TL;DR You’re definitely not the only one. I had to drop out of college because of my toxic family and spend 3 years afterwards wafting around with no purpose and no will to live. But I figured things out and am doing much better now. If my dumb ass can pull it off, you can too.

The year I was in college, and the few years after I dropped out. I went to school as a music education major. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, and with how active I was in my high school’s orchestra program most of my family and teachers really pushed me to pursue a career in music. The idea of trying to survive as a gigging musician was honestly a little terrifying, so I decided to major in music education instead of music performance since being a teacher seemed like the more stable route. Turns out I hate kids. Who woulda thunk it?

I went to college in my hometown, so I stayed home instead of living on campus. I lived with my mom and sister who were both alcoholics with bipolar disorder. Plus, music ed is apparently a pretty busy major. So I would have 12 hours worth of classes and assisting student teachers that I wasn’t particularly enjoying, just to come home and break up a fist fight and then (try to) go to sleep in a room with a gaping hole in the ceiling that all of the roaches that infested the walls would enter the rest of the house through.

Needless to say, this environment was not conducive to succeeding in school. I lost my academic scholarship. Previously, that was enough to pay for all of my schooling, but without it I’d have to take out loans every semester just to finish a major that I didn’t even know if I wanted to do anymore and there was no way in hell I was doing that. So I dropped out and started working while volunteering with the university symphony, until I got a new job with a new schedule that meant I had to stop playing with them. It was an Amazon fulfillment center. Feel free to google that to see why I only lasted a few weeks. I lost touch with the few friends I made in college, I had a falling out with the closest friend I ever had, I now officially had no purpose in life since I wasn’t able to do anything with music, and had no plan for getting myself out of my abusive and toxic home life.

That period was rough, but I eventually made it out of there. Long story short, I was able to do warehouse work until I could move out, I did a 3 month program at a community college to get some IT certifications, and now I make $70k/yr to work from home doing tech support for robots with plans to finally move out of my home town later this year.

I got a used car at the end of 2022. I am just now accepting the fact that it was a stupid decision. I’m already upside down on the loan and now the turbo is having issues that may be costly to repair. I’m wanting to move soon to a place where I won’t need a car anymore, but now I’m realizing selling it isn’t going to be quite as straight forward as I initially thought.

I have a few from playing with friends a few years back. But my favorite is when I accidentally made a dick castle.

Generally my method of building castles is finding a nice big hill or cliff, plopping a few towers along the top, and then connecting them up with a big wall. If it was big enough, it’d be an open court yard in the middle. But in this case, it was just a long hallway connecting 3 towers, with the main tower overlooking a sheer cliff face into the plains below. Majestic, glorious, the perfect spot.

My friend had been heckling me about how the shape was a little phallic, but I scoffed at his observations. After a week of building this thing, and finally getting the roof done over the hallway connecting the towers, my friend made a map. And I could deny it no longer. I spent a week constructing a giant cock n balls, with the head threateningly pointed at the village to the east. The map remained proudly displayed in the entryway to our shared base just south of my castle. To a 15 year old, this was peak comedy.

Later my friend burned it down. I still bring up this betrayal to him sometimes.

Definitely glasses. I tried contacts when I was younger. It took the eye doctor about 15 minutes to put on my trial set of contacts for me and I was very concerned about how the hell we were going to get them back out. I tried to put them in by myself in the mornings before school for about a week and couldn’t get them in once. So I gave up.

Shame, because I feel like I look better without my glasses. But oh well

Much better. I’ve seen maybe 2 bots in the past month or so and they were kicked pretty quickly

My friends and I have been getting back into Team Fortress 2. Still tons of fun after all these years, especially the jump maps

I didn’t really find out until I was in my early 20s. I had a close and sometimes intense relationship with my best friend who I met at college. We spent a ton of time alone together, opened up to each other about things we’d never talked about with anyone else in our lives, and had one or two dramatic “friend breakups” before making up again and coming back to our friendship. It took both of us two or three years of this before we realized that this was more than just bros being bros, but that we had real romantic feelings for each other. We confessed our feelings for each other after experimenting with cuddling in a hammock on a hiking trip together and wound up as boyfriends for about a year.

I had a lot of confusion about my identity around that time and didn’t really know what to call myself, but I eventually settled on bisexual cis male.

Tacos for sure. Throw your choice of meat (I prefer chicken), chopped cilantro, and some diced onion in a corn tortilla, then squeeze a slice of lime on top. It’s very possible you’ll need two tortillas per taco for some extra structural integrity depending on how much meat you put in there, but either way you’d definitely want to lightly toast those tortillas on a pan for a minute or so on each side before assembling the tacos to kick it up a notch.

As a bonus, chips with guacamole is a great side for this that’s similarly easy to throw together. An avocado or two, lime juice, and some salt and pepper is all you need, plus your tortilla chips of choice.

Reading through Attached by Amir Levine, recommended to me by my therapist. It talks about different types of people’s ability to form attachments and relationships with others. I’ve definitely learned a lot about myself so far and I’m only halfway through.

Any MOBA really, particularly League of Legends. A number of my friends played these obsessively, but I could just never get into it. I’ve sat in on quite a few Discord calls with people playing this game and I gotta say, not once did anyone ever sound like they were having fun. I’m not sure what it is, but it just seems like the genre attracts toxicity like no other, especially when playing with strangers. On the occasions I tried them myself, the gameplay just wasn’t engaging enough for me to want to put in the tremendous amount of time necessary to become somewhat decent at the game.

For me it’s Skyrim. Streets of Whiterun, Masser, Jerral Mountains, Under an Ancient Sun, so many tracks that just instantly transport me back to the world I was immersed in throughout most of high school. They bring a sense of peace that comes from exploring in a simpler time.