Hey all! I was originally gonna call this Aurelius' Slave Emporium but I figured that naming it after a MCR song would cause less people to be upset or some such shit. As for what it even is: I've come to the realization that I make a lot of status updates. Like, too many. Sometimes I double post and it's bad. So, this is my solution. I'm going to use this thread to discuss anything with everyone, be it game/movie recommendations, life advice, or whatever; and I'll continue to do so until I die or get vatted. Today I'm gonna touch upon the second topic (life advice not how to get vatted).
Let's start off strong, with:
What to do if You're Accused of a Crime
I already gave Ayelander the abridged version of this but I figured that in the hopes of someone else learning from my bad example I'd give everyone the painstaking details. This is gonna be less advice and more an obnoxiously long personal anecdote that I hope you can all take some lessons from; it's gonna touch upon my suicidal thoughts, mental health issues, drug use and that kinda shit so if you're sensitive to that I'd cash out now. Note that all names have been shortened or changed entirely; no last names are gonna be used. This isn't about flaming the people who made me miserable. It's about sharing the lowest points of my life and the mistakes I made in the hopes that someone else won't make them too. And if I can help even one person in that way, figure I've done some good.
So, let me set the scene for you. My first year of college, I was gonna kill myself. I lived on the sixth floor, the "party floor". We called it that because we were loud around the clock, and did some crazy shit (sometimes literally; a chick once shat in one've the girls' bathroom showers and mashed it down the drain). It was heaven. But, all the same, I wanted to die. I was fairly popular, had a best friend named Sarah, and got decent grades. Yet I wanted it all to end. And to understand why, we have to go back to my Freshman year of high school.
I remember the summer of 2013 vividly. I'd just started high school end of August, and the stress had really started getting to me. I was in a new place, with new people, and was honestly frightened by the prospect of making friends. Start of Freshman year, I was 5'7" 165 pounds. End of Senior year I was 5'10" 350 pounds. But we'll get to that. The point I'm trying to make is that I was a small kid. And the idea of this new placed filled with new people was, frankly, scary. I was punchy, and played football; despite being a munchkin, I was a mighty munchkin. But my parents told me that the fighting shit I pulled in middle school wouldn't cut it anymore without the cops getting involved, and I took that to heart. It was just another stressor in a year full of them. But anyways, August 28th, 2013 we'd just moved to CT. Stranger in a strange land. I'd left all my friends in Boston to go to middle-of-nowhere Tolland County with my parents, and it was bad. For everyone. They dragged me literally kicking and screaming into that moving truck. I remember not being able to sleep at first because it was too quiet. Boy, was that about to change.
August 29th, I was lying in bed when I started to hear voices. They were faint at first, but they eventually got louder and louder before turning into a wailing cacophony of sound, shouting my name, telling me to kill myself, telling me to kill other people. They'd persist at that volume for the next 5 years of my life. I didn't tell anyone about them, partially because whenever the thought crossed my mind they'd threaten to make me kill them, and partially because my parents weren't the type to believe it. But eventually, believe it or not, I adapted to them. I started seeing the voices not as a detriment, but as my friends. My abusive, psychotic friends that wanted me to grill and eat my cat because they didn't think he loved me. Anyways, I began to see their helpful side. I didn't need to dogear books, for example, because I'd pick the book up and one voice in that crowded lecture hall would say something like "page 162, fuckstick." I got used to them being there, and looking at my grades throughout high school you can see how they went up. As did my weight.
Everything hit the fan in more ways than one senior year. I played football to keep active, but as I started to cope with the voices by eating football did nothing for my shape. I went from a skeleton to a pear over the course of 4 years and literally doubled my weight. Things got worse when Olivia entered my life. Olivia was a gorgeous blonde with aspirations to join the Air Force. We became friends. By that I mean I developed a major crush on her. Wow.jpeg. Obviously, me being a morbidly obese, unattractive Italian man she didn't reciprocate. That was fine; we had a talk then started talking amicably, and became actual friends pretty quickly. That changed with the entrance of Pat. Pat played football with me and had been my backup center since Freshman year; I was fat, but lifted weights. Senior year I could bench press my body weight (350). Pat, on the other hand, was just pure doughboy. Was a nice enough guy, but a little too pompous for a fat ginger to be, you catch my drift. Anyways, he started talking to Olivia, and the voices went wild. To this day I regret letting them control me. Basically, I went wild with them. I followed one've his friends to the bathroom during lunch, and interrogated him there. I won't go into what I did. I washed my hands and went to find Pat, who I'd been told was leaving this period. The lobby and the cafeteria were adjacent so I didn't have to go too far to find him. Luck was on my side; though, I wouldn't call anything that happened afterwards lucky for anyone. I pinned him to a wall and, to my credit, fought the urge to bash his face in but started rambling about how he'd betrayed me and I wanted him dead and blah blah blah psychopath shit blah. I then left as quickly as I'd come.
Next day, turned out he told Olivia. So she confronted me, and our friendship was well and thoroughly fucked. Was my own fault. Got worse. My weight had been an issue for me since I'd started gaining it; I even joked about it when I did standup comedy for the Amnesty International coffee houses at my school. It just so happened that I had to do just that that night. So after getting off the bus, I did what anyone with a time limit at home would do; I experimented with pseudoephedrine. Pseudo would become my favorite amphetamine in the years to come. Anyways, I had a good time, nailed my standup set. But the next morning I woke up with a massive, oozing bloody gash on my cheek (it's since turned into a scar, and I still don't know where it came from).
So from the end of my Senior year of high school to my second year of college, I used amphetamines. Adderall, pseudo; didn't matter, so long as I could feel that rush that gave me an escape from the pain in my own mind, if only briefly. The weight couldn't leave me fast enough; I lost 120 pounds my first year of college alone. It upped my confidence again (as did the drugs), and gave me the courage to talk to a cute redhead first day of school. Her name was Sarah, and we became best friends. And about a month into school, I wrote her a suicide letter. Which brings us to the plan. I was gonna jump out the 6th story window after swallowing a bottle of asprin to rupture my insides (a friend had killed himself that way during high school). Way I saw it, if the fall killed me, great. If it didn't, asprin. I'd die anyways. As for the reason? Despite my newfound confidence, there was something missing. It's hard to explain unless you've experienced it, but when you have voices telling you day in day out that you should die, you feel like you should die. In addition, I'd felt a certain feeling of emptiness since as long as I can remember, and that didn't help things. My roommate walked in as I was gonna do it. And I decided not to. I decided to live like a dead man walking, with nothing to lose. And for a while, it was great.
Then Sarah announced that she was dropping out. It hit me hard. When she finally did leave, the voices told me that it was my fault. I didn't have the strength to argue. Then, another woman appeared to pull me out've the darkness. Two, in fact. Hailey, and Caroline. They were a lesbian couple who thought I was funny, and they seemed to like me. We started spending time together, then every day together, then I started sleeping over in their dorm room and basically lived with them. It was amazing; for the first time in my life, I felt wanted. Like I belonged. And I wanted to spend the rest of my life with these women. When I confided in them about my drug abuse, they tried to help me quit. Life couldn't get any better. Until I fell in love with Hailey.
Hailey and Caroline weren't strictly lesbians. They were technically bi; though Hailey had never fallen in love with a man. So when I fell for her, she obviously didn't reciprocate. But we did become best friends. We liked the same shit, watched the same movies, had the same sense of humor. so we just... clicked. In a way that no-one has ever clicked with me before or since. We started flirting, eventually. Caroline obviously didn't like this; it put a strain on their relationship and eventually, like everything else I touch, this dream situation collapsed and crumbled faster than Alexander's empire after he died. So all of a sudden our three became a two. Me and Hailey, spending time together, but always aware that I had ruined the prior situation. She suggested we move into an apartment together.
You can't see it, but I'm crying as I'm writing this. As I remember the good times we had and how it broke down. But, as per usual, we'll get to that. Hailey and I got an apartment with three other mutual friends, and for a while I began to hope that that paradise situation I'd had before could happen again. But it wasn't meant to be. I'd never stopped using, despite trying to quit, and it stressed things between Hailey and I. I also became a scapegoat for everything that went wrong in the apartment, and eventually I found a proxy to buy me beer and wine and descended into alcoholism. Stopped going to class, stopped leaving my room, just generally stopped... living. Dead man walking once again, but in all the wrong ways. It reached a zenith in October 2017.
I went home for a weekend to wash my clothes en masse without using the campus washing machines, and found that I couldn't go back on campus. I'd been interim suspended for violating the school's code of conduct. Turns out, I'd been accused of rape. By Hailey. I don't know what went wrong. Maybe it was the amphetamine abuse that drove her over the edge. Maybe it was me ruining her relationship. I don't know. And I never will. But the next day I was served with a restraining order which stated I was "6 feet tall, 350 pounds, black hair and blue eyes". I was, and still am, 5'10", 200 pounds, with green eyes and brown hair. I don't know why she described me how she did. But anyways, I got the affidavit and Hailey had told the police about the voices. I'd confided in her, and she used it as "evidence". I showed it to my parents, and we agreed the best step to take was to send me to the hospital.
The hospital wasn't all bad. Aside from really wanting a cigarette the whole time, it was mostly dull. Family visited and brought me books, and while there I made use of their rehab services, which help me finally quit amphetamines and drinking. While there I was misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and put on meds for that. Eventually the voices got quieter, and went away entirely. As soon as I left though, it was time to get to work.
New (mis)diagnosis in hand, I found a lawyer, and began compiling evidence. I got 80 pages of text messages and observations about Hailey. When we went to court for the restraining order, it was thrown out. For the criminal charges, a veritable landslide. Thanks to acting quickly, I'd been able to make myself look good in front of the judge and court; and it won me the day(s). After that, I went to outpatient, where I took a psych eval and was correctly diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and an "unknown psychotic disorder". I started new meds, and shit has been... well, better. I'll be a year sober come October 14, and the meds are good at both keeping the voices quiet and distracting me from the emptiness inside.
The morals of the story are varied, but here's a checklist:
1) Don't be afraid or ashamed to get help. Sometimes it's necessary, and by doing so you can finally take steps towards being the person you want to be.
2) If anyone judges you for getting help, it's them that's the problem, not you.
3) When accused of criminal charges, get on that shit, especially if you know they're false. Discuss a counter argument with your attorney immediately and don't settle if you know you're innocent.
4) Finally, don't ever lose hope, no matter how hard it may be. Life is strange, and complicated. Friends come and go; and with my BPD I have a hard time accepting that. But it's something I have to accept. We all have to accept it. But never give up. On quitting drugs, on getting help, on going to court to fight for your freedom; don't let the world stop you from making a brighter future for yourself.
And that's all, folks. I've had to omit some stuff for length, but I've said everything I care to. And no matter what, don't forget what I said. These are lessons I've had to learn the hard way; I put this out there so you don't. But most of all, thank you for taking the time to read this. And thank you for being there, NMA. I love you all, even though we may be continents apart. Here's to more discussions in the future, and hopefully we can continue this thread! <3
Let's start off strong, with:
What to do if You're Accused of a Crime
I already gave Ayelander the abridged version of this but I figured that in the hopes of someone else learning from my bad example I'd give everyone the painstaking details. This is gonna be less advice and more an obnoxiously long personal anecdote that I hope you can all take some lessons from; it's gonna touch upon my suicidal thoughts, mental health issues, drug use and that kinda shit so if you're sensitive to that I'd cash out now. Note that all names have been shortened or changed entirely; no last names are gonna be used. This isn't about flaming the people who made me miserable. It's about sharing the lowest points of my life and the mistakes I made in the hopes that someone else won't make them too. And if I can help even one person in that way, figure I've done some good.
So, let me set the scene for you. My first year of college, I was gonna kill myself. I lived on the sixth floor, the "party floor". We called it that because we were loud around the clock, and did some crazy shit (sometimes literally; a chick once shat in one've the girls' bathroom showers and mashed it down the drain). It was heaven. But, all the same, I wanted to die. I was fairly popular, had a best friend named Sarah, and got decent grades. Yet I wanted it all to end. And to understand why, we have to go back to my Freshman year of high school.
I remember the summer of 2013 vividly. I'd just started high school end of August, and the stress had really started getting to me. I was in a new place, with new people, and was honestly frightened by the prospect of making friends. Start of Freshman year, I was 5'7" 165 pounds. End of Senior year I was 5'10" 350 pounds. But we'll get to that. The point I'm trying to make is that I was a small kid. And the idea of this new placed filled with new people was, frankly, scary. I was punchy, and played football; despite being a munchkin, I was a mighty munchkin. But my parents told me that the fighting shit I pulled in middle school wouldn't cut it anymore without the cops getting involved, and I took that to heart. It was just another stressor in a year full of them. But anyways, August 28th, 2013 we'd just moved to CT. Stranger in a strange land. I'd left all my friends in Boston to go to middle-of-nowhere Tolland County with my parents, and it was bad. For everyone. They dragged me literally kicking and screaming into that moving truck. I remember not being able to sleep at first because it was too quiet. Boy, was that about to change.
August 29th, I was lying in bed when I started to hear voices. They were faint at first, but they eventually got louder and louder before turning into a wailing cacophony of sound, shouting my name, telling me to kill myself, telling me to kill other people. They'd persist at that volume for the next 5 years of my life. I didn't tell anyone about them, partially because whenever the thought crossed my mind they'd threaten to make me kill them, and partially because my parents weren't the type to believe it. But eventually, believe it or not, I adapted to them. I started seeing the voices not as a detriment, but as my friends. My abusive, psychotic friends that wanted me to grill and eat my cat because they didn't think he loved me. Anyways, I began to see their helpful side. I didn't need to dogear books, for example, because I'd pick the book up and one voice in that crowded lecture hall would say something like "page 162, fuckstick." I got used to them being there, and looking at my grades throughout high school you can see how they went up. As did my weight.
Everything hit the fan in more ways than one senior year. I played football to keep active, but as I started to cope with the voices by eating football did nothing for my shape. I went from a skeleton to a pear over the course of 4 years and literally doubled my weight. Things got worse when Olivia entered my life. Olivia was a gorgeous blonde with aspirations to join the Air Force. We became friends. By that I mean I developed a major crush on her. Wow.jpeg. Obviously, me being a morbidly obese, unattractive Italian man she didn't reciprocate. That was fine; we had a talk then started talking amicably, and became actual friends pretty quickly. That changed with the entrance of Pat. Pat played football with me and had been my backup center since Freshman year; I was fat, but lifted weights. Senior year I could bench press my body weight (350). Pat, on the other hand, was just pure doughboy. Was a nice enough guy, but a little too pompous for a fat ginger to be, you catch my drift. Anyways, he started talking to Olivia, and the voices went wild. To this day I regret letting them control me. Basically, I went wild with them. I followed one've his friends to the bathroom during lunch, and interrogated him there. I won't go into what I did. I washed my hands and went to find Pat, who I'd been told was leaving this period. The lobby and the cafeteria were adjacent so I didn't have to go too far to find him. Luck was on my side; though, I wouldn't call anything that happened afterwards lucky for anyone. I pinned him to a wall and, to my credit, fought the urge to bash his face in but started rambling about how he'd betrayed me and I wanted him dead and blah blah blah psychopath shit blah. I then left as quickly as I'd come.
Next day, turned out he told Olivia. So she confronted me, and our friendship was well and thoroughly fucked. Was my own fault. Got worse. My weight had been an issue for me since I'd started gaining it; I even joked about it when I did standup comedy for the Amnesty International coffee houses at my school. It just so happened that I had to do just that that night. So after getting off the bus, I did what anyone with a time limit at home would do; I experimented with pseudoephedrine. Pseudo would become my favorite amphetamine in the years to come. Anyways, I had a good time, nailed my standup set. But the next morning I woke up with a massive, oozing bloody gash on my cheek (it's since turned into a scar, and I still don't know where it came from).
So from the end of my Senior year of high school to my second year of college, I used amphetamines. Adderall, pseudo; didn't matter, so long as I could feel that rush that gave me an escape from the pain in my own mind, if only briefly. The weight couldn't leave me fast enough; I lost 120 pounds my first year of college alone. It upped my confidence again (as did the drugs), and gave me the courage to talk to a cute redhead first day of school. Her name was Sarah, and we became best friends. And about a month into school, I wrote her a suicide letter. Which brings us to the plan. I was gonna jump out the 6th story window after swallowing a bottle of asprin to rupture my insides (a friend had killed himself that way during high school). Way I saw it, if the fall killed me, great. If it didn't, asprin. I'd die anyways. As for the reason? Despite my newfound confidence, there was something missing. It's hard to explain unless you've experienced it, but when you have voices telling you day in day out that you should die, you feel like you should die. In addition, I'd felt a certain feeling of emptiness since as long as I can remember, and that didn't help things. My roommate walked in as I was gonna do it. And I decided not to. I decided to live like a dead man walking, with nothing to lose. And for a while, it was great.
Then Sarah announced that she was dropping out. It hit me hard. When she finally did leave, the voices told me that it was my fault. I didn't have the strength to argue. Then, another woman appeared to pull me out've the darkness. Two, in fact. Hailey, and Caroline. They were a lesbian couple who thought I was funny, and they seemed to like me. We started spending time together, then every day together, then I started sleeping over in their dorm room and basically lived with them. It was amazing; for the first time in my life, I felt wanted. Like I belonged. And I wanted to spend the rest of my life with these women. When I confided in them about my drug abuse, they tried to help me quit. Life couldn't get any better. Until I fell in love with Hailey.
Hailey and Caroline weren't strictly lesbians. They were technically bi; though Hailey had never fallen in love with a man. So when I fell for her, she obviously didn't reciprocate. But we did become best friends. We liked the same shit, watched the same movies, had the same sense of humor. so we just... clicked. In a way that no-one has ever clicked with me before or since. We started flirting, eventually. Caroline obviously didn't like this; it put a strain on their relationship and eventually, like everything else I touch, this dream situation collapsed and crumbled faster than Alexander's empire after he died. So all of a sudden our three became a two. Me and Hailey, spending time together, but always aware that I had ruined the prior situation. She suggested we move into an apartment together.
You can't see it, but I'm crying as I'm writing this. As I remember the good times we had and how it broke down. But, as per usual, we'll get to that. Hailey and I got an apartment with three other mutual friends, and for a while I began to hope that that paradise situation I'd had before could happen again. But it wasn't meant to be. I'd never stopped using, despite trying to quit, and it stressed things between Hailey and I. I also became a scapegoat for everything that went wrong in the apartment, and eventually I found a proxy to buy me beer and wine and descended into alcoholism. Stopped going to class, stopped leaving my room, just generally stopped... living. Dead man walking once again, but in all the wrong ways. It reached a zenith in October 2017.
I went home for a weekend to wash my clothes en masse without using the campus washing machines, and found that I couldn't go back on campus. I'd been interim suspended for violating the school's code of conduct. Turns out, I'd been accused of rape. By Hailey. I don't know what went wrong. Maybe it was the amphetamine abuse that drove her over the edge. Maybe it was me ruining her relationship. I don't know. And I never will. But the next day I was served with a restraining order which stated I was "6 feet tall, 350 pounds, black hair and blue eyes". I was, and still am, 5'10", 200 pounds, with green eyes and brown hair. I don't know why she described me how she did. But anyways, I got the affidavit and Hailey had told the police about the voices. I'd confided in her, and she used it as "evidence". I showed it to my parents, and we agreed the best step to take was to send me to the hospital.
The hospital wasn't all bad. Aside from really wanting a cigarette the whole time, it was mostly dull. Family visited and brought me books, and while there I made use of their rehab services, which help me finally quit amphetamines and drinking. While there I was misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and put on meds for that. Eventually the voices got quieter, and went away entirely. As soon as I left though, it was time to get to work.
New (mis)diagnosis in hand, I found a lawyer, and began compiling evidence. I got 80 pages of text messages and observations about Hailey. When we went to court for the restraining order, it was thrown out. For the criminal charges, a veritable landslide. Thanks to acting quickly, I'd been able to make myself look good in front of the judge and court; and it won me the day(s). After that, I went to outpatient, where I took a psych eval and was correctly diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and an "unknown psychotic disorder". I started new meds, and shit has been... well, better. I'll be a year sober come October 14, and the meds are good at both keeping the voices quiet and distracting me from the emptiness inside.
The morals of the story are varied, but here's a checklist:
1) Don't be afraid or ashamed to get help. Sometimes it's necessary, and by doing so you can finally take steps towards being the person you want to be.
2) If anyone judges you for getting help, it's them that's the problem, not you.
3) When accused of criminal charges, get on that shit, especially if you know they're false. Discuss a counter argument with your attorney immediately and don't settle if you know you're innocent.
4) Finally, don't ever lose hope, no matter how hard it may be. Life is strange, and complicated. Friends come and go; and with my BPD I have a hard time accepting that. But it's something I have to accept. We all have to accept it. But never give up. On quitting drugs, on getting help, on going to court to fight for your freedom; don't let the world stop you from making a brighter future for yourself.
And that's all, folks. I've had to omit some stuff for length, but I've said everything I care to. And no matter what, don't forget what I said. These are lessons I've had to learn the hard way; I put this out there so you don't. But most of all, thank you for taking the time to read this. And thank you for being there, NMA. I love you all, even though we may be continents apart. Here's to more discussions in the future, and hopefully we can continue this thread! <3
Good luck!
