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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll preface by saying I have done some bad things I’m not proud of in life.

I was an failure relative to my peers and just never felt like I would progress, so I did things to people I am not proud of doing in times of need.

One of these came back to bite me when I started a new job at the same place as two people I’d wronged. Suffice to say I was recognised and one of them made a complaint.

So during my training, the last week, I was taken aside and confronted by HR and subsequently canned. I was canned for discrepancies in my application as they could hardly can me on hearsay.

Well, that spurred me to apply for a job, not my ideal job, at a better company. Which to cut this short basically enabled me to grow as a person, get a neurodivergent diagnosis with medication. Re-train and now I work in my dream field.

The moral is good things happen to bad people i guess.

When I was 12 learning C from a programmer friend

“This is too complicated”

“Why does it matter if it’s complicated?”

Yeah actually, I don’t have a reason to feel threatened by complicated things. There is no cost to tiring your brain, no cost to doing something tedious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been the recipe to my success.

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

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

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

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

Lift with your legs, not your back.

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