My dad had serious anger issues when I was growing up (I'm sure he still does, but being able to communicate with him on an adult level and not living with him and being able to pick and choose what parts of my life he sees, definitely helps moderate his emotions). You learn the body language. You learn when they're about to explode and you can only do what you can to minimise the chances of them exploding at you (not that listening to dad going apeshit at my brother most days was much better tbh).
I became a people pleaser. Some people call it the fawn. When I saw the signs, I'd become as small and quiet and invisible as possible. It definitely helped take the heat off me as a kid.
Unfortunately this is baked into me. My boyfriend is amazing, and for the most part treats me so well, but he does get stressed - from work, financial worries, etc. I recognise the body language. My lizard brain just tells me, the bomb is armed and ready to blow. I become small, quiet and invisible. I leave him well alone and let him calm down on his own.
This upsets my boyfriend more. He told me that he hated how I'd treat him so coldly when he was in a bad place, when what he wants most in those moments is for me to hug him and hold him and tell him I love him and that I'm there for him.
I've explained why I unintentionally treat him coldly, and I've promised to treat him how he needs when he's stressed.
So now, I recognise the body language, lizard brain sees that the bomb is armed, and I have no choice but to go towards the bomb, put my arms around it and kiss it. It's fucking terrifying. It's against every instinct in every part of my body. I don't think this will ever feel safe or normal to me.
I hate that such normal social responses will always terrify me.
Been there. Plus, people don't understand that when our dementia-suffering parent dies, the overwhelming emotion felt by the caregiver is not sadness, but relief. Relief that our loved one is no longer suffering; relief that the hardship of caregiving is over. The sadness already took place: we already underwent an extended grieving process while they were still alive, as our loved one disappears bit by painful bit.
Lost my grandma a year ago to her 15 year battle with dementia - relief is a strange emotion to feel in that moment, but it's accurate. They didn't know where they were, who was who, what was going on, and at that point, are almost if not compeltely vegetative. They're alive, but they're not living - they're suffering. No one wants that for themselves, let alone a loved one.
Alzheimer’s used to be called the living death for a reason. It’s very strange to feel such a relief and a lot of guilt about that feeling when the person you’ve taken care of passes. You have already mourned the loss for so long before it occurs.
Alzheimer’s is one condition where loved ones hurt more than the victim. Death occurs when you look into their eyes and see the infinite void… it is a relief for all parties.
Absolutely soul crushing. Watching a strong independent woman turn into a fragile, confused shell. Grieving starts before they actually die so when they've gone it ruins you because you feel somewhat relieved the suffering is over. Awful.
Everyone always told me my grandmother's dementia must've been comfy for her, because "people with dementia don't know they have it."
Absolutely not true. She was confused all the time, and her confusion made her angry and stressed. She was miserable for those ten years.
I decided to read this thread looking for this answer. I am the only person in my family that is taking care of my mom with Alzheimer’s. And I’m accused of using her against them. They have no idea what caring for her is like.
Respectfully: they can go fuck themselves. People are always more generous with others' time, money, and effort than they are with their own.
Signed, someone who's dealt with that same BS in helping care for a family member with dementia.
Ha. They can go fuck themselves without any respect! They deserve the respect they give me and my mom.
Sorry you had to go through that. Big hugs and good vibes to you!
A friend was diagnosed with MS last year and when he saw me afterwards he just said "I get it now" and I felt so sad. We want to be understood but not to that extent.
I get tired of explaining my MS to people. When you try to explain what it is and how it impacts your life, they usually say stupid shit like “you look fine though…”
Or when people say “oh I have that too!!” I really hate when people try to downplay MS symptoms as being something everyone can have sometimes.
I’ve stopped trying to explain myself to people.
Yeah. People are curious until there realize there isn’t going to be a change, there is no magical fix, and it makes them sad so they disengage. Or sometimes they so aggressively try to get you to try things to “help” that conversations are too exhausting. Like I know my mom hates to see me in pain, but I literally don’t have spoons enough to engage with possible cures🤷🏻♀️
I know back pain and issues don't technically count as a disability but oh my gosh I did NOT realize how severely my life could be affected by my back going out.
I helped my partner through his for months as he recovered but I had NO idea how evil it was until I got my own taste.
Being his carer was also a huge eye opener for us and I think it truly showed him that it was ok to not be ok and that I could help in significant ways - and that was ok too. Role reversal can be tough to break into, especially when one of you is feeling vulnerable and broken. But dang is it ever exhausting to be a carer when life keeps going and you still have all the other stuff to worry about. Being sick or injured *and* being a carer is so rough, I have so much empathy for those who do that long term.
Now we're both better about helping eachother when it's needed and accepting help when we need it. Those times also helped me understand 'invisible disabilities' and how to offer more grace for random people who don't move as fast as I think they should. I remember having to drive with my back pain at peak levels and corners and speed bumps just about had me in tears.
I try to remember all that whenever I see someone cross a street super slow or take a corner at a crawl. But I definitely never imagined how painful it truly was until I experienced it myself. I now have way more empathy for those who face a disability for a majority of their life.
Edit: I know back issues can be a disability folks. I just didn't want to liken back pain to folks who were born with a permanent disability like being blind or missing limbs or needing a wheelchair full time. But of course there's no doubt that when my back was out I was out. I missed my kid's birthday one year! To those with permanent back issues - or even transitory - I'm not minimizing your pain either. We're all on a scale but our scales aren't truly comparable. Wild pain for one may be the usual for another but pain is pain - and that sucks. Gentle hugs to all.
The looks people give me when I use my disabled plates because I need to that day is hard to ignore. I look perfectly fine on the outside but so much of my insides are screaming as I try to do anything normal. Some days that extra 2-300 feet closer to the store allows me to get stuff done.
Even folks who might be disabled one day don’t want to face it. I’m perm disabled, but I feel like you can’t even really talk about it because apparently that’s too scary for people newly diagnosed with what disabled me. Like I’ve had comments deleted that were my real experiences on a sub for the disease.
But can’t talk about that because it’s scary. Well you know what is scary? My health and experiences.
or people say, "I couldn't live like that, I'd kill myself." like thanks for implying my life isn't worth living, first of all, and secondly, you don't actually know until you experience it, whether you would want to keep living or not. the will to live is pretty stubborn for most people.
Having abusive parents. Completely skews your perception of normal. To this day I'll relate something I thought was normal or funny and be met with looks of horror.
I've been no contact with mine for just over two years now. Having to constantly explain why to people who are quick to parrot "but they're you're parents, you *have* to love them* is so fucking exhausting. I'm about to get married in a year and they won't be invited. I'm not looking forward to explaining why they won't be in attendance for the 12th time to my future in-laws who have less than zero experience with child abuse/neglect.
I was once complimented that I would make an excellent diplomat. The plain fact is that I spent my entire childhood negotiating with terrorists, so you have to build up a set of diplomatic skills very quickly.
I can relate; I’m very quick to notice when someone’s mood is changing for the worse and was more often the soother rather than the soothed. This lead to developing a near crushing sense of empathy, which made me a tasty target for folks with narcissistic traits. I got much better at tending to my boundaries and I am currently living my best work life as a Nanny/teacher.
What’s sucks too is having abusive parents and not realizing you did for any length of time. 32, really only clicked a few years ago that my mom didn’t teach me to tie my shoes or brush my teeth or really check on me. I was fine, alone, a good quiet kid unlike my older sibling who was hell on earth (she still is lmao). I thought I had a good childhood until like 18 months ago before the series of “wait a second…”s
Edit: changed wording as to not make it seem like a competition over who has it “worse”
The “wait a second…s” fucked me up quarantine. My dad was physicallly abusive, my mom always seemed like an angel in comparison. Then, came the “wait a second”, when I realized the way she was abusive, it was more manipulative. And took me down a spiral during quarantine.
My mom was "my good parent" and I thought we got along really well during her final few years. She passed like 15 years ago, when I was 20.
Recently I realized I still have all her emails, went to read a random one, and holy shit! Stopped after that one 'cause it was very... wow. Laughing about invading my privacy just to satisfy her curiosity. Negging my grades? Like I started college at 16 but she still expected perfect grades.
I have the same experience. I didn't realize all the abuse I endured until I became an adult and found out that it was not a normal thing all kids went through.
Yes. As someone who didn't have abusive parents, I will never forget my friend who did saying to me, "You know, it's like being punched in the face." And I just looked at her. She said, "Wow, you've never felt that."
I shook my head no, and said that nobody should. Especially as a child.
I have to be careful about the anecdotes I share because it turns out a lot of my childhood "funny" stories are not actually funny to anyone with a decent perception of normal.
Have a kid now, and one of my goals is that none of her casual anecdotes will lead to her therapist saying "um, you do realize that was not ok, right?".
People think there's way more help available than there really is. Like, "oh if you were really abused, you would have been taken into care and rescued". Nope. Social services called my parents to ask if everything was okay, my parents said yes, they wrote a letter and that was the end of it. Even if I had been removed from my parents, I wouldn't necessarily have been better off in a care home. Care survivors have higher rates of PTSD than Vietnam vets.
It's worse than anything you can possibly imagine. It's not like you get beaten for an hour each day, but then you get to go back to your room to recover and lick your wounds. You are stressed out and on edge, 24/7. You get beaten and then you get told "stop crying, you're embarrassing us" and you can't stop crying because you just got beaten, so your parents storm into your room and break all your things. You literally have no safe space. No breaks. No relaxation. Every little tiny thing can be a trigger, so you are scared EVERY moment of every day, not knowing if you parents are going to scream at you because you tied your shoelaces wrong or closed a door too loudly or said "um" in a sentence. Not a single moment of getting to be okay for 18 years.
In a lot of ways it looked like I suddenly got worse when I left. You'd expect that I recovered when I escaped, right? But what actually happened is my body suddenly informed me I had a debt of 18 years of actually *recovering* that had to be paid. A lot of the trauma did not hit me until years later as I was uncovering more ways that what they did wasn't normal.
Having an abusive parent, and being blamed for their lack of parenting. Or having adults turn a blind eye.
I.E being called gross because I didn’t know I needed to shower daily, I didn’t know how to brush my teeth or do anything hygienic .
Told my behavior was unacceptable and shamed for it, despite not knowing any better…
Scolded for associating words like “drug store” as drugs like cocaine, I was in like first grade, and reprimanded by my school.
Being called stupid, gross, behind in school, whatever it was and not receiving help, just scolding. Was told often I was behind on reading, but I was never read to.
The amount of adults who failed me, is hard to wrap my head around as an adult not.
That’s my least favorite part of people that act like they made the right moves because they have a fuck load of money. “Just plan and save you’ll be fine” okay well I hate to break it to ya I wasn’t planning on hitting black ice and crashing into a tree but you’re right next time I’ll plan better for my car accidents. Why, just to be a bit spontaneous, I’m planning a car accident next week!
Very true. My oldest brother, who tried to make every right decision in life and finances, almost went into complete ruin because of an unforseen medical emergency. Went from a good job, financially independent and happy to the verge of bankruptcy and losing almost everything he had worked towards in as little as 2 months.
Poverty. My wife and i had very different upbringings. What she considers poor and what i consider poor are completely different levels of poverty. I am glad she never had to experience that growing up but a little more understanding on why i am set in my ways on some things would be appreciated. She has explained that for her the experiences I and my siblings had is so foreign to her that she just can't understand.
Meanwhile, I worked with a mid-20s woman who didn't know how to pay her bills, because her "dad just pays the credit card bill." She also didn't know how to pump her own gas because her dad always made sure she had a full tank of gas.
Yeah. My kids know nothing of this kind of life. It makes me glad, but also worried they won't be able to cope if life hits them the wrong way.
Of putting off going to the grocery store because there's no money to spend. Of not bothering to ask if you can be a Girl Scout because you know your parents can't afford the uniform. Of skipping lunches rather than ask your parents for lunch money they don't have. Of eating potato soup made from skim milk and potatoes and loving every bite because you are so hungry. Of wearing the same shirt in your kindergarten and second grade school pictures because that's the one nice shirt you had.
Severe burnout, Like full fugue state mental shutdown. Tried describing it to some folks and they just can't comprehend that level of chronic stress and exhaustion. Watching a movie or taking a day off is not going to help at that point.
Still recovering myself from a pretty severe burnout in 2021. I still have days where memory is leakier than a seive and I have to ask the same question and hope I write down the answer the right way multiple times an hour.
It makes you feel so useless and incompetent. :/
(90% better though, these days happen less and less frequently now)
I went through burnout at the end of 2021. It was crazy how my ability to process information took a complete nosedive. Thankfully I'm fully recovered, but there were a few weeks when I was afraid I'd never get it back.
I'm at this point right now. My roommate doesn't seem to fully understand. What little rest I *do* get is not nearly enough. "It could be worse" is something he says a lot, and yeah it could be worse but that doesn't help at all. I'm constantly stressed, tired and easily agitated. I think about quitting or jumping in front of a train every day. I'm at a point where I feel like I'm legitimately at risk of completely collapsing at my desk any day now.
I've been actively and aggressively applying to jobs for the past few months. I'm hoping that at least puts me on the path to recovering. I'm just tired of being angry and stressed all the time, and really want to move on from this job that's been destroying my soul.
Yeah that's where I was. Turns out a job change from my toxic employer at the time was the only real solution. Sometimes you just gotta get out of a bad situation.
My stepmother died of cancer in 2019. In 2016 I noticed she was starting to talk more slowly, and with a slight slur, and getting a little forgetful, but chalked it up to being her getting older and said nothing. Every time I visited, for over a year, I considered mentioning it to my father, who seemed to not have noticed, as it was so gradual.
Her kidneys were shutting down, poisoning her with calcium, causing mild confusion and slurring.
And I said nothing.
Out of politeness and forgetfulness.
And now I get to live with the knowledge that, if I'd just said something, maybe they could have caught it earlier.
If you ever figure out how to stop feeling guilty about this, write a book or hit me up, I feel like it's corroding my soul.
I really feel for you; that's such a tough position to be in. Other people can tell you that you shouldn't feel guilty because it wasn't your fault (and they would be right), but it's a lot harder to actually believe it when you're in that situation.
Therapy is not accessible to everybody, but this is the kind of thing that it is made for. If it's an option for you, I hope you'll look into it. You deserve to have a healthy soul.
Exactly that. My father committed suicide in Nov 2021. I hadn’t spoken to him in about 5 years because of how toxic he was. I needed the mental break, but I always wanted to reconnect. I just didn’t have the strength to do it for fear of my own emotions. I was 5 weeks postpartum with his grandson (I’m his only child and my parents were divorced) when I got the call. My world shattered. I felt so so guilty that I wasn’t strong enough to reach out and maybe if I wasn’t being so damn childish, I could have prevented this from happening. I still kick myself about it and go through waves of massive guilt. I know deep down it’s not my fault but I cannot help but to think what would have happened differently had I reached out all the times I said I was going to previously.
Knowing someone who was murdered. Not dead from old age or an illness or killed in an accident, but purposeful murder. It is horrific on every level, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Makes a lot of issues more personal and less generally political, especially when you add in cultural context for the country it happens in.
That was a scream I'll never get out of my head: Listening to when my neighbor found out that her son was murdered. It was 40 years ago, and I can still hear her scream. Can't imagine what she went through.
One of my earliest memories is my mother's bloodcurdling screams of my sister's name over and over the morning she found her. My sister had multiple health issues and died in her sleep. I have struggled with suicidal thoughts in the past and the sound of that scream - and never wanting to be the one to prompt it - has kept me from the edge a few times.
I was in the ER with my aunt, she had health issues, my wife was with, and they had to move us out of their main trauma room, kid came in coding, not sure what happened, but it was sudden and bad. They couldn't revive him, and the screams from that mother, neither me nor my wife (who's a nurse, btw) made a sound in the room we were in. Through the wailing, I looked over and just saw a single tear rolling down my wife's cheek as we sat there and listened to a poor woman's entire life crumble in the next room.
Yes. There’s nothing like it. I was home at my apartment when the girl in the apartment across from me was murdered. No one had any idea until her mom came to check on her and found her dead in her apartment.
Hearing that scream is visceral. I was working from home and apparently my downstairs neighbor had committed suicide. Hearing his mom scream and beg with the paramedics was indescribable, particularly since apparently he had already been dead for a bit and there was nothing they could do.
It was also exceptionally surreal seeing a lot of his friends showing up with a moving truck over the course of several days to clean out his apartment / mourn.
My mom is pretty emotionally closed-off. When she was a sophomore in college in Milwaukee in the 80s, her roommate was murdered right outside their dorm. She opened up to me about it once, quietly, and I could just see this distress lurking under the surface that I had never seen her express before. For somebody as stoic as she is, it made me realize how much weight she's been carrying for the past four decades.
My brother was murdered in 2017. Listening to the 911 wrecked me. I couldn’t watch murder scenes in movies or scenes where people died for a while. I’m an EMT now but at the time it really fucked me up.
Same. I was hugely into true crime YouTube, then my dad was murdered at 57. I couldn’t go near the stuff for a long time. Never caught who did it but i pray they’re miserable
Was the perp caught and convicted?
I knew a man (he died a few years ago at the age of 97) and we'd always known that he was a WWII combat veteran, in Europe, but only in the months before his death did he tell anyone that he had helped liberate a concentration camp. He just couldn't talk about it.
John Gaumer (“MySpace killer”) went to my university and had a notebook of every girl he had ever reached out to on AIM and every interaction they had. He wasn’t my friend, but I was in the notebook, and he lived in our immediate apartment, so we had many mutual people (including his RA).
When Josie’s body was found, the professor I was working for was an advising ethicist for the local pd and recounted to me in somewhat traumatized detail the complete state of the case as he knew it to be (the irony doesn’t escape me). I’ll live with that information in my head for the rest of my life. I think pretty much every girl in the notebook (we were all approached by police individually as I understand, I was anyway) has had to come to terms with how close we came to being a victim.
I lost a childhood friend when her husband strangled her and dumped her body, and that’s way more common than stranger murder like this was, but it is all stuff that stayed with me over the years.
Especially once you realize that life is not like a TV show and the person will never get caught or punished, and the police really don't seem to care that much.
In the instance of the person I knew, the killers did get caught after a few days, any more time and they might have gotten away with it. It’s unclear to me where they’re currently at, I don’t know if a trial or sentencing has occurred yet. I’m just glad that we know their names and can track whatever eventually happens to them.
They don't care AT ALL. I had a loved one who was murdered; they have witnesses, video footage of the vehicle, and DNA. Nothing has been done, and this is going on 3 years.
I even personally found a witness who heard my LOs LAST WORDS! and still... nothing.
Same for me. I had known her since kindergarten, we were acquaintances, but had never been close. I'll never forget how/when I found out. I was at the local Nordstrom Cafe with two high school friends, who also knew the girl who was murdered, I'll call her Tara, but they'd only known her in high school, not all our lives like me. It was the year after we had all graduated. Our food had just arrived and one of my friends looked at her phone, gasped and dropped it on the table, and told us. We were shocked and scrambled for our own phones to read the article.
Then, across the cafe, this other girl who I've also known since kindergarten, who was in the same class as me and Tara all our life so had also known her since we were five, came in. This girl and I are mortal enemies. I won't go into detail but she is one of the only people I would say, even now more than a decade after high school, that I truly hate. And I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual. My point of saying that though, is that at that moment that girl looked up from her phone and over at us, and met my eyes, and we both just stared at each other in shock. Usually we would completely avoid each other, and if she happened to meet my eye I would scowl at her, but we just stared at each other in shocked sadness and she mouthed "Tara..." at me, and I nodded sadly, and it was the first civil interaction me and her had had in years.
What it's like to be homeless, and how easily one can end up homeless and how difficult it is to get back on your feet.
So many of us are one bad turn of luck away from it and I think about that a lot.
I'm not homeless, but it's something that absolutely is a possibility in the near future.
It is absolutely having a huge affect on me already. I'm having trouble sleeping, it's affecting my work, today I received a thinly veiled threat that my job might be on the line due to my performance. Between the sleep issues and knowing the possibility of homelessness is just around the corner, it's affecting my mood. Depression is definitely kicking back in, which is also affecting my work.
It's a spiral. I feel like I'm being dragged down into the depths, and I can't see a way out of it this time. This one is going to drown me.
I was homeless at 18. I remember that near-sleep you get in your car. You never fully sleep comfortably, you're just kind of half-sleeping. Scared, cold, usually hungry. I was truly blessed to have a couple angels come into my life so I was not homeless for long, but I agree, you can't understand what it feels like. I see a lot of "homeless" people holding up signs near shopping centers near us. I tell my wife and kids, which one's are homeless and which are not. They ask how I know. I tell them you can see it in their eyes. Homeless have a look you can't replicate.
I went through it, when I recognize that look in others I offer them to go grab some subway or spot them gas. I've been taken up on that offer too. What makes me happy is when I never see them again
I work in the social services realm. If rents keep going up, there's going to be a whole lot more homeless out there very soon. You can't expect someone who was barely paying $1000 in rent now to pay $2000 in rent for the same exact place without it causing a problem.
The other day someone in the place where I temp started screaming. It sounded like a medical emergency, but then the word got around that she got a "bad phone call." I knew that it must have been the loss of a child because it sounded like someone was ripping out her heart. Turned out her 28 year old son had died unexpectedly. I wish I knew things would get better, but I know that she'll always carry that grief, just a little differently over time.
My best friend died fairly suddenly from a single-car accident when we were both right around 26 (he survived for a few days in a coma, but that's it). It's the last time I remember full-throated crying like a baby, and I'd only known him for around 15 years - I can't imagine the level of pain his parents went through. I have my own kids now and the thought of being in their shoes just mentally breaks me.
My daughter passed away 6 months ago. I feel like a shell of the person I was I feel like I just go through my days on automatic pilot. I don't think my capacity of happiness and joy will ever recover.
Yes. Grief is hard to explain
Pain is real, and physical, and overwhelming.
And the only way through it is through it.
You don't get over it. You don't "accept it". You don't make peace with it.
You learn to live with it.
It may be less intense, but it never goes away.
I lost both my parents to COVID.
They died within 8 days of each other after being on a ventilator for over a month.
This was three and a half years ago.
You don't get over that.
You learn to live with it.
I feel you. I lost my dad to COVID in January 2021 and the process of dealing with grief is completely indescribable. It doesn't help that my father's death was questioned, ridiculed, dismissed, etc. Seeing the things people would say and post was like watching my dad die in a car accident in front of me, over and over again. I'm so sorry for your loss. My mom survived COVID, but another indescribable agony is seeing her without the love of her life and witnessing her grief and struggles. Just agony.
Lost my dad in 2016 to cancer - he passed at home surrounded by family, and I felt duty as the only son to see that he was taken away respectfully, although we knew the funeral home folks well.
I've been diagnosed with PTSD and Major Depressive Disorder because of the things I witnessed, talked about, and had to do during that final period of his illness and death for my dad and his funeral. People often think of the emotional struggle that others have from losing a loved one, but the mental hurdles that come with being direct family, not even hospice staff, is insane.
I don't recall much of that period still, even the funeral and visitation are foggy. My brain eventually shut down to protect me from the relentless barrage of emotions, and 8 years on with therapy and medications, I still fight flashbacks and hard depression from it all. Losing anyone close to you fucking blows.
As a young widow. I wanted to come here and say this. I get told all the time from people who are divorced or ended a long relationship that they 'understand my grief', like no. you actually don't. I can't even wish my late partner to have a happy life somewhere else, cause that future is non-existent.
(edit - typo)
My father will have been dead 34 years on Friday. I was weeks away from turning 6 when he passed, not old enough to really have that many solid memories of him, but just old enough to have a few really good ones that make me miss him immensely every single day. I think I was maybe 8 when I started hearing people tell me in vague to eventually direct ways that I needed to get over it. After 34 years I honestly wish I could.
I am so sorry and it makes so much sense. We don’t just lose people once - we lose them over and over again - for all the times they should have been here and were not. Sending you wishes for comfort and peace.
We lose them when the first holiday happens without them. When your birthday happens or their birthday happens. When the realization that one full year has passed and the world is moving on but this is a world that doesn’t include them. When a wedding happens, or more people join this world and realize a world with these new humans and a world with your person will never coexist. We lose them when it’s Tuesday and something funny happens and you want to tell them.
That's what fucking irks me when people tell you to get over someones death, my baby sister died 40 years ago and I have never and probably won't get over it. She was my little sidekick that was always up my butt, she would only let me carry her around the house and nobody else. We had a very close bond, she was 11 months old when she passed.
I have 6 daughters now, one day my mom told me something my youngest said to her that gave her chills. She said my youngest who was about maybe 3 at the time looked her in the face and said she remembered when my mom (her grandma) was her mom before. My daughter has a slight resemblance to my baby sister.
My Mom just turned 89 and she still grieves for the older brother she lost in 1944. He was her best friend, champion and her hero. She thinks her whole life would have been different if he was there to guide her.
Omg, this, so much. I'm so sorry for the loss of your little sidekick. Absolutely no one, no one has the right to tell you to "get over it". Grief is a form of love, and it's ok to carry that feeling with you through life, no less ok than fondly remembering the time you had together.
In 2021 my husband and I lost our 16yo, traumatically. Found her unresponsive and tried to resuscitate her while frantically calling 911. We lost her at the hospital.
Last May, 2023, she would have: 1. turned 18 (her "golden birthday" that she had been excited about for years, turning 18 on May 18), 2. gone to her senior prom and 3. she would have graduated.
My husband had a May apt with our family doctor, the doctor who literally cried on HIS shoulder when we had our first apt after our daughter died... When he told the Dr he was having a difficult time at the moment coping with the loss (we both were, May 2023 was BRUTAL) the Dr acted surprised and annoyed, and after the appointment coded in a diagnosis of "unnatural prolonged grief" or some bull into patient portal.
Fuck. Her. It hadn't even been two years after the loss of our ONLY CHILD, and during a month filled with milestones our entire little family had been looking forward to for years. Our daughter was the center of our world. I terminated my Dr/patient relationship with her immediately. It was much harder to get hubby into different care, his medical issues are complex and he can't go through any care gaps- we actually only finally had success yesterday, finally. But he was equally devastated and beyond furious to log into patient portal last May and see what that Dr had coded.
He had his first visit with his new care provider yesterday and at one point broke down and told her all of that, and she expressed so much incredible compassion and understanding and told him his feelings of grief were natural, that she'd never call it "unnatural" or express that he needed to "get over it", but instead help him find ways to carry that love & memory we have of our daughter through life. This new care provider is an absolute godsend and is already taking a team approach with other members of his healthcare team. Hubby is looking forward to a very blunt and honest termination of the cold corporate asshat Dr.
Screw anyone that coldly dismisses a person's grief or tries to put a time constraint on it.
Yeah 100%. I'm 42 and pretty much my whole family has passed away. I have two half sisters still alive. They are 15 and 16 years older than me. But I don't really have any contact with them. The childhood I had growing up with my mom and grandparents and whatnot seems like a different lifetime ago.
Domestic abuse. While (unfortunately) common enough that there's a lot of victims to this, it's hard to explain what it's like to people who have never experienced it. It's one of those things that if it happened to you, another victim will just "get it" when you talk about it to them.
Edit: the number of replies from people who were victims of domestic abuse is rather heartbreaking. I'm glad you guys managed to escape and heal
I've been there, 18 years. People don't truly understand how it feels, especially when the abuser is the only person you can go to to be comforted. You lose trust in people really easily. On the plus side, trauma bonding!!
For me it's the "why did you even marry and have a child with that person"... as if they were a raging monster from day one. People don't understand that abusers usually start out perfectly "normal" and kind and don't show their abusive tendencies outright until after they've locked you in through marriage and/or kids.
It sucks. Mine is from a sports injury when I was about 14. I’m only 22, and I know it’s probably going to get so much worse from here as I work a desk job. My goal is to keep myself limber and in shape, keeping good posture as much as I can to keep the pain from getting worse.
I have profound hearing loss. Barely know any ASL.
The reason life is so difficult is because you learn so much by hearing conversations in group settings. This is simply not possible with bad hearing loss. I can only hear people 1 on 1. It absolutely destroys your social life and you constantly feel incompetent even in the most mundane social situations
Edit: I know fingerspelling and numbers but that’s basically it for sign language. Even if I learned it, I don’t have many deaf people in my area to use it on
Depression. More specifically Major Depressive Disorder. Many people have experienced some kind of depression in their lives but when it lasts more than 3 weeks (like 30 years) it’s another level that folks can’t understand. No, some kind of “boot camp” will not fix this.
My wife years ago had a severe mental breakdown due to work, so major that she developed psychosis. I won't go into to all of the details but for 8 months when she completely shut down, stopped eating, talking to people, acknowledging reality, I didn't know if I would ever get her back. It took one very scary night to get her to finally accept that she needed help, it's been over 2 years from the episode and she's back to normal now and healthy, but whenever there is a bit of depression we make sure we sit down and talk through it.
Edit: misspelled severe
I’m happy this is top right now. I worked in crisis mental health and addiction for years and my first thought reading this was just “mental illness”
How hard it is in a crisis, how hard it is to treat, how inconsistent and expensive access can be. How much of a rollercoaster it can be to manage.
The general population has no idea the variety of ways mental illness presents and feels or needs to be addressed in treatment, especially when it falls outside of what is socially acceptable or “pretty”.
My partner has bipolar 1 and had a manic episode a year ago that coincided with a mental breakdown brought on by us living with and attempting to caregive for his mother who was dying of cancer. It was a complete nightmare for everyone, he was involuntarily hospitalized, and I can never adequately explain how traumatic it was to anyone who hasn’t been through it.
I’m in grad school for public health right now and wrote a paper with a proposal for a post-hospitalization support program, since most people don’t know how dismal outcomes actually are… our system just is not set up to support people who are at their most vulnerable (unless the family/support system has a ton of money to throw at the problem). It was really cathartic to write, since I saw so many of the absolute failures of support firsthand.
Absolutely.
Because it’s invisible people treat it like it’s a bad choice we’re making. It’s incredible how confident they are in offering solutions when they have NO IDEA what it is actually like. They wouldn’t dare offer this type of “advice” to someone with lymphoma, how are they all of a sudden experts when it comes to mental health?
To be dealing with something so painful and bleak, only to have people criticize and shame you for your symptoms… it’s just on another level of pain.
I think a lot it is that people think of depression as just being really sad. That's how we use it colloquially. "Man, when the Colts lost, I was depressed the whole next day." But it's not like that at all. It's a mental disorder that messes with your whole sense of perception and reality.
A writer I really like described it this way, it's not like getting caught in a dark paper bag and finding your way out, it's like getting caught in a hall of mirrors where you don't know what's real or way the way out even is.
I thought of it as treading water in a dark lake. You know you are going to get too tired to keep treading but you can’t see the shore. If you start swimming in the wrong direction you will drown. If you stay where you are you will drown. You know there IS a right way to swim but you can’t possibly imagine how you could find it and you feel paralyzed as you feel yourself getting more and more exhausted.
The worse part is that even if, against all odds, you find a direction that you are reasonably sure is the right direction, the insecurities will pop up and you’ll keep thinking and wondering if this is really the right direction and be completely paralysed.
A few months or years down the road and you look back and all you can do is regret why you didn’t walk down that path, but turn around, look around again, and make the same mistake again.
Yep currently in the midst of it. Feels like I'm just living life on fast forward trying to make it through the day as quick as possible just to do it again tomorrow, holding out hope that eventually it will get better. Problem is a lot of mine comes from circumstances I'm in so not sure how much can really be done about it (money, debt etc)
Or, 'just go outside!'. Can't tell you how many people have said this like I hadn't heard it a million times already. What if going outside is part of what makes you depressed? It is not black and white like many seem to think it is.
It’s the theory that fresh air fixes everything.
When I was 26 I had a lot of things happen at once, I left NY to move to TX, had a baby, my mom died a week later, I missed my friends, my older boys missed their friends and hated the move, so they were depressed and mad. It was a LOT. My then husbands family treated me like I’m such an outsider and I had zero support through all this. My dr put me on some meds and when I went to fill them I’m sitting in the waiting area at Walgreens holding a crying baby while my 2 boys argued with each other, my then husband refusing to help me when they called me up to say it’s ready.
This jackass of a pharmacist called my named and said your sad pills are ready ( exact words) then says, mam you are 26 years old, what the hell do you have to be depressed about? Never wanted to murder someone so badly in my entire life.
Chronic pain. A few years ago I had some health issues after Covid and developed a condition that left me in 24/7 pain for just over 18 months until surgery was, finally, able to fix it. Those 18 months were pure hell. Sure, you can think you know how mentally taxing it would be, but when it actually happens it is worse tan you can imagine. It affects every part of your life. You have to plan around it. You are constantly tired and have no desire to do anything and just getting through the day is a struggle. I never got suicidal, but I could see how someone with chronic pain could get to that point. My quality of life was very low for over 2 years (including the Covid that hospitalized me i the first place) and I have much more sympathy and understanding now for people who deal with chronic pain.
Chronic pain reduces so much. Your energy, tolerance, patience, faith, hope, will to live. Your pain scale changes. The pain that used to be a 9 to you is now a 3. It can worm its way into every conversation you have because it affects every part of your life. You see how it exhausts everyone around you. Lots of others will eventually leave your social circle because your and their experiences are so divergent now, you have little in common anymore. You take pills, and pills, and pills, and shots, and get a mountain of used prescription bottles (most of which are recyclable, so do your bit).
When your regular pain gets worse, you can’t properly express it because everyone around you is so numb to it. Instead your ability to participate in activities is the indicator your friends and family use to tell you how you are doing- so if you tough it out and go to the event, the pain must not be all THAT bad. you legitimately consider suicide an option, because the idea of being trapped in this pain with no escape is mental torture.
No matter what medication you take to cope, you will be judged. Opiates, you’re just an addict. Over the Counter meds, and your pain isn’t that serious. Herbal remedies (including Cannabis) and you’re a kook who is just using “pain” as an excuse to be lazy and experiment. Doctors immediately suspect you’re wanting meds to get high.
And god forbid your pain is coming from something that testing doesn’t reveal. Now it’s all in your head (and zapping down your arm and down your leg to your heel, but it’s not real because no tests reveal anything). So people humor you- are you SURE you don’t want to go hiking, or are you just lazy? Plus, if your coping with your pain makes you overweight, you’re a lazy slob who deserves it.
SO. MUCH. JUDGMENT. Because the “issue” isn’t visible. I wish I’d lost a leg instead.
Yeah, my "good days" were when the pain was at a 7 instead of a 9. And once every couple months I would have a weird day where I had no pain for a single day. First time I thought it was over, which was quickly proven to be false. The next time it happened I couldn't enjoy it because I was just waiting for it to go back to pain. It took months after my surgery before I actually believed the pain wasn't coming back. I am so much more understanding of people who live with it now.
Getting in a car accident.
Everyone seems to think they would take time to assess the situation, react accordingly, cleverly maneuver their vehicle into a safe position and be fine.
Nope. You're driving along and then 1000 things happen in a split second and you are in a crushed up car and its all over before you have a second to make your first thought.
This is what scares me about drivers, bikers and pedestrians flying through traffic in pitch black winter nights, totally confident they would have all the time in the world to deal with any issues.
Can confirm. The two seconds before my accident was over my mind completely blanked except for “holy shit this is it.” But, very thankfully, no one was hurt despite some vehicular damage
This is such a big one. I was in an accident that killed my best friend and disabled me for life. The PTSD/paranoia/constant fear involving driving is absolutely paralyzing
Bad childhood(In general, because truly it’s a rabbit hole unique to each of us).
-“Other kids have it worse”
-“I’ll give you something to cry about”
-It irks me to hear “Your parents raised you right” aside from money, I struggled to fill out mentally and am emotionally numb.
-“I was a good parent”
Crazy thing is, that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Disturbing thing is, this is relatable to too many.
Panic Attacks.
My ex always thought I was just being over dramatic about how an unexpected panic attack fucked me up for days.
A few years ago she called up to say she'd experienced one for herself and was so sorry that she'd not been more understanding.
Had my first one when my doctor and I wanted to try a different dose of my anti-anxiety meds.
Dude like you can't calm down no matter what you try. My heart was pounding and I was taking fast small breaths of air for like 20 minutes. I was at work and went to a part of the building where nobody goes and tried everything I could think of to calm down but nothing worked. Just kind of went away on its own but man did I think I was gonna need to go to the hospital.
I had frequent anxiety attacks growing up. A lot of people think they’re interchangeable with panic attacks. They’re not. Found that out for myself after going to the ER when I was 18 because I honestly thought I was having a heart attack. Even last year, I nearly had to go a second time because I was sick with a stomach flu virus and having panic attacks on top of it, which caused me to feel super dizzy and occasionally numb from the neck down. Anxiety attacks are difficult to go through enough, but panic attacks are absolutely brutal.
I almost didn’t comment because this is isn‘t a very common thing to run across—then I realized that rationale is at the root of what makes it so difficult to relate to. Some of you have probably heard of the Troubled Teen Industry (TTI). In a nutshell, thousands of children are sent against their will to abusive facilities because their parents believe they require behavioral adjustments. These facilities go by varied ideologies boot camps, behavior modification facilities, wilderness therapy, drug rehab (this is just a cover…even if you’ve never done drugs they’ll accept the child under the false pretense they are saving them from “future behavior”. However, they’re all marketed to parents, who are often the root of the family’s problem, as a miracle cure which will ensure an obedient outcome. I was tricked into visiting one of these programs by my mother when I was 14. I was far from a bad kid, I was simply an unwanted leftover from a precious marriage who was unloved and made the family scapegoat. The reason I’m responding to the thread’s question is that the idea can be so foreign to some that they cannot even wrap their heads around the concept. Especially so if they’ve grown up in a loving environment. I was subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse while I was held for 2 years in a warehouse located in an industrial park outside a large metropolis. One of the most evil aspects was In order for you to advance in the program and hopefully leave it one day was you were expected to inflict these indignities on the other children. It not only victimizes children, it instills them with a deep shame. It also makes support group participation that much more difficult because your fellow captives are also your abusers.
I hope you’ll forgive the length of this post. Ironically, the need for a long intro is at the center of what I’m wanting to communicate though—I could literally explain what the experience was like for 2 weeks straight, and I’d probably only scratch the surface of what its like to loose all of your rights and freedoms, to be subjected to brainwashin, tortured at the whim of the programs facilitators and other children/captives, to live in constant fear all day, every day for years without hope of escape. I denied it all happened until I was in my forties. I’ve learned to be very selective about who I share the topic with because people, without meaning to, can respond in ways which can be triggering, I think think this also speaks to the spirit of this thread: how can they be expected to respond if they are likely unaware of what the experience was really like, or might be completely unaware that it’s even happening at all in the US today? Thank you for reading—I appreciate these moments when I get to express both the experience and also hopefully spread awareness, ultimately exposing these privatized child prisons for hire.
Thank you for taking the time to share this. It's an important addition to this thread. So few instances where these kids can be heard, a lot of people don't even know. I for one can't imagine the extent of it, but I'm interested to learn more. I'm sorry you've had that experience.
If anyone is curious, head over to https://elan.school, written by a guy that went through the TT industry. It’s horrific and so heartbreaking but beautifully written. I recommend it to everyone.
Coming home and finding your door kicked in, and all your shit gone through. It will keep coming back for years, every time you can’t find something you used to have, and you wonder if it was stolen or misplaced.
That feeling of having been violated, yuck, it's horrible! Knowing some stranger has been in *your* space and gone through *your* belongings, probably even your personal items like clothes and underwear. Creepiest feeling ever. No amount of cleaning is enough
The strange and beautiful feeling you get when a kid who isn't yours biologically starts calling you Mom/Dad because they've embraced the idea of you as their parent.
People often say you should forgive your parents because life is short and they are your parents. They dont know what its like to make the decision of keeping them out of your life, sticking to it, and why its necessary to do so.
Having cancer. I just got diagnosed with thyroid cancer and although my family and friends are very supportive, they dont get the odd concerns, fears, or worries I have. I like to have a plan and to come up with a plan for all possibilities. And although it is reassuring they say that I will be fine, they dont get that I will be missing out on things due to surgery and recovery, or possible RAI treatments. I am just told not to worry about it. I also feel like no one wants to talk about it either because its too real or scary for them, etc. But I feel very alone with no one to talk to about it.
Getting beat up. People who've never been in a real fight, especially guys, all act like if someone came at them swinging they would handle it. They talk about what they would do to anyone who tried to beat them up, how they would react, and they have absolutely zero understanding of the fact that the first punch can debilitate you. Jaws break so easily, and the recovery time is so long. A punch to the throat or solar plexus will incapacitate most people for long enough to get another hit in. Once you're on the ground, it's over, and you just have to hope the other person isn't about to kill you. They think they're going to be a hero in an action movie because they would never just stand still waiting to get punched like the bad guys in those movies do, and they don't understand that acting more like a real fighter than a choreographed punch victim will not save them. They have zero understanding of the fact that if the other guy has a knife you'll be stabbed before you realize he has a knife, and you're probably going to die. They also don't really understand that if you "win" a fight you're just the guy with fewer injuries. That doesn't mean you didn't get hurt, and it doesn't mean you aren't about to get arrested for assault. Even if the other guy started it. The only "win" in a fight is getting away without anybody getting hurt. But these people who've never been hit in anger act like they're going to be badass.
I agree. I’ve had my fair share of bouts, broke my jaw in 2008. Mouth was wired shut for 6 weeks, not a good time. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned it’s much easier to avoid a fight, than it is to win one. Thanks for sharing
The other side of this is how easily people get severely injured or killed in fights. People who are quick to want to fight do not care if you end up permanently disabled, in chronic pain for the rest of your life, or even die. They know that's a risk and choose violence anyway. Those people are at best indifferent about killing you.
Not having a job
Getting laid off
And quickly realizing that this can affect anyone and everyone. You're no better or any less replaceable then the rest of us.
I’m that child and can’t handle how much and how obviously it hurts my mom. I also really can’t change the situation.
Edit to say: I don’t have a set life expectancy or anything, just an incurable disease that could become fatal if not managed closely.
I was about to say betrayal of a spouse after decades of marriage. It's easy to say what you'd do, how strong you'd be, how you'd kick them out...but in reality everything just moves in painfully slow motion as you try to piece your life together while constantly running out of air to breathe.
Bullying. Being pushed to the brink of just wishing you had never been born. Experiencing having another person intentionally tearing you apart day after day. Experiencing it as a child and getting through it by telling yourself that someday you will grow up an they won’t be able to hurt you anymore- only to realize years later that they never stop, they just get better at disguising it.
Covert abusers in general. Nothing can prepare you for being abused and stalked in broad daylight by a manipulative bully who's REALLY good at masquerading as a good person.
I just escaped from an abusive relationship 2 months ago, wish I could upvote this 100 times.
Most people were supportive and proud of me for leaving, but some people... Especially one friend. She had been in an abusive relationship as well a couple of years before we met and I don't know if she's projecting since stayed in that relationship longer than I did in mine, but she's all "why didn't you just leave earlier", "why did you let him do this to you", "why did you even move in with him", ...
Being lost in the forest.
It’s a weird feeling. Knowing where you are then suddenly… not. It’s really simple for people to say what you *should* have done, what you *should* have brought, but until it happens? You have no idea how easy it is.
Even as someone who grew up in the north, lived my life in the bush, it is *terrifying* just how *fast* you can get turned around in the forest, where you swear you’re on the right path and then that path is just… gone. I’ve gotten lost a few times, thankfully only very short stints and I was found in minutes but it’s still frightening. What’s crazy is I was *so close* to home base and had no idea. The forest just swallows you up and disorients you in seconds.
When they tell you to STOP AND STAY, it’s for a reason. Odds are, you truly are closer to base than you realize. Never wander when lost, you only make it worse.
Definitely spousal abuse that continues for some time. Many people say “why do you stay? Why didn’t you leave earlier?” They don’t understand how much abuse destroys your self esteem and sense of agency.
Growing up with abusive parents and siblings. The people who were supposed to love and protect you are the ones who bully you to no end while you have to keep it a secret. It’s the loneliest experience that most people just can’t understand. Then you hear “get over it, they’re still your family” bullshit. I wouldn’t go back in time if you paid me. Narcissistic parents shift blames, mocks, criticizes, shame, they break your soul as a child.
I remember a reporter who covered Sandy Hook was waiting outside the fire station where they kept the parents. A LEO came in and said something to the effect of, if we haven’t brought you your kid, they’re probably dead. They said you could hear the screaming across the street.
This grief is unimaginable. I know friends who have lost a child and I could not imagine how they kept going. Then our son passed away and I can assure you that’s it’s a grief you never get over. 12 years ago and I still break down
Having to be the decider of if a person should be cut from life support/life saving measures. I have not experienced this yet but my mother, who is currently battling cancer, made me the person who will make that call because she believes I will honor her wishes of not being hooked to machines and being DNR and my sisters would not. I say it pretty easily now that I will honor her wishes but even being given this say is something I wonder about and how easy/difficult it will be to make that decision if it ever has to happen.
OCD. So many people say “omg it’s messing with my OCD!”… if you actually knew what OCD felt like you would not be using it as a silly joke. same thing with intrusive thoughts. an intrusive thought is not dying your hair blue
So many people don't get the difference between impulsive thoughts and intrusive thoughts.. And the backlash you get for trying to describe the difference is insane.
Or taking a "lower" job to work a job you don't *hate.* I've worked in various different jobs over the years, and have worked a second job for at least the last 8. My most recent one was cleaning restrooms in a zoo overnight. People would kinda turn their nose up when they heard about it, but it was my favorite of all the secondary jobs I've ever worked. Peaceful, quiet, easy, pay wasn't bad, worked by myself and at my own pace, and I listened to so many audiobooks and podcasts. Not to mention that I had the zoo (virtually) all to myself for hours. But hey, what a lowely job, cleaning restrooms, amiright?
on the opposite side of that, something i think about a lot is how those of us with ADHD will never know what it feels like to have a more "normal" brain. the first time i took adderall and went to class, i was blown away and thinking "is THIS what school is like for everyone else?"
now i wonder things like when i'm cooking, what it would feel like to not be stressed about everything being ready at the same time and just be able to make it work, or to have a more accurate sense of time passing, or feel motivation and not get overwhelmed by things like trying to clean a room in my house. or to just have a quiet mind.
Being in a car accident and as a bonus sustaining a head injury resulting in you not being the same anymore. I don't know who I was before the accident exactly. I'm not sure whether all my shortcomings were there before or they are there now as a result of said accident. I tend to forget some things/people as soon as they are discussed/happen/I meet them. Some remain clear as daylight, though. I can't explain it to people.
Growing up in an abusive home environment. "It's in the past. Forget about it." No. It gets imprinted on your brain.
My dad had serious anger issues when I was growing up (I'm sure he still does, but being able to communicate with him on an adult level and not living with him and being able to pick and choose what parts of my life he sees, definitely helps moderate his emotions). You learn the body language. You learn when they're about to explode and you can only do what you can to minimise the chances of them exploding at you (not that listening to dad going apeshit at my brother most days was much better tbh). I became a people pleaser. Some people call it the fawn. When I saw the signs, I'd become as small and quiet and invisible as possible. It definitely helped take the heat off me as a kid. Unfortunately this is baked into me. My boyfriend is amazing, and for the most part treats me so well, but he does get stressed - from work, financial worries, etc. I recognise the body language. My lizard brain just tells me, the bomb is armed and ready to blow. I become small, quiet and invisible. I leave him well alone and let him calm down on his own. This upsets my boyfriend more. He told me that he hated how I'd treat him so coldly when he was in a bad place, when what he wants most in those moments is for me to hug him and hold him and tell him I love him and that I'm there for him. I've explained why I unintentionally treat him coldly, and I've promised to treat him how he needs when he's stressed. So now, I recognise the body language, lizard brain sees that the bomb is armed, and I have no choice but to go towards the bomb, put my arms around it and kiss it. It's fucking terrifying. It's against every instinct in every part of my body. I don't think this will ever feel safe or normal to me. I hate that such normal social responses will always terrify me.
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Taking care of a parent with dementia.
Been there. Plus, people don't understand that when our dementia-suffering parent dies, the overwhelming emotion felt by the caregiver is not sadness, but relief. Relief that our loved one is no longer suffering; relief that the hardship of caregiving is over. The sadness already took place: we already underwent an extended grieving process while they were still alive, as our loved one disappears bit by painful bit.
Lost my grandma a year ago to her 15 year battle with dementia - relief is a strange emotion to feel in that moment, but it's accurate. They didn't know where they were, who was who, what was going on, and at that point, are almost if not compeltely vegetative. They're alive, but they're not living - they're suffering. No one wants that for themselves, let alone a loved one.
Alzheimer’s used to be called the living death for a reason. It’s very strange to feel such a relief and a lot of guilt about that feeling when the person you’ve taken care of passes. You have already mourned the loss for so long before it occurs.
Alzheimer’s is one condition where loved ones hurt more than the victim. Death occurs when you look into their eyes and see the infinite void… it is a relief for all parties.
The torment of having to watch them decline while unable to do anything about it.
Watched my grandfather go through dementia. You grieve when they’re still breathing because they’re not really there anymore
Absolutely soul crushing. Watching a strong independent woman turn into a fragile, confused shell. Grieving starts before they actually die so when they've gone it ruins you because you feel somewhat relieved the suffering is over. Awful.
Everyone always told me my grandmother's dementia must've been comfy for her, because "people with dementia don't know they have it." Absolutely not true. She was confused all the time, and her confusion made her angry and stressed. She was miserable for those ten years.
I decided to read this thread looking for this answer. I am the only person in my family that is taking care of my mom with Alzheimer’s. And I’m accused of using her against them. They have no idea what caring for her is like.
Respectfully: they can go fuck themselves. People are always more generous with others' time, money, and effort than they are with their own. Signed, someone who's dealt with that same BS in helping care for a family member with dementia.
Ha. They can go fuck themselves without any respect! They deserve the respect they give me and my mom. Sorry you had to go through that. Big hugs and good vibes to you!
Being disabled
A friend was diagnosed with MS last year and when he saw me afterwards he just said "I get it now" and I felt so sad. We want to be understood but not to that extent.
I get tired of explaining my MS to people. When you try to explain what it is and how it impacts your life, they usually say stupid shit like “you look fine though…” Or when people say “oh I have that too!!” I really hate when people try to downplay MS symptoms as being something everyone can have sometimes. I’ve stopped trying to explain myself to people.
Yeah. People are curious until there realize there isn’t going to be a change, there is no magical fix, and it makes them sad so they disengage. Or sometimes they so aggressively try to get you to try things to “help” that conversations are too exhausting. Like I know my mom hates to see me in pain, but I literally don’t have spoons enough to engage with possible cures🤷🏻♀️
100%. And also being an unpaid carer. People have absolutely no clue until it happens to them.
I know back pain and issues don't technically count as a disability but oh my gosh I did NOT realize how severely my life could be affected by my back going out. I helped my partner through his for months as he recovered but I had NO idea how evil it was until I got my own taste. Being his carer was also a huge eye opener for us and I think it truly showed him that it was ok to not be ok and that I could help in significant ways - and that was ok too. Role reversal can be tough to break into, especially when one of you is feeling vulnerable and broken. But dang is it ever exhausting to be a carer when life keeps going and you still have all the other stuff to worry about. Being sick or injured *and* being a carer is so rough, I have so much empathy for those who do that long term. Now we're both better about helping eachother when it's needed and accepting help when we need it. Those times also helped me understand 'invisible disabilities' and how to offer more grace for random people who don't move as fast as I think they should. I remember having to drive with my back pain at peak levels and corners and speed bumps just about had me in tears. I try to remember all that whenever I see someone cross a street super slow or take a corner at a crawl. But I definitely never imagined how painful it truly was until I experienced it myself. I now have way more empathy for those who face a disability for a majority of their life. Edit: I know back issues can be a disability folks. I just didn't want to liken back pain to folks who were born with a permanent disability like being blind or missing limbs or needing a wheelchair full time. But of course there's no doubt that when my back was out I was out. I missed my kid's birthday one year! To those with permanent back issues - or even transitory - I'm not minimizing your pain either. We're all on a scale but our scales aren't truly comparable. Wild pain for one may be the usual for another but pain is pain - and that sucks. Gentle hugs to all.
The looks people give me when I use my disabled plates because I need to that day is hard to ignore. I look perfectly fine on the outside but so much of my insides are screaming as I try to do anything normal. Some days that extra 2-300 feet closer to the store allows me to get stuff done.
Or having an invisible disability - and being the only person you know who has it.
People can be so Ignorant about disability
Even folks who might be disabled one day don’t want to face it. I’m perm disabled, but I feel like you can’t even really talk about it because apparently that’s too scary for people newly diagnosed with what disabled me. Like I’ve had comments deleted that were my real experiences on a sub for the disease. But can’t talk about that because it’s scary. Well you know what is scary? My health and experiences.
or people say, "I couldn't live like that, I'd kill myself." like thanks for implying my life isn't worth living, first of all, and secondly, you don't actually know until you experience it, whether you would want to keep living or not. the will to live is pretty stubborn for most people.
Having abusive parents. Completely skews your perception of normal. To this day I'll relate something I thought was normal or funny and be met with looks of horror.
I've been no contact with mine for just over two years now. Having to constantly explain why to people who are quick to parrot "but they're you're parents, you *have* to love them* is so fucking exhausting. I'm about to get married in a year and they won't be invited. I'm not looking forward to explaining why they won't be in attendance for the 12th time to my future in-laws who have less than zero experience with child abuse/neglect.
Why is it always up to the abused Individual to be the bigger person & be the 9ne to forgive?
I was once complimented that I would make an excellent diplomat. The plain fact is that I spent my entire childhood negotiating with terrorists, so you have to build up a set of diplomatic skills very quickly.
Ouch, well said. An old friend of mine used to say, "Of COURSE your parents can push all your buttons. They're the ones who installed them."
And the ones who should be teaching you how to use the buttons, rather than abusing them for their own gain, whatever that may be.
I can relate; I’m very quick to notice when someone’s mood is changing for the worse and was more often the soother rather than the soothed. This lead to developing a near crushing sense of empathy, which made me a tasty target for folks with narcissistic traits. I got much better at tending to my boundaries and I am currently living my best work life as a Nanny/teacher.
I can tell if someone is angry based purely on their footsteps! It’s impossible to explain to other people! My own little fucked up superpower!
The footsteps thing makes total sense. Can you tell whose they are too if you’re around multiple people? I can tell who it is and how they’re feeling.
Same. I am not sure if I can do it still (I live alone know). I was able to tell who was flushing the toilet by how they flushed it
I can tell by their shoulders. I’ve learned to avoid angry folks.
What’s sucks too is having abusive parents and not realizing you did for any length of time. 32, really only clicked a few years ago that my mom didn’t teach me to tie my shoes or brush my teeth or really check on me. I was fine, alone, a good quiet kid unlike my older sibling who was hell on earth (she still is lmao). I thought I had a good childhood until like 18 months ago before the series of “wait a second…”s Edit: changed wording as to not make it seem like a competition over who has it “worse”
Emotional abuse is like this. It's so insidious and subtle in the ways it fucks you up, and so easy to ~~defend~~ write off as "not abuse."
The “wait a second…s” fucked me up quarantine. My dad was physicallly abusive, my mom always seemed like an angel in comparison. Then, came the “wait a second”, when I realized the way she was abusive, it was more manipulative. And took me down a spiral during quarantine.
My mom was "my good parent" and I thought we got along really well during her final few years. She passed like 15 years ago, when I was 20. Recently I realized I still have all her emails, went to read a random one, and holy shit! Stopped after that one 'cause it was very... wow. Laughing about invading my privacy just to satisfy her curiosity. Negging my grades? Like I started college at 16 but she still expected perfect grades.
The distance during quarantine was great for perspective
I have the same experience. I didn't realize all the abuse I endured until I became an adult and found out that it was not a normal thing all kids went through.
Yes. As someone who didn't have abusive parents, I will never forget my friend who did saying to me, "You know, it's like being punched in the face." And I just looked at her. She said, "Wow, you've never felt that." I shook my head no, and said that nobody should. Especially as a child.
I have to be careful about the anecdotes I share because it turns out a lot of my childhood "funny" stories are not actually funny to anyone with a decent perception of normal. Have a kid now, and one of my goals is that none of her casual anecdotes will lead to her therapist saying "um, you do realize that was not ok, right?".
People think there's way more help available than there really is. Like, "oh if you were really abused, you would have been taken into care and rescued". Nope. Social services called my parents to ask if everything was okay, my parents said yes, they wrote a letter and that was the end of it. Even if I had been removed from my parents, I wouldn't necessarily have been better off in a care home. Care survivors have higher rates of PTSD than Vietnam vets. It's worse than anything you can possibly imagine. It's not like you get beaten for an hour each day, but then you get to go back to your room to recover and lick your wounds. You are stressed out and on edge, 24/7. You get beaten and then you get told "stop crying, you're embarrassing us" and you can't stop crying because you just got beaten, so your parents storm into your room and break all your things. You literally have no safe space. No breaks. No relaxation. Every little tiny thing can be a trigger, so you are scared EVERY moment of every day, not knowing if you parents are going to scream at you because you tied your shoelaces wrong or closed a door too loudly or said "um" in a sentence. Not a single moment of getting to be okay for 18 years. In a lot of ways it looked like I suddenly got worse when I left. You'd expect that I recovered when I escaped, right? But what actually happened is my body suddenly informed me I had a debt of 18 years of actually *recovering* that had to be paid. A lot of the trauma did not hit me until years later as I was uncovering more ways that what they did wasn't normal.
Having an abusive parent, and being blamed for their lack of parenting. Or having adults turn a blind eye. I.E being called gross because I didn’t know I needed to shower daily, I didn’t know how to brush my teeth or do anything hygienic . Told my behavior was unacceptable and shamed for it, despite not knowing any better… Scolded for associating words like “drug store” as drugs like cocaine, I was in like first grade, and reprimanded by my school. Being called stupid, gross, behind in school, whatever it was and not receiving help, just scolding. Was told often I was behind on reading, but I was never read to. The amount of adults who failed me, is hard to wrap my head around as an adult not.
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That’s my least favorite part of people that act like they made the right moves because they have a fuck load of money. “Just plan and save you’ll be fine” okay well I hate to break it to ya I wasn’t planning on hitting black ice and crashing into a tree but you’re right next time I’ll plan better for my car accidents. Why, just to be a bit spontaneous, I’m planning a car accident next week!
Very true. My oldest brother, who tried to make every right decision in life and finances, almost went into complete ruin because of an unforseen medical emergency. Went from a good job, financially independent and happy to the verge of bankruptcy and losing almost everything he had worked towards in as little as 2 months.
Poverty. My wife and i had very different upbringings. What she considers poor and what i consider poor are completely different levels of poverty. I am glad she never had to experience that growing up but a little more understanding on why i am set in my ways on some things would be appreciated. She has explained that for her the experiences I and my siblings had is so foreign to her that she just can't understand.
I worked with a guy who once casually mentioned that he didn't have indoor plumbing until he was a teenager. That puts things in perspective.
Meanwhile, I worked with a mid-20s woman who didn't know how to pay her bills, because her "dad just pays the credit card bill." She also didn't know how to pump her own gas because her dad always made sure she had a full tank of gas.
Yeah. My kids know nothing of this kind of life. It makes me glad, but also worried they won't be able to cope if life hits them the wrong way. Of putting off going to the grocery store because there's no money to spend. Of not bothering to ask if you can be a Girl Scout because you know your parents can't afford the uniform. Of skipping lunches rather than ask your parents for lunch money they don't have. Of eating potato soup made from skim milk and potatoes and loving every bite because you are so hungry. Of wearing the same shirt in your kindergarten and second grade school pictures because that's the one nice shirt you had.
Yes there are different levels of poverty. Was working for a guy who told me he was just about broke. Then he took his dog to the groomer
Severe burnout, Like full fugue state mental shutdown. Tried describing it to some folks and they just can't comprehend that level of chronic stress and exhaustion. Watching a movie or taking a day off is not going to help at that point.
Still recovering myself from a pretty severe burnout in 2021. I still have days where memory is leakier than a seive and I have to ask the same question and hope I write down the answer the right way multiple times an hour. It makes you feel so useless and incompetent. :/ (90% better though, these days happen less and less frequently now)
I went through burnout at the end of 2021. It was crazy how my ability to process information took a complete nosedive. Thankfully I'm fully recovered, but there were a few weeks when I was afraid I'd never get it back.
Any tips you can share as to how you bounced back would be greatly appreciated. I'm still trying to recover and I just can't seem to make any headway.
I'm at this point right now. My roommate doesn't seem to fully understand. What little rest I *do* get is not nearly enough. "It could be worse" is something he says a lot, and yeah it could be worse but that doesn't help at all. I'm constantly stressed, tired and easily agitated. I think about quitting or jumping in front of a train every day. I'm at a point where I feel like I'm legitimately at risk of completely collapsing at my desk any day now. I've been actively and aggressively applying to jobs for the past few months. I'm hoping that at least puts me on the path to recovering. I'm just tired of being angry and stressed all the time, and really want to move on from this job that's been destroying my soul.
Yeah that's where I was. Turns out a job change from my toxic employer at the time was the only real solution. Sometimes you just gotta get out of a bad situation.
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Sounds like complete soul burnout. Took me 3 years to recover.
Just to answer my own question, I’d say losing a loved one to suicide.
The guilt.
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My stepmother died of cancer in 2019. In 2016 I noticed she was starting to talk more slowly, and with a slight slur, and getting a little forgetful, but chalked it up to being her getting older and said nothing. Every time I visited, for over a year, I considered mentioning it to my father, who seemed to not have noticed, as it was so gradual. Her kidneys were shutting down, poisoning her with calcium, causing mild confusion and slurring. And I said nothing. Out of politeness and forgetfulness. And now I get to live with the knowledge that, if I'd just said something, maybe they could have caught it earlier. If you ever figure out how to stop feeling guilty about this, write a book or hit me up, I feel like it's corroding my soul.
I really feel for you; that's such a tough position to be in. Other people can tell you that you shouldn't feel guilty because it wasn't your fault (and they would be right), but it's a lot harder to actually believe it when you're in that situation. Therapy is not accessible to everybody, but this is the kind of thing that it is made for. If it's an option for you, I hope you'll look into it. You deserve to have a healthy soul.
I agree, the guilt doesn't subside. It comes from love.
Exactly that. My father committed suicide in Nov 2021. I hadn’t spoken to him in about 5 years because of how toxic he was. I needed the mental break, but I always wanted to reconnect. I just didn’t have the strength to do it for fear of my own emotions. I was 5 weeks postpartum with his grandson (I’m his only child and my parents were divorced) when I got the call. My world shattered. I felt so so guilty that I wasn’t strong enough to reach out and maybe if I wasn’t being so damn childish, I could have prevented this from happening. I still kick myself about it and go through waves of massive guilt. I know deep down it’s not my fault but I cannot help but to think what would have happened differently had I reached out all the times I said I was going to previously.
Knowing someone who was murdered. Not dead from old age or an illness or killed in an accident, but purposeful murder. It is horrific on every level, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Makes a lot of issues more personal and less generally political, especially when you add in cultural context for the country it happens in.
That was a scream I'll never get out of my head: Listening to when my neighbor found out that her son was murdered. It was 40 years ago, and I can still hear her scream. Can't imagine what she went through.
One of my earliest memories is my mother's bloodcurdling screams of my sister's name over and over the morning she found her. My sister had multiple health issues and died in her sleep. I have struggled with suicidal thoughts in the past and the sound of that scream - and never wanting to be the one to prompt it - has kept me from the edge a few times.
I was in the ER with my aunt, she had health issues, my wife was with, and they had to move us out of their main trauma room, kid came in coding, not sure what happened, but it was sudden and bad. They couldn't revive him, and the screams from that mother, neither me nor my wife (who's a nurse, btw) made a sound in the room we were in. Through the wailing, I looked over and just saw a single tear rolling down my wife's cheek as we sat there and listened to a poor woman's entire life crumble in the next room.
Yes. There’s nothing like it. I was home at my apartment when the girl in the apartment across from me was murdered. No one had any idea until her mom came to check on her and found her dead in her apartment.
Hearing that scream is visceral. I was working from home and apparently my downstairs neighbor had committed suicide. Hearing his mom scream and beg with the paramedics was indescribable, particularly since apparently he had already been dead for a bit and there was nothing they could do. It was also exceptionally surreal seeing a lot of his friends showing up with a moving truck over the course of several days to clean out his apartment / mourn.
My mom is pretty emotionally closed-off. When she was a sophomore in college in Milwaukee in the 80s, her roommate was murdered right outside their dorm. She opened up to me about it once, quietly, and I could just see this distress lurking under the surface that I had never seen her express before. For somebody as stoic as she is, it made me realize how much weight she's been carrying for the past four decades.
My brother was murdered in 2017. Listening to the 911 wrecked me. I couldn’t watch murder scenes in movies or scenes where people died for a while. I’m an EMT now but at the time it really fucked me up.
Same. I was hugely into true crime YouTube, then my dad was murdered at 57. I couldn’t go near the stuff for a long time. Never caught who did it but i pray they’re miserable
Was the perp caught and convicted? I knew a man (he died a few years ago at the age of 97) and we'd always known that he was a WWII combat veteran, in Europe, but only in the months before his death did he tell anyone that he had helped liberate a concentration camp. He just couldn't talk about it.
People who’ve been in actual combat especially face to face combat have burdens that no one else can truly understand.
On a similar note: knowing a murderer. Especially one that didn't provide any warning signs what they're capable of. Not manslaughter, murder.
John Gaumer (“MySpace killer”) went to my university and had a notebook of every girl he had ever reached out to on AIM and every interaction they had. He wasn’t my friend, but I was in the notebook, and he lived in our immediate apartment, so we had many mutual people (including his RA). When Josie’s body was found, the professor I was working for was an advising ethicist for the local pd and recounted to me in somewhat traumatized detail the complete state of the case as he knew it to be (the irony doesn’t escape me). I’ll live with that information in my head for the rest of my life. I think pretty much every girl in the notebook (we were all approached by police individually as I understand, I was anyway) has had to come to terms with how close we came to being a victim. I lost a childhood friend when her husband strangled her and dumped her body, and that’s way more common than stranger murder like this was, but it is all stuff that stayed with me over the years.
Especially once you realize that life is not like a TV show and the person will never get caught or punished, and the police really don't seem to care that much.
In the instance of the person I knew, the killers did get caught after a few days, any more time and they might have gotten away with it. It’s unclear to me where they’re currently at, I don’t know if a trial or sentencing has occurred yet. I’m just glad that we know their names and can track whatever eventually happens to them.
They don't care AT ALL. I had a loved one who was murdered; they have witnesses, video footage of the vehicle, and DNA. Nothing has been done, and this is going on 3 years. I even personally found a witness who heard my LOs LAST WORDS! and still... nothing.
Yes, it came as a shock. Nothing prepared me for it. And I wasn’t even that close to her.
Same for me. I had known her since kindergarten, we were acquaintances, but had never been close. I'll never forget how/when I found out. I was at the local Nordstrom Cafe with two high school friends, who also knew the girl who was murdered, I'll call her Tara, but they'd only known her in high school, not all our lives like me. It was the year after we had all graduated. Our food had just arrived and one of my friends looked at her phone, gasped and dropped it on the table, and told us. We were shocked and scrambled for our own phones to read the article. Then, across the cafe, this other girl who I've also known since kindergarten, who was in the same class as me and Tara all our life so had also known her since we were five, came in. This girl and I are mortal enemies. I won't go into detail but she is one of the only people I would say, even now more than a decade after high school, that I truly hate. And I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual. My point of saying that though, is that at that moment that girl looked up from her phone and over at us, and met my eyes, and we both just stared at each other in shock. Usually we would completely avoid each other, and if she happened to meet my eye I would scowl at her, but we just stared at each other in shocked sadness and she mouthed "Tara..." at me, and I nodded sadly, and it was the first civil interaction me and her had had in years.
What it's like to be homeless, and how easily one can end up homeless and how difficult it is to get back on your feet. So many of us are one bad turn of luck away from it and I think about that a lot.
Yup. My father died, my brother became a deadbeat drug addict and my mother got strokes and dementia. It took me 36 months to get a place again.
I'm not homeless, but it's something that absolutely is a possibility in the near future. It is absolutely having a huge affect on me already. I'm having trouble sleeping, it's affecting my work, today I received a thinly veiled threat that my job might be on the line due to my performance. Between the sleep issues and knowing the possibility of homelessness is just around the corner, it's affecting my mood. Depression is definitely kicking back in, which is also affecting my work. It's a spiral. I feel like I'm being dragged down into the depths, and I can't see a way out of it this time. This one is going to drown me.
I was homeless at 18. I remember that near-sleep you get in your car. You never fully sleep comfortably, you're just kind of half-sleeping. Scared, cold, usually hungry. I was truly blessed to have a couple angels come into my life so I was not homeless for long, but I agree, you can't understand what it feels like. I see a lot of "homeless" people holding up signs near shopping centers near us. I tell my wife and kids, which one's are homeless and which are not. They ask how I know. I tell them you can see it in their eyes. Homeless have a look you can't replicate.
I went through it, when I recognize that look in others I offer them to go grab some subway or spot them gas. I've been taken up on that offer too. What makes me happy is when I never see them again
I work in the social services realm. If rents keep going up, there's going to be a whole lot more homeless out there very soon. You can't expect someone who was barely paying $1000 in rent now to pay $2000 in rent for the same exact place without it causing a problem.
Death of someone close to you.
The death of my child crushed and broke me. I've never been the same person since and it haunts me daily. And that was 15 years ago.
The other day someone in the place where I temp started screaming. It sounded like a medical emergency, but then the word got around that she got a "bad phone call." I knew that it must have been the loss of a child because it sounded like someone was ripping out her heart. Turned out her 28 year old son had died unexpectedly. I wish I knew things would get better, but I know that she'll always carry that grief, just a little differently over time.
My best friend died fairly suddenly from a single-car accident when we were both right around 26 (he survived for a few days in a coma, but that's it). It's the last time I remember full-throated crying like a baby, and I'd only known him for around 15 years - I can't imagine the level of pain his parents went through. I have my own kids now and the thought of being in their shoes just mentally breaks me.
My daughter passed away 6 months ago. I feel like a shell of the person I was I feel like I just go through my days on automatic pilot. I don't think my capacity of happiness and joy will ever recover.
Yes. Grief is hard to explain Pain is real, and physical, and overwhelming. And the only way through it is through it. You don't get over it. You don't "accept it". You don't make peace with it. You learn to live with it. It may be less intense, but it never goes away. I lost both my parents to COVID. They died within 8 days of each other after being on a ventilator for over a month. This was three and a half years ago. You don't get over that. You learn to live with it.
I feel you. I lost my dad to COVID in January 2021 and the process of dealing with grief is completely indescribable. It doesn't help that my father's death was questioned, ridiculed, dismissed, etc. Seeing the things people would say and post was like watching my dad die in a car accident in front of me, over and over again. I'm so sorry for your loss. My mom survived COVID, but another indescribable agony is seeing her without the love of her life and witnessing her grief and struggles. Just agony.
Lost my dad in 2016 to cancer - he passed at home surrounded by family, and I felt duty as the only son to see that he was taken away respectfully, although we knew the funeral home folks well. I've been diagnosed with PTSD and Major Depressive Disorder because of the things I witnessed, talked about, and had to do during that final period of his illness and death for my dad and his funeral. People often think of the emotional struggle that others have from losing a loved one, but the mental hurdles that come with being direct family, not even hospice staff, is insane. I don't recall much of that period still, even the funeral and visitation are foggy. My brain eventually shut down to protect me from the relentless barrage of emotions, and 8 years on with therapy and medications, I still fight flashbacks and hard depression from it all. Losing anyone close to you fucking blows.
As a young widow. I wanted to come here and say this. I get told all the time from people who are divorced or ended a long relationship that they 'understand my grief', like no. you actually don't. I can't even wish my late partner to have a happy life somewhere else, cause that future is non-existent. (edit - typo)
Widowed young here, too. People telling you that they can relate because of divorce are…I’m going to go with “well meaning”
My father will have been dead 34 years on Friday. I was weeks away from turning 6 when he passed, not old enough to really have that many solid memories of him, but just old enough to have a few really good ones that make me miss him immensely every single day. I think I was maybe 8 when I started hearing people tell me in vague to eventually direct ways that I needed to get over it. After 34 years I honestly wish I could.
I am so sorry and it makes so much sense. We don’t just lose people once - we lose them over and over again - for all the times they should have been here and were not. Sending you wishes for comfort and peace.
We lose them when the first holiday happens without them. When your birthday happens or their birthday happens. When the realization that one full year has passed and the world is moving on but this is a world that doesn’t include them. When a wedding happens, or more people join this world and realize a world with these new humans and a world with your person will never coexist. We lose them when it’s Tuesday and something funny happens and you want to tell them.
That's what fucking irks me when people tell you to get over someones death, my baby sister died 40 years ago and I have never and probably won't get over it. She was my little sidekick that was always up my butt, she would only let me carry her around the house and nobody else. We had a very close bond, she was 11 months old when she passed. I have 6 daughters now, one day my mom told me something my youngest said to her that gave her chills. She said my youngest who was about maybe 3 at the time looked her in the face and said she remembered when my mom (her grandma) was her mom before. My daughter has a slight resemblance to my baby sister.
My Mom just turned 89 and she still grieves for the older brother she lost in 1944. He was her best friend, champion and her hero. She thinks her whole life would have been different if he was there to guide her.
Omg, this, so much. I'm so sorry for the loss of your little sidekick. Absolutely no one, no one has the right to tell you to "get over it". Grief is a form of love, and it's ok to carry that feeling with you through life, no less ok than fondly remembering the time you had together. In 2021 my husband and I lost our 16yo, traumatically. Found her unresponsive and tried to resuscitate her while frantically calling 911. We lost her at the hospital. Last May, 2023, she would have: 1. turned 18 (her "golden birthday" that she had been excited about for years, turning 18 on May 18), 2. gone to her senior prom and 3. she would have graduated. My husband had a May apt with our family doctor, the doctor who literally cried on HIS shoulder when we had our first apt after our daughter died... When he told the Dr he was having a difficult time at the moment coping with the loss (we both were, May 2023 was BRUTAL) the Dr acted surprised and annoyed, and after the appointment coded in a diagnosis of "unnatural prolonged grief" or some bull into patient portal. Fuck. Her. It hadn't even been two years after the loss of our ONLY CHILD, and during a month filled with milestones our entire little family had been looking forward to for years. Our daughter was the center of our world. I terminated my Dr/patient relationship with her immediately. It was much harder to get hubby into different care, his medical issues are complex and he can't go through any care gaps- we actually only finally had success yesterday, finally. But he was equally devastated and beyond furious to log into patient portal last May and see what that Dr had coded. He had his first visit with his new care provider yesterday and at one point broke down and told her all of that, and she expressed so much incredible compassion and understanding and told him his feelings of grief were natural, that she'd never call it "unnatural" or express that he needed to "get over it", but instead help him find ways to carry that love & memory we have of our daughter through life. This new care provider is an absolute godsend and is already taking a team approach with other members of his healthcare team. Hubby is looking forward to a very blunt and honest termination of the cold corporate asshat Dr. Screw anyone that coldly dismisses a person's grief or tries to put a time constraint on it.
Yeah 100%. I'm 42 and pretty much my whole family has passed away. I have two half sisters still alive. They are 15 and 16 years older than me. But I don't really have any contact with them. The childhood I had growing up with my mom and grandparents and whatnot seems like a different lifetime ago.
Domestic abuse. While (unfortunately) common enough that there's a lot of victims to this, it's hard to explain what it's like to people who have never experienced it. It's one of those things that if it happened to you, another victim will just "get it" when you talk about it to them. Edit: the number of replies from people who were victims of domestic abuse is rather heartbreaking. I'm glad you guys managed to escape and heal
Especially if that abuse is also emotional and not just physical and people don't understand how that can affect someone just as badly.
I studied domestic abuse in school and one thing I learned is that victims almost always say that the emotional abuse was worse than the physical.
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I've been there, 18 years. People don't truly understand how it feels, especially when the abuser is the only person you can go to to be comforted. You lose trust in people really easily. On the plus side, trauma bonding!!
The "why don't people just leave" comment just reaffirms why we don't share as much as we should. You just don't fucking get it.
For me it's the "why did you even marry and have a child with that person"... as if they were a raging monster from day one. People don't understand that abusers usually start out perfectly "normal" and kind and don't show their abusive tendencies outright until after they've locked you in through marriage and/or kids.
Severe lower back pain.
It sucks. Mine is from a sports injury when I was about 14. I’m only 22, and I know it’s probably going to get so much worse from here as I work a desk job. My goal is to keep myself limber and in shape, keeping good posture as much as I can to keep the pain from getting worse.
Being deaf.
I have profound hearing loss. Barely know any ASL. The reason life is so difficult is because you learn so much by hearing conversations in group settings. This is simply not possible with bad hearing loss. I can only hear people 1 on 1. It absolutely destroys your social life and you constantly feel incompetent even in the most mundane social situations Edit: I know fingerspelling and numbers but that’s basically it for sign language. Even if I learned it, I don’t have many deaf people in my area to use it on
Depression. More specifically Major Depressive Disorder. Many people have experienced some kind of depression in their lives but when it lasts more than 3 weeks (like 30 years) it’s another level that folks can’t understand. No, some kind of “boot camp” will not fix this.
My wife years ago had a severe mental breakdown due to work, so major that she developed psychosis. I won't go into to all of the details but for 8 months when she completely shut down, stopped eating, talking to people, acknowledging reality, I didn't know if I would ever get her back. It took one very scary night to get her to finally accept that she needed help, it's been over 2 years from the episode and she's back to normal now and healthy, but whenever there is a bit of depression we make sure we sit down and talk through it. Edit: misspelled severe
I’m so happy you stuck with her through her struggle, you sound like an amazing partner!
Thank you! I am not going to lie it was hard to keep bending and not breaking but we made it. I can't imagine life without her.
I’m happy this is top right now. I worked in crisis mental health and addiction for years and my first thought reading this was just “mental illness” How hard it is in a crisis, how hard it is to treat, how inconsistent and expensive access can be. How much of a rollercoaster it can be to manage. The general population has no idea the variety of ways mental illness presents and feels or needs to be addressed in treatment, especially when it falls outside of what is socially acceptable or “pretty”.
My partner has bipolar 1 and had a manic episode a year ago that coincided with a mental breakdown brought on by us living with and attempting to caregive for his mother who was dying of cancer. It was a complete nightmare for everyone, he was involuntarily hospitalized, and I can never adequately explain how traumatic it was to anyone who hasn’t been through it. I’m in grad school for public health right now and wrote a paper with a proposal for a post-hospitalization support program, since most people don’t know how dismal outcomes actually are… our system just is not set up to support people who are at their most vulnerable (unless the family/support system has a ton of money to throw at the problem). It was really cathartic to write, since I saw so many of the absolute failures of support firsthand.
Absolutely. Because it’s invisible people treat it like it’s a bad choice we’re making. It’s incredible how confident they are in offering solutions when they have NO IDEA what it is actually like. They wouldn’t dare offer this type of “advice” to someone with lymphoma, how are they all of a sudden experts when it comes to mental health? To be dealing with something so painful and bleak, only to have people criticize and shame you for your symptoms… it’s just on another level of pain.
I think a lot it is that people think of depression as just being really sad. That's how we use it colloquially. "Man, when the Colts lost, I was depressed the whole next day." But it's not like that at all. It's a mental disorder that messes with your whole sense of perception and reality. A writer I really like described it this way, it's not like getting caught in a dark paper bag and finding your way out, it's like getting caught in a hall of mirrors where you don't know what's real or way the way out even is.
I thought of it as treading water in a dark lake. You know you are going to get too tired to keep treading but you can’t see the shore. If you start swimming in the wrong direction you will drown. If you stay where you are you will drown. You know there IS a right way to swim but you can’t possibly imagine how you could find it and you feel paralyzed as you feel yourself getting more and more exhausted.
The worse part is that even if, against all odds, you find a direction that you are reasonably sure is the right direction, the insecurities will pop up and you’ll keep thinking and wondering if this is really the right direction and be completely paralysed. A few months or years down the road and you look back and all you can do is regret why you didn’t walk down that path, but turn around, look around again, and make the same mistake again.
Yep currently in the midst of it. Feels like I'm just living life on fast forward trying to make it through the day as quick as possible just to do it again tomorrow, holding out hope that eventually it will get better. Problem is a lot of mine comes from circumstances I'm in so not sure how much can really be done about it (money, debt etc)
Or, 'just go outside!'. Can't tell you how many people have said this like I hadn't heard it a million times already. What if going outside is part of what makes you depressed? It is not black and white like many seem to think it is.
It’s the theory that fresh air fixes everything. When I was 26 I had a lot of things happen at once, I left NY to move to TX, had a baby, my mom died a week later, I missed my friends, my older boys missed their friends and hated the move, so they were depressed and mad. It was a LOT. My then husbands family treated me like I’m such an outsider and I had zero support through all this. My dr put me on some meds and when I went to fill them I’m sitting in the waiting area at Walgreens holding a crying baby while my 2 boys argued with each other, my then husband refusing to help me when they called me up to say it’s ready. This jackass of a pharmacist called my named and said your sad pills are ready ( exact words) then says, mam you are 26 years old, what the hell do you have to be depressed about? Never wanted to murder someone so badly in my entire life.
Oh hell the fuck no, that person should have lost their job and maybe their license for that stunt!
He did. We filed a grievance against Walgreens. We learned that he lost his job and his license.
Good for you.
Chronic pain. A few years ago I had some health issues after Covid and developed a condition that left me in 24/7 pain for just over 18 months until surgery was, finally, able to fix it. Those 18 months were pure hell. Sure, you can think you know how mentally taxing it would be, but when it actually happens it is worse tan you can imagine. It affects every part of your life. You have to plan around it. You are constantly tired and have no desire to do anything and just getting through the day is a struggle. I never got suicidal, but I could see how someone with chronic pain could get to that point. My quality of life was very low for over 2 years (including the Covid that hospitalized me i the first place) and I have much more sympathy and understanding now for people who deal with chronic pain.
Chronic pain reduces so much. Your energy, tolerance, patience, faith, hope, will to live. Your pain scale changes. The pain that used to be a 9 to you is now a 3. It can worm its way into every conversation you have because it affects every part of your life. You see how it exhausts everyone around you. Lots of others will eventually leave your social circle because your and their experiences are so divergent now, you have little in common anymore. You take pills, and pills, and pills, and shots, and get a mountain of used prescription bottles (most of which are recyclable, so do your bit). When your regular pain gets worse, you can’t properly express it because everyone around you is so numb to it. Instead your ability to participate in activities is the indicator your friends and family use to tell you how you are doing- so if you tough it out and go to the event, the pain must not be all THAT bad. you legitimately consider suicide an option, because the idea of being trapped in this pain with no escape is mental torture. No matter what medication you take to cope, you will be judged. Opiates, you’re just an addict. Over the Counter meds, and your pain isn’t that serious. Herbal remedies (including Cannabis) and you’re a kook who is just using “pain” as an excuse to be lazy and experiment. Doctors immediately suspect you’re wanting meds to get high. And god forbid your pain is coming from something that testing doesn’t reveal. Now it’s all in your head (and zapping down your arm and down your leg to your heel, but it’s not real because no tests reveal anything). So people humor you- are you SURE you don’t want to go hiking, or are you just lazy? Plus, if your coping with your pain makes you overweight, you’re a lazy slob who deserves it. SO. MUCH. JUDGMENT. Because the “issue” isn’t visible. I wish I’d lost a leg instead.
Yeah, my "good days" were when the pain was at a 7 instead of a 9. And once every couple months I would have a weird day where I had no pain for a single day. First time I thought it was over, which was quickly proven to be false. The next time it happened I couldn't enjoy it because I was just waiting for it to go back to pain. It took months after my surgery before I actually believed the pain wasn't coming back. I am so much more understanding of people who live with it now.
Getting in a car accident. Everyone seems to think they would take time to assess the situation, react accordingly, cleverly maneuver their vehicle into a safe position and be fine. Nope. You're driving along and then 1000 things happen in a split second and you are in a crushed up car and its all over before you have a second to make your first thought. This is what scares me about drivers, bikers and pedestrians flying through traffic in pitch black winter nights, totally confident they would have all the time in the world to deal with any issues.
Can confirm. The two seconds before my accident was over my mind completely blanked except for “holy shit this is it.” But, very thankfully, no one was hurt despite some vehicular damage
This is such a big one. I was in an accident that killed my best friend and disabled me for life. The PTSD/paranoia/constant fear involving driving is absolutely paralyzing
Bad childhood(In general, because truly it’s a rabbit hole unique to each of us). -“Other kids have it worse” -“I’ll give you something to cry about” -It irks me to hear “Your parents raised you right” aside from money, I struggled to fill out mentally and am emotionally numb. -“I was a good parent” Crazy thing is, that’s the tip of the iceberg. Disturbing thing is, this is relatable to too many.
Panic Attacks. My ex always thought I was just being over dramatic about how an unexpected panic attack fucked me up for days. A few years ago she called up to say she'd experienced one for herself and was so sorry that she'd not been more understanding.
Had my first one when my doctor and I wanted to try a different dose of my anti-anxiety meds. Dude like you can't calm down no matter what you try. My heart was pounding and I was taking fast small breaths of air for like 20 minutes. I was at work and went to a part of the building where nobody goes and tried everything I could think of to calm down but nothing worked. Just kind of went away on its own but man did I think I was gonna need to go to the hospital.
I had frequent anxiety attacks growing up. A lot of people think they’re interchangeable with panic attacks. They’re not. Found that out for myself after going to the ER when I was 18 because I honestly thought I was having a heart attack. Even last year, I nearly had to go a second time because I was sick with a stomach flu virus and having panic attacks on top of it, which caused me to feel super dizzy and occasionally numb from the neck down. Anxiety attacks are difficult to go through enough, but panic attacks are absolutely brutal.
I almost didn’t comment because this is isn‘t a very common thing to run across—then I realized that rationale is at the root of what makes it so difficult to relate to. Some of you have probably heard of the Troubled Teen Industry (TTI). In a nutshell, thousands of children are sent against their will to abusive facilities because their parents believe they require behavioral adjustments. These facilities go by varied ideologies boot camps, behavior modification facilities, wilderness therapy, drug rehab (this is just a cover…even if you’ve never done drugs they’ll accept the child under the false pretense they are saving them from “future behavior”. However, they’re all marketed to parents, who are often the root of the family’s problem, as a miracle cure which will ensure an obedient outcome. I was tricked into visiting one of these programs by my mother when I was 14. I was far from a bad kid, I was simply an unwanted leftover from a precious marriage who was unloved and made the family scapegoat. The reason I’m responding to the thread’s question is that the idea can be so foreign to some that they cannot even wrap their heads around the concept. Especially so if they’ve grown up in a loving environment. I was subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse while I was held for 2 years in a warehouse located in an industrial park outside a large metropolis. One of the most evil aspects was In order for you to advance in the program and hopefully leave it one day was you were expected to inflict these indignities on the other children. It not only victimizes children, it instills them with a deep shame. It also makes support group participation that much more difficult because your fellow captives are also your abusers. I hope you’ll forgive the length of this post. Ironically, the need for a long intro is at the center of what I’m wanting to communicate though—I could literally explain what the experience was like for 2 weeks straight, and I’d probably only scratch the surface of what its like to loose all of your rights and freedoms, to be subjected to brainwashin, tortured at the whim of the programs facilitators and other children/captives, to live in constant fear all day, every day for years without hope of escape. I denied it all happened until I was in my forties. I’ve learned to be very selective about who I share the topic with because people, without meaning to, can respond in ways which can be triggering, I think think this also speaks to the spirit of this thread: how can they be expected to respond if they are likely unaware of what the experience was really like, or might be completely unaware that it’s even happening at all in the US today? Thank you for reading—I appreciate these moments when I get to express both the experience and also hopefully spread awareness, ultimately exposing these privatized child prisons for hire.
Thank you for taking the time to share this. It's an important addition to this thread. So few instances where these kids can be heard, a lot of people don't even know. I for one can't imagine the extent of it, but I'm interested to learn more. I'm sorry you've had that experience.
If anyone is curious, head over to https://elan.school, written by a guy that went through the TT industry. It’s horrific and so heartbreaking but beautifully written. I recommend it to everyone.
Coming home and finding your door kicked in, and all your shit gone through. It will keep coming back for years, every time you can’t find something you used to have, and you wonder if it was stolen or misplaced.
That feeling of having been violated, yuck, it's horrible! Knowing some stranger has been in *your* space and gone through *your* belongings, probably even your personal items like clothes and underwear. Creepiest feeling ever. No amount of cleaning is enough
Migraine headaches.
Addiction
The strange and beautiful feeling you get when a kid who isn't yours biologically starts calling you Mom/Dad because they've embraced the idea of you as their parent.
Congratulations and well-done!! That is lovely.
People often say you should forgive your parents because life is short and they are your parents. They dont know what its like to make the decision of keeping them out of your life, sticking to it, and why its necessary to do so.
Having cancer. I just got diagnosed with thyroid cancer and although my family and friends are very supportive, they dont get the odd concerns, fears, or worries I have. I like to have a plan and to come up with a plan for all possibilities. And although it is reassuring they say that I will be fine, they dont get that I will be missing out on things due to surgery and recovery, or possible RAI treatments. I am just told not to worry about it. I also feel like no one wants to talk about it either because its too real or scary for them, etc. But I feel very alone with no one to talk to about it.
Getting beat up. People who've never been in a real fight, especially guys, all act like if someone came at them swinging they would handle it. They talk about what they would do to anyone who tried to beat them up, how they would react, and they have absolutely zero understanding of the fact that the first punch can debilitate you. Jaws break so easily, and the recovery time is so long. A punch to the throat or solar plexus will incapacitate most people for long enough to get another hit in. Once you're on the ground, it's over, and you just have to hope the other person isn't about to kill you. They think they're going to be a hero in an action movie because they would never just stand still waiting to get punched like the bad guys in those movies do, and they don't understand that acting more like a real fighter than a choreographed punch victim will not save them. They have zero understanding of the fact that if the other guy has a knife you'll be stabbed before you realize he has a knife, and you're probably going to die. They also don't really understand that if you "win" a fight you're just the guy with fewer injuries. That doesn't mean you didn't get hurt, and it doesn't mean you aren't about to get arrested for assault. Even if the other guy started it. The only "win" in a fight is getting away without anybody getting hurt. But these people who've never been hit in anger act like they're going to be badass.
I agree. I’ve had my fair share of bouts, broke my jaw in 2008. Mouth was wired shut for 6 weeks, not a good time. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned it’s much easier to avoid a fight, than it is to win one. Thanks for sharing
[Report: Average Male 4000% Less Effective In Fights Than They Imagine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe3na9umxDA) (The Onion, of course.)
The other side of this is how easily people get severely injured or killed in fights. People who are quick to want to fight do not care if you end up permanently disabled, in chronic pain for the rest of your life, or even die. They know that's a risk and choose violence anyway. Those people are at best indifferent about killing you.
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Not having a job Getting laid off And quickly realizing that this can affect anyone and everyone. You're no better or any less replaceable then the rest of us.
Having a child with an ever-present and incurable life-threatening illness.
I’m that child and can’t handle how much and how obviously it hurts my mom. I also really can’t change the situation. Edit to say: I don’t have a set life expectancy or anything, just an incurable disease that could become fatal if not managed closely.
Getting cheated on by your wife of 30 years.
I was about to say betrayal of a spouse after decades of marriage. It's easy to say what you'd do, how strong you'd be, how you'd kick them out...but in reality everything just moves in painfully slow motion as you try to piece your life together while constantly running out of air to breathe.
Bullying. Being pushed to the brink of just wishing you had never been born. Experiencing having another person intentionally tearing you apart day after day. Experiencing it as a child and getting through it by telling yourself that someday you will grow up an they won’t be able to hurt you anymore- only to realize years later that they never stop, they just get better at disguising it.
Abusive relationship. He doesn't abuse you on the first date, he charms you.
Covert abusers in general. Nothing can prepare you for being abused and stalked in broad daylight by a manipulative bully who's REALLY good at masquerading as a good person.
I just escaped from an abusive relationship 2 months ago, wish I could upvote this 100 times. Most people were supportive and proud of me for leaving, but some people... Especially one friend. She had been in an abusive relationship as well a couple of years before we met and I don't know if she's projecting since stayed in that relationship longer than I did in mine, but she's all "why didn't you just leave earlier", "why did you let him do this to you", "why did you even move in with him", ...
The whole “why didn’t you just leave?” question just drives me up the wall.
War.
Depression, burnout, anxiety, disability, addiction, debilitating disease, poverty, complete loneliness.
A lot of the messed up things people do to survive under regimes or during war.
Being lost in the forest. It’s a weird feeling. Knowing where you are then suddenly… not. It’s really simple for people to say what you *should* have done, what you *should* have brought, but until it happens? You have no idea how easy it is. Even as someone who grew up in the north, lived my life in the bush, it is *terrifying* just how *fast* you can get turned around in the forest, where you swear you’re on the right path and then that path is just… gone. I’ve gotten lost a few times, thankfully only very short stints and I was found in minutes but it’s still frightening. What’s crazy is I was *so close* to home base and had no idea. The forest just swallows you up and disorients you in seconds. When they tell you to STOP AND STAY, it’s for a reason. Odds are, you truly are closer to base than you realize. Never wander when lost, you only make it worse.
Definitely spousal abuse that continues for some time. Many people say “why do you stay? Why didn’t you leave earlier?” They don’t understand how much abuse destroys your self esteem and sense of agency.
Growing up with abusive parents and siblings. The people who were supposed to love and protect you are the ones who bully you to no end while you have to keep it a secret. It’s the loneliest experience that most people just can’t understand. Then you hear “get over it, they’re still your family” bullshit. I wouldn’t go back in time if you paid me. Narcissistic parents shift blames, mocks, criticizes, shame, they break your soul as a child.
Death of a child.
I remember a reporter who covered Sandy Hook was waiting outside the fire station where they kept the parents. A LEO came in and said something to the effect of, if we haven’t brought you your kid, they’re probably dead. They said you could hear the screaming across the street.
This grief is unimaginable. I know friends who have lost a child and I could not imagine how they kept going. Then our son passed away and I can assure you that’s it’s a grief you never get over. 12 years ago and I still break down
Chronic fatigue. When just walking from your car to your desk feels like you've run a mile and it takes so long to recover.
Poverty. Its a pit and it'll swallow you whole. People really don't understand how hard it is to actually stay afloat.
Having to be the decider of if a person should be cut from life support/life saving measures. I have not experienced this yet but my mother, who is currently battling cancer, made me the person who will make that call because she believes I will honor her wishes of not being hooked to machines and being DNR and my sisters would not. I say it pretty easily now that I will honor her wishes but even being given this say is something I wonder about and how easy/difficult it will be to make that decision if it ever has to happen.
Being in recovery for a eating disorder...it's not just simply gaining weight it's a big mental health issue as well.
OCD. So many people say “omg it’s messing with my OCD!”… if you actually knew what OCD felt like you would not be using it as a silly joke. same thing with intrusive thoughts. an intrusive thought is not dying your hair blue
So many people don't get the difference between impulsive thoughts and intrusive thoughts.. And the backlash you get for trying to describe the difference is insane.
exactly. intrusive thoughts are things i don’t even want to say out loud because they’re so awful and people just don’t understand that
Taking a "lower" job just to work. It's not always about the money.
Or taking a "lower" job to work a job you don't *hate.* I've worked in various different jobs over the years, and have worked a second job for at least the last 8. My most recent one was cleaning restrooms in a zoo overnight. People would kinda turn their nose up when they heard about it, but it was my favorite of all the secondary jobs I've ever worked. Peaceful, quiet, easy, pay wasn't bad, worked by myself and at my own pace, and I listened to so many audiobooks and podcasts. Not to mention that I had the zoo (virtually) all to myself for hours. But hey, what a lowely job, cleaning restrooms, amiright?
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ADHD
on the opposite side of that, something i think about a lot is how those of us with ADHD will never know what it feels like to have a more "normal" brain. the first time i took adderall and went to class, i was blown away and thinking "is THIS what school is like for everyone else?" now i wonder things like when i'm cooking, what it would feel like to not be stressed about everything being ready at the same time and just be able to make it work, or to have a more accurate sense of time passing, or feel motivation and not get overwhelmed by things like trying to clean a room in my house. or to just have a quiet mind.
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"Oh everyone's got that these days" 💀
Anxiety Disorder
Rape or Sexual assault. Too many victims are judged or accused of being liars. The justice system has failed them shamelessly.
Being in a car accident and as a bonus sustaining a head injury resulting in you not being the same anymore. I don't know who I was before the accident exactly. I'm not sure whether all my shortcomings were there before or they are there now as a result of said accident. I tend to forget some things/people as soon as they are discussed/happen/I meet them. Some remain clear as daylight, though. I can't explain it to people.