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Summer Damian

Experiences you had that affected you profoundly

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As the title says, this is a thread for sharing some of the identity-defining experiences that altered your personality, taught you a lot about life, and were a major stepping-stone in you getting to where you are today. You can think of them as the "core memories" from Inside Out that define each of Riley's islands of personality. What major teaching moments have you encountered in your life? What experiences left you a changed person, for better or worse? What did you learn from it, and why did it have that effect on you? Or something along those lines.

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Placing 3rd in the Dance Drama category of the World Irish Dance Championships. Placing 22nd in the solo portion of the World Irish Dance championships. Getting into Dartmouth on a portioned stipend to pursue fantastical genre theory. Completing my first thesis of Roberto Belano's Currents of Poetry. Getting published on CardKnockGames with MTG competitive Theory.

I think the biggest "memories" I have are the personal relationships I developed with my mentors. I consider my dance teacher almost akin to a second mom, and much more of an authority to follow when it comes to looking up to than my actual mom. My mom is more like a peer. My professor from my Undergrad put me in as her research assistant, and that was a major step for me academically since it pushed me forward than my compatriots that I "worked" along side in regular classes. I was able to pursue my own academic interests with proper guidance, that provided me a foundation in postcolonial, Arthurian, and narrative theory, that forms how I look at texts. It also benefited me in the focus of how I want to view texts as literary, and form my own idea from them rather than a straight reader-response lens.

I don't really know what has affected me on the otherside. I guess my love life has been the most traumatic, as I tend to follow a pattern that often disappoints me. I love the people I never fall in love with and fall in love with the people I will never come to be loved by. I like the ability to feel love from a far, it inspires me to be more creative and pursue much more than the every day desire that I take into. Makes me come to love myself and be adamant on how I am. Those that I come to love are the ones that arise from opportunity rather than "destiny", to put it obnoxiously but simply. I take opportunity to ask people out. I have been more consistent with my dating life. But the ones that I fall in love for, it is a muse and the "idea of the person" that I never lose. I learn only what I want to know, and come to feel for them only how I want to feel.

My greatest place is when I am able to love from a far rather than following the "ritual" of love, and the courtship of the companion. I much more like the muse than the person. That is something that I have come to focus on a lot more lately, especially when I started looking into the Romantic movement of the 19th Century.

Retrospectively, I think the biggest qualms of my life as the ones where I don't feel affected by just the most mundane thing. It gets boring and unexciting living in such a world where I lack passion to even follow my own worth, whether I recognize it or not. If this means anything, I'll refer to a quote I made on reddit that brought me back to where I am right now

 

Quote

I was going to post this in r/askreddit, but I couldn't provide context to the question. I thought, at least, some context might help to establish what I mean by this question.

I was driving down the highway on a small road trip, and a song came on that hit me the right way at the right time. I started to tear up, as much as I would, and felt a range of emotions that I haven't understood for a good while. One of those was sadness, the feeling of loss and what I am missing in life.

And now, I didn't think I was missing anything, since I think my life is going pretty well; I have a solid career path, I have support on everything, I finally had sometime to just get out an enjoy myself, I am dating someone I truly enjoy. I didn't think I was missing anything. Instead, since I didn't think I was missing anything, was trying to recognize why I was feeling such as a way - as if I had lost something. And it wasn't that I had lost something particular, more that I was missing something in my life that I used to revel in. I was missing the excitement of simply feeling my emotions, feeling joyous, saddened, etc. I had lost, at least for sometime, the feeling about being able to feel my emotions to their most effective state of being an emotion. I still am missing it, but that one moment had me remember what it meant to feel my emotions again and find passion in what to do that again.

I tried to reach such states before, having done some drugs that never lived up to the way people have explained me. I used to write poetry and prose to just understand places and stages I have experiences. I think what I was missing was the wanderlust of emotions that literally move you, whether it be negatively-charge or positive ones.

This, hopefully, provides clarity to my question: Do you want to feel sad (or at least an emotion) powerfully sometimes?

Now, looking at myself: I tend to see myself fall short of what I think I am. Sure, I have a big ego and I am quite stern in my own stances on life, but I have recently only been moved by the humanities and the written word. Politically, I support more of a classicist approach because of Hannah Arendt's works. It seems more fulfilling in the life that I want to achieve. Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity aligns much with how I would approach my own spiritual ideology, that satisfies my inquiries more than my own mind would have sufficed with just reading religious texts.

Again, the romantic is where I see myself changing; the next step to only fall deeper into the idea of the moved "I", the soul or spirit as it is also termed, that I want to understand and recognized beyond how I truly seem to get from just my own sanctity. The points that I turn more is when I can do as much as I can to conquer what I feel about myself, the id to the ego, and how I can trace that back to a place that cements my adamant self in more often a followed measure. I am affected by the affects of my emotions, if that is an easier means to understand.

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There's plain too many to count.

I keep beginning to type something here, but every time I do, I'm kinda... unsure. After all, there's so many pivotal moments in my life. It seems like a rather plain thing to me to have so many.

Names? I've got plenty. 820, Phantom, Andx, Jake the Sage, Proto, Ice, Nexev, Kokonoe, Fenrir, Clair, Cherry, Kazooie, BlindMonkey, Fusion, DL, El Make, Creator, Hina, Klavier, Rodrigo, Pika, Chris, Barty, Ashley, PhoenixOfCute, SunshineJesse, CowCow, Sai, Yui, and probably some I've neglected to mention.

And that's just YCM/NCM and people I've met through it. Acceptance, rejection, fear, loneliness, hardening, love, friendship, kindness, confusion, adversity, heartbreak, healing, understanding, freedom, and beyond.

Games? While the largest once I can wax about is UNDERTALE, plenty have had a serious impact on me. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness/Time/Sky, multiple Zeldas, Bravely, Danganronpa, Fire Emblem, etc. All full of lessons that I've used to come to know myself better. What I truly desire from this life. This world. What I want to do, what I want to see. Who I want to be.

Same with other media. The line between fiction and reality blurs for me very, very easily, so getting in touch with works of fiction has been a huge part of my life, especially in getting to know myself. 

I feel like... if I go into details, I'd be here forever, basically writing an in-depth autobiography. I've done something to that effect before, but it wasn't for public eyes. Maybe I'll edit it...

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Hmmm...there are a few that I think back on, quite a few in fact. Guess I better separate them in categories then...

Real Life Experiences

Spoiler

What this basically encompasses is everything that's gone on within my daily life up to this point. I won't add anything with the forums here, since I'll most likely add that to "Online Life Experiences".

Firstly, I suppose one thing that affected me was graduations, from elementary school all the way to college. That has been something that always affects me, of course for the betterment of myself. Sure, from elementary to middle school it really didn't matter much...hell, not even did high school (given I was homeschooled due to the fact that before I was still living in a neighborhood where the public schools were pretty bad), but the ones that mattered the most were college, both community college and the university. It showed that no matter how much I screwed up in certain areas of my education, I was still able to get my degrees to make something better of myself. Hell, I was even the one with the biggest accomplishment: first person in my family to ever finish college, which was a HUGE deal.

Second would be something I remember from my fourth/fifth grade year of school. Before those who knew me here knew me, I was actually a shy kid. I kept to myself and didn't really open up much...why, I really don't know. However, for whatever reason, I started to show a bit more...effort into trying to be different. Apparently it showed. At the end of the school year, the classes did a bit of a hangout...my class did this and also presented awards (I say awards but they were really plastic plates with sharpie written messages, still...didn't matter, for the kids) and I was actually presented with an award: "The Outbreak Award". It wasn't for being a genius like my one friend or the funniest, but this was just them saying for the one who showed the most growth and who broke out of his shell. To me, I was actually amazed at this...to this day, that has always stuck with me.

Thirdly, was a bit of a negative experience...they all can't be good ones. April 22nd, 2019, my father died of a massive sudden heartattack. It was devastating and still is to this day (to where we've almost hit the one year anniversary of it). That there showed that...life is way too short. I've always known that, but knowing something and then physically experiencing something are two separate things. It made me realize one thing...my dad did what he could, numerous times, to spend as much time with us as possible. After 9/11, he was working some weird hours and even before then when my brother and I were still young, he worked crazy hours still...and almost missed us growing up. Both he and my mother both told me this when I got older, so I always thought this was him trying to make up for lost time...at the same time...whether that was the case or not...he spent so much time with us and I should've cherished every moment a bit more than I did. ...sorry, didn't mean to make that as heavy as I did, but tis one of the experiences that affected me greatly.

Online Life Experiences

Spoiler

As you can tell...everything online.

Truthfully, I think the one that still gets me is me finding YCM for the first time in 2008. It was a completely different creature back then, but it was still a community that introduced me to some really huge names back in the day: Fusion, D.L., El Make, Blake (though back then I remembered him as Marsuvees Black/Black), Creator, Desu...and a good portion of the "Old Guard of YCM". It's also there that I discovered the whole Text Based RPs that I've become accustomed to now...but then again, back then it was also a different beast...didn't get to the Advanced Format of RPing until way down the line...I believe at that point is when I swapped usernames from Nightwing2199 to finally my alias of Chaos Sonic.

There have been ups, there have been downs in this vein, but the bonds made through these didn't change. A good portion of these people I talked to on both YCM and then Skype...and a good portion I still keep in contact with (or at least attempt). Through the years, eventually I met two other users who ended up...I wanna say sort of being always around me and/or just want to stay conjoined to the hip as it were...but wouldn't trade anything for the time and laughs I've had with Yui and Saikazo. Those two: a pair of good friends there. And I'm not just saying that cause they have a gun to my head...

With the YCM and even NCM forums being integrated into my life like this, it's affected me both positively and negatively. In the good veins, it introduced me to the forum community and even how things work around here, introduced me to people who are great to be around and talk to and it introduced me to RPs that I enjoy participating in.

 

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Comrade Duck (Dad) put it in a way that I couldn't have said better myself: Depression makes small things in life seem big. That's basically how it's been with me for as long as I can remember. My life's not exactly the most interesting (despite how modest I typically am), but I often look back on some moments in the past and, seeing myself where I am today, it's pretty difficult to imagine ending up in the same place if it weren't for those moments. Some of those more major moments are as follows:

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1. Fallout with my high school friends

I've mentioned and ranted about this several times here as well as other forums, but after some self-evaluation, I can pretty confidently say that this was the ultimate turning point to my depression. Granted, I was mostly at fault and I could've handled it much better, but I often contemplate that it could've been handled better on either end. Regardless, this was undoubtedly the most regretful and shattering moment of my life. I could go on a several paragraph rant about it, but it's pretty self-explanatory: I had an awesome group of friends in my later years of high school that I hung out with on a regular basis, then towards the end of senior year I ended up getting into a disagreement with one of them (we'll call her Em) that got ugly. Considering that most if not all of the other people involved were much closer to her than I ever was, which was a much stronger bond than their relationship ever was with me, they sided with her and I was literally alone with my opinion on the matter. Next thing I know I lost all of my friends and ended up moving to a different state after graduating. At this point I was truly alone, despite living with my family at the time. For the next few years I tried to reach out to Em to apologize, but she would block me on every platform I could find her on until she threatened to involve the police. Needless to say, this was the moment where everything before that felt tame in terms of the shock I felt. On top of turning friends into enemies in the course of a couple months, I had basically devolved into a stalker without realizing it.

So in conclusion, not only did this put me in a dark mental valley, but it also made me even more introverted and indifferent to having friends outside of online stuff. Even when I make friends in real life and hang out, it just doesn't feel right and being with them is exhausting even for casual hangouts.

2. This site

It should come as no surprise that this place has had a massive impact on my life, considering it's where I find myself socializing the most over the past several years. That being said, I've been a part of this community since 2007, not long after it first started. Granted I wasn't anyone special back then (and not really even now), but comparing back then to now is a pretty massive development. I started becoming the most significantly active in late 2011 after that whole shitstorm mentioned earlier when I remembered it was a thing after a couple years being away, making me log back in out of curiosity. It was around then when most of my activity was in C&O (rip), more specifically the YCMaker Ultra Hotel, where I met guys like Jake the Sage, Desu, Daemon, Striker, and other people I fail to remember at the time. Nonetheless, spamming that section pretty much sums up my experience up until I started writing parody shipping fanfics involving certain members, to which I had made somewhat of a name for myself. After that, I've basically only been known for that as well as a few other miscellaneous things, but as its significance began to fade away with time, I've just been here chilling with some of the people I've met during that time ever since, including chatting with some other guys that aren't even active anymore. Even though there may have been better ways to cope with my introversion, being here with you guys has certainly helped a lot with how I've been feeling during that time of my life, to which I am very thankful for.

3. Quitting alcohol

Okay, so maybe I haven't quit entirely, but I've most certainly gotten more in control of the urge to get shitface drunk every night, which for those of you who don't know me that well was regretfully a phase I went through a few years ago (I've said and done many things that I am not proud of here at the time.) There was about a 6-7 month period where I had attempted to quit many times before relapsing, but it wasn't until the first of the year 2018 when I officially stopped drinking alone entirely for the next couple years. I think of all moments of my life, that was the most profound, considering just how different I felt not having to feel like shit every morning as well as not feel like my life is ending if I don't have at least a half-dozen drinks in me after work every night. I felt way more energetic and motivated to do a lot of things, including put myself out there for jobs that I never thought I'd see myself doing, even with a degree.

-

Anyway, thanks for tuning into my TED Talk.

Edited by Thar

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Warning: Here there be darkness.

But really this is unpleasant stuff below I'll try and think of more positive experiences but this is what came to mind when I read and it kind of got away from me, sorry if it doesn't entirely fit the prompt.
 

Spoiler

 

There's quite a few things I'm sure. Many I probably...don't really remember. I have trouble with recalling memories from before high school...and even a lot of that. Not sure why but many of my memories I can get to feel like they happened to someone else and it's a lot of vague and uncertain stuff.

Anyway, something that springs to mind was in high school when I had my first panic attack. There was this presentation we were supposed to do. I think it was a "persuasive essay" and I just felt....frozen. I couldn't focus, I was shaking, and well the details are hazy but I ended up sitting outside the classroom to try and calm down but couldn't and ended up getting helped by an upperclassman to to office.

Where first I was interrogated about drugs by a cop and then taken by my cousin to the hospital.

What followed was months of getting tests and examinations which led them to eventually, after going to a bigger city hospital, telling me "Yeah it's anxiety". I wasn't given anything for it and I never really felt like it was being treated seriously.

This was Junior year in school. I had been an A or B student up until then but after this the anxiety got worse and I would end up just skipping school often. I think I only went to about half to two-thirds of my Senior year. I was never a super social person, though part of me wanted to be, but I withdrew a lot more after that.

Basically it really fucked me up mentally emotionally and academically and I still don't know if I'm "okay" or not.


This next thing is hard to put out in public like this but I'm already down this rabbit hole. It's not entirely right to call this an "experience" because overall it was multiple things over a long period of time which I can only assume had an effect on me.

My parents divorced when I was...6 or so. This in itself didn't actually affect me much as I was young so that just sorta became what was normal for me. But around a year later my mom remarried. As I said before my younger memories are spotty (I remember meeting his dog though, she was a good dog) but looking back on things well....

So this guy, he was an addict, a chronic liar, and a prick. He'd often yell and sometimes hit (though I think he was afraid of my cousin and brother so not often) at me for stuff like slurping soup and, when I was a teenager and we moved into new house, for having my bedroom door locked and threatened to remove the door because "he shouldn't be locked out of anywhere in his house".

In part I assume, because I found out that my clothes had a certain smell on them, because he was doing drugs in my room.

Anyway so I spent about....10 years or so with this guy in my life. Near the end when he finally left, which was after it was found out he was cheating on my mom, we discovered some much worse things. He had hidden a camera in the bathroom and had video of my, then adult, sister in the shower. He denied it was his, of course, and technically we couldn't prove anything. After he was long gone we found out he had been arrested for child porn.

So while it wasn't "an experience" exactly living and dealing with him I can only assume affected how I am now and my view on life and people in general.

 

 

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The event itself had no impact on my personality or who I am today, but the way its consequences completely changed my daily life most certainly did. The event in question? The death of my grandmother some... 11? 12 years ago? I never bothered counting the years, but I think I heard 11 mentioned on the anniversary of it earlier this year. Anyway, some context and then why this had such an effect on me.

Up until not long before her passing, my grandmother was the woman who raised me for most if not all of my childhood. Certainly all of it that I can remember, at least. My happiness seemed her greatest priority, and in that pursuit, I may or may not have been spoiled rotten as a child (despite how I may seem today). Other than that, rather uneventful childhood on the whole. But when she died and in the time leading up to that, somebody had to take care of 14-15 year old me still. This fell onto the shoulders of my mother. To put it short, she was given a boy who seldom wanted for anything, didn't really understand the world around him, and perhaps had a bit of an ego problem, and molded that boy into the man typing this today. I still can't adult, and I'm still rather shit at anything ending in -pathy, but those and an inability to properly tie my shoes are issues that will probably stick with me for life.

Under the half (roughly) of my life that was under my mother's raising, I lived in a lot of different states, attended a lot of different high schools (before dropping out near the end of junior year), and met a whole lot of people. That, all the moving, and just putting more responsibility on my shoulders & disciplining me when I was out of line, all went miles in reining in shitty child me. That shitty child became this grown-ass man, though I have noticed that I'm quite a bit less forgiving of others than when I was young. Might just be me turning into a grouchy old man a few decades early, or maybe it's because I've been using all the forgiveness on my mother. Who knows?

I should also clarify that on a mental and emotional level, this death has little long-term impact on me. I don't normally open up on this sort of level, but I quite like the idea behind this thread, and so felt I should contribute.

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I thought of a positive one. I'm not fully sure if this counts as an experience either but it's closest thing to it.

I was a young lad, don't remember specific age but I was probably around 10. My dad was dropping off my sister...or picking her up, can't remember, from her friend's house. Her friend was having a garage sale and we were just looking around. Then I saw this book that they were selling for 25 cents. The cover looked interesting so I wanted it and my dad bought it. It was from the Dragonlance series. And I read it and it just spoke to me in a way other books, and I was for sure a reader even then, did and I just knew.

I want to do that. I want to write stuff like this. And from then on I've had my focus entirely on writing stories. And it all started from a 25 cent garage sale book. Which, amusingly, was the second book in a trilogy. But from there on I devoured Dragonlance books and just grew to love everything fantasy.

tbh given how important writing is to me that was probably one of the most important moments in my life as odd as that may sound.

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23 hours ago, LordCowCow said:

I thought of a positive one. I'm not fully sure if this counts as an experience either but it's closest thing to it.

I was a young lad, don't remember specific age but I was probably around 10. My dad was dropping off my sister...or picking her up, can't remember, from her friend's house. Her friend was having a garage sale and we were just looking around. Then I saw this book that they were selling for 25 cents. The cover looked interesting so I wanted it and my dad bought it. It was from the Dragonlance series. And I read it and it just spoke to me in a way other books, and I was for sure a reader even then, did and I just knew.

I want to do that. I want to write stuff like this. And from then on I've had my focus entirely on writing stories. And it all started from a 25 cent garage sale book. Which, amusingly, was the second book in a trilogy. But from there on I devoured Dragonlance books and just grew to love everything fantasy.

tbh given how important writing is to me that was probably one of the most important moments in my life as odd as that may sound.

Small things can lead to big changes. It's a domino effect: One thing leads to another, and another...

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My biggest experiences in my life that I seem drawn to want to re-experience, at least ruminate the idea that I could have done something different and made the outcome better than what I wanted are the ones where I have failed myself, more than I have have others or anything like that. The closest place in my mind that I can recall, where I failed myself, was when I fell in love with this girl, about two (almost three) years ago and I lost her. We started dating around October, she would see me on campus talking to everyone and everything. I got a nickname before I even met her, she called me "friend guy" just because I seemingly was friends with everyone and everyone was friends with me. This took a step further when she saw me show up to a friend's performance at a local coffee shop, turns out this girl was my friend's friend growing up. My nickname became cemented. I didn't talk to her until a few days after, actually got rejected by another girl at the same event in one of the nicest manners.

Well, I got rejected and was used to that. This was like the third time I thought I found someone I fell for in that semester, the first only dating for about a month from End of August to end of September. Well, this girl came up to me and started talking to me before I even said a word to her. She saw me walk to class, like she normally does, and walked up asking about her friend and how I knew her. I got her number, shooting her a text that was not something I normally do. I just asked her, "What's something that you're smiling about right now?". I was out for the night with friends, but I was glued to my phone that entire time. We talked for about 4 hours back and forth, just through the phone, and I would see her the next day. Same time, same place.

We saw each other so often that I never asked her on a date until her birthday was coming up, and I asked her out. I wanted to celebrate her birthday even though I was only talking to her, really. We spent the night talking, I got to know her. And it was that moment that I felt my most romantic self. I didn't just want to date this girl, I wanted to be someone who would be worth dating. Someone she would see herself with and would want to be with. I started going to church to get more acquainted with my spiritual side, wondering what kind of affect she was having on me. I didn't know and I had to, not just because of who she was but because I put myself and my happiness onto someone . I have never done that before.

We start seeing each other casually, go on car rides and just spend time together. I never wanted to officially ask her out because I didn't feel like I was the type of guy that was ready for her. It strained me, and all the time we spent together I wanted to prove myself, even if I just acted like myself. Then, around November 30th, we went on a walk around campus and we just talked, genuinely talked, that in such a way that I wrote a poem about. I never gave her that poem until it was too late. There's a lot more that I could go into right now, but that might have to be a part two. Since we were still casual, I was still dating other people since I was just being myself. She learned of this, step one of the downfall. The official collapse of everything was around March, and it was more than just because I was dating other people. But I couldn't face myself. Then, I saw her fall in love with someone else as I was falling out of love with myself.

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