I was 6 miles into a very technical mountain bike ride, when I fell and broke my collar bone. No one had any cell service. Hiking out of there was pretty hellish.

This thread really makes me appreciate how good I have it…

Removed by mod

My brother is a veteran, and when he came back he started “self-medicating” with meth to treat his PTSD. He was constantly on the verge of crisis and making violent threats (carefully phrased to not be actionable). At the time, I was working at an Amazon warehouse, at times doing 60 hours weeks, and at the time I was on Facebook and if I got off work and wanted to check it, he’d see I was online and if I left him on read it would be a whole thing. I described it as being a 911 operator on call 24/7. I basically wrote him off as dead to me, but my parents wouldn’t and that was the worst part. I remember visiting and we tried to go out for dinner but then he texted my mom with another crisis and now she’s in tears again, like always. It was constant. And he’d accuse them of all sorts of stuff, my mom still had one of those phones you had to press the button multiple times to get a letter and if she had a typo he’d accuse her of doing it on purpose. All he did all day was be alone with his thoughts, going through the same cycles, shooting up meth and absorbing whatever crazy right-wing bullshit he was listening to.

My parents are pretty well off and they were there for him. They tried to check him into all sorts of mental hospitals and rehab, but he’d check himself out early. There was an incident early on where he checked himself into the VA and they tried to cut him off Xanax cold turkey, which is potentially life-threatening, and he responded violently. This put a flag on his record which made it difficult to get him treatment later, and he was also careful to phrase his threats ambiguously enough to not be institutionalized.

It was pretty clear to me that this was only going to end one way, and at one point I thought about going up there and killing him myself, before he could hurt an innocent person. But the cops kept a watch on his house until it happened and he took a gun and led them on a car chase to somebody’s house, pulled a gun on them, and got shot in the arm. When I heard it happened, I didn’t know if he’d live or die and didn’t care, I was just relieved that it had finally happened and that nobody else got hurt. He went to jail for a bit and that got him off the meth so he’s doing better now.

What really gets me about it though is how easy we got off, though. Compared to the people on the other side of the war, the people actually living in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, countless civilians. The children terrified of sunny days because that’s when the drones fly. How many times over do you have to multiply the pain and suffering I felt when I saw my mother’s face in tears to get even an inkling of the suffering inflicted on those people?

And it’s all just out of sight, out of mind. We went to war and people hardly even noticed, everybody just went about their lives as normal like it wasn’t even happening. People don’t even give a shit about veterans killing themselves on the daily in VA parking lots and waiting rooms because they can’t get care, they sure as shit don’t care about brown people on the other side of the world that the news treats as subhuman. And now, Bush gets rehabilitated on Ellen and the libs expect me to vote for Biden. It’s absurd how little people care about all the people they murdered.

Went under to have my wisdom teeth removed and I swear I was in hell for 5 seconds. All I could see was faded yellow and orange and I was hearing screaming.

Did some volunteering at some old folks homes and a hospice.

The hospice had people who were literally trapped in their own bodies. Bedridden and unable to move their arms, legs or even speak. They communicated yes/no by monotone grunting(two for yes, one for no.

Person was fully conscious and aware. Just unable to act on the outside world.

My brother left my disabeled mother to die in a diaper after a fall, until her leg turned septic from an untreated fracture. He was legally in charge of her and my dementia addled father; put a DNI on her and let her die of a heart attack after sitting in her shit for a week.

Then promised to fly me out to the funeral and ghosted me the same week, leaving my maternal family thinking I skipped the funeral.

Secondhand experience was being a content moderator for Tiktok and witnessing every warcrime, csam or otherwise horrible video spread on the internet for internet points before we had to manually flag it and take it down.

Not sure, I’d have to say it’s a tie between having my hometown sunk into chaos by the classic tabloid treatment, accidentally contributing to the first human tragedy of someone close to me I’ve had to hear about, witnessing my only friends’ families tear apart by legal forces, assault and stuff at the psych ward, being kidnapped once, and overall people targeting me for various reasons.

Depression and gender dysphoria. It’s not very dramatic nor fast-acting, it just ate away at me for a decade until I was sure I wasn’t gonna survive the next few years.

The fear of death doesn’t go away, it just starts to seem like the least terrible option. And it’s one thing when you get those impulses to do it, but it’s even scarier when you feel calm and levelheaded and still feel you should do it.

Racism. I’ve been called racial slurs for not just my race, but other races. I’ve been profiled by police. I’ve watched my boss not only allow racist remarks made by my coworkers for no reason (eg: working like a hard-R) but laugh along to them. People judge Tarantino’s movies for excessive use of racism but I think they’re the most honest depictions of American culture.

Being a child with an ear infection, rather than take me to a doctor to get antibiotics, my parents had my grandmother come over to pray for me and she told me that Jesus was my physician. I just remember wondering why my physician wasn’t fucking doing anything about it.

I’ll just go with a tame one (Edit: I have a lot to pick from and most are really hard to put into text due to the trauma)

My firsthand experience with police brutality

For context I was 15 at the time and still in highschool

When I was homeless I slept on some benches in my hometown and one night I slept on the bench behind the local library because it was one of the few that was covered and it was raining that day.

I was woken up by being tazed by a police officer.

He was screaming and I couldn’t do a damn thing because I was getting tazed.

After finally falling off the bench he stopped but was screaming that he could kill me and leave my body in the woods (the town is basically right on the border of a national forest) and no one would find me.

He was screaming that if I didn’t leave he would.

I took off like a bat out of hell.

He followed me with his car from a distance for a while before finally taking off in a different direction. When he took off I stopped walking down the streets and made my way to my school through less conventional means and slept there that night under one of the buildings.

Edit 2: For anyone curious, I was homeless for 8 years. I’ve got a nice place now and I’m back on my feet.

I had no job, no money and no family. I was young and had no identity documents, and was knocked back from government services because I couldn’t prove who I was. I took the first safe shelter I could. With the benefit of many years experience, I know there were other options but at the time it seemed like the only option. There are ways of accessing help without ID, but I didn’t know where to look.

It was a small, dodgy outbuilding at the back of someone’s property. It was clad by nothing but tin. The wind would lift the rusty roof up and slam it down with a deafening crash for hours at a time. No insulation, no services of any kind. I slept on an old mattress, just laid on the floor. It had a slope to it and the springs were poking through. I had a single, sweat-stained blanket.

I lived there long enough to experience both an unusually cold winter and a heatwave. I remember the sound of the frozen grass crunching beneath my feet. It was the first time I’d ever experienced temperatures that low, having grown up in a hot climate.

The owner would occasionally let me use the facilities inside their house, but only ever during the day when it was unlocked. They gave me enough food to survive which they’d leave outside for me. We’d have a very brief exchange maybe once a week. Apart from that I had a total absence of social interaction. The property was isolated if you didn’t have a car - which I did not.

It was a trap. It seemed better than the streets, because I had relative safety and a roof over my head. But it also left me totally unable to change the situation I was living in. I couldn’t go anywhere to find help, I couldn’t contact anyone. I didn’t want to leave because the alternative seemed worse. I was stuck.

The owner had meant well. They had their own mental health issues and, even if they had been high-functioning, they had no idea what to do. They were a hoarder and the inside of their home was somehow filthier than my “living” space. The situation was a result of the contradictions between their heartfelt desire to help, their own anxieties and other mental demons. They were trapped too, in their own way, and had barely more contact with the outside world than me.

Isolation destroys your mind. You can’t think straight, you lose your ability to solve even basic problems. You become paranoid. You hallucinate. Your memory is obliterated, not just for the period of the isolation but the memories formed before and after too. I had to piece together a time line of major events in my life from a couple of years before and after from little scraps I kept.

I lost my inner monologue during that time. The voice in your head. My thoughts became sensations and movement, like water being poured into a network of branching channels and spreading amongst them. They’d remain that for years and even more than a decade own it’s still not the ‘same’.

I was almost non-verbal at the end - finding even a few basic words, to say “yes” or “no” to a question was exhausting. My manner of speaking is not the same as it was and my accent isn’t quite like anyone else who was born here. For at least a year later I was still losing time, hours or days, and was unsure of how I got there.

I was aware I was losing my mind throughout the process. I’d try to force structure and logic upon what I was processing but it doesn’t work. The information you’re receiving is already corrupted, then it gets further twisted in your mind. There is nothing more terrifying than being trapped in your own mind.

Eventually the owner, in a more lucid moment, managed to get mental health services to come out. I felt so betrayed at the time. I was terrified of them, unfamiliar faces after so much time alone. I was deeply ashamed. I’d come to realize this act saved me, but I hated the owner for it at the time.

Testicular torsion. As a teenager, I woke up early in the morning with the worst back and stomach pain I had ever felt in my life. I remember thinking I might be sick, vomiting, then passing out from the pain. My parents found me later that morning because I was delirious and moaning. They took me to the hospital and it was fixed.

Just kidding! My parents are shit bags so they told me I just had the flu and I was being dramatic. After my testicle swelled up to over double the size later that day, they called our family doctor who said I probably had a hydrocele and he’d look at it when he got back from vacation. For the record, mine was textbook testicular torsion, my doctor was as idiotically negligent as my parents.

The pain again became excruciating that evening and I was exhausted from lack of sleep, so I started yelling and demanding my parents take me to the hospital, which they did the next morning. There was TV to be watched, they couldn’t bother with taking care of their children. The ER determined my testicle was quite dead. Surgery was scheduled for that evening and I’ve had one testicle since. Get fucked, mom and dad.

Alcohol withdrawal after months of insane 24-7 drunkeness. I was in a pretty bad place for a number of years. I’ve gone through withdrawals like this multiple times, usually when I was passed out and woke with no booze just after the legal cutoff for sale at night. There is nothing worse feeling on the planet. No illness or injury (that I’ve experienced) can compare.