No Stupid Questions

Yeah definitely. In the span of a month my wife suddenly left me to date women, my job laid me off, and my dog got sick and needed surgery. Everything I'd relied on for ten years just fell apart real fast and without a whole lot of warning. It's been quite the year trying to recover from all that. Dog survived, divorce finalized, still no job.

When I was living at my parents home, and covid started... before that j never had to leave. I felt fine loving at my parents. But when they became covid deniers, and I was a journalist at the time, I suddenly had the very strong urge to get up and get out.

After I moved out by sheer luck, (finding a place was hard), I noticed a switch flicked and that I no longer needed approval of my parents. For anything I did. At all.

I probably saved my life with ecstasy because it took one night with it to get me out of my depression. I tried a few times afterwards but it was never as good as the first time so I stopped but my depression never came back, the colour stayed in my life.

I'm not saying drugs are good but at the right time at the right place with the right amount it can help.

May 27th, 2022 I got off work and bought a 750ml bottle of Captain Morgan. This was more or less a nightly occurence. I woke up the following morning, finished off the bottle (less than a single shot thanks to the previous night), and thought "I'm done".

Excluding the single glass of champagne and a little sip of margarita at a loved one's wedding last month, that thought has proven correct. It makes no sense to anyone who's dealt with addiction. Every day I felt myself being pulled toward the bottle, then all of a sudden that feeling was gone. The cravings are gone. Hell, I once got nauseous from friends even talking about alcohol too much.

It was like I had tried for a while to escape from a prison and eventually accepted that I'd die there. Then I woke up in an open field with no explanation. It's bizarre. I can't explain it. But you won't hear me complain.

I know what you mean, and yes. At 20 years old, I turned down a job in my field to take one outside that I wanted to do for a few years just to see where it led and get it out of my system. I almost physically heard a door close and wondered if I’d done the right thing. Almost forty years later, I’m still not sure.

Yeah. It was so dramatic I knew it would happen again, and waited for it to catch it in the act.

I'm super smart, but also super lazy. I think I'm lazy because I'm smart. School was super easy for me, so I was always bored. I got poor grades overall because I didn't do the work. I could show up and crush the tests, but felt that homework was a waste of time and never did it. I took AP classes that give college credit, got a weak grade in the class but got 4s and 5s on the AP test. (Out of 5).

Poor grades in highschool meant I couldn't get into college right away. So I took a few years off and just sort of hung out for a bit. Then the click. I decided I wanted to go to college, not just any, but a really good school. So I went to the local junior college and asked the counselor how I could go there next year. He explained that the transfer program is a two year program, but I wanted to go next year. He said I probably won't succeed, but here's a schedule of classes that will get me the two years of credits in one year. 24 units per semester for two semesters. I got straight As. I just did all the work and crushed it. Got into my dream school and studied... philosophy.

Don't get me wrong, it was what I wanted to study. I got a great education, but it didn't set me up for a real job after school, more for grad school, but I felt like I was done with school for a while. I ended bartending and waiting tables for years. It was in this phase that I started thinking about that click. Something in me elevated me to get into my dream school within a year once I decided I wanted to. I found peace in that fact. I knew that despite my toiling, working hard just for rent, making it month by month in the city, that I'd elevate myself again when the time was right. I thought a lot about it. That one year of 48 units and straight As was such a blur, what was it that drove me? I was so confident it would just happen again though that I decided to try to consciously catch it in the act.

Sure enough it happened again. Enrolled in a coding boot camp. One year of absolute blur, crushed it, became a successful software engineer. I failed to notice while it was happening, but did think right after: "fuck that was it, that was the thing, I was right, it did happen again!"

Turns out I'm bipolar and was just making the most of my manic upswings.

I was in highschool suffering from multiple mental health disorders and social isolation. I was smart sure, but as I later learned you can't outsmart your own brain. What it took was finding a girl, as studious and hard working as me, but even more stressed and destroyed by home life and a destructive boyfriend that preyed on their undiagnosed autism and major depression. It started when I simply told them that their emotions mattered, that they mattered as a person. Suddenly I was confronted with a person in their most stressful senior year, previously a danger to their own self, offloading their sorrows to me in need of anything resembling emotional support.

I had to learn (the hard way sometimes) how to listen, and listen with intent. I felt this urge, this duty to help, no matter how little I could do with how I was faring. I felt like if I didn't do this, I would regret it for the rest of my life. It eventually lead to friendship into a relationship on fundamental compatibility, but I didn't have any of those feelings at the beginning. I just accepted their texts, their calls, the first ones I had ever made to someone outside of school. It was the first time I ever felt I had a purpose. It was the first time I felt like I could do what was right, rather than what was expected.

Our relationship is rekindling as we both near college graduation. We're far more stable now, but we crave our scant few hours shared on weekends. I can feel my life trajectory flying wildly out of prediction as the day they move in with me nears. However, I know that if it was anything like the last time, I can afford to be bold and to be true to myself. It's one thing for your life trajectory to change, but it's another to be committed to making it as good as possible.

My senior year of college right before graduating with a history degree, I bought a canon rebel t3i after watching a short film that made me go “I want to make these.” I don’t do narrative work anymore, but I’ve got some film fest screenings notched on my metaphorical bat and I produce content for a tech startup now with excellent healthcare and a solid salary. Wife, kids, the whole deal.

Still have that rebel, it’s one of the few things in my life that I can point to and go “this thing changed everything.“

One day, I understood that my then-boyfriend was the real thing.

Before him, I had a couple of good relationships. I was happy, but always wondered if I would have been better off on my own. The thought would pop up every couple of days, I would seriously consider it for a bit, then decide I was happier with them than in my own. Then my now husband showed up and we started dating.

One day, some three-four months into this new relationship, I realized I never had that old thought. It just never crossed my mind for months that I should evaluate the relationship. We clicked on so many levels, he made me a better person because it made me want to be better.

We got married “fast” for some external reasons and I never doubted that was the right choice. Since then, i don’t have to think about it: I know my life is so much better with him in it.

In high school and college, I used to be the kind of person who always overanalyzed everything with intense scrutiny, especially things related to dating/romance, and I felt like I was just a constant failure in that part of my life. I wasn't always single, I did have some relationships over the years, but during those relationships I remained the overanalytical type, always overly worried that something might be going wrong or that I said the wrong thing, replaying conversations in my head thinking of better ways to say things, etc. After one stretch of being single after semi-unwillingly breaking off an engagement (and continuing to be overanalytical), I was asked out by a new person and we started dating, and fell in love incredibly fast, and are now very happily married.

When she asked me out and we went on that first date and both realized how incredibly well we got along, something flipped in my brain, and I have literally never been the same since; that was 10 years ago, and I no longer overthink things at all, and it has been the greatest gift anyone could've given me.

My mother is a conservative who poured subtle homophobia into me when I was a child.

I was at a rave, high on MDMA (ecstasy back then), smoking in the rain in the parking lot with some other young people. This flamboyant gay guy was hilarious and making everyone laugh heartily. In that moment, I realized that we were the same. He just wanted to go out and have a good time and take drugs on a Saturday night, too. My homophobia was gone in an instant. (I won't lie; I had to have more exposure to LGBTQ people before I stopped noticing them so hard, but moving from the midwest to the Bay Area fixed that problem).

When I was young, I decided that big choices would go through a filter in my head...

What would my mother do in this situation, what would my father do?

I think both of them are horrible people that constantly make bad choices, so I would always look for the solution they wouldn't choose.

It has been the recipe to my success.

its called growth

I was about 19, a magician friend told me I was good enough at juggling to do busking but I was too shy. Decided to give it a go anyway and remember shaking so hard while lighting the fire torches I was using. Made R30 ($2) so not a lot but I did it. I remember thinking to myself, "I'll never have to work again!"

That was over 20 years ago, and since then - with the exception of that stupid pandemic we had recently - I have made a decent living as a circus performer and magician.

I won't tell you it wasn't a bumpy ride at first, but that first show was the turning point for me I will never forget.

Yeah a few times. The one that came to mind first was my ex wife. She always made sure to not say anything about divorce but couldn't even stand to be in the same room as me anymore. I was texting her about a year into the "separation" and it just clicked. She didn't want to be the reason for the divorce but she had no intention of trying to fix anything.

Yep, when I was a young it pup I was working for a hospital making $15 an hour which was enough to afford rent and food and taking care of a wife that didn't work and all that shit but I kept feeling like something was off and I kept getting passed over for raises and after 3 years with the same company yeah I finally said enough is enough I either need a raise or I'm going to quit and they told me they can't give me a raise so I quit.

In my two weeks offboarding a friend of mine recommended me a different job and I applied for it and got it and it was an immediate jump from $15 to $21 an hour.

This was in 2014, so $21 an hour is not that much money but it was a hell of a lot more money than $15 an hour so I took the new job.

I worked there for three years and I took a new job and I worked there for three years and because of finally having enough I'm now making over $60 an hour 9 years later.

Which I know could be a lot more, but $60 an hour is more than enough to support myself and take care of my shit and it all came down to me just having that little mental fit where I said there's no fucking way I'm going to keep working for $15 an hour and not getting pay raises.

It was years later that I found out that the hospital had hired somebody else with the exact same name that I had and they had gotten their numbers or something confused in the system and I was getting the other bizarrolands reviews and he was getting mine.

My coworkers that stayed there are now making like $19 to $22 an hour so I would say that it was definitely a good call for me to run away.

Yep. At 18 I was hard set on going to college for game design. About a week into classes, I just up and decided "wait, this isn't the right thing right now", dropped out and continued my day job for 3 years before going to another college for software development. It wasn't really the plan, but thinking about it now, it was a good move to switch from game design to more generally software.

A couple months before graduating, I landed a solid job on the other side of the country (US), finally moved out on my own and grew my career. Now I'm in the same field but making six figures, married, own a house, and fun hobby cars.

I was always mildly overweight growing up, despite doing enough sports and physical activity to be relatively fit. One day a flip switched and I started going to the gym daily. 6 months later, while doing cardio I pulled something or otherwise hurt myself and a month of back and forth later discovered I have herniated discs. My trajectory very much went downhill from there. PT made me miserable, the steroid epidural didn't work. I was too young for surgery. I had to get rid of my motorcycle since riding it caused me to be bedridden in pain. I had to stop any recreational sports. Going shopping is rolling the dice over whether I'll be in pain the next week.

Lift with your legs, not your back.

Am trans, didn't realize or do the self exploration on that one until mid 20s. It's like I found the secret hardmode button to make life perpetually difficult for me.

Yeah, when I was 10, I was laying flat on my back on the grass of the soccer field after getting out of school in Jakarta and I was contemplating my life compared to the lives of my neighbors who lived about 200 yards away. We lived in Pondok Indah, at that time the most prestigious and richest neighborhoods in Jakarta. The neighbors I'm talking about lived in a Kampung in the little jungle just down a dirt road from our house, which was on the very edge of that rich neighborhood. I made some friends in the Kampung and we used to run around and get up to shenanigans together. To me, as a kid, the distinction between rich and poor wasn't much of a thing, they were just my friends. But I got to thinking about how there are these divides in life, and that from what I had seen, those kids and their parents were much happier than anyone else I knew.

But I digress, that's not actually what I was trying to say, it's just what started me thinking. While laying there staring up at the clouds I slowly came to realize that I was laying on a giant ball, spinning through space traveling at who knows what speed through that void, and I had a major (first) existential crisis, fully internalizing that we're just tiny specks on another tiny speck hurtling through the unknowable and that nothing I could ever do would have any impact on the universe whatsoever. And that's how I became a humanist nihilist. Nothing matters but what you choose to matter to you.

This is why I try to find a way to empathize with others, to be patient and kind where I can, because that stuff matters to me. I wear the clothes I want, I am in relationships with people I love, and I don't give a flying fuck what anyone else thinks of me. That moment when I was 10 led me to become the man, father, son and lover I want to be.

Not my life, more like a real life level up.

I had been swimming in my local Y for months after working out. I had not had much gains. 1 lap was my max.

One day I was resting an watching someone swim. And. It just clicked. I KNEW how to swim. Better.

I was able to pull off 3-7 laps from then on.

You called it a switch. And that's pretty accurate. I could almost hear the switch in my head getting flipped on.

Many times. Although often it didn't happen unexpectedly, but built up for a few days or weeks before it "clicked".

Most impactful: becoming vegan.

Also impactful, but weird:

• Stopping to drink alcohol
• Decision to use it as a narcotic agent for a specific thing
• Stopping to drink alcohol again after resolution of that specific thing.

Many other smaller things that build towards quality of life and quality social interactions.

All of these things built up during meditation sessions before I took a conscious decision that I acted upon.

I went back to school in my late 20s after doing poorly in highschool. Finally paid attention and did homework. Got straight A's. Realized my childhood dream of going to my favorite university was in reach. Buckled down for four years and got accepted. Now work at a great company.

Back in late 2000, my girlfriend and I broke up. She moved out of our apartment and back to her hometown. I was feeling kinda down and one of my friends invited me to a rave the next night. I didn't really have any interest, it never seemed like my kind of scene. But I didn't have anything else going on, so I went with him. He ended up buying ecstasy, which I had never done before either.

That's literally the night that changed the entire trajectory of my life. I spent the next decade traveling all over America, going to parties, hanging out with people I met on a message board. I ended up shacking up with a girl I met on the board for a few years. I made friends that I still have today.

My 20's were a blur of parties and substances, but I can trace a direct line from what happened that night to where I am today.

Yup when I choose fucking science stream!

Twice. As a teen, I was extremely sensitive to the point someone made a joke and I couldnt stop crying got called home and hid on the bus the next day because I couldn't go in. My mum was trying to cheer me up because she's great and she casually said " why do you care amongst a bunch of other things' I'm not sure why it clicked in my brain. It obviously wasn't the first time that had been said to me but after that I became incredibly desensitized to emotion. I couldn't care about others outside of a few people, I enjoyed company but any problem people had would go in one ear out the other. Because of this I lead an incredibly selfish life. I never even considered dating or hooking up with people because it was too much effort. I only cared about my own amusement and stopped cooking, cleaning, etc.

One night in during COVID I was lying in bed and the thought of death crossed my mind and I felt that switch again and I realized extremely vividly I am afraid of dying. Had a panic attack, was constantly stressed, realised in the next week that I want more of life, I want to get married and have kids. I want to improve myself. At age 29 I have decided to try push myself into the dating scene even though it will be stressful and I'm scared, I have created a cooking and cleaning regiment, I have been working out. I have been planning, and my empathy is starting to return.