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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 18, 2018 21:19:28 GMT -5
Update: It's all over. I've cut her off completely. I rang her, and completely laid out at her over the phone. She was texting me saying that she still loved me, and wanted to be friends. I told her that although I'm a clinically depressed friendless hermit, I'm no one's second best, or substitute. I think she lost it when I said that, and she blocked me on all social media, and I done the same. I've deleted her number, pictures, and everything. I'm done, and I strangely feel positive from this all. No doubt this'll disappear after an hour and I'll cry again, but hey, it's for the best. The other night, she said the distance was the problem. When I offered to do a college course in Scotland which meant I'd move in about 4-5 months with the help of a student loan, she suddenly backed off and said 'I'm not happy anymore'. Fuck her. I called her a cheat, and to not come calling back. I doubt I'll ever meet anyone else. I mean, look at my life. Look at me. BUT I feel a bit free. I really do now. Thanks everyone. It's good that you had enough self respect not to let her play around with you like that. I really hope you get better. Take care.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 18, 2018 13:48:49 GMT -5
Well, you can guess by me typing this that I haven't went through with anything. Not yet, anyway. Loads of this posts have touched my heart dearly, and I've cried reading loads of them. I'm just not in a good place, and I don't see how it's going to improve. Anyways, bit of an update: The girl messaged me for a few days there, wanting to know if I was alright, and still wanting me to come over to Scotland. She said she still thinks we could stand a chance someday. Well, after talking to her there for a few days, a bit of truth came out. Turns out she's been seeing the guy, and admitted that they had kissed. I've blocked her, blocked her number, and that's it. I don't think I could deal with anymore. I broke down and told my mum about the whole stuff, including what I'm typing next. I've been self-harming myself through razorblades and burning myself for a few days now. I also haven't been eating (lost 11 pounds in weight in 3 days), and I haven't been sleeping either. I just can't get her out of my head, and alongside that, my life is a mess. I'm just very alone. Me and my brother are planning on doing more things together though. I've removed all social media (not that I had many on it anyway due to being friendless), and basically have no reason to own a phone which I'm paying £40 a month for. I've started driving lessons though. Pretty terrifying, but I guess it gives me something to do. This just hurts a lot. Some part of me is still planning suicide, and my mum freaked out at that, and is booking me an appointment with the doctor right away. Not even a high dosage of antidepressants are taking any heat out. I don't know what to do. I'm up here, watching old episodes of game shows, in a state of tiredness, yet can't sleep. Because I can't get this out of my head. I can't do life anymore, not that I have one anyway. Thanks for everything though. You guys are literally amazing, and you all don't know how much you're worth and actually mean to me, especially Tom who I'm gutted I haven't heard from for a bit. *gives you a big hug and waits for you to let go first* If you’re embarrassed about learning how to drive at your age, don’t be. I was around your age when I got my driver’s license. I only had my overprotective aunt to supervise my driving when I had my learner’s permit, and I had to drag her through it kicking and screaming. It was hysterical, but driving meant everything to me and I pushed until I finally made it. I was anxious about driving too. Stay in your lane, always do your checks before turning the wheel, and watch the car in front of you. The rest of what you learn is still important, but if you focus on those things first, your anxiety will dissipate and the rest will come easier. Never drive when you’re too emotional; it’s a distraction. Be ready to get honked at and called names when you're new to driving and you make a mistake or the other driver is just an asshole. I worry about someone doing that to you and you taking it too hard. I didn’t know whether to say anything, but I agreed with the person who said the girl you were with didn’t come off well in your own story, even though it seems you tried to make her look blameless. You did the right thing shutting her out, but I’m sorry you had to do that. I don’t know if this makes you feel any better, but I’ve been getting my own heart broken looking for someone on the dating websites over the past few months. Shallow women, fake profiles set up by scammers, too many women my age who are single moms. Give an honest answer to the wrong question and they stop talking to you. It’s tough. That’s why I’ve decided to step away for a while and focus on putting together a new circle of friends, because I need that support when it’s not going so well with the ladies. It sounds like you should do the same. There’s a lot of talk now about how hard it is for women, and I’m not trying to discredit that, but the unblemished truth is that both genders are terrible and we’re just a terrible species generally. Neither gender is innocent. I think praying mantises treat their partners better than we do. Just try to find guy friends and friends who happen to be female for now. We’re here, but we can’t all be with you in your living room or take you out to lunch. You need people you can talk to in the flesh. Maybe not about all this, but even talking to them about trivial issues would be healthy for you. Maybe there’s even some people at work who would like to get to know you better? Don’t give up having a phone. You shouldn’t have to pay £40 a month. I don’t know what’s available in your area, but in the US we have plans from smaller carriers that only charge $20 or less for basic service with little or no data and you can add space as you go. You’ll want a phone for when you’re ready to start socializing and at the very least it will become a necessity for GPS or to call someone when you have your driver’s license and you get lost or your car breaks down (I know I did. In Detroit, no less.) I wish I knew what to say about the self harm. When I was your age and unemployed with nothing but time on my hands, I used to hit myself. Not because I was depressed or suicidal, but because I was full of rage at people who had wronged me. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do to them because of the consequences it would have involved, and I couldn’t take it out on anyone else, but it felt like someone had to answer for those wrongs, so, I hit myself. Lucky for me I couldn’t hit worth a damn and I never really got myself injured. All I know to say is that you need to find some other outlet for those feelings that doesn’t bring you physical harm. There has to be something. At least find an additional part time job or take up something where you’re too busy to dwell on those feelings. You mentioned that driving is helping you; that’s wonderful. Find more projects like that. I work full time and I’m always looking for work on the side, firstly because I need the money, but as a side benefit I simply don’t have time to dwell on things I shouldn’t be thinking about. About sitting in your room watching old shows, boy have I been there. I’d zone in on something and watch it obsessively. Not because it was that good or even to fill in time, but because it insulated me from my own thoughts. I didn’t even care how many times I’d watched it before, I just wanted to hear voices in the room so I’d feel like I had company. I won’t tell you to stop doing that, because maybe that’s what you need for right now, after this breakup. Like I said, indulge yourself and take all the time you need. And don't feel too bad about it, because guess what's popular now? Binge watching tv shows. Throwing the day away and watching a whole season in one sitting, maybe with one other person in the room if you're lucky. People aren't as connected to each other personally as they used to be, and a lot of us are getting lonely. It's not just you. But, please remember that these are distractions and they can’t change or solve anything. There’s a purpose for them, definitely, but it’s only for keeping you occupied while you aren’t being productive. You need something real. You need to be involved in something that has its own set of concerns and keeps your life moving. Just focusing on passive entertainment always leads you back to square one, wondering why nothing’s changed. That’s what I’m working on myself. I recently signed up an account at Meetup.com and when the weather gets nicer I want to start getting out to the local events that are posted on there. I want to meet people who share my interests and find projects to work on with them. Not only will that keep me occupied, but it will make my old problems and dramas seem more distant because I’ll have invested myself in these new people. Please do the same for yourself. It is hard putting yourself out there and trying to go from being total strangers with people to acquaintances and then friends, but you’ve got to do it. I’ve got to do it. No one’s gonna do it for us. My messages are this long because I can’t help but see myself in you a great deal. My early twenties probably even outrank my early teens as the worst time in my life. I want you to just look forward. Don’t stop and get discouraged by what’s going on around you, just keep looking straight ahead and move forward. Don’t hurt yourself, please. Keep coming here so we know you’re ok.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 17, 2018 20:21:32 GMT -5
[Click through the images on the embedded tweet so you can read the headline in the first pic.]
Seriously, after I saw that episode, I immediately thought, "This is more true than it even thinks it is."
For those who haven't seen BoJack Horseman (it's a fantastic series), there's an episode titled "Thoughts and Prayers" where the female lead hates guns but ends up carrying a gun herself and then starts a movement for women to carry them to defend against rape. The movement takes off and guns become popular with women. Mass shootings happen frequently throughout the episode, and as in real life nobody does anything, until one finally happens with the twist being the shooter is female. The state of California promptly bans all guns.
This was meant to be over the top satire, or at least it was presented that way, but I don't doubt that that's exactly what would happen. If the 2nd Amendment debate were to somehow become a women's rights issue, positions would change. Fast. Same if it were identified with any other group than conservative white men overcompensating for their insecurities. I've long felt that it's ironic that the group that always talks about the need for civilians to own assault rifles to protect against government tyranny is also the last group that would actually be targeted if the feds somehow needed to use brute force to usurp more control than what they already have. And that it's the groups the gun nuts typically hate - immigrants, LGBT especially trans, illicit drug users, racial minorities, etc. - who would most actually need the right to bear arms, because it's those groups the government would target first after scapegoating them with the same type of dangerous rhetoric and propaganda they're using now.
Case in point, about what I just said about drug users: I just saw Trump doing a rally where he calls for drug dealers to get the death penalty. And the Secular Talk channel on youtube had the perfect take on this: he's not talking about big pharma. He's not talking about the drug alcohol, which is responsible for 75,000 deaths in the US each year, so he's not talking about dragging the CEO of Budweiser out of his house and forcing him into an electric chair. No, he's talking about street dealers. People who turned to a black market because they were shafted by a broken system and weren't born into money like this horse's ass who started with "a small loan of a million dollars" and went on to spend his whole life scamming people for money he didn't need. And one of Nixon's aides just recently came out and admitted that they started the war on drugs so they could jail hippies and African Americans who weren't likely to vote for them. That was the whole motive to begin with. Those are groups the government would come after in a hostile takeover, and it's because they're poor and they have no influence like the NRA and their rich friends. They would never come for Cletus and JimBob down at the shooting range because they need them for votes.
And I'm not even being fair to Cletus and JimBob, because most of the NRA's members support universal background checks. Just not the NRA itself. The NRA actually started out as an organization that was in favor of sensible gun regulation, but over time they started making too much money thanks to these irresponsible policies. And now they're trying to distract us with a decades old debunked discussion about fucking violence in video games.
The gun debate is identity politics. That's all it is. Just parrot this list of talking points and call liberals pussies and you'll be seen as a strong, virile man. I'm no radical feminist, and I'm not for putting things in such simplistic terms, but in this case I think it really is that simple.
You want serious gun reform, start a movement where it becomes a women's self defense issue. You want idiots to stop being idiots, change the issue so their demagogues can't make it sound like it's about them.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 13, 2018 19:03:06 GMT -5
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 11, 2018 12:32:05 GMT -5
Good, not great. I watched all the episodes on my Kindle during my lunch breaks. It's okay for that, but I probably wouldn't have devoted any spare time to it. It's kind of predictable, even for me.
I do like the show's use of the quote about being so focused on being the hero of your own movie you don't realize you're the villain in someone else's. One thing it does a good job at is showing each character's motivation and point of view even when they say something that's way out of line.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 11, 2018 10:38:02 GMT -5
Hi,
I remember your thread. As it turns out, I'm in the process of taking a freelancing gig where I'm expected to write a short bio and I just wrote a diary entry expressing my fear of not having a good enough past to even write that bio. I won't spill it all out here, but I'm older than you and my list of accomplishments or lack thereof, both social and professional, is considerably more embarrassing than yours. But I've resolved to try anyway and see what I can say without outing myself as a "loser."
Listen, I get that it doesn't feel like it now, but 23 is still very young. You might be bringing up your age because you feel like you haven't met some quota of accomplishments and that proves your luck will never change. All I can do is tell you that just isn't true. Your past will stop dominating you as soon as you decide to only look ahead and move forward.
About the girlfriend ... let it hurt. Take all the time you need to grieve and don't feel ashamed of it. When you've indulged in that to the point of boredom, you'll be ready to move on. Maybe not to another girl, but move on to something.
I know what it's like to be treated as badly as you were in school, I know what it's like to be literally friendless as an adult, and I know what it's like to be suicidal. A few years ago I even bought a rope and learned how to tie a noose in case I finally decided to hang myself.
What helped me to keep those thoughts at bay was taking someone's advice, which was to just stop giving a fuck. Not in the sense of giving up on the future or not trying to better my situation, but rather to stop thinking that happiness is a thing to chase after. Don't let yourself think you'll be a happier person when you move out or lose your virginity. You can't depend on your circumstances because it doesn't work that way.
Just live for the point of experiencing life and stop giving a fuck. See what's out there in the world. When you go to work, do it to see if it's a good day or a bad one. When you go to a movie, don't read any reviews and just go to see if you'll like it or not. Next time you're happy about something, just say to yourself, "I like this. This is good for now." Because that's all it's good for; for now. Whatever's making you happy at the moment won't last, and you're okay knowing that, because you don't need to be happy. And when you're sad, you'll know that that isn't going to last forever either.
The other big thing that helps is knowing the difference between wanting to kill yourself and not wanting to live anymore the way you're living. I don't know you, but from reading your posts since you started that original thread, I don't think you want to kill yourself. But it sounds like you're just really tired. You don't want to go on living with the way things seem to have always been for you. I think you're desperate to stop the cycle, and you don't know how, but you feel like you'll do anything to get out of it even if it means taking your own life. If you feel that desperation, you don't want to kill yourself. You just want out. Use that desperation to motivate yourself and make your situation better. I know that seems to contradict what I said in the last paragraph, but you have to learn to really care for yourself along the way and know that happiness comes from within.
If all else fails and you still need a mental wall to keep you from suicide, just know that the great majority of suicide attempts fail. Even if you succeed, any method you can think of, no matter how painless it seems, is going to hurt. Badly. Your body was made to fight anything that tries to kill you, including yourself. And you'll almost invariably leave some poor soul with a terrible mess to clean up, your loved ones investigated for foul play, not to mention the trauma you'll cause whoever finds your body. But more likely than that, you end up in a hospital with some horrible injury to live through on top of whatever you were trying to escape from. You might even be incapacitated. Maybe you're like me when I feel this way and you think it's unfair to be forced to live a life you no longer want, but that's our situation.
I believe you can change your life into something more bearable because you're still very young and from what you've said, I don't think you're in a situation where you're immobile or in prison or anything that's keeping you stuck. Finances might be holding you back, but that can always change. And if things don't change, at least try to stay focused on just living. You don't need happiness all the time, just appreciate it when it's there.
If you can be encouraged to seek help, I encourage it. It's better for you to get professional help, but if you just want unprofessional help, PM me or come back here and tell us what's going on. Or if something's going on that's too personal to share with others ... as I mentioned, I keep a personal diary that I write to every day. I have it in Google Docs so I can get to it any time from any device. It's like having someone to talk to at all times and not having any reason to worry about what they might think, because you're talking to a computer. So maybe that would help you.
Wow, I just looked at your old thread and it's a year older than I thought it was. Glad you've stayed with us. Take care.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 10, 2018 18:41:04 GMT -5
One of my supervisors at work is in his late fifties or so. I told him last month that I went to see Noel Gallagher and he smiled and said, "Oh, is he still around?" and I said yes. Then he said, "Does he still do that thing with the watermelons?"
Ugh.
He had no idea who Oasis were and didn't know Wonderwall or Champagne Supernova or anything else.
But, I still meet people my own age or people who care more about music that know about them and think they were pretty cool. Maybe that's a little different about southeast Michigan? I don't know. I think they have a stronger hold in Canada too.
But yeah, in the US in general it's mostly Wonderwall, fighting, and ripping off the Beatles that they're remembered for.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 10, 2018 9:53:27 GMT -5
im not that stupid to know the tweet is fake either way it looks funny as fuck and could very well be real Apologies but I didn't know what to think because I almost believed it myself. As we've learned it only takes one person with access to a corporate twitter account and that could have been real. The President of the United States is being credibly sued by a porn star after trying to cover up an affair, and that's not even the fifth biggest thing to distract us from poverty, a doomsday climate, mass incarceration, and the coming of World War 3. Nothing is too out there to happen anymore.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 9, 2018 18:10:17 GMT -5
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Mar 3, 2018 18:50:10 GMT -5
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 21, 2018 9:46:03 GMT -5
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 19, 2018 20:57:32 GMT -5
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 18, 2018 15:35:24 GMT -5
Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven Of Bliss
Famous person you'd like to be close friends with even if they weren't famous or wealthy?
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 18, 2018 12:59:37 GMT -5
I'd be a better president than Trump.
Seriously.
I've seen some level of corruption and incompetence in all the men holding that office that I've studied or lived under, but even among the worst, even while I'd be more morally sound than say Andrew Jackson, I'd hesitate to call myself savvy or educated enough in my own time to be a better man for the job overall than any of them. Until now. I've never before felt with certitude that the United States and the world would actually be better off with me sitting in the Oval Office.
Let's go. I'm 35 and I was born in California. I can start tomorrow.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 15, 2018 17:41:40 GMT -5
Just to confirm, there was no opener for Detroit ? No supporting act, no. Doors opened at 7 and they just played recorded music from bands like Cake, Stereolab, Primal Scream and Kid Koala till Noel got on a little after 9.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 15, 2018 17:27:00 GMT -5
Still hiring only the best people.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 13, 2018 18:34:26 GMT -5
I have the Paul Anka CD that that's on and I just love his version of Wonderwall. Always have to listen to it more than once when I'm playing that album.
Don't behead me.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 11, 2018 16:33:29 GMT -5
I liked the end of the fucking world. I'd watch it during my lunch break and it was good for passing the time.
I finished watching the only season of Atypical. I don't recommend unless you or someone you know is on the spectrum and you can relate to it. The casting, dialogue, stories and even the characters' names are very predictable. But I have Asperger's and I think it does a pretty realistic job of portraying autism and its effects and getting some humor out of it.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 10, 2018 21:06:27 GMT -5
I've been wanting to do it for quite a while but I don't want to put in the effort of learning it. The instructions (guidelines?) for it seem too vague and I keep thinking they're never going to work. The weirdest one is to just lie in bed repeating the phrase "tonight I'm going to have lucid dreams." I tried that one night and my skeptical side was just going "okay, good luck with that."
Had the worst luck at keeping a dream journal. I couldn't write anything down without getting so woken up I had to pee and by the time I was done I'd forgotten most of the dream if not all of it.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 10, 2018 20:25:35 GMT -5
We all heard him sing it years ago when the SOTSOG demos were leaked so I'm not sure what the surprise even is?
I was there last night and Be Careful What You Wish For sounded particularly great. Interesting choices of GLIO, LBL and TIOBI as I don't think those would be high on most people's lists but maybe he wants to flesh out his catalogue by giving them a new life.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 10, 2018 17:55:13 GMT -5
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 10, 2018 13:46:55 GMT -5
I don't seem to have many to pick from, but in high school our class walked to a pizza place for lunch one day and me and my friend were walking about 15 feet ahead of everyone else. Just to be random I turned around and did the DX crotch chop, and then just after I turned back a woman next to us on the street driving a minivan slammed into the back of a Comcast truck at a red light. No one was hurt but she was face palming. I've always wondered if she was distracted by seeing me do that and that's what caused the accident. Later I asked my friend if he thought any of our class saw me do it and he said "No, but I think Ms. Garnett did."
What do you envy about the opposite sex?
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 9, 2018 11:33:11 GMT -5
Anyone else checking to see if Detroit tonight is going to be cancelled? I'm close enough to get there on time but the ride home would be hellish. This winter storm couldn't happen any other day.
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 5, 2018 19:04:50 GMT -5
The US stock market is a barometer of economic activity and since President Trump was elected President it has skyrocketed. Now we say it's all Obama's fault, right?
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Post by As You Built The Moon on Feb 3, 2018 14:07:57 GMT -5
The GOP tax cut gave the Koch brothers 1,400,000,000 dollars. He's deleted this tweet, of course. Beady’s Here Now I hope your political views are just shtick and in real life you're aware of how phenomenally stupid it is to think people like this care about doing right by you.
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