I am fairly active on Lemmy and I want to ask this rather personal question using this account. Friendly warning: I talk about trauma in this post, and I am both autistic and ADHD so forgive if you read something that seems asinine to you.

Question: Would you consider yourself successful? If so, how much have you let your past trauma/bad luck (if any) affect you? I’ve gotten into a rut lately where I cannot get it out of my head that I am unlucky, and so I am trying to get perspective.

While some people would call me successful because I am highly educated (PhD in Engineering), have my own house (valued at $1M+), am fairly good looking (pull both ladies and men), have a decent enough resume with fancy names on it etc. I still feel like a loser because I am not married and don’t have kids, and I don’t think I am exceptional or outstanding in my field (this is not imposter syndrome, I am just not as good as people who are great).

Lately I’ve been examining why I feel like shit about my life, and I think it’s because whenever I had time to learn and grow, something outside of my control happened which derailed me. Am I making excuses and not taking responsibility?

I know I have C-PTSD as I was diagnosed for it, so obviously I let my past affect me. I also have memory issues because of trauma which have gotten worse over the years. I still have issues about being bullied and mocked in middle school, and I am not sure that’s normal. I also got bullied in primary school and high school as well, but remember less of this. I remember I had a math teacher who beat me in primary school (because I grew up where that was allowed).

When my parents moved to the U.S., my family faced a period of extreme poverty for at least 10 years during which I went through HS and college. My brother started emotionally and physically abusing at this point till he moved out. My brother and I had a weird relationship even prior to the physical (not sexual) abuse in that one time he kissed me, and it was such a gross moment because I really trusted him.

College was also isolating because I burned out from the poverty issues and emotional/physical abuse from my brother, and I got severely isolated and depressed and burnt out. I went to a top 30 liberal arts school so it wasn’t exactly an easy place, but it’s not like it was Harvard tough.

After college I ended up working somewhere I kind of liked at first but by this time I had developed an emotional void which needed attention and love, and I instead focused that on trying to excel at work but in a way which alienated others and isolated me socially. I ended up leaving that job for a higher paying one, and I’ve learned over time how to recognize these trauma-induced symptoms in me and to even out my personality for better social interactions.

I started going to school part-time while working, and it was during this time that I started getting stalked and received unwanted sexual attention. I went to the police and over time this matter resolved itself. I finished school etc.

Which brings me to now where I feel like a complete loser who isn’t deserving of respect or love, or a dignified life.

I am wondering if I feel this way because I can’t handle stress like other people can, and there are people who have had worse things happened and are more successful? The latter is definitely true, so I think I want to hear from you about your traumas and how your life is successful despite them.

I also want to know if I am just making excuses for being mediocre, please feel free to let me know if I am being dramatic.

I understand why they added Wilson to the script and I think it was necessary but I am not sure I would do that myself.

The cave makes sense initially but he never really improves upon it. I guess I am thinking of all the stuff they built on Gilligan's Island (which was fictional of course). It just seems like he should have built more stuff...perhaps build a hut, a bed frame, table etc. inside the cave.

Also, he was there four years. He could have started building a raft in the first month and had a much nicer raft than the one he used.

I still like the movie. I just think if it were me I don't think I'd have a Wilson and I would probably build more stuff somehow.

I feel like people don't even consider instant coffee, but it has served me well. Plus it's affordable, quick and doesn't require any extra appliances.

Edit: People I wrote my thesis on Nestles ethical malpractices. I'm sorry 😭

Either that or stainless steel makes it worse.

Either that or stainless steel makes it worse.

I've been happily posting away here on two accounts since just before the Great Migration, and have no problem being openly a woman on the internet. Up to and including correcting people who assume I'm a guy, and even occasionally acknowledging the existence of periods.

Which, honestly that was a bad tactic back on Reddit, my inbox was a nightmare. But here it's gone much better, so thank you to anyone who ever received one of my corrections with good grace!

It's also brought quite a few DMs my way from other women who try to stay more anonymous with their posts, a choice I can completely understand.

So today on International Women's Day I just want to wave hello to the other women out there, even if you don't want to break cover and wave back. Anonymous or not, cis or trans, I see you out there and you're killing it.

This may break the community rule on encouraging discussion, if nobody wants to out themselves to say hello back. So I guess I should also ask a question.

Um...anyone else using it as an excuse to treat themselves today? I've given myself the day (mostly) off work and am doing some fun gamedev all afternoon instead, then we're planning a takeaway tonight. Easily pleased, perhaps, but sounds good to me 😄

Curious to see what the trends are

Trying to get some positivity today

Is it gonna reach anywhere or die out like kbin and the way it is going i would say mbin ? They are also trying to dip toe in the microblogging platform as well and trying to use lemmy clients and that confuses me as they are promising some features lemmy doesn't have so how would that and the microblogging part work out on lemmy clients . Also srry if i am at the wrong /c/ and just point me in the right way .

EDIT: After some researches i don't think i wanna support sublink as the devs didn't open any issues or propose any contributions to lemmy which could've solved the whole mod tools issue for everyone but they straight up went to forking for who knows why and that is not a good look.

If anyone wants to ask me somethin or something else you can find me at @The_wild_card . That's all.

I mean really. I often forget about it because I like many other people out there just take it for granted and we use it everyday.

It's really insane being able to call someone from any given location (well if you signal lol) to anywhere on this globe. You can write an e-mail and the person will read it with little no delay.

Heck, we can be living in a polar climate zone and be in tropical climate zones within a day if you have the spare money to fly.

110 years (1914) people installed the first air conditions in their homes. I don't know how life was without but I can imagine.

We can buy food in a store and keep the food cool and frozen for however long we want in our own homes.

Note: It's for drug possession, not anything super bad.

13 years ago, my now former best friend tried to first con me out of money and then did it to my mom instead because my daughter had just been born (which he knew) and money was tight. I always knew he had addiction issues, but I never thought he would actually stoop that low.

Today, my wife showed me that there was a public database where you could search Indiana court cases, so out of curiosity, I typed in his name.

21 court cases, mostly drug, vehicle and fraud offenses in the county where we grew up, went to college in, and which he eventually moved back to, stretching back to 1999! Note he didn’t even live there for 10 years!

He’s currently in prison until December because he was found in possession of methamphetamine. And it was not his first time in prison or the first time he had meth on him. He did drugs when we were in college, but the most serious one was cocaine and that was very occasional. I knew he had a drinking problem, and even that he was abusing prescription medication (he offered me Vicodin when I was visiting him in San Francisco and had a headache) but I had no idea he sunk as low as meth.

This was a guy who wanted to compose classical music when I met him in middle school. He was very intellectual and well-read even then. He eventually went to Indiana University, which has one of the world’s top music schools, for composition. He always was very full of life and cheer and how far he has fallen! I knew he'd sunk really low back when he conned me, but this was the first friend I ever made in middle school in the eighth grade after going through all of seventh grade with no friends and we could and did talk about anything for hours, so I kept him in my life for as long as I could.

After college, he got way into restaurants and cooking and was working at some really high-end places, so when he contacted me and told me he wanted to do a pop-up restaurant as a way of starting a full business and needed $400, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. We mostly talked to each other online at that point, so he gave me a pretty false picture of his life.

I’m honestly not sad about the end of the friendship anymore. I cut him completely out of my life 13 years ago and I do not miss him at this point. Would it have been nice to sit together on a porch in the nursing home in 40 years and spend hours talking about Kafka? Sure. But I'm not losing any sleep over it. In fact, when she told me about the database, it was the first time I had thought about him in ages, but he was the only person I thought of and I had to look.

So I'm not sad about it. I shouldn't even be surprised about it. But it's so weird knowing my former closest friend is spending a year in prison.

Have you ever found out anything like this about an old friend you lost touch with?

I want to give a card to one of my teachers and wanted to decorate it personally, I have never been into painting, but I don’t want to get anyone else to paint for me. Wish me Luck

So I don't really know how to ask this question because I can't quite explain what I really mean or want to ask.

I am now 30 years old and I couldn't be in a better situation than currently. My job is fun and providing me enough money to live a happy life and pay my own built house (I am a nurse). I have way more free time than lets say even in my childhood. I remember coming home from school and feeling anxiety cause of exams. I remember nursing school, it was hell for me.

Now all I have to do is go to work and when my shift is done I am off and can do whatever I want whenever I want. I don't have to ask parents to drive me somewhere, I have my own money, I have my own house, I can play video games all day... and still, I don't know why but nostalgia is real.

I am not even sure if my feelings are real. I can only give silly examples like coming home from school, logging into world of warcraft with friends and having a blast. But I don't think it was like that. We were all just in skype and everyone was minding their own business in that game. We had good laughs though.

I don't know. My life should be so much better than it was 15 years ago but I miss the 2000s era. It all just felt so different. I remember the hot summers going to the lake with friends.

Now? I don't know. Maybe it is because it seems like I am the only one that has so much "time" and no one really joins anymore. While I have a wife and no kids and most of my friends don't even have a wife yet (so no kids....) they still are somehow busy and don't go to the lake anymore, don't play video games anymore, don't do anything. I actually wonder what they do all day.

Life felt more exciting back then. Maybe because I had goals and now I am "done"? But this should feel good. I am happy that I am "done". House, wife, job. Those were the things I wanted back then and now I am more than happy to have those things.

For better or for worse, while growing up my social life was mostly online: gaia online, livejournal, deviantart, tumblr, and many others. I've heard of social media interaction be described as social junk food & even as I want to defend the many genuine, meaningful online relationships I had, I'm sympathetic: of course it's better to laugh together, to touch each other, to see each other's facial expressions, to do projects together, to tangibly help each other, to be part of each others' physical lives. Of course tech companies prey on our increasing loneliness and need for interaction the way that Coca Cola preys on thirst: claiming to cure it but exacerbating it and making us ill at the same time (and killing workers as they do it). But lots of people are in situations that keep them isolated that they can't easily change: disability, living rurally, working two jobs, living in places where they can't speak the language well, and the internet can provide a solution.

My life circumstances enable me to live the life I've always wanted to live, but it comes at a few sacrifices, the biggest being a social life, particularly a social life with people who share my values and who I feel comfortable speaking intimately with. There are lots of ways I can think of to make friends online, but mostly they involve having conversations on spyware platforms. Now that I'm privacypilled I can't unring that bell. It's as comfortable for me to make a friendship on a facebook group as it would be meeting a stranger for lunch in an extremely crowded public venue and have to scream our entire conversation perpetually. At least if they were willing to switch to Signal or something at some point we could metaphorically go to a quiet cafe and speak freely, but even the dude I talked to who talked about the book he read on techno-feudalism ditched it after trying it for a grand total of five minutes with me.

I fucking hate most tech companies and basically can't tolerate mainstream social media. My IRL prospects are what they are, I could change them only at great cost to myself. But, embracing my milkless cloth monkey mom, I have to admit sociality, love, and understanding are needs: their absence won't kill me as quickly as starvation, but it's probably up there with sedentism. Anybody else in the same pinch? How do you cope?

Would any of you like to be a mod? With the way things are going, we're looking for equal numbers lemm.ee and lemmy.world mods. If you'd like to apply, tell us about yourself below, let it flow.

How was it spent?

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/25506145

Just finished a decade long expedition of starting my business, growing it with love & tears to an exit to a venture funded giant in the space, being on their leash for a few years, & getting laid off just this week. AMA why capitalism will self consume. And since I have some time now I can try to articulate what I think will replace it.

Share your food. Whatever your eating today. Bonus points for photos.

Crispy bacon, fish, eggs, spicy fish sauce, liver, and crunchy ears.

From my experience i would say i'm getting more familliar with pain and just registering it less rather than actually having any gains. I think i will be stopping it from now on . Maybe i shouldn't have continued after i started feeling pain ? Will see if the pain stop or will go to the doctors. Anyway thoughts ?

EDIT : Gentleman/woman i am pleased to announce the pain has completely ceased to exist and seems like i hadn't suffered any damage and gotta say thanks for your concern lemmy .

Also what about the chinese guys beating up wood if there is no gain why are they doing that ?

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4433

Should i repost this to any other /c/'s meant for this kind of things ?

EDIT: In case anyone don't understand what this is it is an issue raised by someone on lemmy git that when an account is deleted or banned it should also delete the data the data posted by the user. And one of the main dev nutomic is blowing it of like it won't affect me and maltfield is remainding him that it is illegal under the EU law and it also affects lemmy and moreover it is not ethical or moral . And i thought that was what lemmy was built on privacy, ethics and morals now i am dissapointed.

EDIT : For everyone saying there is no way i am not really ap roggrammer or anything but couldn't this work :

They could just roll it out on a new version and i think most instances won't mod it to remove that maybe some oddball ones will but not most. I know saved copies will be there but who cares no one is saving my 1000 comments but that is not the case with this .

It is copy pasted from one of my replies.

EDIT: Also it is not my intention to point finger to lemmy devs and i can differentiate their political stance and their work my only intention was to see that if this post gained enough traction they will reply or fix the issue.

EDIT : Relevant comment from @[email protected] about what if other instance don't delete your data.

So maybe those instances are breaking the law, but Lemmy by default should comply. You could say the exact same thing about any social media - scrapers can and do archive everything they can - but that doesn’t absolve the original platforms (e.g. Twitter) from having to follow the law.

EDIT : As just a person i can't do anything about it but i am certain if everybody pitch in the lemmy devs will listen and even though everyone seems to hate lemmy devs political stance i can differentiate with politics and their work and i find @[email protected] to be very responsive so i am gonna mention him and see what he thinks about it instead of trashing lemmy devs on speculation (i don't know nutomic's id) even though i don't agree wuth nutomic's response in this case i don't share the views of many people in the comments and don't associate this post with them.

EDIT : I just want an option to purge my data when deleting an account that you can enable or disable.

EDIT:Ok i just woke up and am catching up with some of these replies and i wanna say i don't share any of their views nor am i affliated with them i never wanted to trash on the dev and that is one of the main reason i posted this on casual conversation i didn't think this would get this uncasual . All i wanted to so was draw attention to this problem so devs will act on it faster but since then i have learned lemmy politics does'nt work like that and as i am not the mod or anyththing i can't do anything about some of the comments except make it clear i have no affliations with them. Just keep it casual people. I too want these changes but maybe geemtting on the nerve if devs isn't the best way to achieve it.

Something @[email protected] chimed in .Your comments can be public, but your data is yours. That’s the whole point of GDPR. Think of an art gallery. The gallery does not own the art a lot of the time, they simply show it. The art is owned by the artist. If they want to take it down they can. The same thing applies here. Your data, you get to choose what happens to it in the eyes of the law.

EDIT:

I accidently left this part out so uploading it.