A friend I met as an adult. He had a pretty rough life growing up, his family was homeless and roamed around a lot, he was supposed to be ‘homeschooled’ but was really taking care of his parents during that time, so he never really had an education, obviously never went to college, etc.
He fell into learning programming as a teenager and started working when he was 16 as a web programmer. Now in his 30’s, he makes more money than anyone I’ve personally known and I’m so freaking happy for him. A lot of bullshit people like to brag that they’re ‘self made’ when they own companies, or are CEO’s, etc. And this guy is like the most humble, kind and well adjusted person I’ve ever known, and he did it all himself. Super greatful to be his friend and have him in my life.
A closeted gay acquaintance that I knew from shared extracurricular activities, is now a judge who ran as a Republican because that’s the only party people will vote for in the redneck town we grew up in.
shared extracurricular activities
😏
My best friend was a fucking degenerate in high school. Drugs, alcohol, fights, got his girlfriend pregnant at 16, was in and out of jail for all kinds of stupid shit… I fully expected him to die young or end up doing hard time.
He’s now a department head at a very large university, even has his own published textbook. I’m incredibly happy for him.
I was a physics student for some time (got to quantum and realized it was not for me lol) and one of the smartest, most hardworking students I ever met was a 27 year old who had been in and out of rehab since he was 18. He is working on his masters now.
One of my friends in school was super popular. She was in cosmetology, was always immaculately dressed and had a stabe boyfriend for years in school and after we graduated. Her family life was rock solid but in 1988 she went off the rails and into a super depressive mode, stopped talking to everyone and killed herself. NO one, to this day, saw it coming. It came out of the blue within 4 months. She was carrying something emotionally bad that ate her, or some sort of wild metabolic disorder sent her into a spiral… no one knows.
Hell of a path NO one saw coming.
I dated a girl like that in college. She never went deep off the rails, but when I met her she was reckoning with the fact that she had basically been forced into the perfect pretty cheerleader life by her backwards Louisiana family, even having them go so far as to put her in a mental institution for a short time and hide it from everyone in their lives to keep being able to pretend she was “perfect.” It dragged on her mentally, and she years later would tell me the reason she disappeared and stopped talking to me after six months was I was the first man who had ever been interested in who she was and what her thoughts were and she literally didn’t know how to handle it. She tried to play the perfect pretty girl for a while longer, even marrying a guy who treated her the same way her dad did, as though she only existed to be a trophy wife, before getting divorced and starting to break free from those shackles.
Anyway, just saying, sometimes those super popular, happy seeming immaculate people have something sinister hiding under the surface: like a family forcing them to be that way.
She married the wrong guy.
But most feminists would skewer me for saying that, because it’s her choice and “nice guy” actually means “predator” apparently. And then they complain about how men are so abusive and wonder why they can’t find a man who treats them well.
And nobody is allowed to tell them that “Not all men are like that” or that “Your perception is indicative of the kind of men you’ve chosen to give your attention to.”
And all the guys who spent their lives respecting women are instead quietly pursuing their own hobbies because they’ve realized there’s no room for them in the dating pool, and never approaching women because apparently they would rather be mauled by a bear…
Y i k e s.
I guess fuck all the intergenerational trauma she experienced, it’s all her fault for not being smarter about men! I guess you missed the part where she got divorced and began to break free of her traumatic upbringing which absolutely included changing the type of men she was allowing into her life.
Get a grip, you sound like a “nice guy” yourself.
She dumped you because she didn’t know how to respond to a guy legitimately caring about her, and then she married an abuser to relive her trauma.
I never said her intergenerational trauma doesn’t matter, but whenever my intergenerational trauma has caused me to make bad decisions, I’ve never received any sympathy. People just say I’m responsible for my own decisions and can’t blame my present conditions on the circumstances of my past.
I’ve seen it happen all the time where women stay with their abusers, and take their anger out on anyone who tells them they deserve better. And yet they blame men as a generalized, abstract category for all the ways they’ve been mistreated by particular men, sparing no reflection for the selection bias at play.
Saying “women choosing to date abusive men is a problematic choice” isn’t misogyny. Pretending they have no agency in who they decide to date is.
Don’t be a cuck.
but whenever my intergenerational trauma has caused me to make bad decisions, I’ve never received any sympathy.
Cry me a river. Being treated badly isn’t a good or valid reason to treat others badly.
And yet they blame men as a generalized, abstract category for all the ways they’ve been mistreated by particular men, sparing no reflection for the selection bias at play.
And you’re definitely not doing the same thing to women (blaming them as a generalized, abstract category) when you speak like this, got it, sure, sure.
Don’t be a cuck.
Man, this couldn’t get any more sad and funny at the same time. Whew, thanks for the laugh.
But seriously, you really need to learn to let go of that pain and try to not blame the opposite gender at large for what you see as perceived failures on their part. If you have only ever experienced women saying your intergenerational trauma is your own problem… you might be just as guilty of the “sin” of choosing to pursue the wrong type of person as you claim women are.
I personally have had loads of supportive and loving women in my life, so it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around this mindset. Maybe I’m just lucky, or maybe it has something to do with me not making generalized statements about women in general instead of accepting them all as unique, flawed individuals just as much as anyone else, including myself.
Dude, you’re being really based here
Thank you kindly for the compliment.
Cry me a river. Being treated badly isn’t a good or valid reason to treat others badly.
You could say the same to women who use their trauma as an excuse to berate men.
And you’re definitely not doing the same thing to women (blaming them as a generalized, abstract category) when you speak like this, got it, sure, sure.
Maybe there are some who don’t act like that, but at least online they seem ubiquitous. Hence the famous “man or bear” question, and basically every thread that’s ever existed in a feminist space online. I’m simply reporting the evidence of my eyes and ears.
At the very least, if women give themselves a free pass to make sweeping generalizations about men, then I don’t want to hear any grandstanding about how I’m supposedly generalizing about them when I say it’s a common occurrence.
But seriously, you really need to learn to let go of that pain and try to not blame the opposite gender at large for what you see as perceived failures on their part.
If a woman chooses to date abusive men, that’s a failure on her part. Acknowledging that they have a responsibility in that decision isn’t “blaming the opposite gender at large,” and the fact that it’s so taboo to even point this out is problematic.
If you have only ever experienced women saying your intergenerational trauma is your own problem… you might be just as guilty of the “sin” of choosing to pursue the wrong type of person as you claim women are.
I don’t pursue anyone anymore, because women have made it clear that they don’t want to be pursued. The only guys left pursuing women are the ones who don’t respect boundaries, and what that means for natural selection is fairly easy to guess. Assholes will reproduce, and “losers” like me will perish. You’ll get the day you asked for when all the “nice guys” are gone.
Even if I did choose to only pursue women who don’t blame me for the sins of all men everywhere, her friends and the rest of society would just say I chose her because I picked her out as “an easy target” who “doesn’t stand up for herself,” because they’ll always assume my intentions are predatory and never simply “wow, she’s an introvert just like me. She likes books, I like books. She doesn’t like parties, I don’t like parties. We could really work together!”
I personally have had loads of supportive and loving women in my life, so it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around this mindset.
Well, look at you! You must be well-adjusted, maybe conventionally attractive, certainly in possession of social skills. You might have a good sense of humor, a charming personality. In any case, you’re probably generally likeable. You probably had plenty of women in your life growing up, and some positive male role models as well. Likely plenty of opportunities to interact with your peers and develop socially in an organic way.
What about someone who was homeschooled and isolated growing up, kept in a conservative bubble and fed lies about “evil liberals,” sheltered, brainwashed, and gaslit about what’s true or false? No opportunities to interact with peers, to develop social skills in an organic way the way most people do during the formative years of their development.
What if the only women in one’s life was one’s own mother, and the occasional visit from an aunt or two, all conservative? What if the only male role models were narcissists with exploding tempers, and an older brother with abusive tendencies?
What about when that person finally enters the world and attempts to socialize, with no basic social skills to go off of, and is immediately singled out, ostracized, bullied, and universally disliked?
And then that person goes on to become an adult. Do you think they’ll just magically develop social skills and become well-adjusted, simply because they’re legally an adult now and are expected to have a minimum level of “maturity,” or what the general consensus dubs “maturity”?
Go on, and blame me for having no friends. Go ahead and blame more for having no healthy relationships, no supportive women in my life, no positive role models to look up to and emulate.
Go ahead and fucking blame me, I don’t care. It’s just fucking typical. I’ve been putting up with that my whole life. It comes as no surprise.
Sounds like you’ve gone down tbe blackpill/incel rabbit hole, hopefully these videos might help. You should also at least read books such as cPTSD by Pete Walker if you’re not looking for therapy, which is for everyone.
Seriously man, and I say this with no ill-intent or judgment, you need a therapist. This is way too much for me, an internet stranger, to unpack. I go to therapy for chronic depression that I had long before I was diagnosed with cancer when the depression got worse. I often feel like the universe taunts me by giving me everything I’ve ever dreamed of and then slapping it out of my hands and pointing and laughing. I’m not blaming you for anything, but we all have time to grow and the ability to grow and change and not be the person we were raised to be with the limitations placed on us. I was sent to an extremely small private Baptist school where the only “friends” I had were the same 18 kids from kindergarten to middle school, and I was mostly bullied and ostracized by them. My mother was overbearingly Christian and lacked education herself and had trauma from losing her first children to being kidnapped by her ex-husband which led her to being overly controlling because she would panic about losing us the same way. My extended family was similar to yours, it sounds like as well. I am by no means conventionally attractive and have been overweight the majority of my life.
Our experiences and trauma don’t define us. The pain and problems we suffered aren’t what make us who we are unless we allow them to. That bitterness you hold for it all, that deep contempt for a world where you assume everyone is going to reject you or judge you before even giving them the chance to do so is a choice, even if it doesn’t feel like one. I just try to let such judgments roll off my back, because they will always be there, there will always be someone else judging us or rejecting us. I learned that in high school when I found out there was some kid who hated me and thought I got all the attention from women because of one of my few friends who even had a boyfriend who wasn’t me. It made no sense because she was just my friend and was dating someone else, and it just made me laugh, because it was so patently absurd.
The only blame I can lay at your feet is your unwillingness to be open to the opportunity for things to be different instead of crawling inside a shell of self-protection by rejecting others before they can reject you, and even then I can understand why your trauma makes that hard. It’s been hard for me in similar ways, but I promise you life is easier if you don’t do that. I promise that you don’t have to reject everyone to protect yourself, and that you’re doing yourself more harm and disservice by doing so than you would by being open to the opportunity for something good to happen for once.
What probably makes me the saddest is how much how you speak reminds me of my longest-lived relationship, and the one that troubles me the most about it ending, where she felt like no one would ever love her and people would always judge her for her mental health problems and she had endless panic about being abandoned. I spent so much time and energy trying to prove to her she was worth loving, and that she shouldn’t let people’s judgments impact her, and that I wasn’t going to abandon her. You deserve someone who gives you that kind of effort and time as well, but if you don’t allow someone giving you that kind of time and effort to allow yourself to grow and accept that things could be better, try to change your outlook, you will end up still bitter and blaming the world just like she does, which is what ultimately ended our relationship. I worry for her a lot still.
Not high school, but close. We hung out in the same group of friends freshman year at the local technical college. He was a very free spirited guy, with all sorts of wild tattoos and piercings, like a few others in the group. He even got some sort of genital piercing that I declined to see when he was showing it off after he got it. He was also fairly antiestablishment, an atheist who I think leaned politicaly towards anarchism.
Unlike the rest of the group though, he was way into drugs. There were a few who dabbled in marijuana and probably one dedicated stoner, but nothing like this. This guy was snorting lines of cocaine off the bathroom sink between classes, and always finding new pills try. Aside from that he was a very personable guy who had interesting perspectives to include in our conversations about anything and everything. Even when he wasn’t all there, at worst he was still decent company, so everyone just let it go. We’d all expressed our concerns at one point, and there wasn’t any point in continuing to bring it up. We were a very diverse group and most of us had some things we tolerated but didn’t agree with in each other.
For Christmas that year I bought a cheap little gift for each person in the group. Most were silly, but I got him a pill organizer. He excitedly began to brainstorm organizational ideas on how to use it, going on about uppers and downers and more terminology I can’t recall. I told him something along the lines of knowing he wasn’t going to stop experimenting, but I hoped it would help him stay safe. He hugged me and said it was one of the most thoughtful gifts he’d ever gotten.
At the end of the school year we largely all ended up going different ways and I lost track of him. Many years later, I heard from a friend I had kept in touch with that they had run into him. I’d feared he’d end up in jail or dead, but he was doing well, if in an unexpected way. Still had kept the crazy piercings, but was otherwise a button down, white collar guy. He had a wife and kids, lived in a suburban home, and worked as a manager at some office business. He was even a deacon at his church. He was healthy, happy, and proud to be many years clean of drugs. I’m glad he kept enough of the rebel spirit to keep the piercings, and I’m more glad he was off the drugs.
A guy I grew up with playing music and working odd jobs for his dad is now a hardcore right wing influencer.
His family was very progressive (still are as far as I know) and we lived in a staunchly blue part of the country. Hell, we wrote songs that were hyper critical of the govt and authoritarian systems.
Now he’s screeching to a million plus followers and participating in counter protests as a pro-maga mouthpiece.
I am sure it has to be for money. He was always an egomaniac. Between that and the dopamine hit of a good grift, it has to be. I just can’t resolve in my own heart that he’s truly gone to the dark side.
Not to judge your friend, but an egomaniacal dopamine addicted grifter IS the dark side
You’ll get no argument from me on that. It’s definitely a case of the mask is fully off now.
We’ve moved on at this point. There’s no room in my life for hatred and facism.
A good friend in school always had really good grades. She worked hard, had mostly As and wanted to become a scientist since 5th grade, later she was mostly interested in biology and wanted to go into genetics. She graduated with really good grades, the second best student of our year, and would have probably made it into a field of her choosing. When I looked her up years later she had studied art and works at an art gallery. I’m happy for her if that’s what she wanted, but she had talked about studying biology nonstop from 5th grade to graduation.
He wasn’t a friend, but he was an acquaintance. There was this guy named Robbie, who was dating the principal’s daughter, and everything seemed bright and shiny for them.
They were like our small school’s power couple, Robbie and Shannon.
After high school, Shannon came up pregnant, and everyone was excited and startled because they hadn’t gotten married yet, and then it came out that the kid wasn’t Robbie’s.
Robbie took a nap on a train track.
The weird thing is, he survived being run over by a train. It was a huge event in our suburb.
But then he went deep into drugs and just fell apart. I don’t think he made it to 27.
The girl who got into every prestigious college for hard sciences is now working in the performing arts. I assume she was studying to placate her parents and then chose her own path as soon as she could escape.
A guy with good grades was accepted into a prestigious architectural school.
He works for a local brewery now.
I had a really close group of friends in high school and by the time we had all graduated college all of us were going in directions we never predicted.
One buddie became a doctor.
One really loved being a professional chef.
I joined the Army after Undergrad and eventually went into IT.
The fourth member became a jeweler.
The biggest shock was a guy I met in first grade and was friends with all throughout school. We went our separate ways for college but saw each other on breaks. He went on to grad school, then med school and residency after that and I didn’t see him much. I was supposed to see him and a bunch of other friends at wedding but he didn’t make it. We callled him and gave him shit about it and he kinda played it off.
One day a year or so later my mom asked if he was done with residency and was a full doctor yet. I wasn’t sure so I looked on Facebook and his was about as barren as mine the last 10 years. Did a search, and nope not a doctor, got caught trying to pick up a 15 year old.
I never expected anyone I grew up with to ever be on the wrong side of the law for anything more than a misdemeanor.
The one who became sergeant of a French special forces unit really surprised me. I thought he was gonna become a brilliant mathematician.
Edit because this is bringing back memories and I’m bored af: I have 2 best friends. Him, and another guy. They are diametrically opposed and never could really get along for more than a couple of hours. The other guy became a successful businessman (the ‘has 3 new sports cars in the garage’ kind), which I always knew was coming, but I know how he got his seed money, and how that’s the real reason why he can’t live in our birth country anymore. He was the street smart one. I met him at a martial arts tournament (kicked my ass btw). The other best friend, the subject of this comment, was always pretty much Sheldon Cooper. Archetypical book smart. We were in the same elementary school, high school, and college. Smartest guy I have ever known, but super awkward, which never bothered me the slightest.
And so we were in college together, and after another night of him drinking way too much, to the point of resulting in a head wound that I treated in my room with my mother who’s a nurse on the phone, he decided he absolutely needs strong structure, dropped out, enlisted 2 days later. A year later he was in the special forces. 2 years after that he was sergeant. 3 years later another grade bump, and now he teaches strategy at the top military academy we have. Turns out he wasn’t just a brilliant nerd, he’s the kind that’s brilliant at anything he sets his mind on. I don’t call “best friend” just anybody :)
The sweet, shy, quiet band girl ODd on heroin sophomore year.
pretty much all of my high school friends went off the deep end, except for myself.
my best friend went to jail for heroin positition and beating his girlfriend.
most of my other friends dropped out of college and burned out on drugs to the point they looked/sounded like homeless mushmouths, or if they were women, they got married at like 20 and popped out kids and never had jobs.one of my girlfriends became a nun another one became a stripper
another became a nun then left the covenant became a trad wife
another one became a poor broke hippie and married the guy she dated after me who was poor broke musician, and they both became addicts.a lot of other people i was not friends with, even if they did graduate college and get jobs, lived at home, married very young, and basically inherited their parents homes and never left the area. they never lived on their own or had lives outside of the town. that includes some of my relatives, they all ended up working for their parents even if they graduated college.
I grew up in a shitty town that was in the lower quartile of economy/education. i was maybe like 10% of people who grew up there who ‘made it out’. and when people learn what town i grew up in they tend to give me the cold shoulder because it’s not a ‘good place’ and ‘good people’ don’t come from there… which is pretty much true. it sucks to that i will never live down the fact my parents were broke and that town was the best place they could afford to live.
on the flip side, anytime i met anyone from my past… they think I’m major pretentious asshole now because I went to an ivy league school, got a good job, lived on my own my entire life, got a graduate degree, lived abroad, and now live in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. and they start telling how ‘disappointed’ they are I’m not famous or super rich some bullshit. because they are miserable twats who hate their lives and made bad choices. I didn’t. i have never been back to that down since my parents sold the house when i was 21.
