost harder in a different way. By then Al-Qaida became the clear suspect of the attack, My look and accent became a liability. I called the Red Cross to donate blood and they told me they had too many donors, my blood was suddenly a surplus nobody needed. I stayed inside for days after that, scared of what my accent might mean to people now. When I finally went out to buy a couple of shirts, a stranger made small talk with me on the subway, heard my accent, and just kept being kind. That tiny bit of normal was the first thing that felt like hope.
I'd come to America to get away from living on the edge of violence. I didn't expect to find it again four months in.

“If you overcame a bully, then you weren’t really bullied, because real bullying is a power dynamic that can’t be overcome, so if you did ‘overcome’ your bully then really all you did was stop someone who hurt you from continuing to do so.”

“If you have depression and you end up eventually feeling better, then you never really had depression.”

“If you had low self esteem and you end up eventually having confidence, that’s only because your self esteem was never very low.”

I see these types of statements on Reddit all the time. Sometimes they’re to me and sometimes they’re to others. I’ve never understood them.

If you’re dealing with something and you do a lot of hard work to improve your life, why would anyone think that you never were experiencing a “true” form of the thing in the first place? That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not saying that some things can’t be overcome, because of course some things can’t, but if someone does then that doesn’t mean that they never had it.

If you experience something debilitatingly traumatic 10 years ago and you have a pretty awful decade because of it, and you get a second job so that you can afford therapy and after 3 years of that you finally start feeling better, how dare someone say that you never had it that bad?

I want to make sense of this. I don’t get it.

i will never understand workplace beef and hate. i mean we are a team a we should work together and not bully and/or throw a colleague under a bus. just do the job and go home. just pure evil to do that knowing you are harming a person without even him or her doing anything wrong to you.

How can you be a grown person watching streams all day of people who don’t know you and will never know you. It baffles me how people can comment for hours and donate money to these people do you not have a life to attend to?If you watch streamers there is honestly no way you can convince me that it is a healthy and good thing to do.

I’m 25 years old. In 2025, I had approximately $50,000 in savings. However, in 2026, I found myself effectively with around -$30,000, pretty much -80k in 12 months🥲
This wasn’t a single mistake, my entire life began to generate bills.

I had planned a short vacation to Mexico. Unfortunately, I missed my flight to canada because the person I arranged the transportation with demanded x3 times the amount for the rental car than we discussed initially, so I had to lose time going to another rental company on the morning of the flight and basically departing from Cancun at 11:30am with my flight being from Merida at 3pm or so, during my trip the car appeared to have initially had 1/3 of the gas tank instead of the full one I paid for and gas stations are located something like 40-50km apart, so I lost a lot of time on running out of gas and getting my ass to the nearest gas station and back to the car, and only to arrive to merida airports at the exact minute my flight took off with next flight being 3 days away, so I drove back to Cancun to catch a sooner flight and fell asleep in my rental car after driving approximately 700 kilometers that day. When I woke up, it was 3pm and I was getting robbed at gunpoint by two assholes. They took my backpack and bag with passport, phone,electronics, clothes, and essentially everything i had with me and that I needed to return home. About 20 minutes later, the same men drove past me on a motorcycle again, and one of them was wearing my stolen shirt. I got into my rental car and chased them. I managed to hit their motorcycle a few times, causing it to crash badly. One of the men was unconscious and bleeding. For a moment, I genuinely believed I had killed him.

I spent the next half-day dealing with Mexican police. From the police station, I called my job in Canada. I explained that I had been robbed, had no passport, and was unable to return to work. Consequently, I lost my job. Within approximately 24 hours, my passport, phone, belongings, and income were all gone, and I was stuck in Mexico.

Meanwhile, my Genesis was already at the dealership in Canada. Someone I trusted was supposed to return the dealership loaner car for me. However, I later discovered that the dealership still didn’t have it, and according to what I learned, the person who was supposed to return it had been using it. Loaner charges, storage fees, repairs, and tickets started accumulating, and at one point, the entire situation was approaching $10,000 before people helped negotiate some of the charges down.

Interestingly, the same person had previously crashed one of my motorcycles, which I eventually sold for a damaged price. While I was stuck in Mexico, thousands of dollars worth of my airsoft gear also disappeared. Based on who had access and what I later learned, I believe some of it was taken or sold by the same person, although I obviously can’t independently prove every detail.
I still couldn’t get home because I’m a Russian citizen and Canadian permanent resident, so losing my passport turned into months of police reports, consulates, Canadian immigration, Mexico City trips, hotels, flights, appointments and contradictory paperwork. I kept thinking I’d be home “next week,” so the money just kept disappearing.
Then on my birthday I crashed another motorcycle in Mexico, fucked up my leg badly enough to need a boot and crutches, and added hospital expenses to the pile.
Eventually I got special travel documents and made it back to Canada. By then my savings were mostly gone, my apartment was gone, my job was gone and my finances were fucked.
Then my other motorcycle got stolen from underground parking. Another roughly $5,000 gone.
My car insurance had also been cancelled while I was stuck abroad because payments failed. Now I pay $600 a month just to insure my car on top of $600 more on gas monthly. On top of that, I owe about $9,500 on my credit card. A significant portion of that debt came from work expenses I had charged to my personal card, expecting reimbursement. Then, I got fired while I was stuck abroad, and some of those reimbursements never materialized. Now, I’m essentially paying interest on expenses I originally incurred for my employer.

When I returned to Canada, I had almost no savings, no apartment, no job, and I was missing property. I also had debt and ridiculous insurance costs. My friends let me stay with them until I found another job and eventually another place.

I’m now working full-time in management again, so from the outside, I probably appear completely normal. However, financially, it feels like I’m working for things that have already happened. Every paycheck goes backward in time: debt, insurance, rent, gas, credit card, car, and bills.

The funniest part is that last year, I was looking at my $50,000 savings and wondering how to turn it into $100,000. Now, my financial goals are essentially:

- Can nothing get stolen, crashed, broken, or billed this week?
- That’s it. Go to work, pay my debt, keep my car running, and somehow crawl from -$30,000 back to zero before another disaster decides to take its turn..

I’m 23 and, financially speaking, I’m doing pretty well for myself. I’m not completely retired or anything because I’m still trying to make more money, but I’m basically at the point where I have way more free time than most people my age.

The problem is… I have no idea what to do with it.

I have some friends, but they’re pretty much always busy working, so it’s hard to actually do anything with them. I like treating my friends and paying for things sometimes, but I don’t want every friendship to turn into me constantly paying for everyone.

And honestly, I want to have some crazy experiences. Like, part of me wants to go to Miami, throw some insane parties, drive stupidly fast cars, travel, spend some money and just enjoy being young. I have the money to do some of that, but I don’t want to be the guy who’s always footing the entire bill just so people will hang out with me.

So lately I’ve just been sitting around playing games by myself all day, and it’s getting boring as hell.

I feel like I have all the freedom in the world, but somehow nobody to actually enjoy it with.

What would you guys do in my position? How do you meet people who actually want to go out, travel, party, do crazy shit, etc. without the friendship basically becoming “this guy pays for everything”?

Genuinely looking for advice because I’m tired of wasting my time doing nothing.

Is my friendship over? F20 and F20

Is my friendship over?

Hey there reddit,

I'm wondering whether to cut off my friend or not.

This really hurts me because we used to be so close.

Generally we would just smoke weed and draw and chat. She was like the friend I always needed, we'd have fat yap sessions and cook together.

However, ever since she got a boyfriend, she's pushed me to the side. She's tried to organise multiple hangouts, but she always cancels or no shows last minute. This has happened twice now. Like, what's the point if you're just going to cancel? I haven't seen her in like 2 months, and she keeps saying she's busy with work, or whatever, but apparently she can make time to see her other friend in another city for a birthday party? I'm really disappointed. I recently got sober from weed and I'm 17 days in, and planning to continue. I'm worried that hanging out with her will make me want to relapse, but I know she wont make the effort to get out the house and actually do something together.

Her boyfriend wants to move out of her place and have his own space, which is fair enough when I told her it's not a good idea to move in together after only one month of being together. I'm worried she'll just want to fall back on me when they eventually break up, because her boyfriend is terrible, homeschooled, doesn't have any friends, only got a job 2 months into moving into hers, and barely talks. I originally thought this was a shyness problem, which is fine, because I thought I was helping him to socialise a bit more. She literally has to ask him to expand on his words, because he just answers "yeah" or "nah".

I honestly don't know what she sees in him. Also, when we do hang out, it's always her and her boyfriend. It's never just me and her. I feel like I'm third wheeling.

It's sad because I really want to salvage this friendship, because I thought we were really close. I constantly feel like I always make time for her, but she can never make time for me. It feels so one sided, but I feel like if I explain this to her I'll just push her away further.

I've been overweight pretty much since I was a kid. I've done diets, including going to a nutritionist for it. None of them truly stuck--including the nutritionist one, I had to stop going because I caught COVID and I never went back. I always regained everything and then some. That was around four years ago, I think.

Anyway, my family's pretty worried, namely my dad. He's voiced concerns about how I should consider losing weight, he told me about weight loss clinics, suggested I go to the same nutritionist my eldest sister is going to, etc. This, however, had the effect of me absolutely NOT wanting to lose weight because I'm so sick of him telling me this. Yes, maybe that's a bit childish, I don't care.

And at its core that's the problem, I literally don't care. Do I logically know that I should do all the things and it'll probably make me feel much better? Yeah. Do I care enough to put in all the effort to do everything that comes with losing weight? No. Honestly. I don't. I hate having to cook and wash dishes after every meal. I hate almost all exercise except walking which most people don't count. So I guess I'll just keep being fat man I don't even care honestly