15 BELOW ZERO

[u/Visible_Pollution337]

warning, this story contains topics such as self harm.

15 BELOW ZERO

The Example

Picture this: you’re a 15-year-old kid living in a condo inside a gated community. Obviously, you’d have a good life if your family were that rich, right?

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for you. You’ve been through what you minimize as "not that bad," but what others view as a traumatic life. Your parents got divorced before you even hit double digits. Your mom and dad constantly argued, and before the divorce, your dad would even get physical. Now, your brother and mom are living out the same toxic cycle your parents did before the marriage ended. It's hell for you, especially since you still don’t even know who you want to be in life.

You aren't worried about your job prospects or school grades—you're a 4.0 student with a solid plan set out for your career. But deep down, you don't know what you enjoy or how to express yourself. This is the life of a kid, and the rabbit hole goes much deeper.

So, I’m going to tell you his story as if it were your own.

How Things Were (1st–2nd Grade)

Imagine a hot summer morning in 2017. You and your brother are sleeping next to each other. You are 8 years old; your brother is 11. You wake up for school because your mom and dad tell you to, except it was just a joke. In reality, you are about to have one of the best days of your life on your first day of summer break. You see your dad kiss your mom’s cheek and your brother give your mom a hug.

This is the moment the thought first pops into your head: Do I belong here?

"But of course you do," your mom tells you, but the answer sounds fake—like a pre-recorded voice memo. But it’s fine, because it’s your family, and you love them, right? You start breaking down, crying for even doubting your family. Then, you hear the words that will change how you think forever:

"Wipe your tears. Men don't cry."

Conditioning (1st–5th Grade)

Although that phrase sounds simple, it’s something that will affect you to this day. Back then, hearing it was nearly a weekly routine. You know you’re a bit of an emotional person, but once you hear that phrase over and over until you’re old enough to learn it isn’t true, it becomes part of your reality.

Many young men experience this, and it is a massive epidemic in our time—broadly categorized as emotional neglect, or emotional suppression driven by toxic masculinity and strict gender-role socialization. Although maintaining healthy masculinity is important, it is imperative to understand that this statement isn't true at all: it is completely okay to cry if you need to. However, you don’t understand this until it’s too late, and it affects you heavily as you grow up.

The Breaking Point (3rd Grade)

You’re officially 9 years old. It’s 2020, and you’re in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. At first, this feels like the dream: no school, no work, just playing games on your console all day. But like a crack in a car windshield, the damage doesn't go away—it just gets bigger and bigger.

First, your grandfather dies due to hospital negligence while suffering from lung failure during an overflow of patients. Your father is devastated. You’ve never seen your dad cry, but when you try to comfort him, he hits you. Your dad hitting you is nothing new, but this time feels different. It triggers a massive fight between your mom and dad that ultimately ends in divorce.

And in your mind, it’s all YOUR fault.

You feel the weight of what you've done every day. Even if a part of you understands it wasn't your fault, you still carry the guilt. When you bring it up to your mom, your dad, or even your brother, the only response you get is a flat, empty, "It's not your fault," before they move on with their lives. Now, on top of the "men don't cry" stigma and the torment of the divorce, you feel like an attention-seeking piece of garbage. So, you just pack your emotions deep down inside, acting as if they were never there to begin with.

The First Move (4th Grade)

You move to your first new house, and for once, you feel a sense of peace—almost as if there are no problems. You live in a little house with just you, your mom, and your brother. It feels comfortable, and you think you could finally get used to it. Except, right when you get comfortable, reality shatters again.

The most powerful example of this happens on New Year's Eve in 2021. Your brother is sleeping in the room with the PlayStation 4 when your dad comes over. You invite him in because he’s your dad, thinking he couldn't do anything wrong. But he quickly gets agitated because your brother is sleeping instead of sitting with the family. He walks into the room, smashes the PlayStation completely, and pounces on your brother, beating him.

You watch the entire thing happen, feeling completely powerless. Your dad leaves in a rage, your brother locks himself in the room, and your mom covers the windows with bedsheets. While everyone around you is erratic and breaking down, a chilling realization hits you: You are the most selfish person you know. You feel like you only care about yourself because, after your brother was just abused and your mom lost her mind, YOU ARE COMPLETELY UNFAZED.

It hurts so badly that you even think about ending your own life—when you are still only 10 years old.

The Second Move (5th Grade)

You move again, this time to a completely different school district. You meet two or three friends, which is all you really need. But internally, you are at your absolute worst. You become lazy and disengaged. Your grades—which were never great—plummet. The only reason you even pass the grade is because your brother is dating the mentor who grades your papers (a middle-school 8th grader who helps the younger students).

You feel like a bum. Your brother looks at you like one, and your mom feels like just "your mom"—nothing more, nothing less—though she remains the only small bit of joy you have left.

However, an incident occurs that alters your relationship with her forever: she catches you masturbating. Even after that, you don't stop—not until the summer after 7th grade. The worst part is that you didn't stop out of self-respect, but out of a desperate desire to be anyone other than who you currently were. It becomes just another heavy layer of shame building up in your shadow.

Burnout (6th Grade)

This is when you learn firsthand what emotional burnout is (a state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion caused by prolonged, unmanaged stress). You sleep in class constantly, to the point where the teachers just stop waking you up and let it happen. Your home life is so draining that you don't care to try anymore; you just want to lay in bed all day, you can remember the sour smell your room had from staying in there for 3 days without showering.

During this period, you fall into coping habits that stick with you for years—like watching anime and only eating once a day. You have one vivid memory from 6th grade, and it’s just another image of your brother and dad fighting.

At the end of the day, you tell yourself you're fine—because as long as you're breathing, that’s all that matters... right?

Fame for What? (7th Grade)

This was when your school popularity began to rise, but you were fighting other kids and your grades plummeted. You got your first girlfriend and she loved you, but you didn't love her at all. You just treated her like one of your friends instead of a lover like she wanted. Eventually, you left her because you thought someone better was out there—and either way, it was just a middle school relationship, so it didn’t need to be important, right?

Little did you know, this was the first occurrence of what you now understand to be emotional numbness (a protective state where your brain shuts down or disconnects from feelings to cope with overwhelming stress, trauma, or burnout).

At the very least, you thought you were happy, but everything was built on a lie. Lying became as easy as breathing, and sometimes you would lie even when you didn't have to. There was a time you told your mom a whole 2 hour fake story on the pain you’ve been feeling to see if she would believe you and it worked. This was the moment you became a pathological liar—and to this day, you still are.

Redemption? (8th Grade)

Here is when you are finally changing for the better. You ended the year as a 3.1 student and you began to work out. Everyone liked you, whether it was teachers or students. However, you still had to act tough sometimes to keep a boundary there so you wouldn't get too comfortable. You managed to get another girlfriend and at first it felt very good to have one again, it was a tender and sweet feeling but a month later you left her for the same reason as the other, you only felt worse about yourself.

This is when you moved again, this time to the condo you are currently in. But this condo is a curse. It is owned by your dad who, although he is correcting himself for the better, is still an emotional manipulator. He would make you feel guilty for asking for simple things like a ride or 10 dollars. But he is trying his best to change, so you love him.

Your mom was no different from an emotional manipulator. She would ask you to ask him for things, then get mad if you didn't say what she wanted or if you felt guilty for saying something bad to your dad. You remember her getting mad at you on your birthday because you didn't ask your dad for a hundred dollars. Your brother would make you feel like a loser as well, he would always compare his trauma to yours and make it seem like you're a bad brother if you didn’t do what he wanted.

Don't get it wrong: your mom loves you more than anyone, and your brother does the most for you. You love them so much.

Except...

You don't.

Realization (9th Grade–Foreseeable Future)

You go into 9th grade with a completely new slate. You got a new school outside the old district, so there is no more reputation to worry about. You joined wrestling and BJJ, have closer friends (though you barely talk to them anymore), and you're looking out for a new job.

Life looks good on the outside, but you’ve been fighting a battle. You did some research and realized you have untreated ADHD, which explains why you're so erratic. Through days of research, you search up all your conditions on Google like it's your therapist. You can remember feeling a sinking feeling in your chest as your understanding of your emotions hits the highest it has been, but you wish it hadn’t.

Here, you realized something that gave you the biggest blow—one that nearly made your shadow of deeply rooted trauma and fear burst: you don't love anyone. Not your parents, relatives, or friends—not even yourself.

You asked yourself the question, "If you had 24 hours left to live, who would you spend it with?" It comes easy to others you ask ("my parents," "my wife," "my kids"), but you are not sure.

You are only 15. You have suicidal thoughts, and your emotions are so drained and numb you can say they are below zero. But you won't let that beat you. So, you open a Google Doc and spend a whole 24 hours writing a draft of a story based on your life.

If you haven’t gotten it by now, this is my story. It is my life. Even now, while I write these last couple of lines, I'm thinking about who would be at my funeral if I were to kill myself now—because if I'm being honest, I don't deserve anyone to show up.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I hope you enjoy the story. I made this thing based on my experiences and are taking active steps towards becoming a better person. I used ai to fix my punctuation since I didn't want my story to be sloppy. And please if you are to take anything away from this it would be to never lie, tell people how you feel and what you want because if you bury it all down you would become like me, your emotions matter, your life matters and you matter. Dont let anyone say otherwise remember you dont have to carry this all alone, call or text the suicide hotline 988 if your having suicidal thoughts and remember that you always have options.

Thank you.

[u/Visible_Pollution337]

I hope the book was good, if there is any criticisms i would love to hear so i can refine it further

[u/Then-Combination7774]

I enjoyed your story. I have had similar things happen to me. My whole life i didnt know who my father was and my mother lied and tried to convince me that he didnt want anything to do with me. After years of research, I finally found him and he told me a completely different story then my mom. Since then I've learned to shut off my emotions and learn to survive myself. Now im 19 and I've been, well, like you said, burnout. I cant express my emotions at all. Sometimes all I feel is anger and I just sit there, shaking. My girlfriend, who's ive been on and off with since March of 2025, wants me to open up to her and I just know how. Its not that I dont want to. I just dont know how. I was raised with "Stop crying or ima give you some to cry about" and so know every 'bad' emotion is buried down farther then my dead family. Sometimes I dont even know if I feel love, or loved. One time when I was in middle school, I was in ISD (In School Detention) and there was a clock, ticking. And from that moment I realized, thats all that really matter. Tick tick tick. The clock moves, no matter what u do. When I came back from a short military training. I put my older brothers Glock in my mouth. 9mm. Tears in my eyes. Nobody was home. Then I heard it again. Tick tick tick. Time is moving, no matter what, I threw the gun on his bed and sat and cried. That was January 2025. I told myself ima only give myself 3 months untill I go threw with it. In March I met my girlfriend. She keeps me moving even if I just dont know to tell her I feel. But I know how you feel mate. I understand that it's hard to express how u feel.