My baby has a rash on her face

I’ve been posting a series of essays regarding Jon’s identity and I think most people didn't understand the point I’m trying to make, so I thought I’ll give it another try. There's a short summary at the end.
Here’s the point: I believe that we were fooled, ASOIAF is “the real story” that Bael’s song tells.
Let me please explain myself better.
ASOIAF begins with a mystery, a cold creature kills a boy, Waymar Royce, who seems to be the hero stereotype: he’s handsome, smart, and owns a nice sword, and the mean wildlings are trying to deceive him, so he goes there sword in hand, like a hero does.
However, when you pay close attention to his story, you realize the poor kid set himself for failure. He left his best swordsman guarding the horses, asked a man who was known for being silent to be his watcher, and went straight into a place that he had described himself as a suspicious scene.
His outcome was predictable.
In the following chapters, we get three seemingly fantasy clichés one after another, Ned, the honorable hero, Jon, the young hero with a mysterious parentage, and soon after that, we are told how Lyanna was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by the evil dragon, Rhaegar Targaryen.
Of course, the predictable outcome would be Jon being Rhaegar’s son, after all his mother spent the war with the man, right? Well,maybe she didn’t.
Why am I claiming that we are being deceived?
When you compare Waymar’s story to Ned’s fever dream, we are being told *the exact same story.*
Like Waymar, the prince seems to have left his best swords “guarding the horses”, he leaves a person in charge of the watch who seems to go against his interests, and goes straight to die a meaningless death like Gared when he decided to desert.
What’s the issue? *It’s a song.*
Ned’s story of what happened in the tower (his fever dream) follows Bael’s song to the letter, and the point of that song is the deception, it’s not about love or even the baby, but Bael being a liar.
That also happens in AGoT’s prologue, Waymar was being deceived but not by the wildlings as he assumed.
The biggest hoax is that Bael’s song tells three different stories in which the “hero” is always “Bael”.

1. The Stark of WF wanted Bael’s head, but couldn’t take him.He calls Bael “a craven who preys only on the weak”, so Bael decides to teach him a lesson and goes to WF.

Being a wildling song, we expect Bael to be the hero, so when the lesson comes we might be a bit lost.
What’s the lesson? The lesson is the Stark “calling” Bael, giving a name to the “craven who preys only on the weak”.

1. Bael fakes to be a singer called Sygerrik (which means deceiver) and spends the night singing for the Stark, when he’s done, the lord offers him to “name” his reward. Bael asks for “the fairest flower” and the Stark gives him a winter rose. After leaving with the lord’s daughter, Bael leaves the flower as proof.

What’s the lesson here? It can’t be the lord realizing who took the maiden since the singer gave him a fake name, and he was welcome because the lordhad never met him before. The flower proves the lord is a deceiver.
When the singer asks for “the fairest flower” the lord knows he is asking for his daughter (even when he never names her), and tries to deceive Bael by giving him a rose. The flower proves the lord lied.

1. Bael comes back years later with an army; he’s faced in battle by his own son who doesn’t recognize him. Bael stays silent and lets the boy kill him. The word “recognize” implies that he knew the man; the very definition of recognition is “the identification of someone from previous encounters.”

What’s the lesson in this one? Who raised the boy? Bael: a liar and craven who never told the truth.
The “young lord,” was a liar (he had to recognize Bael from his own experience), and a craven who took advantage of Bael’s own weakness (his silence) to kill him.
Basically, when you go over the song, the baby, the maiden, and “the singer” are all victims of the lord of WF who never told the boy who he was, took the child “as payment”, and blamed “Bael” for the things he did.

“Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. "My mother told me that *dead men sing no songs*," he put in.” AGoT - Prologue

Bael is the lord of WF in the three stories and the “hero” of his own songs: a name that means something, a flower as proof of his deception, and dead men*singing songs.*
To summarize, the biggest deception in the song is the language, or rather, the way people are named.
We’ll now examine how Lord Stark deceived us all, and later why this is “a song of ice and fire”.

A hero of his own songs

We are first introduced to the song in AGoT’s Prologue when we meet three men on a mission: Waymar Royce, Will, and Gared.
Each of them helps us understand one of the stories told in Bael’s song. The prologue seems to be about these men deciding what to do regarding some dead people. In truth, they illustrate the lessons in Ned’s song for us, while we can also understand other stories of dead people: Rheagar’s and Lyanna’s.
One of the men, Will, is a craven who “wants nothing so much as to ride hellbent for the safety of the Wall”.
Waymar suspects that the wildlings are trying to deceive them, and notes that some things in Will’s story don’t seem to add up.
He wants to go personally to see the dead wildlings and prove his theory: someone is lying. Ironically his own broken sword is proof that he was right about the deceptionbut wrong about the author.
The third man, Gared,instantly recognizes what happened to the wildlings by Will’s description, even when he never actually saw them; but knew from previous experiences what “the cold” does, as he had found one of his brothers “with a smile on his face”.
Let’s examine how the song unfolds so we can find the real Bael.

1. The Craven and the given name.

In the song, “Bael” is a name that means something, is what you call a craven who preys only on the weak.
We get to see how Will exemplifies the concept of being a craven when the Others appear. I mentioned earlier that one of Waymar’s mistakes was sending a brother known for being silent to act as his watcher.
Will sees the entire fight while hiding on a tree (he’s a craven after all), and never says a word, not even when he sees the shadows moving, not when he sees the Other facing Waymar, and not while the boy is being mercilessly butchered.
He realizes, however, that he should “call down a warning” as the shadows start to appear, and ironically, Waymar shouts his name instead.

The Others made no sound. Will saw movement from the corner of his eye. Pale shapes gliding through the wood. He turned his head, glimpsed a white shadow in the darkness. Then it was gone. Branches stirred gently in the wind, scratching at one another with wooden fingers. Will opened his mouth to call down a warning, and the words seemed to freeze in his throat. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had only been a bird, a reflection on the snow, some trick of the moonlight. What had he seen, after all? "Will, where are you?" Ser Waymar called up. "Can you see anything?" He was turning in a slow circle, suddenly wary, his sword in hand. He must have felt them, as Will felt them. There was nothing to see."Answer me! *Why is it so cold?"*

Interestingly, that’s exactly what happens in Ned’s dream, he tells us how he gets to the Tower with a bunch of shadows and how he sees three men in white waiting for him, and curiously, the person yelling in the dream was recognized before by Ned himself as being*so weak* that she could only whisper:

He could hear her still at times. Promise me, she had cried, in a room that smelled of blood and roses. Promise me, Ned. The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister's eyes.” Eddard I - AGoT

Lyanna’s fear as she dies seems far more interesting considering how Will never yells fearing “the shadows”, since Ned gets to his dream surrounded by shadows. Now, while we are told by Ned himself how she could barely speak, somehow, she calls ‘Bael’ loud and clear:

"As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. "Eddard!" *she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky,as blue as the eyes of death. *"Lord Eddard," Lyanna called again.

See the first lesson in the song?
Why would Lyanna use the word “Eddard”, to call her own brother; a brother that she, and everyone who knew himcalled “Ned”?
In the song, the Stark gives Bael a name because he doesn’t know the man, but he knows *he’s hiding his identity to take advantage of “the weak”.*
In the dream “Eddard” means Bael. *He’s lying.*
The “craven” who actually yells in the dream is deliberately hidden:

"The finest knight I ever saw was Ser Arthur Dayne, who fought with a blade called Dawn, forged from the heart of a fallen star. They called him the Sword of the Morning, and he would have killed me *but for Howland Reed*." Bran III - ACoK

In Ned’s “song” Lyanna yells even when she is so weak that she can barely speak. In truth, the one yelling, Howland, is warning him about the “white shadow”, Arthur Dayne, who was moving towards Ned to kill him as the shadows move to kill Waymar. That’s what Will should have done when he saw them: warn his brother.
The parallels between the Other facing Waymar and Arthur with Dawn in hand facing Ned in the dream are clear too. This is the Other:

The Other slid forward on silent feet. In its hand was a longsword like none that Will had ever seen. No human metal had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed almost to vanish when seen edge-on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing, a ghost-light that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew it was sharper than any razor.

This is Arthur, holding his sword made from “no human metal”.

"And now it begins," said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass,*alive with light*. Eddard X - AGoT

You see, Ned did in his dream what Lord Stark does in the song: the “weak” (Lyanna), are identified as a Stark; Bael takes advantage of weak people to sing his song, to tell his own version of things.

"Your Bael was a liar," he told her, certain now. "No," Ygritte said, "buta bard's truth is different than yours or mine. Anyway, you asked for the story, so I told it." Jon VI - ACoK

In fact, Lyanna ends up buried in WF’s crypt (like the maiden in the song) because she’s identified by Ned as a Stark, so that was “her place”.
That’s the first lesson: In Ned’s song (his dream) he hid the truth by identifying the person who yells as Lyanna, when it was actually Howland Reed warning him.
The biggest clue is the person calling him in a way that’s not familiar to him, like “Brandon the Daughterless” is not familiar name to Jon when he hears Bael’s song. We’ll discuss that name later.
What was Ned hiding? That Lyanna was never in that tower, that’s Ned’sbiggest deception, hiding the fact that Rhaeagar spent half the war chasing shadows, like Waymar, and that Robert never “avenged” Lyanna as he believed,because the prince was deceived and Robert was too late to the vengeance train.
When Jon hears the song’s happy ending, he asks if Bael has brought back the maiden, to which Ygritte replies that she was “hiding with the dead”. Ned made people believe that he had brought Lyanna’s body from Dorne while he left his friends’ corpses buried there, but he didn’t. She died elsewhere.
As for “the craven”, Ned himself explained his issue with the man: the “laughter”.

"They say it grows so cold up here in winter that a man's laughter freezes in his throat and chokes him to death," Ned said evenly. "Perhaps that is why the Starks have so little humor." Eddard I - AGoT

Howland Reed was identified as “the Knight of the Laughing Tree” by his children, he wasn’t, but he’s one of the three main suspects: Howland, Ned and Lyanna. None of them was the “laughing” one though.
While Ned tells us how people’s laughter freezes in their throats and chokes them to death, look what happens to the craven Will in the prologue when he thinks of doing what Howland does: calling “Bael”.

Will opened his mouth to call down a warning, and *the words seemed to freeze in his throat*.

You likely remember how Will dies, choked to death by the un-dead Waymar.
To summarize: in Bael’s song “Bael” is a name that means something, is what you call a craven who preys only on the weak.
In Ned’s dream, the word “Eddard” means “Bael”; he’s hiding the warnings: Howland warned him about Arthur Dayne trying to kill him, and Lyanna gave him her own warning:

"I hear he has gotten a child** on some girl in the Vale." Ned had held the babe in his arms; he could scarcely deny her, nor would he lie to his sister, but he had assured her that what Robert did before their betrothal was of no matter, that he was a good man and true who would love her with all his heart. Lyanna had only smiled. "Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but *it cannot change a man's nature*." Eddard IX - AGoT

What Ned is trying to hide (mostly from himself) is the fact that killing Arthur turned him into a kinslayer, since Ashara got pregnant in Harrenhal, explaining why he links “the laughter” with “the freezing cold”: he fathered a bastard.
Ned was great at hiding things in plain sight and being silent, yet his dream sang a different song.

2. The deceiver and the flower.

When Will reports he found the wildlings dead, Waymar doesn’t believe him. To confirm his suspicions he asks the most experienced of the group, Gared, his views about the scene that Will had described, andhe says without hesitation “it was the cold”.

"I've had the cold in me too, lordling." Gared pulled back his hood, giving Ser Waymar a good long look at the stumps where his ears had been. "Two ears, three toes, and the little finger off my left hand. I got off light. We found my brother frozen at his watch, *with a smile on his face*."

Waymar asked Will a series of questions that Ned diligently answer for us:

"Did you see *any blood?" "Well, no," Will admitted. "Did you see *any weapons?" "Some swords, a few bows. One man had an axe. Heavy-looking, **double-bladed, a cruel piece of iron.It was on the ground beside him, right by his hand." "Did you make note of the position of the bodies?" Will shrugged. "A couple are sitting up against the rock. Most of them on the ground. Fallen, like."

In Bael’s song, the lord offers the singer to “name” his reward, and the man asks for “the fairest flower” which as we know, is then left behind as proof of the lord’s deception.
When Ned comes home from the war with “proof” of his deception, his wife names “the reward”, Ashara Dayne, and Ned’s answeris priceless:

It had taken her a fortnight to marshal her courage, but finally, in bed one night, Catelyn had asked her husband the truth of it, asked him to his face. That was the only time in all their years that Ned had ever frightened her. "Never ask me about Jon," he said, cold as ice. "He is my blood, and that is all you need to know. And now I will learn where you heard that name, my lady." She had pledged to obey; she told him; and from that day on, the whispering had stopped, and Ashara Dayne's name *was never heard in Winterfell again*." Catelyn II - AGoT

In this memory, Catelyn parallels Bael singing (marshaling his courage) until he’s asked to name the reward, and not daring to name the maiden, he asks for “the fairest flower”, to which the lord gives him not what he asked for, but “a rose from the gardens”.
Ned gives Jon’s name when he’s asked about Ashara, most importantly,he establishes the link between Jon and “the blood” he later dreams of, meaning he makes us believe that the boy killed Lyanna while being born,that’s the deception.
Did you see any blood? Yes, a ‘brother’ “frozen at his watch”, a sister who allegedly died “in a bed of blood”, and the “fairest flower” blowing in the wind like the petals Ned sees when he hears his name.
They waited before the round tower, the red mountains of Dorne at their backs, their white cloaks blowing in the wind. And these were no shadows; their faces burned clear, even now. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, had a sad smile on his lips.” Eddard X - AGoT
Killing Arthur made him a kinslayer, but Will saw a “double-bladed” weapon.
Did you see any weapons? Yes, petals falling “dead and black”.

Ned remembered **the way she had smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, *dead and black*. After that he remembered nothing. They had found him still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his. Ned could recall none of it. "I bring her flowers when I can," he said. "Lyanna was … fond of flowers."

What about the position of the bodies? They all waited for Ned and ended up “fallen”: Ashara, Arthur, *and Lyanna.*
Let’s discuss the proof.
When Waymar falls, Will thinks he needs to take his sword as proof of what he saw, as if the entire thing had nothing to do with him.
Ned, as we know, takes Dayne’s sword to Starfall and after that visit, Ashara commits suicide. Yet, we have no idea what he told them. It seems kind of weird how Lord Dayne seems to highly respect the man who killed his brother and caused his sister’s suicide, right?
The point is how Will finds the sword that was supposed to be proof:

He found what was left of the sword a few feet away,the end splintered and twisted like a tree struck by lightning. Will knelt, looked around warily, and snatched it up. The broken sword would be his proof.

We know that Ashara killed herself (explaining the sword splintered and twisted like Bran). We also know that Ned killed Arthur since that was the talking in Winterfell when he returned from the war (as Will intended to get to the Wall with a story), the proof being he took Dawn to Starfall.
What matters here is “what was left” and Ned “snatching” something that ended up in Winterfell, even when he never brought his friends’ corpses back. You see, in Ned’s memory, he seems to do what Will does when everything is over, “look around warily”.

“…the rose petals spilling from her palm, *dead and black. After that, he remembered nothing. *They had found him** still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his…”

The scene is not just weirdly similar to the way that the un-dead Waymar finds Will withhis sword, but also the proof of the crime that “Bael” left behind for the lord to find: a dead flower instead of the maiden as proof of the kidnapping.
As I said earlier, in Bael’s song the flower doesn’t mean that the lord realizes who took the maiden sincethe singer *gave him a fake name, and he was welcome in WF becausethe lord had never met him* before.
The flower proves the lord is a deceiver. It wasn’t Jon being born what killed Lyanna, *it was Ned’s flower.*

Ned Stark reached out his hand to grasp the flowery crown, but beneath the pale blue petals the thorns lay hidden. He felt them clawing at his skin, sharp and cruel, saw the slow trickle of blood run down his fingers, and woke, trembling, in the dark.” Eddard XV

Ned mentions how he always brings Lyanna flowers, and that’s exactly what happened the last time he saw her. Except this time the flower was poisonous and killed her.
That’s one of the “weapons” that Will sees in one of the “fallen” *“right by his hand”,* which makes Ned a “double-bladed” weapon, or rather a double kinslayer.

“…the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black. After that he remembered nothing. They had found him still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his…”

Howland clearly realizes what happened and takes her hand from Ned’s so he wouldn’t die too.
All the weapons used in Ned’s song are mentioned by Will in the crime scene beyond the Wall: “It was on the ground beside him, right by his hand.”
It was “the ground” that killed Ashara, Ned being “beside” Arthur, and the petals in Lyanna’s hand.

"The trees press close here," Will warned. "That sword will tangle you up, m'lord. Better a knife." AGoT - Prologue

We get to see the proof of all victims in the way that Waymar raises being a portrayal of all three fallen.

Will rose. Ser Waymar Royce stood over him. His fine clothes were a tatter, his face a ruin. A shard from *his sword* transfixed the blind white pupil of his left eye. The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.

Waymar is the proof: the white pupil “transfixed” by the sword is for Arthur he died from multiple stabb wounds, the right eye “burning blue” is for Ashara (what Catelyn saw) while the “dead and black” Waymar stands for Lyanna in “her bed of blood”.
She died surrounded by her "brothers" too.
When Waymar rises, his gloves soaked in blood go straight for Will’s throat, and the man never gets to tell what he knows.
To summarize: in Bael’s song the flower proves the Lord’s deception, and the lie isn’t just about the maiden’s disappearance, or the boy’s identity, but about his own attempt to deceive the person who asks about “the flower” (his wife).
Like I said, the lord didn’t know the identity of “the thief”.Jon’s father is never named in any of Ned’s chapters*, not once,* not because he didn’t know him though, but because Ned stole “his song” as Will intended to steal Waymar’s, proof included.

3. The cold ending

In the song, when Bael comes back years later he’s faced in battle by his own son who doesn’t recognize him. I said earlier how the lack of recognition is related to previous experiences that “the young lord” should have seen coming.
Now, for some reason, the most experienced brother, Gared, runs south, he’s caught and beheaded.
That’s Bael’s fate in the song, and therefore, Ned’s.
What’s interesting is how Ned gets to that point. He goes south when he’s named “Hand” in the crypt, which is ironic as hell, but he only accepts the position since he’s determined to investigate a poisoning, and how that’s related to his son’s “falling” from a tower. Of course, he loses his sword at the peak of his mission, though Tywing was no singer, just a common thief and mass murderer.
Ned died singing his own song, *like Bael.*

Your Bael was a liar.

Since we get AGoT’s prologue from Will’s point of view and Bael’s song from Ygritte’s, (therefore the song of ice and fire), we might forget that there are other songs to be learned here.

Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. "My mother told me that dead men sing no songs," he put in. "My wet nurse said the same thing, Will," Royce replied. "Never believe anything you hear at a woman's tit. There are things to be learned even from the dead." His voice echoed, too loud in the twilit forest. "We have a long ride before us," Gared pointed out. "

I claimed at the beginning how the prince seemed to have left his best swords “guarding the horses”, how Lyanna seemed to go against his interests even when we are led to believe that she's there on her own will, and how Rhaegar goes straight to die a meaningless death.
All of that is true only if you believe Ned’s song.
When Waymar leaves Gared behind, they have a quite enlightening exchange:

Gared dismounted. "We need a fire. I'll see to it." "How big a fool are you, old man? If there are enemies in this wood, *a fire is the last thing we want."* AGoT - Prologue

We know that “a fire” was exactly what Rhaegar was looking for, what he called the “one more”, apparently a daughter to complete his three-headed dragon.
Interestingly, Bael’s enemy is called Brandon “the daughterless” and he’s the deceived person in the song.

"Will you make a song for him?" the woman asked. "He has a song," the man replied. "He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire." He looked up when he said it and his eyes met Dany's, and it seemed as if he saw her standing there beyond the door. "There must be one more," he said, though whether he was speaking to her or the woman in the bed she could not say. "The dragon has three heads." He went to the window seat, picked up a harp, and ran his fingers lightly over its silvery strings. Sweet sadness filled the room as man and wife and babe faded like the morning mist, only the music lingering behind to speed her on her way.” Dany IV- ACoK

See the issue? Rhaegar parallels “Brandon the daughterless”, while Ned parallels Aegon, the promised one, as if the heads *had been exchanged.*
Ned’s song, like Aegon’s, was about people believing he was “the one and true hero” versus the truth proved by what happens to Waymar and his broken sword, and the true Aegon’s broken skull as proof.
Ned is “the one” because he’s the only hero in his song, even when “three heads” (Ashara, Lyanna, and Jon) would like to disagree.
Now, let’s examine the music “lingering behind” the prince and the winter rose, and how the song was playing from their point of view of “daughterless” lord and disenchanted promised bride.

1. The first lesson in the song is The Stark giving a name: “Bael” and the future “king” deciding *to teach a lesson.*

There were three people suspected of being the KoLT in Harrenhal, (Howland, Ned and Lyanna), though none of them were the true one, the real one was “a craven” who hid, (like Will), on a tree.
His shield had a laughing weirwood tree. We already saw how Ned thought that laughing causes people to freeze and choke to death, perhaps explaining why Ghost is mute.

The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been given. Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold butchery. The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were silk. Will closed his eyes. Far beneath him, he heard their voicesand laughter sharp as icicles.

The lesson in the daughterless song is Lyanna claiming to be the knight to hide “the true Bael”, who was teaching a lesson to the squires who had bullied the little Howland when he arrived at the tourney.
That explains why in Ned’s dream she’s giving the warning instead of the person who actually warned him*. They all claimed to be the knight.
In this version of the song, Bael is “a craven” because he hides his identity and “preys only on the weak”; the weakness is not knowing, and this is relevant to understanding the rest of these songs.

1. The second lesson is “the singer” asking for a reward without ever naming it and *leaving the flower as proof.*

The flower proves the lord is a deceiver, meaning Rhaegar didn’t believe Lyanna was the knight but he understood why she lied, *she was in love with the man.*
The reward however, is Rhaegar winning the tourney using the mystery knight’s same strategy, cheating:

“The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were silk.” AGoT - Prologue

This is how Ned remembers the prince’s success in the tourney:

A plume of scarlet silk streamed behind him when he rode, and it seemed no lance could touch him. Brandon fell to him, and Bronze Yohn Royce, and even the splendid Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning.” Eddard XV - AGoT

Truly, no lance could touch the man, that’s the proof that “Bael” left behind, “scarlet silk streaming”; he won by cheating.

1. The final proof is Bael coming back, and here’s where we need to split the songs between ice and fire.

Let’s start with the prince and something closer to Ygritte’s version of the song.
Rhaegar’s incursion to the Trident is explained *by what he lacked, the daughter he was searching for and, most importantly, *the promise of magic that “Bael” meant for him. When he learns that Elia can’t have more children, he does what “the daughterless” does in the song, ***send “the crows” to look for the maiden and her Bael.*
That’s how Ned finds them, the guards end up in the tower because they were deceived and went there thinking that Lyanna and “the craven” were there. They were never there. Howland and Wylla were in the tower, she was faking to be Lyanna.
The prince got what he was searching for though in a very twisted way but still. Dany hatched the dragon’s eggs that came from Asshai, like the silk that Rhaegar wore in the tournament.
He wanted magic so Elia could have the daughter he wanted, since apparently, *that’s what the prophecy promised:* a three-headed dragon.
When Waymar is told about the dead wildlings, as we saw, he asks about their blood, their weapons, and the position of their bodies. All those things are related to Rhaegar’s quest for dragons.
In the daughterless song, the line seems to end with the woman, and the lack of recognition that happens when (the liar) Bael comes back means that Aegon is a fake, which we all suspect already since his song seems a bit too convenient. The “song of fire” now is whatever Dany decides to become, it’s her song.
Now, when you examine the song from Lyanna’s position, the story is about the maiden hiding in the crypt, and you have a completely different song because down there you can only find dead Starks, swords, and direwolves.
We know that Lyanna went to the tournament and that months after that, she disappears roughly at the same time that Rheagar was seen in the Trident.
That doesn’t mean he took her, it means she was hiding from him, because the prince wanted Bael like Waymar wanted those “dead wildlings”. He wanted to know who the man was.
The point of Lyanna’s song, however, is not so much about the tragic way in which she died, but how she convinced her father to get what she wanted: her own “sword”.
Ice as we know was divided into two swords, “Widow’s Wail” and “Oathkeeper”. Lyanna was married when she died, therefore the widow’s “wailing”, the cry that Ned remembers when she died.
The oath-keeping, however, is about Rickard and the “smell of blood and roses” Ned mentions when Lyanna dies:

Lord Rickard Stark, Ned's father, had a long, stern face. The stonemason had known him well. He sat with quiet dignity, stone fingers holding tight to the sword across his lap, but *in life all swords had failed him*.” Eddard I - AGoT

Rickard had broken his word towards Robert when he allowed Lyanna to marry someone she liked instead of the man whose “nature” wouldn’t change no matter what he vowed. Robert *was blind. He didn’t care.* His lack of interest caused his downfall starting in Harrenhal when Lyanna saw him for what he was, and she seized that chance.
Lyanna fell in love with another man right in front of him and he didn’t see it because he never cared about her until “she was stolen from him” as if the woman had been his property.
Lyanna came back from the tourney *with proof:* she knew about the bastard, and she had the flowers as proof that when the prince embarrassed her in front of the entire realm her betrothed told nothing, like Will, he just stood there.
What Ned remembers of Rickard is what happened to Lyanna in the tourney, she was sitting “holding tight” to the winter roses across her lap, the proof of her father's “sword” failing.

He sat with quiet dignity, stone fingers holding tight to the sword across his lap, but*in life all swords had failed him*.”

She had “the blood” (the bastard daughter) and “the weapon” (the crown) that Waymar asks for as proof of the deception. The position of her body changes after that because *Rickard agrees with her.*** Like Will, Robert couldn't be trusted, he would ruin Lyanna's reputation making her the laughing stock of the realm.
In Lyanna’s song, Bael comes back with an army too, he sneaks into Winterfell when Robert comes looking for Ned, he uses a fake name “Mance Rayder” to introduce himself, and sings for Lord Brandon.
When they meet, the real Bael is singing “The Dornishman’s Wife”, a song about a man who dies singing and laughing.
Jon’s true name is Brandon, like “The Daughterless”. In the song, the name of the young lord is never told, but since he grows up to become lord and the only lord in the song is Brandon, well, that’s the young lord’s name.
That’s what the Song of Ice and Fire is about names that mean something, magical proof, and young heroes dying, only to rise again *singing their own songs.*
Jon’s survival is explained by Waymar’s failed song, when he’s stabbed (like Arthur), he falls face down (like Ashara), only to rise again when someone goes for his sword.
Jon himself found his mother’s sword, *and he has proof too.*
Jon’s sword was the bastard letter. The letter told him Bael’s song again, only the names are different. The letter mentions the blood, the weapons, and the position of the bodies: Mance is in a cage cloaked by the skins of women “for all the north to see”.
That’s what Will saw coming for Waymar: *silent watchers.*

“The Others *made no sound.* Will saw movement from the corner of his eye. Pale shapes gliding through the wood. He turned his head, glimpsed a white shadow in the darkness. Then it was gone.”

Jon is an “Other”, all you need to become one *is knowing,* finding the truth hidden inside the lies to realize that the lord is a liar and craven who preys only on the weak.
That’s how you find the winter rose and *her armor.*

"The armor of the Others is proof against most ordinary blades, if the tales can be believed, and their own swords are so cold they shatter steel.. Jon II - ADwD

If you know, then you’re not weak anymore, your “armor” is proof against ordinary blades, because some tales should be believed.
To summarize, I claimed at the beginning how the biggest hoax is that Bael’s song tells three different stories in which the “hero” is always “Bael”.
The stories are all related to the brothers in AGoT’s prologue:

• Waymar telling Rhaegar’s story and how his failure turned into success when Dany achieved what he never could, finding real magic.
• Gared telling Ned’s story, thinking how he “needed” a fire to keep away “the enemies”. As Aemon told Sam, “fire consumes, but cold preserves”, explaining why Ned wanted some fire.
• The silent Will telling Jon’s story of finding his own “broken sword” as proof of his identity: a widow and an “oathkeeper”.

Summary:

The song of ice and fire is about how we are told the exact same song in two different ways: from Will’s point of view in AGoT’s prologue were “the Others” are the villains, and from Ygritte’s point of view were the Stark in Winterfell is the villain.
Ned’s song, his fever dream, which was closer to Will’s version, meant that he’s the only hero in three different stories: Lyanna’s mystery, Jon’s parentage, and his family’s downfall.
Rhagar’s song was closest to Ygritte’s, as his intention was having another child, which explains why she calls the lord “the daughterless”.
In the midst of those versions you find a “grey one”, Lyanna’s and what she left behind as proof:a broken sword.
The biggest hoax in Bael’s song is that it tells three different stories in which the “hero” is always “Bael”. The stories are all related to the brothers in AGoT’s prologue and what they do regarding the dead people:

• Waymar tells Rhaegar’s story and how his failure was turned into success when Dany achieved what he never could, finding real magic.
• Gared tells Ned’s story, thinking how he “needed” a fire to keep away “the enemies”.
• The silent Will tells Jon’s story of finding a “broken sword” as proof of his identity: a widow’s wai and an “oathkeeper”.

I’ve been posting a series of essays regarding Jon’s identity and I think most people didn't understand the point I’m trying to make, so I thought I’ll give it another try. There's a short summary at the end.
Here’s the point: I believe that we were fooled, ASOIAF is “the real story” that Bael’s song tells.
Let me please explain myself better.
ASOIAF begins with a mystery, a cold creature kills a boy, Waymar Royce, who seems to be the hero stereotype: he’s handsome, smart, and owns a nice sword, and the mean wildlings are trying to deceive him, so he goes there sword in hand, like a hero does.
However, when you pay close attention to his story, you realize the poor kid set himself for failure. He left his best swordsman guarding the horses, asked a man who was known for being silent to be his watcher, and went straight into a place that he had described himself as a suspicious scene.
His outcome was predictable.
In the following chapters, we get three seemingly fantasy clichés one after another, Ned, the honorable hero, Jon, the young hero with a mysterious parentage, and soon after that, we are told how Lyanna was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by the evil dragon, Rhaegar Targaryen.
Of course, the predictable outcome would be Jon being Rhaegar’s son, after all his mother spent the war with the man, right? Well,maybe she didn’t.
Why am I claiming that we are being deceived?
When you compare Waymar’s story to Ned’s fever dream, we are being told *the exact same story.*
Like Waymar, the prince seems to have left his best swords “guarding the horses”, he leaves a person in charge of the watch who seems to go against his interests, and goes straight to die a meaningless death like Gared when he decided to desert.
What’s the issue? *It’s a song.*
Ned’s story of what happened in the tower (his fever dream) follows Bael’s song to the letter, and the point of that song is the deception, it’s not about love or even the baby, but Bael being a liar.
That also happens in AGoT’s prologue, Waymar was being deceived but not by the wildlings as he assumed.
The biggest hoax is that Bael’s song tells three different stories in which the “hero” is always “Bael”.

1. The Stark of WF wanted Bael’s head, but couldn’t take him.He calls Bael “a craven who preys only on the weak”, so Bael decides to teach him a lesson and goes to WF.

Being a wildling song, we expect Bael to be the hero, so when the lesson comes we might be a bit lost.
What’s the lesson? The lesson is the Stark “calling” Bael, giving a name to the “craven who preys only on the weak”.

1. Bael fakes to be a singer called Sygerrik (which means deceiver) and spends the night singing for the Stark, when he’s done, the lord offers him to “name” his reward. Bael asks for “the fairest flower” and the Stark gives him a winter rose. After leaving with the lord’s daughter, Bael leaves the flower as proof.

What’s the lesson here? It can’t be the lord realizing who took the maiden since the singer gave him a fake name, and he was welcome because the lordhad never met him before. The flower proves the lord is a deceiver.
When the singer asks for “the fairest flower” the lord knows he is asking for his daughter (even when he never names her), and tries to deceive Bael by giving him a rose. The flower proves the lord lied.

1. Bael comes back years later with an army; he’s faced in battle by his own son who doesn’t recognize him. Bael stays silent and lets the boy kill him. The word “recognize” implies that he knew the man; the very definition of recognition is “the identification of someone from previous encounters.”

What’s the lesson in this one? Who raised the boy? Bael: a liar and craven who never told the truth.
The “young lord,” was a liar (he had to recognize Bael from his own experience), and a craven who took advantage of Bael’s own weakness (his silence) to kill him.
Basically, when you go over the song, the baby, the maiden, and “the singer” are all victims of the lord of WF who never told the boy who he was, took the child “as payment”, and blamed “Bael” for the things he did.

“Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. "My mother told me that *dead men sing no songs*," he put in.” AGoT - Prologue

Bael is the lord of WF in the three stories and the “hero” of his own songs: a name that means something, a flower as proof of his deception, and dead men*singing songs.*
To summarize, the biggest deception in the song is the language, or rather, the way people are named.
We’ll now examine how Lord Stark deceived us all, and later why this is “a song of ice and fire”.

A hero of his own songs

We are first introduced to the song in AGoT’s Prologue when we meet three men on a mission: Waymar Royce, Will, and Gared.
Each of them helps us understand one of the stories told in Bael’s song. The prologue seems to be about these men deciding what to do regarding some dead people. In truth, they illustrate the lessons in Ned’s song for us, while we can also understand other stories of dead people: Rheagar’s and Lyanna’s.
One of the men, Will, is a craven who “wants nothing so much as to ride hellbent for the safety of the Wall”.
Waymar suspects that the wildlings are trying to deceive them, and notes that some things in Will’s story don’t seem to add up.
He wants to go personally to see the dead wildlings and prove his theory: someone is lying. Ironically his own broken sword is proof that he was right about the deceptionbut wrong about the author.
The third man, Gared,instantly recognizes what happened to the wildlings by Will’s description, even when he never actually saw them; but knew from previous experiences what “the cold” does, as he had found one of his brothers “with a smile on his face”.
Let’s examine how the song unfolds so we can find the real Bael.

1. The Craven and the given name.

In the song, “Bael” is a name that means something, is what you call a craven who preys only on the weak.
We get to see how Will exemplifies the concept of being a craven when the Others appear. I mentioned earlier that one of Waymar’s mistakes was sending a brother known for being silent to act as his watcher.
Will sees the entire fight while hiding on a tree (he’s a craven after all), and never says a word, not even when he sees the shadows moving, not when he sees the Other facing Waymar, and not while the boy is being mercilessly butchered.
He realizes, however, that he should “call down a warning” as the shadows start to appear, and ironically, Waymar shouts his name instead.

The Others made no sound. Will saw movement from the corner of his eye. Pale shapes gliding through the wood. He turned his head, glimpsed a white shadow in the darkness. Then it was gone. Branches stirred gently in the wind, scratching at one another with wooden fingers. Will opened his mouth to call down a warning, and the words seemed to freeze in his throat. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had only been a bird, a reflection on the snow, some trick of the moonlight. What had he seen, after all? "Will, where are you?" Ser Waymar called up. "Can you see anything?" He was turning in a slow circle, suddenly wary, his sword in hand. He must have felt them, as Will felt them. There was nothing to see."Answer me! *Why is it so cold?"*

Interestingly, that’s exactly what happens in Ned’s dream, he tells us how he gets to the Tower with a bunch of shadows and how he sees three men in white waiting for him, and curiously, the person yelling in the dream was recognized before by Ned himself as being*so weak* that she could only whisper:

He could hear her still at times. Promise me, she had cried, in a room that smelled of blood and roses. Promise me, Ned. The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister's eyes.” Eddard I - AGoT

Lyanna’s fear as she dies seems far more interesting considering how Will never yells fearing “the shadows”, since Ned gets to his dream surrounded by shadows. Now, while we are told by Ned himself how she could barely speak, somehow, she calls ‘Bael’ loud and clear:

"As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. "Eddard!" *she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky,as blue as the eyes of death. *"Lord Eddard," Lyanna called again.

See the first lesson in the song?
Why would Lyanna use the word “Eddard”, to call her own brother; a brother that she, and everyone who knew himcalled “Ned”?
In the song, the Stark gives Bael a name because he doesn’t know the man, but he knows *he’s hiding his identity to take advantage of “the weak”.*
In the dream “Eddard” means Bael. *He’s lying.*
The “craven” who actually yells in the dream is deliberately hidden:

"The finest knight I ever saw was Ser Arthur Dayne, who fought with a blade called Dawn, forged from the heart of a fallen star. They called him the Sword of the Morning, and he would have killed me *but for Howland Reed*." Bran III - ACoK

In Ned’s “song” Lyanna yells even when she is so weak that she can barely speak. In truth, the one yelling, Howland, is warning him about the “white shadow”, Arthur Dayne, who was moving towards Ned to kill him as the shadows move to kill Waymar. That’s what Will should have done when he saw them: warn his brother.
The parallels between the Other facing Waymar and Arthur with Dawn in hand facing Ned in the dream are clear too. This is the Other:

The Other slid forward on silent feet. In its hand was a longsword like none that Will had ever seen. No human metal had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed almost to vanish when seen edge-on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing, a ghost-light that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew it was sharper than any razor.

This is Arthur, holding his sword made from “no human metal”.

"And now it begins," said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass,*alive with light*. Eddard X - AGoT

You see, Ned did in his dream what Lord Stark does in the song: the “weak” (Lyanna), are identified as a Stark; Bael takes advantage of weak people to sing his song, to tell his own version of things.

"Your Bael was a liar," he told her, certain now. "No," Ygritte said, "buta bard's truth is different than yours or mine. Anyway, you asked for the story, so I told it." Jon VI - ACoK

In fact, Lyanna ends up buried in WF’s crypt (like the maiden in the song) because she’s identified by Ned as a Stark, so that was “her place”.
That’s the first lesson: In Ned’s song (his dream) he hid the truth by identifying the person who yells as Lyanna, when it was actually Howland Reed warning him.
The biggest clue is the person calling him in a way that’s not familiar to him, like “Brandon the Daughterless” is not familiar name to Jon when he hears Bael’s song. We’ll discuss that name later.
What was Ned hiding? That Lyanna was never in that tower, that’s Ned’sbiggest deception, hiding the fact that Rhaeagar spent half the war chasing shadows, like Waymar, and that Robert never “avenged” Lyanna as he believed,because the prince was deceived and Robert was too late to the vengeance train.
When Jon hears the song’s happy ending, he asks if Bael has brought back the maiden, to which Ygritte replies that she was “hiding with the dead”. Ned made people believe that he had brought Lyanna’s body from Dorne while he left his friends’ corpses buried there, but he didn’t. She died elsewhere.
As for “the craven”, Ned himself explained his issue with the man: the “laughter”.

"They say it grows so cold up here in winter that a man's laughter freezes in his throat and chokes him to death," Ned said evenly. "Perhaps that is why the Starks have so little humor." Eddard I - AGoT

Howland Reed was identified as “the Knight of the Laughing Tree” by his children, he wasn’t, but he’s one of the three main suspects: Howland, Ned and Lyanna. None of them was the “laughing” one though.
While Ned tells us how people’s laughter freezes in their throats and chokes them to death, look what happens to the craven Will in the prologue when he thinks of doing what Howland does: calling “Bael”.

Will opened his mouth to call down a warning, and *the words seemed to freeze in his throat*.

You likely remember how Will dies, choked to death by the un-dead Waymar.
To summarize: in Bael’s song “Bael” is a name that means something, is what you call a craven who preys only on the weak.
In Ned’s dream, the word “Eddard” means “Bael”; he’s hiding the warnings: Howland warned him about Arthur Dayne trying to kill him, and Lyanna gave him her own warning:

"I hear he has gotten a child** on some girl in the Vale." Ned had held the babe in his arms; he could scarcely deny her, nor would he lie to his sister, but he had assured her that what Robert did before their betrothal was of no matter, that he was a good man and true who would love her with all his heart. Lyanna had only smiled. "Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but *it cannot change a man's nature*." Eddard IX - AGoT

What Ned is trying to hide (mostly from himself) is the fact that killing Arthur turned him into a kinslayer, since Ashara got pregnant in Harrenhal, explaining why he links “the laughter” with “the freezing cold”: he fathered a bastard.
Ned was great at hiding things in plain sight and being silent, yet his dream sang a different song.

2. The deceiver and the flower.

When Will reports he found the wildlings dead, Waymar doesn’t believe him. To confirm his suspicions he asks the most experienced of the group, Gared, his views about the scene that Will had described, andhe says without hesitation “it was the cold”.

"I've had the cold in me too, lordling." Gared pulled back his hood, giving Ser Waymar a good long look at the stumps where his ears had been. "Two ears, three toes, and the little finger off my left hand. I got off light. We found my brother frozen at his watch, *with a smile on his face*."

Waymar asked Will a series of questions that Ned diligently answer for us:

"Did you see *any blood?" "Well, no," Will admitted. "Did you see *any weapons?" "Some swords, a few bows. One man had an axe. Heavy-looking, **double-bladed, a cruel piece of iron.It was on the ground beside him, right by his hand." "Did you make note of the position of the bodies?" Will shrugged. "A couple are sitting up against the rock. Most of them on the ground. Fallen, like."

In Bael’s song, the lord offers the singer to “name” his reward, and the man asks for “the fairest flower” which as we know, is then left behind as proof of the lord’s deception.
When Ned comes home from the war with “proof” of his deception, his wife names “the reward”, Ashara Dayne, and Ned’s answeris priceless:

It had taken her a fortnight to marshal her courage, but finally, in bed one night, Catelyn had asked her husband the truth of it, asked him to his face. That was the only time in all their years that Ned had ever frightened her. "Never ask me about Jon," he said, cold as ice. "He is my blood, and that is all you need to know. And now I will learn where you heard that name, my lady." She had pledged to obey; she told him; and from that day on, the whispering had stopped, and Ashara Dayne's name *was never heard in Winterfell again*." Catelyn II - AGoT

In this memory, Catelyn parallels Bael singing (marshaling his courage) until he’s asked to name the reward, and not daring to name the maiden, he asks for “the fairest flower”, to which the lord gives him not what he asked for, but “a rose from the gardens”.
Ned gives Jon’s name when he’s asked about Ashara, most importantly,he establishes the link between Jon and “the blood” he later dreams of, meaning he makes us believe that the boy killed Lyanna while being born,that’s the deception.
Did you see any blood? Yes, a ‘brother’ “frozen at his watch”, a sister who allegedly died “in a bed of blood”, and the “fairest flower” blowing in the wind like the petals Ned sees when he hears his name.
They waited before the round tower, the red mountains of Dorne at their backs, their white cloaks blowing in the wind. And these were no shadows; their faces burned clear, even now. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, had a sad smile on his lips.” Eddard X - AGoT
Killing Arthur made him a kinslayer, but Will saw a “double-bladed” weapon.
Did you see any weapons? Yes, petals falling “dead and black”.

Ned remembered **the way she had smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, *dead and black*. After that he remembered nothing. They had found him still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his. Ned could recall none of it. "I bring her flowers when I can," he said. "Lyanna was … fond of flowers."

What about the position of the bodies? They all waited for Ned and ended up “fallen”: Ashara, Arthur, *and Lyanna.*
Let’s discuss the proof.
When Waymar falls, Will thinks he needs to take his sword as proof of what he saw, as if the entire thing had nothing to do with him.
Ned, as we know, takes Dayne’s sword to Starfall and after that visit, Ashara commits suicide. Yet, we have no idea what he told them. It seems kind of weird how Lord Dayne seems to highly respect the man who killed his brother and caused his sister’s suicide, right?
The point is how Will finds the sword that was supposed to be proof:

He found what was left of the sword a few feet away,the end splintered and twisted like a tree struck by lightning. Will knelt, looked around warily, and snatched it up. The broken sword would be his proof.

We know that Ashara killed herself (explaining the sword splintered and twisted like Bran). We also know that Ned killed Arthur since that was the talking in Winterfell when he returned from the war (as Will intended to get to the Wall with a story), the proof being he took Dawn to Starfall.
What matters here is “what was left” and Ned “snatching” something that ended up in Winterfell, even when he never brought his friends’ corpses back. You see, in Ned’s memory, he seems to do what Will does when everything is over, “look around warily”.

“…the rose petals spilling from her palm, *dead and black. After that, he remembered nothing. *They had found him** still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his…”

The scene is not just weirdly similar to the way that the un-dead Waymar finds Will withhis sword, but also the proof of the crime that “Bael” left behind for the lord to find: a dead flower instead of the maiden as proof of the kidnapping.
As I said earlier, in Bael’s song the flower doesn’t mean that the lord realizes who took the maiden sincethe singer *gave him a fake name, and he was welcome in WF becausethe lord had never met him* before.
The flower proves the lord is a deceiver. It wasn’t Jon being born what killed Lyanna, *it was Ned’s flower.*

Ned Stark reached out his hand to grasp the flowery crown, but beneath the pale blue petals the thorns lay hidden. He felt them clawing at his skin, sharp and cruel, saw the slow trickle of blood run down his fingers, and woke, trembling, in the dark.” Eddard XV

Ned mentions how he always brings Lyanna flowers, and that’s exactly what happened the last time he saw her. Except this time the flower was poisonous and killed her.
That’s one of the “weapons” that Will sees in one of the “fallen” *“right by his hand”,* which makes Ned a “double-bladed” weapon, or rather a double kinslayer.

“…the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black. After that he remembered nothing. They had found him still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his…”

Howland clearly realizes what happened and takes her hand from Ned’s so he wouldn’t die too.
All the weapons used in Ned’s song are mentioned by Will in the crime scene beyond the Wall: “It was on the ground beside him, right by his hand.”
It was “the ground” that killed Ashara, Ned being “beside” Arthur, and the petals in Lyanna’s hand.

"The trees press close here," Will warned. "That sword will tangle you up, m'lord. Better a knife." AGoT - Prologue

We get to see the proof of all victims in the way that Waymar raises being a portrayal of all three fallen.

Will rose. Ser Waymar Royce stood over him. His fine clothes were a tatter, his face a ruin. A shard from *his sword* transfixed the blind white pupil of his left eye. The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.

Waymar is the proof: the white pupil “transfixed” by the sword is for Arthur he died from multiple stabb wounds, the right eye “burning blue” is for Ashara (what Catelyn saw) while the “dead and black” Waymar stands for Lyanna in “her bed of blood”.
She died surrounded by her "brothers" too.
When Waymar rises, his gloves soaked in blood go straight for Will’s throat, and the man never gets to tell what he knows.
To summarize: in Bael’s song the flower proves the Lord’s deception, and the lie isn’t just about the maiden’s disappearance, or the boy’s identity, but about his own attempt to deceive the person who asks about “the flower” (his wife).
Like I said, the lord didn’t know the identity of “the thief”.Jon’s father is never named in any of Ned’s chapters*, not once,* not because he didn’t know him though, but because Ned stole “his song” as Will intended to steal Waymar’s, proof included.

3. The cold ending

In the song, when Bael comes back years later he’s faced in battle by his own son who doesn’t recognize him. I said earlier how the lack of recognition is related to previous experiences that “the young lord” should have seen coming.
Now, for some reason, the most experienced brother, Gared, runs south, he’s caught and beheaded.
That’s Bael’s fate in the song, and therefore, Ned’s.
What’s interesting is how Ned gets to that point. He goes south when he’s named “Hand” in the crypt, which is ironic as hell, but he only accepts the position since he’s determined to investigate a poisoning, and how that’s related to his son’s “falling” from a tower. Of course, he loses his sword at the peak of his mission, though Tywing was no singer, just a common thief and mass murderer.
Ned died singing his own song, *like Bael.*

Your Bael was a liar.

Since we get AGoT’s prologue from Will’s point of view and Bael’s song from Ygritte’s, (therefore the song of ice and fire), we might forget that there are other songs to be learned here.

Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. "My mother told me that dead men sing no songs," he put in. "My wet nurse said the same thing, Will," Royce replied. "Never believe anything you hear at a woman's tit. There are things to be learned even from the dead." His voice echoed, too loud in the twilit forest. "We have a long ride before us," Gared pointed out. "

I claimed at the beginning how the prince seemed to have left his best swords “guarding the horses”, how Lyanna seemed to go against his interests even when we are led to believe that she's there on her own will, and how Rhaegar goes straight to die a meaningless death.
All of that is true only if you believe Ned’s song.
When Waymar leaves Gared behind, they have a quite enlightening exchange:

Gared dismounted. "We need a fire. I'll see to it." "How big a fool are you, old man? If there are enemies in this wood, *a fire is the last thing we want."* AGoT - Prologue

We know that “a fire” was exactly what Rhaegar was looking for, what he called the “one more”, apparently a daughter to complete his three-headed dragon.
Interestingly, Bael’s enemy is called Brandon “the daughterless” and he’s the deceived person in the song.

"Will you make a song for him?" the woman asked. "He has a song," the man replied. "He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire." He looked up when he said it and his eyes met Dany's, and it seemed as if he saw her standing there beyond the door. "There must be one more," he said, though whether he was speaking to her or the woman in the bed she could not say. "The dragon has three heads." He went to the window seat, picked up a harp, and ran his fingers lightly over its silvery strings. Sweet sadness filled the room as man and wife and babe faded like the morning mist, only the music lingering behind to speed her on her way.” Dany IV- ACoK

See the issue? Rhaegar parallels “Brandon the daughterless”, while Ned parallels Aegon, the promised one, as if the heads *had been exchanged.*
Ned’s song, like Aegon’s, was about people believing he was “the one and true hero” versus the truth proved by what happens to Waymar and his broken sword, and the true Aegon’s broken skull as proof.
Ned is “the one” because he’s the only hero in his song, even when “three heads” (Ashara, Lyanna, and Jon) would like to disagree.
Now, let’s examine the music “lingering behind” the prince and the winter rose, and how the song was playing from their point of view of “daughterless” lord and disenchanted promised bride.

1. The first lesson in the song is The Stark giving a name: “Bael” and the future “king” deciding *to teach a lesson.*

There were three people suspected of being the KoLT in Harrenhal, (Howland, Ned and Lyanna), though none of them were the true one, the real one was “a craven” who hid, (like Will), on a tree.
His shield had a laughing weirwood tree. We already saw how Ned thought that laughing causes people to freeze and choke to death, perhaps explaining why Ghost is mute.

The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been given. Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold butchery. The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were silk. Will closed his eyes. Far beneath him, he heard their voicesand laughter sharp as icicles.

The lesson in the daughterless song is Lyanna claiming to be the knight to hide “the true Bael”, who was teaching a lesson to the squires who had bullied the little Howland when he arrived at the tourney.
That explains why in Ned’s dream she’s giving the warning instead of the person who actually warned him*. They all claimed to be the knight.
In this version of the song, Bael is “a craven” because he hides his identity and “preys only on the weak”; the weakness is not knowing, and this is relevant to understanding the rest of these songs.

1. The second lesson is “the singer” asking for a reward without ever naming it and *leaving the flower as proof.*

The flower proves the lord is a deceiver, meaning Rhaegar didn’t believe Lyanna was the knight but he understood why she lied, *she was in love with the man.*
The reward however, is Rhaegar winning the tourney using the mystery knight’s same strategy, cheating:

“The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were silk.” AGoT - Prologue

This is how Ned remembers the prince’s success in the tourney:

A plume of scarlet silk streamed behind him when he rode, and it seemed no lance could touch him. Brandon fell to him, and Bronze Yohn Royce, and even the splendid Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning.” Eddard XV - AGoT

Truly, no lance could touch the man, that’s the proof that “Bael” left behind, “scarlet silk streaming”; he won by cheating.

1. The final proof is Bael coming back, and here’s where we need to split the songs between ice and fire.

Let’s start with the prince and something closer to Ygritte’s version of the song.
Rhaegar’s incursion to the Trident is explained *by what he lacked, the daughter he was searching for and, most importantly, *the promise of magic that “Bael” meant for him. When he learns that Elia can’t have more children, he does what “the daughterless” does in the song, ***send “the crows” to look for the maiden and her Bael.*
That’s how Ned finds them, the guards end up in the tower because they were deceived and went there thinking that Lyanna and “the craven” were there. They were never there. Howland and Wylla were in the tower, she was faking to be Lyanna.
The prince got what he was searching for though in a very twisted way but still. Dany hatched the dragon’s eggs that came from Asshai, like the silk that Rhaegar wore in the tournament.
He wanted magic so Elia could have the daughter he wanted, since apparently, *that’s what the prophecy promised:* a three-headed dragon.
When Waymar is told about the dead wildlings, as we saw, he asks about their blood, their weapons, and the position of their bodies. All those things are related to Rhaegar’s quest for dragons.
In the daughterless song, the line seems to end with the woman, and the lack of recognition that happens when (the liar) Bael comes back means that Aegon is a fake, which we all suspect already since his song seems a bit too convenient. The “song of fire” now is whatever Dany decides to become, it’s her song.
Now, when you examine the song from Lyanna’s position, the story is about the maiden hiding in the crypt, and you have a completely different song because down there you can only find dead Starks, swords, and direwolves.
We know that Lyanna went to the tournament and that months after that, she disappears roughly at the same time that Rheagar was seen in the Trident.
That doesn’t mean he took her, it means she was hiding from him, because the prince wanted Bael like Waymar wanted those “dead wildlings”. He wanted to know who the man was.
The point of Lyanna’s song, however, is not so much about the tragic way in which she died, but how she convinced her father to get what she wanted: her own “sword”.
Ice as we know was divided into two swords, “Widow’s Wail” and “Oathkeeper”. Lyanna was married when she died, therefore the widow’s “wailing”, the cry that Ned remembers when she died.
The oath-keeping, however, is about Rickard and the “smell of blood and roses” Ned mentions when Lyanna dies:

Lord Rickard Stark, Ned's father, had a long, stern face. The stonemason had known him well. He sat with quiet dignity, stone fingers holding tight to the sword across his lap, but *in life all swords had failed him*.” Eddard I - AGoT

Rickard had broken his word towards Robert when he allowed Lyanna to marry someone she liked instead of the man whose “nature” wouldn’t change no matter what he vowed. Robert *was blind. He didn’t care.* His lack of interest caused his downfall starting in Harrenhal when Lyanna saw him for what he was, and she seized that chance.
Lyanna fell in love with another man right in front of him and he didn’t see it because he never cared about her until “she was stolen from him” as if the woman had been his property.
Lyanna came back from the tourney *with proof:* she knew about the bastard, and she had the flowers as proof that when the prince embarrassed her in front of the entire realm her betrothed told nothing, like Will, he just stood there.
What Ned remembers of Rickard is what happened to Lyanna in the tourney, she was sitting “holding tight” to the winter roses across her lap, the proof of her father's “sword” failing.

He sat with quiet dignity, stone fingers holding tight to the sword across his lap, but*in life all swords had failed him*.”

She had “the blood” (the bastard daughter) and “the weapon” (the crown) that Waymar asks for as proof of the deception. The position of her body changes after that because *Rickard agrees with her.*** Like Will, Robert couldn't be trusted, he would ruin Lyanna's reputation making her the laughing stock of the realm.
In Lyanna’s song, Bael comes back with an army too, he sneaks into Winterfell when Robert comes looking for Ned, he uses a fake name “Mance Rayder” to introduce himself, and sings for Lord Brandon.
When they meet, the real Bael is singing “The Dornishman’s Wife”, a song about a man who dies singing and laughing.
Jon’s true name is Brandon, like “The Daughterless”. In the song, the name of the young lord is never told, but since he grows up to become lord and the only lord in the song is Brandon, well, that’s the young lord’s name.
That’s what the Song of Ice and Fire is about names that mean something, magical proof, and young heroes dying, only to rise again *singing their own songs.*
Jon’s survival is explained by Waymar’s failed song, when he’s stabbed (like Arthur), he falls face down (like Ashara), only to rise again when someone goes for his sword.
Jon himself found his mother’s sword, *and he has proof too.*
Jon’s sword was the bastard letter. The letter told him Bael’s song again, only the names are different. The letter mentions the blood, the weapons, and the position of the bodies: Mance is in a cage cloaked by the skins of women “for all the north to see”.
That’s what Will saw coming for Waymar: *silent watchers.*

“The Others *made no sound.* Will saw movement from the corner of his eye. Pale shapes gliding through the wood. He turned his head, glimpsed a white shadow in the darkness. Then it was gone.”

Jon is an “Other”, all you need to become one *is knowing,* finding the truth hidden inside the lies to realize that the lord is a liar and craven who preys only on the weak.
That’s how you find the winter rose and *her armor.*

"The armor of the Others is proof against most ordinary blades, if the tales can be believed, and their own swords are so cold they shatter steel.. Jon II - ADwD

If you know, then you’re not weak anymore, your “armor” is proof against ordinary blades, because some tales should be believed.
To summarize, I claimed at the beginning how the biggest hoax is that Bael’s song tells three different stories in which the “hero” is always “Bael”.
The stories are all related to the brothers in AGoT’s prologue:

• Waymar telling Rhaegar’s story and how his failure turned into success when Dany achieved what he never could, finding real magic.
• Gared telling Ned’s story, thinking how he “needed” a fire to keep away “the enemies”. As Aemon told Sam, “fire consumes, but cold preserves”, explaining why Ned wanted some fire.
• The silent Will telling Jon’s story of finding his own “broken sword” as proof of his identity: a widow and an “oathkeeper”.

Summary:

The song of ice and fire is about how we are told the exact same song in two different ways: from Will’s point of view in AGoT’s prologue were “the Others” are the villains, and from Ygritte’s point of view were the Stark in Winterfell is the villain.
Ned’s song, his fever dream, which was closer to Will’s version, meant that he’s the only hero in three different stories: Lyanna’s mystery, Jon’s parentage, and his family’s downfall.
Rhagar’s song was closest to Ygritte’s, as his intention was having another child, which explains why she calls the lord “the daughterless”.
In the midst of those versions you find a “grey one”, Lyanna’s and what she left behind as proof:a broken sword.
The biggest hoax in Bael’s song is that it tells three different stories in which the “hero” is always “Bael”. The stories are all related to the brothers in AGoT’s prologue and what they do regarding the dead people:

• Waymar tells Rhaegar’s story and how his failure was turned into success when Dany achieved what he never could, finding real magic.
• Gared tells Ned’s story, thinking how he “needed” a fire to keep away “the enemies”.
• The silent Will tells Jon’s story of finding a “broken sword” as proof of his identity: a widow’s wai and an “oathkeeper”.

I (M18) had a great relationship with a girl who I really thought would be the one I marry one day. She was year younger than me and I plan on attending college later this year and was really adamant about staying together through it all. That is until I learned about a bunch of secrets being hidden from me.
To start, I had went on a cruise midway through last year and met a nice girl who had I had hit it off really well with from the start. Given, she made it blatantly clear that she had a boyfriend and I respected that fully. TBH I had no intention of getting with her because of that and only wanted to enjoy a cruise within the friend group that we had developed. I had helped her with a college course she had been enrolled in because I was bored and we were about to go clubbing and I like to think of myself as a somewhat academic person so I opted to help with her assignment. I ended up doing the assignment for her and basically saved her from failing the class because it was due at 11:59 and I was the only one who could do it under a hour.
Anyways, we get off the cruise and I keep in contact with her afterwards. At this time me and her brother become basically bestfriends and play games together all the time. She ended up "ending" things with her boyfriend a few weeks later after the cruise and we became closer because of that. She invited me to a wedding with her family and I went. I had suggested playfully matching colors for outfits and she surprisingly agreed. I forgot to mention she lives about a 2 hour drive away from me so I WAS a little but of hassle getting there but it was worth the drive. After the wedding we become way closer and as the days nearing our start of the HS school year come things seem to be coming to a good spot. Until I dropped the question the day before school started. She ended up blocking me for the first 3 days of school due to she was "trying to give her ex another chance because he said he changed." I was hurt but I just accepted this was a talking stage for us and I just let it go. This ex is the root of my issues. He has abused her, allegedly SA her, and verbally degraded her to the point where she turned to self harm to punish herself because she was being gas lit into thinking she was the problem. He had been her first everything and she called it a trauma bond.
After the 3 days of being blocked she unblocked me and told me that she made a mistake with her ex and that he really wasn't going to change. I thought "oh wow I have a chance again" and took her back and reignited the flame we once had. Another 3 weeks go by of us talking and I finally make her my girlfriend and drive to see her. Once we had become official, I basically drove 2 hours every Saturday to go see her and take her on dates. I really wanted to treat her the way she deserved to be treated because her ex had mistreated her and her family had been in shambles (dad throws parties and neglects the kids and the mother is a mentally ill women who threatens to hurt herself). I knew the risks of a long distance relationship but to me, it was worth it. I learned what a wonderful person she was through the talking phases I had with her and the late nights where all we did was stay up and talk on the phone. She was my first everything and taught me a whole lot of thing that I never thought I'd learn from someone. Towards our 4 month of dating we started to become rocky and argue about things here and there. She was diagnosed with clinical depression from a young age so her mental health got a hold of her a lot making her become emotional and upset at me. We ended up breaking up due to that and she said she had to focus on her mental health. I was distraught but understanding and we stopped seeing each other. It sucked because I had asked her to homecoming a week prior and even had her parents approval to sleep in her room with her because they really had trusted me (a little sketchy now looking back but eh). Its a different type of expierience when you sleep skin to skin with someone you cherish.
Fast forward 2 months, she reaches back out to me to say that she wanted to be friends again. I was hesitant but agreed and ended up going wayyy to far and ending being convince to try the relationship again. We began dating again and everything was amazing. We spent christmas together and new years on a roof top sushi resturant that had been my favorite (i paid for a $400 meal that night). We were amazing up until February. Since we were long distance, we had each others location in case we needed to get in contact. She told me she was going out with her friends on valentines day for a Galentines since it was a tradition for her. I knew her friends and they confirmed that with me. I ended up tired and checked her location for fun to see her at a address i didn't recognize at around 7pm. I called her bestfriend and she had said that my girlfriend had left a hour ago to go home. my gfs house and her bsfs houses are not an hour apart. So I end up calling her multiple times and was sent to voicemail everytime. I was playing with her brother and he told me about the address and my heart sank. It was the ex's house. The bestfriend ended up telling me that they both went to his house to confront him because he had been begging to be friends again to JUST be friends and they went their to confront him. The bsfs ended up scolding him for mistreating my gf and to just forget about it because of how bad he had treated her, My gf later went back on her own time for an hour and a half to talk to him and tell him that they couldn't be friends. When she got home and called me, she told me she just got back from her bsfs house and lied to my face. When I confronted her she became really upset and cried saying she didn't know how to tell me and that it was really just to tell him no and that they couldn't be anything out of respect for me. I was upset and made that clear but then she turned it into a "trauma bond" and how she had to talk because she felt bad. And then she brought up her depression and such and mental health and how she felt like everyone hated her. I calmed her down but then went to bed because I felt dissmissed and the whole situation still not being clarified. I forgave her and she ended up driving up to see me to celebrate a late valentines day with me. Everything was okay from there on out, with the occasional argument about the whole valentines day thing again, and we were somewhat steady.
Then my birthday came around. The big 18. I took a shift on my birthday because it landed on a friday and I had wanted to celebrate my birthday the next day with my gf. After I got off work I called my gf to tell her about my day and then when she picked up it was pitch dark. She had been crying because one of her friends had brought up her ex to her and she got triggered with trauma from him and cried. Her parents ended up yelling at her for crying and told her to cut it out because it bothered everyone in the house but that only made it worse. She ended up leaving and drove to a random parking lot. Police were called and she ended up getting baker acted because there were signs of harm on her arms. This is when I had logged into her socials to see what exactly had been the issue and found that there was a DM from a friend and it said, "does your boyfriend know that youve been playing games with youre ex." She had said no and that her and her ex were no longer talking at all. I snoop around a little bit more and uncover the entire truth. She had been contacting him ever since valentines day and they had been hanging out behind my back and talking to each other. The ex still called her baby and princess and she didnt saying anything about it. They had skipped school together and even kissed in the car (my gf would later say this was forced and she couldnt say no and had cried when it happened). And when I found out that she had decided to go on a date on my birthday with him i lost it. When she called me from the ward phone that night I flipped out. I asked her why she had been cheating on me and she said she didnt know and that it was a big mistake. She didnt know how to tell me about it and cried to me. i couldnt handle it and blocked her while she was in the mental hospital still. I was so hurt and destroyed that I didnt come out of my room for days. Her brother helped me get videos and screenshots of the messages between the two. When she was discharged she had decided to have the brother convince me to unblock her and talk to her again abt it all. I listened. I was told that it was a mistake and that she didn't know what to do because she really felt bad for him since he had no friends. She told me that she regrets it and only wants me and our future together. I told her that it was over but we could still be friends and work past it possibly.
After that, we had slowly began fixing things and working together, but still arguing a lot. She said I love you on multiple occasions and even kissed me. I felt gross. She became upset at me when I didn't reciprocate back and told me that I was confusing her. I honestly didnt know what i wanted because one side of me wanted to go back to being her boyfriend, the other half wanted to be her ex because she cheated. A week ago we had a really bad arguement and she threatened to hurt herself and even threatened to end her self because she had been struggling with mental health for so long and that if I didnt have a future with her then she didnt see a future at all. The argurment had been about why i didnt reciprocate back and what i wanted which ended awfully. She had expected me to treat her like her boyfriend again and comfort her when she was really struggling which I did, but no in the way that I used to and more like a friend would. I couldnt bring myself to do it and call her baby and calm her down. After her threats and her constant berating of me I had enough. I said that I couldn't work past all of this and that she had cheated on me for weeks and that this pain wouldnt go away with the way we've been going. I said my goodbyes and she begged me to stay and that she would change but I couldn't handle it anymore. She even had her mother crying to me begging me because she loved me and my gf so much and only wanted to see us together. I couldn't. I blocked her on all socials and her number blocked to. She had posted about me not treating her correctly and it made me feel bad and almost unblock her and try again but I stopped myself. I can't lie. I did fight and I didnt treat her the best after I found out, but by no means did I abuse her or go as far to make her feel small and a burden around me. I only ever tried to communicate with her and work on the future we had promised each other to end. But in the end, I couldn't keep my promise of staying forever and making the future we had promised each other become a reality.
AITA?

I’m going try to make this a short as I can, but it’s a lot. It all starts with the fact that her dad isn’t my dad biologically but even though my mom cheated and got pregnant with me this man still married her and adopted me and was even at my birth. A year and a half later they had my little sister. I believed that this man was my dad until I was almost 7 when one day we were in the kitchen and he was showing me how to make his famous scrambled eggs. Little sis gets jealous and yells at me that he’s not even my dad. So I go crying to my mom who’s just like “well honey, she’s right. It’s about time you knew, he isn’t your real daddy and he needs to be spending more time with your sister.” Commence me just breaking down and my ‘dad’ getting Uber upset with my mom. He ends up leaving and not coming back for several years. By then I’m constantly being bullied by my sister and her friends and mostly living with my grandma all the way up until 7th grade. At the point I was finally making friends and spending my nights off school babysitting my baby brother (also has a different dad). I start dating in 9th grade and one of my bfs had brought his friend over who my sister and I both were just infatuated with. I ended up making out with him later but lost contact. When sister turned 15 she moved in with her best friend a couple towns over with my moms permission. Fast forward almost 4 years later and I back in touch with said guy. I’m in a terrible relationship with this other POS dude who constantly cheated and I end up leaving him for the other guy. Sister finds out and at first she’s happy for us. We date for several years and eventually move into one of my grandmas properties. We end up letting sister and her 2 kids live with us. She refuses to pay rent directly to me which caused strain on my grandma because it was hard for her to get to the utilities compiles when they were open so she’d usually give me sisters money to go take care of it. After living with us a few months she’d lost her 2 year old son at least 4 times that I was aware of, one time being because she left at 3 am to go to he f-buddy’s house (she had also brought both of her baby daddies to my houses and was screwing both of them) and the baby got out the back door. My then fiancé found him about a mile out in the woods laying down and though he was dead. Things get worse and she starts getting physically violent with both of us. Admits at one point that my fiancé was on her list so she’s jelly. We decide it’s best if she moves and we don’t talk again until my grandmas funeral almost a year later. In this time I had gotten married and didn’t invite her. She actually picks a fight at my grandmas funeral about it! Says it’s my husband or her kids (I still face time with them when they are with my mom), I can’t have both. I don’t see her again until my grandpas funeral 2 months later. We don’t speak there or again for 2 years. My birthday was 3 weeks ago and she put on my fb wall “happy birthday sister”. At first I wasn’t going to reply but eventually said thank you and I hope the kids are doing well. I should also note that ‘dad’ has been in touch with me every so often and says sister won’t even talk to him even though he’s helped her out a lot and we’ve made plans to visit each other since I’ve moved a lot closer to the state he’s currently living in. She never did say anything else. I almost feel bad but don’t think I should. So, AITAH?

Just to put it out there as it might help to keep in mind, there is no court ordered arrangement. She has his last name and he is on the birth certificate w/o a paternity test.
Im in the thick of it so this may sound rambly/ranty. My baby is only 4 months old, her dad didn’t want anything to do with us until she was born so naturally I made arrangements to live and care for her without him. Everyday he makes threats of what court would do to make things “even”. He lives an hour and a half away and says it’s not fair that I don’t bring her to him. He doesn’t pay for anything. No emergency appointments, diapers, clothes, etc. She is on Medicaid so they sent a letter about him needing to give child support. There is an online negotiation on May 1st that we have the option of attending. Everyday though, he is berating me with demands to see her but he won’t come to us because he “isn’t comfortable” but won’t give a reason why that is and won’t meet me at a neutral location either. He says he wants to spend time with her alone but not only do I not trust him, she is only 4 months old, breastfeeds, and relies on me for comfort. I refuse to put her comfort in jeopardy for his appeasement and I’ve tried gently explaining this. I don’t know how to navigate this situation at all. I don’t know what steps to take. He is blowing up my phone with calls and texts, cursing at me, and being just outright immature because I won’t do what he wants. I don’t block him because I let him FaceTime her and supposed to “arrange” meet-ups but that hasn’t been easy to do. I’m so annoyed because it can be so simple. At the end of the day after disrespecting me he apologizes and says how much he loves me and wishes we could be together. Like what kind of person am I dealing with here?? I just want peace.

I am the wife. Now 39 and my husband 44 and our children are now 1 and 3 years old.
My husband showed me his post but he has missed a lot of things out. If I am the a*shrike I will put my hands up and admit that.
Prior to the VIP event at Downing Street, the best man from our wedding had come to our house and in front of my husband. Stated that my husband had been flirting with their friend’s girlfriend at this LARP he had been attending for many years. He said,”You can twist it up to (my name) as much as you want afterwards.” My husband didn’t back deny it, he didn’t throw his friend out, or deny the claims. I felt sick but I had no words.
When the VIP Downing Street event came up, it was my cousin who had been out of work for years who had the job and she phoned me and offered me a ticket. As she knew, that I don’t really go out anywhere. I asked my husband’s permission on 3 separate occasions. By text, face to face and verbally over the phone and each time he gave his permission. Was still looking for an extra ticket for him and was going to go as far as to use my own month to get a ticket but my cousin told me, that it was VIP and therefore limited. But still we discussed getting tickets in the future as we knew my husband was into politics. It was not a party but V.I.P event, for relatives of people who worked at Downing Street. Before people knew about Boris Johnson and the parties. At the last minute my husband decided that I could not go with our eldest. To get me to listen to him, he threatened to tell my Uncle’s wife about my Aunty being a b*tch. They don’t get on and this would have created so much drama on my side of the family. That my husband was contacting relatives, to moan about my Aunty. The second thing he did, was he said,”You can’t go if there is a bomb scare can you?” In my mind, I thought about me and our baby being tackled by the police and how traumatic it would be for us. Especially our child.
The V.I.P ticket was just that. A V.I.P ticket to look at the inside of Downing Street get a chance to meet my cousin’s collegues. There were other children attending too and every adult there was a parent. From my mother to step father. So it would never be a party.
After I cancelled attending, nobody could take my place as it was such short notice and, they had made arrangements as I was bringing my child who was very young. After the cancellation my husband began saying that he would have taken us down to London, that my step father drove like a maniac. All of these suggestions that he never meanioned before and even worse, he began telling other people this too. As if I would take our baby to a party I am not that irresponsible and I stopped clubbing over a decade ago.
My mother decided to ban my husband from my Grandmother’s house, as that is where everyone meets whenever we are doing anything. Like birthday parties, film night e.t.c My Grandmother who has always liked my husband said that it was impossible for that ban to take place, as it was her house. My mother and I have a very close relationship like best friends.
Yes I was abused as a child by a man who was beating up my mother. But the authorities are aware of that and know who he is and are dealing with it.
I arranged for my mother to have a conversation with my husband as they used to get on so well. My mother even did a surprise birthday spread for him. Something which I have never experienced in the nearly 20 years we have been together from his side, the most I have got is a birthday card and some cards and month but I have still appreciated it. Anyway they talked and my mother brought up what the best man had said about him flirting with another woman, also about him making jokes to our baby saying,”Do you want another Mummy?” Things I had told my husband I didn’t find funny and not to do in public but he did it anyway. Which was in front of his family and I found that hurtful and humiliating. For a moment my husband took the phone to a part in the kitchen where I couldn’t hear what was said and my mother maintains up until this day they that he threatened her.
Regarding the Bomb scare threat I told my husband that even if he had said it in jest, he would have lost his job and been investigated by police. But he laughed it off. My cousin was in tears as she could have lost her job and this is the type of things they warn you about in government jobs. She doesn’t work there now and she did ask to speak to my husband to get an apology but he refused. Said he didn’t have anything to Aplogise for. Why did I tell my Mim about the bomb scare threat he made? We have that relationship where she tells me things about her partner and we have never confronted him about it. I thought it would be the same for me, yes I apologised to my husband all the time about telling my Mum he made a bomb scare threat.
Regarding marriage counciling we tried it it for a moment and in the 1-1 session the councilour told me my husband raised many red flags and asked what he was like with our child.
While pregnant with our second my husband would call me “lazy” and compared me to other women he knew who were pregnant. Still I did everything, from breakfast to ironing his clothes to work, any D.I.Y in the house which needed doing, buying extra rails for our clothes. Even putting the bins out. Still he would cuss me and call me names. On two separate erate occasions he came to my midwife appointment and changed the time and dates there and then saying he couldn’t make it as he had to support a collegue from work. On one such occasion he rushed home after dropping me and our eldest home, had a shave changed his clothes to meet this female colleague. Showing the midwives that he wasn’t too interested in the appointment which they arranged as they were concerned that I would get gestational diabetics. I agreed to the change of the appointment times as I didn’t want to create a fuss and was embarrassed that he had changed them.
While pregnant he would text and phone this female colleague every hour of the night, Waasaap, FaceTime whenever. Meanwhile he was calling me names. He even once turned and said this weird phrase,”If there are 2 dogs but one isn’t interested and another dog comes along and is sniffing.” In relation to his relationship with this female colleague.
There was an incident where one of his mother’s dogs growled at our child for getting too close to him. I was heavily pregnant and had to come off the livingroom chair I was sitting on to get our eldest. My husband said it was just a “warning growl” and his nieces who grew up with dogs said it was “scary” how the greyhound reacted. This is a dog which retired from racing and used to chase small things. So naturally any parent would be weary of that. So I spoke to my MiL about it and she blamed me for it , saying that it was because I was on my mobile phone. Even though there were other relatives who were closer to my son.
I knew I couldn’t talk to my family about how I was feeling so I began speaking to the best man who had since retracted his statement about my husband flirting with another woman at his LARP game. But he let me know that there were other people who felt weary around my husband and how he was banned from LARP for his behaviour. I was shocked as my husband had always told me he was being bullied there. And not one to just follow what someone says on face value I contacted them and they told me that under no circumstances would my husband be allowed at LARP or any other events they themselves did due to his behaviour.
There had also been a few work collegues who said he was threatening to them and aggressive. Not a casual conversation but people who had reported this to people in the company he worked for.
I wasn’t suffering from post natal depression, I was stressed and upset at what was happening , what I was being told and how I was being treated.
My respite was only supposed to be until my husband’s temper had subsided. I stayed at my Grandmother’s for about four days with our children.
Back home my husband confided in me that his mother had been the one to put a stop to the London VIp event. Out of order because the amount of times she will take my husband places and leave me and the children at home.
As well as this revelation being told to me, my brother in law came to the house while me and my children were inside and began kicking and punching the door and making threatening and racist remarks.My husband wasn’t home and our youngest at the time was under 3 months. He left when my MIL came to the door and she told me while I was holding my youngest in my arms that we never should have came back. And she defended my brother in laws behaviour saying it was down to his bipolar and when she left the house she smiled into the ring camera sweetly as if she had been comforting me, I just burst into tears. I had come back home with my children and this happened.
My mother in law came to the house a second time but my family who had heard how she was carrying on advised me not to open the door and let her in again.
Later on in the year my brother in law came to the house wrote a note and posted it through the letterbox. My mother in law came to the house and opened our front door with a key I knew nothing about her having,and removed the evidence. Then miraculously the video footage disappeared. The footage showing my brother in law coming to the house, posting the note through the door and my mother in law coming and leaving. But you could see it had been deleted as it jumped,then there was a huge time lapse. Thankfully I had downloaded the footage moments beforehand. So when the the police came around they had that footage. As this was the second time the police gave me a crime reference number to link the incidents together.
It was my mother and brother who checked the house for me the second time around before my children stepped foot into the house. With me.
Other things….
*I went to a plant show and I had told my husband before hand. He claims that he didn’t know and on the day while I was there at the plant place my mother and I had invited him to come along. He refused. We were also going to see some poets performing there and I love plants and poetry. I wrote poetry and love gardening. My husband didn’t come to see the beautiful view with us and he wasn’t home when I got home at 10pm at night. He didn’t answear any phone calls or texts and I stayed up worried that he was laying dead in a ditch. I had my life360 app on so he could see where I was at all times an app he got everyone to join and yet his location was off. I was pregnant with our second child and I stayed up all night. In the morning he came in briskly without a care in the world and he behaved like he had done nothing wrong. He went to work and he blamed me for him not coming home. I went to see a plant show….. (PoliNations) and he punished me by not coming home. He didn’t care about me our or unborn childrd child.
A*My husband has sent me poo emojis when I have sent him hearts.
He has waited for me to pack the car up with bags and our children and drove off, taking my purse with him. And telling me on the phone while I am begging him to come back to ask my Mum for money if I need it. That day I was meeting my Mum in town and I was so late as a result of this I had to beg my husband to come back as he had my purse and everything in the car.
Yes he still speaks to that female collegue in fact he is getting her a job at his new workplace he has also told me that she wanted to cook for him at her home. Any concerns I have he makes out like I am possessive and paranoid. She has even gone so far as to go to Pakistan to get him t shirts for some union stuff they were doing together.
My husband has also tried to tell me that I am autistic, on the spectrum and mentally ill if I try to remind him of something he has done he will say I’m imagining it or hearing things or am Mad.. Randomly I found an article showing you how to retrieve deleted messages and I found texts where he told me if I died it would serve my mother right for banning him. Other things like that.
We attend many places with his side of the family like museums and family zoos but now as well as this it has become a habit to be out and hear my in laws running down my mother or my side of the family I have asked them not too.
My mother is fearful that if anything were to happen to me and my children. My in laws would cover it up. Am I the arsehole?
The internet is down it took 3 hrs to upload this Thank you for reading.

Hey everyone, So I’m not new to this forum and I have posted in the past about my journey with Crohns along with interacted with some posts in the past. I’ve had many surgeries due to my Crohns and also have a permanent ileostomy. My Crohns is severe and I’ve had multiple surgeries in the past 5 years (10 total ) and sepsis 7 times. I’m currently taking Humira and Rinvoq. My most recent surgery was in October of last year for bowel perforation which prior to that I was in and out of the hospital for about 3 months due to constant blockages. I was unable to keep food down and not having any output from my stoma along with multiple lesions of ulcerations closest to the site which according to my doctor is where my Crohns manifests as well as on the stoma itself.
Since the beginning of this year I’ve gotten sick with normal illness such as flu and Covid about 4 times. I know because of the immunosuppressants that I am always susceptible. I had Covid earlier this month. I am feeling down because I know my Crohns is now flaring horribly. My situation is also difficult as I live far away from family and I also live relatively far away from the facility that treats me due to financial reasons. I cannot work and I have a young child. I also have AVN of my entire right limb and left lower limbs so pain is nothing new to me. Since I had Covid which lasted about 2 weeks for me I started noticing that a lot of the symptoms that usually indicate a Crohn’s flare for me has begun. I am nauseous 24/7 (which I am taking nausea medication around the clock, diarrhea, stomach pain, fatigue, I have rashes on my neck and back along with pouching issues for my ostomy and joint pain. (Worse than usual) I am also swelling in my abdomen and have noticed weight gain which for me is what happens versus weight loss.My GI has told me I have some of the most severe Crohn’s he has seen and they have tried multiple avenues in terms of medication to get this disease under control. I have tried my best to comply with whatever they recommend but whenever this happens I always start getting anxious and feel down because it feels as though I am just starting from the beginning again.
I’ve had Crohn’s now for 13 years and never have been in true remission. My doctor says it is surgical induced remission and that usually lasts anywhere from 3-6 months before I am back to square one. My husband is the sole provider for our home and my fear is that I will soon end up having to go to the ER because of these symptoms. The only person I can depend on is my mom who faces her own ailments, works and lives in another state. I’ve already spoken to her and asked her if she can help me out if something were to happen which she has said yes but I don’t know what else to do in my situation and I’m not sure why I’m even posting other to vent but if anyone has any words of encouragement or advice please let me know. I’ve been around the ringer quite a bit so none of this is new to me but mentally and emotionally I feel I am in a bad place. Physically I am just drained and I am tired of these symptoms. I am scheduled for a scope around the middle of May as the endoscopy lab has Covid precautions and has pushed back my appointment two times due to me having Covid is March and April. I just don’t know what to do anymore.

My (F19) bf (M23) has 2 main friends. One of them I really don't like. The comments I have heard him say make me really upset inside and I don't know what to do because he's my bf's best friend of the 2. I'm gonna call him Ben bc I don't wanna have to type "my bf's friend" every time. So Ben and his gf recently broke up and when the 3 of us were hanging out, he kept making sexual comments about one of my close friends (who has a bf) and asking if I can set them up. My bf asked me if I could set them up too and I obviously said no. Ben then kept on sexualizing her and saying things like "I'll f her up from behind" and that he needs himself a nice young girl. My friend hes asking about is 18 and Ben is 24. He then started making jokes about how he has pedofelic thoughts and that girls like older guys which made me super uncomfortable. Later that night, I told my bf that we needed to talk and he said "oh is it about what Ben was saying? I could tell you were uncomfortable." So in the back of my head I'm thinking if he could tell, why didn't he say anything?
Another thing I don't like about Ben is that he drinks a lot and drives when he has alcohol in his system. My bf is in the car when this happens which worries me and I tell my bf this and he just goes "babe it's fine ben is not that drunk don't worry I'll just text you when I get home." Even when they could easily get an Uber.
Another thing is that my bf doesn't want me going to the bar late at night with my friends without him. Whereas he goes out with Ben to drink without me which is pretty hypocritical. One night when they went out drinking, Ben and my bf were talking to me over the FaceTime and Ben said/joked that (I couldn't tell) some girl was all over my bf and flirting with him making comments about his cologne. My bf just laughed and smiled telling him to stop and changed the subject.
Another thing that recently happened, is that I was on the phone with my bf when he was hanging out with Ben and we were about to hang up. When we hang up we always say ily to each other. So I said ily and he responded "alright baby enjoy your meal make sure to text me." And I said it again in case he didn't hear me "ok don't worry I will I love you!" And he said "alright babe have a good day" and at that point I just said "ok bye" and he hung up. I can't tell if he's embarrassed to say it in front of Ben, if he really couldn't hear me after saying it twice, or idk.
All these things happened in the last couple of days when he's hanging out with Ben over the weekend at his place in New York for fun.
On this same weekend, my bf and Ben were talking when I was on the phone with my bf, and Ben was saying what they should do that day. He said something about setting bear traps and I heard "come here Fred!" And they both laughed. I didn't hear the entire conversation but from what I heard I didn't really like it and I don't like when people hurt animals. Later that day, I told my bf about how in Seaworld they treat the animals really bad and that he should tell Liam this too bc it's important for more people to know. And then I said I feel like Liam would go to seaworld (bc he doesn't care much abt the lives of animals) and my bf's response was "how would you know that you don't even really know him" so he is a bit defensive w his friend which I get bc they've been friends for a long time but I was just a bit surprised by his response.
I remember the first phone call I had with my bf when Ben was there, Ben said the n word in the background which completely took me aback and my bf knows that I don't like that. Ben also supports trump, doesn't believe in climate change or abortion rights, has a bunch of guns, and just does a lot of things like this that I really don't like or agree with. The main thing that bothers me is that people often are like the people they hang out with. So if his friend Ben is like this, is this how my bf acts when I'm not around? And idk if I should bring this up to him bc I can't see how that'll do anything. He'll most likely just deny it. I really just don't know what to do and I told him I want to talk about it tn but I have no idea what I am gonna say. Any suggestions or advice??
TLDR: I (F19) don't like my bf's (M23) long time best friend and don't know what to say. He's done and said a lot of things that I really don't like or agree with and it bothers me a bit that my bf hangs out with him so often bc people are usually like the people they hang out with. I really don't know what to do and I would feel bad if me saying something messes up their friendship and I really just need some advice please 😭

Tonight I just wrote a little short story out of boredom. It’s loosely inspired off of the 2nd last episode of ‘BoJack Horseman’. If you have any thoughts on it I would be really grateful.
“Hmph, look who showed up”
My mother sighs upon opening the towering oak panelled front door of an ornately designed but almost infinitely tall townhouse.
“I suppose you will be wanting a refill on that.” She sneered, then under her breath, “bloody alcoholic”
I whip my vision down to my hands, the flowerpot of peonies I brought as a gift, now a tall glass that smelt strongly of bourbon. I look back at Mom and she seems to stare through me.
“Um, yeah. Sure Mom”
I uncomfortably stood there, in my dress shoes and pinstriped two piece suit, thinking of how mother always said how rude it was to ‘stomp into someone’s house uninvited’
“Stop standing there like a lemon and greet everyone… in the drawing room… dimwit”
I shuffle through the immense hallway, its ceiling so far above it faded out of view, past a stupidly massive hall table. I felt ant sized. My brown leather dress shoes sunk three inches into the hall runner, which was probably the size of a football pitch. To my right, a strangely normal sized door in this land of hugeness almost blended into the eggshell walls. I waded through the runner and grasped the ornate brass handle, that was freezing cold to the touch. I twisted the knob, and a warm feeling washed over me as I stepped into a normal sized drawing room.
“Ricky… so glad you could make it” Cain called out to me.
I set my somehow filled (all the way to the brim) glass of bourbon on a green flowery coaster resting on the coffee table, and squeeze into a chair that’s just a little too tight. As I lean back into the soft armchair, that is now squeezing me in a bear hug like grasp, I wander my vision across the room. My brother Cain sits across, alongside Henrietta and baby Hugh, on the 70s patterned couch, Mom stands in a doorway across the room, and Dad’s huge brutish leather armchair stands, vacant across from the blazing fire.
“Your father is late… as always… so he can have his pot roast stone cold, burnt and with my spit in it after he’s done… done teaching his secretary how to get on his good side…”.
Her mutters between sentences seem inaudible to everyone else, but they pierce my soul like a bullet from a gun. Each word said with such wrath and abhorrence that I feel them physically punch me in my gut.
“Auntieeeee… is dinner almost readyyyy” Henrietta’s sharp yet drawling English accent floating across the room.
“Yes darling. Would everyone please convene at the dining table” Mother responds ever so sweetly.
My chair, now squeezing the life out of me, relinquishes its chokehold on me, as I force myself to my feet to attend dinner. I stop and stand expectantly, closing my eyes and eeking out my breath.
“Chop, chop now” Cain’s sing-song voice calling out. “Don’t make mother wait…”
“What’s the point, I always wake up here. Mom says dinner, you say chop, chop, then I walk into the dining room, hit my head then wake up”. I respond resignedly.
“Ok then, but your dinners getting cold old chap.”
I let time pass for a few seconds, then relent and walk to the aforementioned doorway. Thunk. I smack my head off of the ceiling, the dining room impossibly small, however I seem to be the only one who is not sized proportionally. I bum-shuffle to my place, my legs pressed against my chest just to fit myself in the room.
“Eat, or let it get cold you ungrateful brat” Mother’s words cutting through me like knives.
“Ding, Dong… Ding, Dong” the doorbells rattling chime shakes the whole house with each crash of a bell. The feeling makes me shudder and I crane my neck, so I view of the door.
“Uncle’s home!” little Hugh, now a child of ten or twelve, jumps out of his seat.
A window swings open and a spinechilling breeze saunters in. As I gaze out the void that sits just outside the window, out of nothing Dad climbs through.
“There’s my beautiful family… sorry the front door was open I had to come in through the window”.
I study his welcomingly wrinkled face, his prickly grey streaked beard, and his soft brown suit. He regards mother with a kiss, and then turns towards me.
“And how’s my number one son doing? Staying off the drink I hope…” His cheerful expression and warm demeanour blunt his offhand but inadvertedly pointed remark, but I feel the coldness of a glass fill my hand as another brimming glass of bourbon materialises in it.
“Ah alright Da, just the usual.” I disregard his comment about my alcoholism as I unintentionally feel this glass rise to my lips and begin to tip its contents down my throat.
Father takes his usual huge seat in this tiny room at the head of the table, and the almost mirrored silver cloches covering our meals disintegrate before us. I stare blankly down at the pristine white china crème brulee dish overflowing with assorted colourful pills. I hurriedly glance about the table, at the other meals. Mother has pot roast, beautifully cooked and presented; father has pot roast that looks about as appetising as freshly laid dog mess; Cain has a piece of concrete he is fruitlessly sawing at with a butter knife; Henrietta has nothing; and a now teenage Hugh has a cheese and tomato sandwich.
“Well, dig in, I didn’t slave away at the stove for hours for nothing” Mother announces.
Everyone else proceeds to dig in, apart from Cain who still saws and Henrietta, who seems to be getting thinner by the second. I look back down at the pills and capsules before me, some blank, some with smiley faces, some rainbow coloured.
“So…” Father says. “What would everyone say was the highlight of their lives.” His attempt to spark conversation puzzled me. Surely, he meant is, not was?
“Your stupid secretary’s husband shootin’ you in your bloody corner office” Mother sneers.
Father chuckles, not taking notice too much mother said as always.
“I’d say it’s the view from the top of the Empire State Building, pretty cool I must say the view over all of New York.”
Henrietta, now a bag of bones couldn’t eek out a word. Hugh, who was maybe nineteen now and dressed in soldiers’ clothes, didn’t utter a word as he comforted Henrietta.
“What about you Ricky”. An omniscient voice echoed from somewhere.
“Err, I normally wake up before now, so I don’t really know. Maybe the time I spent with Frank in Connecticut.”
“Always knew you were a bloody poofter” Cain remarked.
I remembered why I cut Cain off years ago.
“Why haven’t I woken up yet” I say out loud. “I don’t want to stay here”.
Everyone at the table looks at me, then turns their heads slowly towards the now massive window. The dark void dissipates, and a vision forms. It’s a camera feed: CCTV footage.
“H-Hey that’s me!” I shout out.
In the centre of the field of view, of what seems to be an alleyway, I lie… on my back in a pool of alcohol and urine, empty bottles, pills and syringes strewn around me.
“Another of your hedonistic benders it seems” Mother remarks snidely. “Surely you know why you can’t go anywhere…”. She pulls out a lit cigarette from her pocket, taking a drag and blowing the whispy smoke in my face
“No…” I trail off.
As mother exhales another drag from her cigarette, the rest of my family blow away like smoke into wind. I feel my chest lock tight and I gasp for air. Looking in closely at the image of me, and a realisation dawns upon me. I’m choking.
“It seems that in your decadent hedonism, you’ve drank too much and have choked on your own sick, you silly, silly boy.”
The room and Mom dissipate into blackness, as I realise why I haven’t woken from the recurring nightmare of my late family.
Edit: Minor mistakes in sentence format pre advice

We have been having arguments frequently lately. We both work very long hours and trying to make ends meet. My wife is pregnant too, it wasn’t planned but we both got happy with the news. We have planned having children in the future anyway so what are 2 years give or take. But biologically it must have freaked me out anyway because I have been having problems getting it up. For two months now I have been avoiding sex.
Wife started mentioning lightly at first that she wanted me but now she was complaining about it saying that with all the stress around us and there’s no relief. We started one of the biggest fights. I didn’t tell her I was freaking out about the baby because I didn’t want to hurt her but I didn’t feel she was understanding of my embarrassment and told her that she was a nag and that I never had this problem before her. She paused and said what do you mean? I said well I never had this problem with Gina (fake name; my ex). She was shocked then she started laughing and left the kitchen shaking her head. That day she threw my pillow and cover on the sofa. Next day I waited for her to get out of the bedroom and I started apologizing and told her I didn’t mean to hurt her. She calmly said don’t worry, I don’t get hurt by an impotent loser and she laughed again.
Now she doesn’t look at me let alone talk to me. She just has this smile on her face that I can’t decipher. She comes from work and locks herself in the bedroom. No hi no good bye no i love you no texts. She used to shower me with I love you throughout the day. And kisses and cuddles. I miss her soft skin and smell. She also used to bake me my favorite cookies when I work overtime so I get something to cheer me up at night when I get home. The cookie jar is empty.
This has been going on for 3 weeks. Yesterday we were invited for dinner with her parents and she acted very normal and excited about the baby. Everyone told her that she was glowing and beautiful and I could swear she looked at me for less than a second before looking away smiling. When we got home I asked her to stay in the living room for a second to talk to me. I apologized and told her that I wanted her and I thought that she’s beautiful and hot and I tried to kiss her. I tried to make her notice that I was aroused she just got up and said you can go fuck yourself or Gina, but not me. Today she didn’t even leave the room besides for food and the gym and walking the dog.
I don’t feel I am an ah. She hurt me first and she wasn’t sensitive about my issue. I know we are both very stressed out but she should have known whats stress does sometimes. But she doesn’t even acknowledge that I exist anymore.

TW: Harassment
​
Well, I (28m) actually got yelled at for the first time in my career and it’s for helping another department out. For context, I work purchasing in a government setting very politically driven in the USA. For identity purposes I will call the person who yelled at me Richard (55+m). Richard was a big help to get someone big elected, let’s call him Oscar, and put into a big position of power. During the campaign run, Richard was hired in a part time position. After the election victory, he was rewarded with a full-time position almost instantly as a supervisor. Unfortunately, in heavily political environment workplaces that’s how you get ahead, although I have done the same yet I have not been rewarded at the slightest. In the span of less than a year of Oscar’s term, he manages to get the one who endorsed him to retire and many others who are in the same political party that endorsed him to either be fired from their positions or resign. Prior to the resignation of one of our beloved employees who was politically adjacent to the endorsing party, Oscar had Richard follow her as she would leave the building for an agenda that I wish I would never find out. She caught Richard and filed charges with our Labor Counsel, but nothing came up. She even filed sexual harassment charges as well and it was not taken seriously. Worst of all is that it was women who downplayed her harassment as well. Oscar and Richard furthermore added more crooked employees on “their side” to further harass and belittle our employees who just want to do their jobs. Jobs that we have been doing for many years. Safe to say that that side of employees are inept as many of them do not speak the common language of the public in our place. Oscar would have baby fits when things wouldn’t go his way and he does not want to address more pressing topics, such as a mold issue that has been existing for at least 4 years that I have worked here. I and many others have had our health affected through this
I hope this context is clear and it shows how bad my work environment. I keep things very vague because this is a government setting and I could lose my job for this if details went out.
Now on to the actual story
I have been helping Richard in setting up a vendor for ordering his goods, because he is inept and has messed up all the other times he tries to do anything. I do not have to do this. My responsibilities only involve actual accounts payable and paying vendors. The supervisors and their respective departments are responsible for ordering and receiving their goods before I put them through for payment. Many times, when Richard will try and do a project, it falls flat on its face. Last Summer our building did not have air conditioning, and rather than finding quotes to fix the a/c unit, he spends on stand-up air conditioners that use water as a filtration medium. Remember the mold issue? We have carpets full of mold and now with this air conditioning method, who knows what could’ve been flying in the air.
I’ve been in constant communication with this vendor throughout this entire month of April. I initiated contact at the beginning of the month submitting all appropriate documents and I awaited further instructions from the vendor. After 7 days we were denied our net 30 terms. I then communicated further to try and get us approved. This is week 1.
The second week of April, I caught a bad case of food poisoning. Thankfully, my bosses and my department as a whole has covered me and did my work. I was still able to communicate with the vendor as my emails are hooked up to my computer. I got the account to be pre-approved with a $2000 credit limit. However, Richard wanted a to spend much more than that. Our account was only pre-approved as well as we needed to acquire and send more documents. When I told Richard of the preapproval, he yelled at me the first time saying how this was urgent and he needed to purchase the goods. Then I told him about the credit limit and he yelled at me again and told me to get it raised. I immediately contacted the vendor and requested a credit limit increase. I was later then asked to wait 4-7 business days for their credit manager to respond. Richard yelled at me again to follow up every day. I did not. Richard is not my boss, and we will just sour our relationship with the vendor even before we do business with each other.
Week 3 comes and we are still in preapproval, our request for a credit extension has been denied because new accounts cannot request for a credit limit until 12 months of the creation. I was not as attentive to this manner with Richard and the vendor this week as week 3 is when I pay all the bills for the month for our whole business. I need to make sure all invoices are given to me, coded correctly, and filed for payment. This usually takes about 3 days for the maximum payments to go out on time and in an orderly manner. Rush jobs leads to vendors being unpaid until the next month. Richard asks for an update, and the vendor has not gotten back to me yet. He then yells and me again for this whole situation. He later orders a laptop from a 3rd party vendor from China. Best believe in a government setting that is based in America we sent that laptop straight back.
Then we go to my breaking point
First Richard comes by the office window asks about the vendor (but he kept saying another vendor cos he’s stupid and doesn’t even know the name of the vendor he chose) I said that we received a letter in the mail yesterday (4/25) that we were approved. I told him that I would give him instructions after I finished doing something I had to do for finance, I was organizing invoices for next month’s payments to get a head start. He then yelled at me saying I wasn’t giving attention to this manner. My coworker told me I should’ve laid him out on the deck right then and there for this harassment. This was right before I left to lunch at around 11:50
Around 2:50-3:00, when I am alone without my bosses and my fellow department members, he texts my work cellphone number the following…
‘What's the status with the vendor? When can I use our account? What is the account # n etcs? Please send me an email ASAP. Thank you. Richard’ 2:34PM
I was alone with no one to defend me.
Immediately after I go to his office give him the information which has all the directions and tell him that he has a $2000 credit limit.
He starts yelling again saying that why wasn’t I able to get the increase and I just calmly told him that that’s the starting credit limit and they won’t raise it for another 12 months. Then, still yelling, he says to make another email with him CC’d asking for another credit increase so he can have the reasoning in writing.
I went to my office to print out the email of the representative saying that we won’t be able to get it increased for another 12 months. I gave him the email. He still was yelling at me saying stuff about the timetables and why I couldn’t do this like right away. He just kept yelling at me and then I walked past him and stormed out of my office. I said out loud that I’m not going to deal with this right now. He says it’s my job to do this for him.
He tells me to go to the big boss’s, let’s call him Roger, office and now he’s yelling at me in front of Roger. So, I calmly try to explain it to Richard again but he keeps yelling so I raise my voice back. Roger yells at the both of us to stop yelling and we will handle this on Monday. He says we will do this professionally on Monday. He tells Richard to calm down multiple times because he kept going after the fact. I end up sitting in his office for a while.
Roger only tells me to calm down after he sees me crying and Richard had left, he said that it was easier said than done. I didn’t cry in front of Richard. He says that if it is urgent then we’ll handle it, if not then it can wait til Monday. I tell Roger that I’m just trying my best to help him, but we are at the mercy of the company. He said that we will talk about it more Monday.
After I gave Roger his paystub and the log in information for his online portal, he just said that he was going to do it and to have a good weekend. I then close and lock my office door, sit down by the door and then cry more until the shift is over.
This is a very poorly written summary of what I went through, but the anonymity and vagueness is necessary to protect my job, which for the just working aspect is fantastic. My bosses are really nice and we really do feel like a family. The work is not hard and the only difficult part about it is when politics come into play, which prior to this year was very few moments and the conflict did not last long. Now under Oscar’s administration, him and his crooked staff has single handedly ruined our work environment. I don’t want to leave because the work aspect of it is really REALLY accommodating, the commute is less than 14 minutes, my benefits and PTO are amazing, and all the other non-affiliated employees and department heads are really nice. I felt like I hit the jackpot with this one. That and I need money too and I get compensated decently. I cannot afford to not work if I want to meet all my goals before I’m 30.
I just want justice. Something has to come and save us, right?

This is my first ever post on Reddit and I hope I’m doing it right, but I just really need some help and perspective, because I don’t know if it’s all in my head, or is it as unhealthy as it seems to me. I want to start this by saying I really love my boyfriend and I would do anything to have future with him. But a healthy one. I think my boyfriend and his mother are in a codependent relationship, that often seems emotionally incestious. We are both 25 and we’ve been together for a year and a half. He lives with his mother, and I currently live with mine, as I cannot afford rent alone. But I am completely independent, I do 90% of the cleaning at home, do all of my own and usually also my mother’s laundry, most of the cooking and buying groceries… In the past I lived in a dorm, and before that in a rented apartment with my ex. My mother was always very supportive of me trying to find my own space under the sun and be independent. But I very much want us to move out of our parents places, and find an apartment together. I want us to start our adult relationship and our own family. But he doesn’t want that. He prefers living with his mother. Some of the reasons why I am convinced they have a codependent relationship: - she’s been using him to satisfy her emotional needs since he was a baby. She and my boyfriends dad (who died when he was 14) apparently had a rocky marriage and she slept with my boyfriend until he was quite old (definitely way over due to sleep in his own bedroom), while the dad slept elsewhere, - she often brings up bringing a man home, and then “jokes” how my boyfriend would never let her do that (and honestly he always gets a “jealous” look on his face when she says that, maybe it’s not jealousy, but it is some negative emotion for sure) - he needs her opinion on EVERYTHING and tells her EVERYTHING - when he was younger, but I’m pretty sure it lasted all the way up to him being like 20, she brought him along on day trips with another married couple and to her work trips - she describes them as “us” when she talks about them doing something in the past, like “we.. we..” - the same way couples talk about each other - he doesn’t want to tell her ‘no’. Ever. She makes him come with her to visit her mother in a nursing home, which he doesn’t want to do and it always makes him feel bad, but he always goes. She even wanted him to go ON MY BIRTHDAY, and he couldn’t say “no” directly, he said something along the lines of “maybe not today..” (we had plans she was aware of) which made her get really angry at him, grab her jacket and leave without even saying goodbye - she has his BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER and regularly checks how much money he spends and tells him he should be saving more money (and he never, not even once, told her to stop doing that, or even remotely indicated it’s not okay - he thinks it’s okay) - as you see, there’s a complete lack of boundaries, including - she doesn’t knock on his door when I’m not there, she just walks in his room - he has trouble making decisions without her, and needs her validation for everything - whenever I say anything about moving out or having kids in front of his mother, he shuts it down immediately, and says we’re not moving out in years.. for instance, a couple of days ago I said we might plant a tree from a seed that just sprouted in our own garden IN THREE YEARS, and he said no way we’d have our own place by then (she was standing next to us), - she does everything for him - washes and irons his laundry, even takes the sheets off his bed and washes them, cleans everything, scolds him for having a messy room… just as if he was 10. AND HE DOESN’T MIND IT. - she is overly involved in his personal life, and must know everything. When his friends visit him, she hangs out with them. I can’t tell him anything personal, because he tells her (he did it in the past so I just don’t tell him stuff now, because somehow she always knows the topics of what I thought were our private conversations). - he is not allowed to be an individualist, his thoughts, values and beliefs must be the same as hers, or she loudly chastises him for thinking differently than her. - she “jokingly” scolds him (in front of me) for taking too long showers or being in the toilet for too long. - we booked a retreat for three weeks, and she kept asking “when are we going, when are we going??” - “we” including her of course. When my boyfriend said she might go with someone else, she responded by guilt tripping him and saying she has no one to go with. She’s not coming with us, because she has work, but I’m afraid what would happen if she didn’t. - we went on a trip, us, his mother and his sister and her family, and it was expected that his sister and her family would share a room and us three would share one. And no one seemed to mind it. I had to beg my boyfriend for weeks to ask for our own room, and even then he didn’t want to do it. He did it in the end when I said i wasn’t coming if I have to share a room with him and his mother for a week. - he doesn’t even pay his own phone bill. - just general lack of privacy, freedom, and boundaries. These are just some of the examples that I think illustrate the situation quite well.
Honestly, I am so willing to work with him and help him cut the cord, because I love him and I want to marry him. But I for sure can’t live like this. But he doesn’t see the problem. He thinks his life and their relationship is normal. And I just want to open his eyes and I am willing to be with him every step of the way, but I just don’t know what to do. Is there any hope? Is there something I can do? I was thinking of maybe showing him this, after I get some perspective from other people. But I’m also a bit scared he might show it to his mom. I don’t know. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
TL;DR boyfriend in a codependent relationship with his mother and doesn’t see it, willing to do anything to help him see it and cut the cord, but don’t know how to do that

Hey everyone, I have made several large decisions over the tail end of my twenties to hit the reset button in several respects and will be 30 by the summertime.
I am the type to have never struggled academically, professionally, or financially but did not adjust to adult life easily. I am the oldest of three brothers, my father started climbing the corporate ladder when I was 8, I started a corporate internship at 15, and I recently resigned from a Principal Engineering role in the telecommunications company to pivot my career back towards my education and core skillset in Computer and Software Engineering. The key driver for this decision was realizing that even though I was incredibly successful, I was living the life everyone else wanted me to live and not the life I wanted. Being 29 and single making well over six figures in an increasingly less technical more people management responsibility and working from home whose social contact chalked up to nonstop conference calls just didn't make sense for the season of life I am in and created a ton of anxiety. I'm not always the best at being in tune with my needs as the expectation through my childhood was for me to take care of everyone around me. Discovering who I was didn't really begin until I was an adult.
I've always been the ambitious but straight arrow type with a really strong moral compass beaten into me from a young age. My perspective has widened greatly over the years, but injustice, people politics, and social cues have never been easy for me to process.
My parents were not bad people, but I am the son of two baby boomers and come from incredibly traditional beliefs. My mom's side of the family is basically the Italian Mafia as she is only a few generations off the boat and therapy has taught me how enmeshed we all were. I had exactly one relationship under my parent's roof as a high schooler, and it ended in two weeks because I was not ready to date at that age. I had a slew of unprocessed emotional issues from moving around a lot as a kid as well as dealing with a lot of bullying I felt like I could never talk about at home because I was the oldest. That led my only girlfriend to choose to cheat on me (high school relationships will be high school relationships). My parents reaction? My mom told me as a 15 year old that the frontal cortex doesn't fully develop until someone is 25 and dating is a waste of time until then. My dad started me in a corporate internship at his company to work on the "important things" that led to the career I just resigned from. I incorrectly internalized all of this as a belief that I was unlovable for a very long time.
I even once had a childhood friend visiting town as a teenager try to hook up with me, and I shut her down when she threw herself at me in a bikini when we were home alone because I didn't think I was the kind of person girls were into.
I had a really poor understanding of boundaries for most of my young adult life. The concept of privacy did not exist in our house and mom would frequently barge right into your room. My parents taught me what I wanted did not matter in comparison to "the family". Mom once adopted a rescue dog who turned out to have an undocumented history of abuse. I frequently voiced unheard concerns of feeling unsafe around the animal until he attacked me in tenth grade and I had to get stitches in the left half of my face. Even after all of that, my parents simply told me that I needed to have empathy for the dog and be more careful around him. Mom was super attached so she did not get rid of him or report it. That animal didn't get put down until he attacked one of my brothers and his friends.
Then there was college. In my freshman year, lots of drama devolved between my roommate and his childhood best friend over a girl who did not have anyone's best interests in mind. I had gone to college with the primary goal of making friends but my caretaker tendencies kicked in after this and not a lot happened there. Then, beginning sophmore year, we received a random match roommate who was a terrible influence. The kind of guy who is fun but at the detriment of everyone around him. That same year, we met a girl next door in premed who came from an immigrant family with parents who were both university professors. Random match and I were both head over heels for this girl, but he was much more socially savvy than I was at that age. She was insecure and impressionable just like me. He and I ended up in a competition I had no chance in, which ended when she decided to start dating him. He was a player and she was a prude, but he didn't much care for what she wanted. So about three months after that, I listened to him sexually assualt her on a spring break trip while trapped in the same hotel room.
Things got really dysfunctional between the three of us after that, and I mostly chose to escape into my academics and career when I wasn't playing relationship therapist for this messed up situation. They broke up when she went to med school and I tried my hand in dating other people early in my career around this time. Unfortunately, I was still stuck on her and projected this girl's identity on every woman I met. Cognitive filtering can be a real challenge... When your favorite car is a Toyata Forerunner, it's all you see on the road.
I isolated and overworked myself after that, but you can't run from yourself, and what you don't deal with has a tendency to come back around. In my case, this girl ended up matching into medical residency in the same city I was in 5 years after it all ended, and we had an incredibly dysfunctional reunion over about an 8 month period when I was 26.
Since then, I have had my own journeys with self help, self improvement, writing a memior as an attempt to make sense of things, falling in love with the married coworker who empathized with me, family systems therapy trying to put every label you can think of on me (C-PTSD, ASD, BPD, etc), CODA anyonomous and ACA, finding a more mature local psychologist who doesn't care about labelling me, getting my fitness back in check (215lb -> 160lb in six months) and generally just trying to find my own sense of self worth again.
Presently I finally feel like I am beginning to live for no one except myself which has been such a huge challenge for me. I'm quitting my six figure job to forge my own path towards the life I want to live with tons of momentum towards a career transition and an opportunity to go get a masters in something I love doing. The psychologist and I continue to work on my anxiety and understanding of myself in a way that isn't labelling or detrimental to my self worth. I have some plans to sell my house so I can relocate closer to my brother and several friends after spending most of my twenties isolated. I'm actively rejecting the person the corporate ladder wanted to push me to become to cultivate the life I want to actually live.
I want to have a family and live a lower key family first suburban life. If I'm completely honest, dating still makes me feel incredibly insecure and I just want to move beyond all of the emotional challenges it has created for me. The most intimacy I have had in my life nearing 30 is hugging my female friends. I've never kissed someone else and you can forget about sex. I've certainly been the guy to get overinvested and in his head. Romance has always felt like this impossible foreign language everyone else spoke that was so incredibly triggering to me. I fell in love with the coworker I mentioned because she taught me that there still could be someone out there for me and pushed me to emotionally open up when I had started to think my romantic goals just weren't in the cards for me. We were able to repair that over five years and are great friends presently, especially now that we don't work together any more.
I'm headed into my thirties with a committed intention towards doing things differently and finally sorting this all out. I don't want to do life alone anymore nor do I want to try to make someone else codependently responsible for any of the things I've written about here. I've processed more than enough and just want to turn the page to move forward at this point.
What advice would you give to someone who is trying to overcome their deepest demons to cultivate a life larger than themselves without falling into old patterns?
I'm not starting from zero and have been on dates before, but I'd be lying if any of this felt comfortable or conventional. But it has been my experience. My life long vice has been the pressure I cook myself under which has certainly not made this easy. Thank you!

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this and quite honestly I never really planned to post it online as I felt lile it would be a move seen as to just gain sympathy but now I'm at a loss and thought I'd give it a shot. I apologize if there's some rambling I'm not quite sure of what I'm doing here. Fair warning abuse and some sh will be mentioned.
I am 16f currently almost 17 and have not had a good home or family connection since I was 10. My bio dad (I think hes 36\37?m) was never really around as well as an addict (He claims to be sober though I dont quite believe that). There is also belief of abuse when I was with him though it isn't and most likely will never be confirmed. I do have many memories that I can remember vividly of times I was with him despite being between 6 and 8 at the time. He officially left on my 10th birthday by sending me an email apologizing and I didnt hear from him again for 6 years and its been on and off texting, he has been to jail multiple times throughout the last almost year weve been in contact.
Past that after he left my mother (34f) and step dad (36m. I think) became my only parents. Despite having my stepfather there my whole life I did consider him as a dad but he wasnt my actual dad my mom was my mom. She became my only 'parent' and I clung onto her. Around this time I also had a baby brother (6m now) my mom and step dads kid and a 10f now sister my dads and one of his ex girlfriends daughter. This is kind of important to note that I love my sibling and family and would never purposefully physically hurt them or hurt them in general.
Fast forward to christmas of the year I turned ten, I had sadly fallen into the wormhole that Im sure many others fell into of being groomed by men. Sending things and being taken advantage of. On christmas eve my step father found out and hell broke loose. I can admit my fault now but back then I didnt understand the length of how bad it was what I had done and had been doing, my mother held me that night as I cried and had my first panic attack. This was the beginning of our downfall though.
My mother and step dad had completely lost trust in me (which is fair) but we just couldnt seem to get along. Sure we could act fine and everything but now the cops were in our lives and I ended up moving away from home from this incident and in with my nana, as my reaction was to shut down while my mother yelled and cried trying to speak with me but I refused. My mother then grabbed a bag packed it and told me to get in the car dropping me off in another town at my nanas. This was early January around the beginning of covid I believe.
Me and my mother were low contact and I quite honestly missed her but at the same time I was happy where I was. One day in March I came home from school to see my mother in the house, she was bringing me back to live with her. I can't remember why so suddenly but I did end up moving back and she switched me to a catholic school (we were online because of COVID at this time).
During my time back I began to date my now ex girlfriend but she is now one of my biggest supports as she knows most of this as she witnessed some. Not in person but through video calls or just regilar calls that I dont believe my family were aware of.
My parents put child locks and time locks on my computer, and I wasnt allowed to have a phone (again fair) but with me being the child I was I wanted to socialize so I would play games like Among us or go into chat rooms that my parents would block and I would get in trouble. I rember about a certain one that they got mad at me for using my step dad months later during an argument yelled at me 'That one site you used just got shut down for trafficking' I was around 12 or 13 at this time and wasnt fully understanding of the length and what that meant. I just know his anger scared me.
I wont give the fully backstory but some incidents were as goes:
We came home from a drive one night and I was laying in bed trying to go to sleep. I was 13 at this time. My step dad came into the room pissed off and I sat up confused and simple asked 'What?'. He got mad and half yelled 'Don't fcking what me' then he continued to take eveything out of my room. Dumped all my clothes into a pile on the floor an drilled two pieces of wood onto the top and bottom of my closet doors so I could no longer open it as well as changed the door handle so that they could lock me in my room (which they did). During this I was standing in the corner scared and crying and he came got all up in my face and said 'Are you fcking scared now l?' Then proceeded to oush my head back then slap me. Afterwards I was locked in my room with a mattress, blanket, pillows and a pile of my clothing. I believe I was in there for a week though Im not sure. During that time they would open the door and ask if I needed to pee or shower, I always reufsed unless I absolutely did have to go because I just didnt want to move. They would at lunch and dinner bring in a plate with food and a cup or bottle of something to drink. I rarely actually ate it and slowly the food turned into bits of food and saltine crackers. I have now learned that according to my mother my step dad told her that I was being violent and getting all up in his face and that he was scared of me. She has also said that they did this because they were scared I was going to hurt or k*ll myself. Which at this point in time I had never done, attempted or really even thought about. Also, on the first night I dont know if more happened but I woke up in darkness to my step dad laying with me and hugging me as well as apologizing, I was scared and didnt know (and still don't know) what to make of it so I pretended to sleep. After awhile he left.
We were arguing basically everyday, which they would always start and I either wouldnt feed into it or would try to end it which only added fuel to the fire.
Many of these arguments led to me running out of the house and coming back late or not at all.
When I was 14 my school counseler noticed I seemed off I guess and I broke and told her. Then CAS came into my life. Long story short they did nothing and saw nothing wrong (my parents never admitted to anything and ir was a childs word against two adults) while only adding onto the tense atmosphere I called home.
Finally in fall of 2021. I left home for the last time. I love to paint and I was on the phone with my girlfriend at the time when my step dad came in and turned the light on (I had a simple lamp on my desk) he then noticed green paint on my floor. He immediatly got mad and told me to clean it to which I said I would. He left for about 5 minutes and I hadnt cleaned it yet having been in the middle of something when he asked. This started an argument and escalated to him screaming at me then grabbing my arm and pulling me into the hallway. I began to scream back and he was taking my wallet and other things using the excuse 'You didnt buy them. They're not yours' my mother was trying to get us both to stop but it ended with my dad opening and unlocking the front door telling me to leave and the door was open so I did. Cops were called that night and I moved in with my grandmother. I lived with her for about 3 weeks and the whole time my mother argued and tried to manipulate me into coming back.
Me, my mother and grandma had made a deal because I didnt feel safe in the house or comftorable that I would come home every Tuesday and Thursday. I stayed there Tuesday and on Wednesday after school went to a friends. My mother tried to get me home claiming the deal had never been made and called the cops on me. They showed up at my friends house and brought me back to my grandmothers where we explained the deal. I called my friend and her mom and began to apologize and not even 5 minutes into it my papa came into the apartment and screamed at me. My mother had apparently called him and said she never wanted to see him, my grandmother or me again and that my stuff would be on the side of the road if I wanted it.
Wuth everything going on I am sad to say this was my first ever time attempting to take my life that night. I went to psych ward for two weeks and moved in with my nana and papa afterwards.
The relationship with my mother and step dad is beyond strained as they both wont admit of the things that went on and since I got my doagnosises (Borderline personality disorder among other things) my mother has now began to blame my bast actions on it saying things like 'it all makes sense now'. Neither of them will apologize and they expect me to apologize. My relationship with my nana and papa is also strained the only person in my family I get along with is my cousin (19m) and my grandmother (84f).
Since turning 15 I gave struggled greatly with depression, suicidal thoughts and worst of all self harm. I have attempted many times and everytime my family only shows annoyance and disappointment only making me go deeper into this spiral.
Since turning 16 I have been kicked out of my nana and papas 3 times. First because they learned I smoke weed and got mad saying they didnt want someone like that in their house as well as I was just like my dad (my father is a drug addict and quite frankly I am terrified of anything other than weed). Second time they somehow got it into their heads that I was using substances other than weed. Third time was because we were arguing and my papa grabbed me to which I started yelling at him to never do that and he immediatly claimed he didnt do anything. I told him to f himself and my nana told me to get out.
Because of all this I havent had a stable place im years. I ended up moving to British Columbia for 4 months and living with my dead best friends family (rest in peace my love💜) where I got amazing support and do plan to live back there once I am 18. Sadly I moved back in with my nana and papa (thin thin line of me staying for good as the toxicity of this household has only grown since I left those months ago). The night before I moved back I had a breakdown and messaged my mother that I need her among other things. The next day while I was at the airport she responded and we blew up into a fight because she didnt give me time to explain what my plan was. All I had said was that I wasnt sure if I was moving back in with my nana and papa and she told me just dont and to stop using them. This escalated to where she blocked both me and her father. My papa. This was in February.
Since she blocked me I have talked to multiple friends and even just had time to reflect and realize that when I say I want my mom. I really want the mom I thought I had back but shes gone and we cannot seem to reach an impasse. Family is one of the most important things to me and it breaks my heart that I cannot be there for my younger brother. I accepted that I will most likely once I'm 18 offically just cut them off and leave this toxicity that I am in.
My family members always push me to apologize and fix my relationship with my mother and step dad.
Last weei my mother reached out again and seemed fine. We talked for a few days until she said 'Well I've heard a lot about new stuff but not past stuff' to which I asled what she meaned and she said 'An apology'. I just got upset and hung up. I know I do owe some apologies and I have aplogized for things like the past mistakes and some arguments but they want me to apologize for everything, even the things they twisted into being my fault which weren't. I refuse to apologize and they refuse to acknlowedge it. I don't know and can't think of what she wants me to apologize for that she was meaning in that phone call but its most likely something she just wants to pin on me. She refuses to acknowledge or belive that my step father ever hit me claiming that at the time 'I was crazy and she can't be sure'. These are statements and things that I won't forget and will most likely never forgive even if I do get the appropriate apologies.
I feel like I am doing the right thing by staying low contact then just cutting them off when I am 18 at this point. Though I am not sure as my nana and papa and others are making me second guess it through guilt tripping or manipulating me. I am well aware of what they are doing and if I could make myself stop believing them and feeling this way I would but they are my family and I really don't want to lose them, but I think its for the best.
AITA? And if you have any advice it would be greatly appreciated.

Hi, I’m a 35yr male. I kinda just fly under the radar and keep to myself. I want social activity but my insecurities get in the way. I’m gonna give you guys something to read. It’s a life story of events.
When I was younger, just a baby I was always yelled at and getting into trouble by my dad, I don’t remember much of that time but I’ve grown afraid of my dad. I had 3 sisters, my oldest sister would always beat me up. I know she had to of got in trouble but for the longest time I had scars all over from where she would dig her nails into my face and arms. I just can’t recall a lot of it. Anytime I shave you can see the damage clearly.
At school every morning, I remember banging my head against the wall just to fall asleep, it’s embarrassing to think about but the cause which I assume was caused by a rocking horse that I would get on, throw an blanket over myself and fall asleep. I’m sure people laughed but I did it for unknown reasons.
My left eye is bad, so it sorta wonders. I remember first grade being alright. Then I got accused for stealing something when I never did. It was a giant sand dollar and someone broke it, hiding it in my bag. After that I just don’t really remember much besides everyone being mean so I just started sleeping through classes.
I was always be little, so I started to assume I was just stupid and I still struggle with this. I’ll list what I can remember from a bullying aspect, my eye was easy target for people and still is. I’m sure my hygiene wasn’t the greatest because I remember not caring because nothing at that time and place made any sense.
I was so used to being in trouble that I couldn’t really tell right from wrong I remember laughing at a kid who’s butt crack was showing as he crawled around the back of us and I kinda just copied him because we’re young and I thought it was funny. I got sent to the office. I remember being deathly afraid of that phone call and for some reason in a state of panic I said I showed my genitals instead. I questioned myself when I did it but I was just so scared it’s what came out. When I got home I got held up by the arm and got my behind blistered.
Then after that, things get foggy. I just remember always being afraid. My dad was chasing me for whatever reason and flipped a couch on me to whoop me, I don’t understand the exact reason for this if I’m honest. Either my mom said I did something or one of my sisters did.
Then another time, my second youngest sister was playing with scissors in the bathroom, I took them away and she ran off and told my mom I was playing with them and I got a spanking for that. Same sister also got me in the most traumatizing event I can remember. I’m probably only 11 or 12 it’s around Christmas. My dad just bought a new pick up, and I guess I had a cold because my nose was runny. I had to sneeze so I covered my nose and mucus went all in my hand. I remember clutching it into a fist. My sister accused me of showing it off when I specifically remember being afraid and holding it. As they’re screaming ew and gross he’s gonna get it on me my dad started yelling at me. I’m sitting exactly behind him. He reached back grabbing me by the hair and slamming my head against the center console telling me if I get that in his pick up he’s gonna make me walk home. Threatening me the entire way to my grandpas.
After that I hid away from everything, I stopped trying because everything I felt like I did was wrong and got a spanking for. I developed nasty habits, biting my nails, eating boogers, kid shit. My dad was a truck driver so he was never home. But anytime we acted up he would come home and spank us. My parents usually yelled at each other and ended up getting a divorce. My mom was dealing with some type of abuse as well but her type of revenge was leaving my dad in a big pile of debt ruining him financially. We jumped from house to house. My mom was always worried about herself after that. She started partying, coming home drunk bringing guys home and you could hear her moaning from having sex in her room. She would try to bait our dad into coming over so she could get him arrested or in trouble.
We eventually moved away to a bigger city, she remarried and things just kept getting worse with her. She always said we wouldn’t mind and literally had a woman come over and spank us. All the while she still going out and partying. Me and my second youngest sister grew closer at this point. At school I was still bullied but got used to isolating myself and just sleeping through out classes. Fresh marks on my arm from my sister but i wouldn’t dare lay a hand on her because it’s just more trouble then it’s worth. I had a couple bullies I hated, one in particular would always try to get me alone. So in retaliation I saved up saliva in my mouth. I spit on him and he left me alone after that I do feel bad about it but it got him to back off The other bully lived in the same neighborhood as me. I couldn’t do much to avoid him. I never stood up to him but one day he picked a lot of sandburrs, stickers or whatever you guys call them. He had a huge stack of them and smashed them on my back when I rode past. Shit hurt, after that my bike was stolen so I just hung out at the house.
I just felt I had no one. Couldn’t have guest over, because we had real bad bugs from when we lived in some apartments before hand. So it was embarrassing having company over. Not like I had friends anyways. But lets get back on track, at this point me and my sister wanted to go live with our dad. My mom kept targeting us, forcing us to do all the chores, grounding us and having us spanked. They would sometimes strip my pants off and push me outside bare ass naked locking me out. If I acted out in a store my step dad started pulling on my ears eventually ripping the lower lobe. Anytime we overslept he would dump ice water on us. He was just big bully too. My dad had visitation rights and he was trying to make up but I developed some ptsd I think. But he noticed the scar tissue behind my ears. He wanted to kill him over it. After that ordeal our mom stuck us in some type of mental disorder daycare place. I don’t even know tbh, I was stuck in a group of much younger kids because I didn’t act my age. I was not mature at all, I believe it’s just how I coped.
Eventually we got our wish, we went to live with our dad. Things were better but the mental abuse continued. He gave me set hours to be home by, and if I didn’t I was in trouble, I was still bullied but I was so used to it. I hand me downs cloths and shoes. My dad always told me I’ll grow into them. But one day one of my new bullied pushed me down and I fell out of one of shoes and he tossed it on top of the school. We couldnt afford it but my dad bought me a new set but of some steel toes and told me to kick them next time. But that following week he went to the school and got both parent and got my bully to leave me alone.
I had a crush on a girl so I annoyed her, my way of flirting which was burping in her ear for whatever reason. Teacher who was also a coach yelled at me and after that I just cried and then went to the bathroom to dry my face. It was so embarrassing, but I deserved it. I just didn’t have many social skills and no one wanted talk to me anyways.
My dad always threatened to kick me out or whatever if I got in trouble or got some pregnant. I never tried to work with him because I would get yelled at and make me afraid. I just stayed in my room, played games and avoided everyone unless it was time to eat. But jokes on him he officially gave me the best kind of birth control, trauma. So after continued being bullied, never seeing my mom till after a couple years the person watching over my step mom (they never got married) starting going over the road with my dad. Me and my sister for 11th and 12th grade were left home unsupervised.
She started going out and I just stayed home. I really had no one beside my online friends. I hid everything because they never knew what I looked like or who was. I would have little mental cracks and write out things in messages. They’re closer to poems than messages and send them out to people I liked online. They enjoyed what I wrote. But eventually I got older. I never could fit in anywhere.
I eventually joined the armed forces, and done everything to get through it but they deemed I was too mentally unstable to continue service. Which they were right.
After that I’ve dated off and on but nothing worth mentioning besides being cheated on multiple time. I just lacked experience in every aspect of my life. Sex life is terrible, social skills is terrible I honestly expected to die some point in my 20s tbh rather it be suicide or I just wrecked. Now I’m 35, no wife, no kids and I blow money like it’s no one’s business. I started driving a truck and wasted my entire 20s running hard doing hot shot work. I was trying to make money and buy things I wanted. I didn’t care about taxes or anything. but it just put me in more financial troubles since I was stupid about it. If you know anything about trucking I was running illegal most of the time. Anything to keep me away from the house. I kinda avoid my parents but some days I’m more open to talk but it’s only my dad. My mom just doesn’t pay attention to anything I say.
Anytime a woman gives me attention I get super attached and I know it’s wrong. I push them away trying to not come off as desperate. I find myself watching wanting a reply. I just get kinda happy someone is talking to me. But I know it’s not healthy so I try to calm myself down and exit out of it.
Even tho my sister wasn’t there for me she has taking strides to make it up to me. I love her and promised her a few years ago I wouldn’t ever take my life. But people just make it hard, I retired earlier this year from trucking because I’m burnt out , my truck kept giving me issues and costing me a lot money and I don’t know where to go. I struggle with committing or finding something to achieve and my depression has me in state of no control or responsibility. I just know nothing is helping my mental state so this year I want to correct it and get my life in order.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this and quite honestly I never really planned to post it online as I felt lile it would be a move seen as to just gain sympathy but now I'm at a loss and thought I'd give it a shot. I apologize if there's some rambling I'm not quite sure of what I'm doing here. Fair warning abuse and some sh will be mentioned.
I am 16f currently almost 17 and have not had a good home or family connection since I was 10. My bio dad (I think hes 36\37?m) was never really around as well as an addict (He claims to be sober though I dont quite believe that). There is also belief of abuse when I was with him though it isn't and most likely will never be confirmed. I do have many memories that I can remember vividly of times I was with him despite being between 6 and 8 at the time. He officially left on my 10th birthday by sending me an email apologizing and I didnt hear from him again for 6 years and its been on and off texting, he has been to jail multiple times throughout the last almost year weve been in contact.
Past that after he left my mother (34f) and step dad (36m. I think) became my only parents. Despite having my stepfather there my whole life I did consider him as a dad but he wasnt my actual dad my mom was my mom. She became my only 'parent' and I clung onto her. Around this time I also had a baby brother (6m now) my mom and step dads kid and a 10f now sister my dads and one of his ex girlfriends daughter. This is kind of important to note that I love my sibling and family and would never purposefully physically hurt them or hurt them in general.
Fast forward to christmas of the year I turned ten, I had sadly fallen into the wormhole that Im sure many others fell into of being groomed by men. Sending things and being taken advantage of. On christmas eve my step father found out and hell broke loose. I can admit my fault now but back then I didnt understand the length of how bad it was what I had done and had been doing, my mother held me that night as I cried and had my first panic attack. This was the beginning of our downfall though.
My mother and step dad had completely lost trust in me (which is fair) but we just couldnt seem to get along. Sure we could act fine and everything but now the cops were in our lives and I ended up moving away from home from this incident and in with my nana, as my reaction was to shut down while my mother yelled and cried trying to speak with me but I refused. My mother then grabbed a bag packed it and told me to get in the car dropping me off in another town at my nanas. This was early January around the beginning of covid I believe.
Me and my mother were low contact and I quite honestly missed her but at the same time I was happy where I was. One day in March I came home from school to see my mother in the house, she was bringing me back to live with her. I can't remember why so suddenly but I did end up moving back and she switched me to a catholic school (we were online because of COVID at this time).
During my time back I began to date my now ex girlfriend but she is now one of my biggest supports as she knows most of this as she witnessed some. Not in person but through video calls or just regilar calls that I dont believe my family were aware of.
My parents put child locks and time locks on my computer, and I wasnt allowed to have a phone (again fair) but with me being the child I was I wanted to socialize so I would play games like Among us or go into chat rooms that my parents would block and I would get in trouble. I rember about a certain one that they got mad at me for using my step dad months later during an argument yelled at me 'That one site you used just got shut down for trafficking' I was around 12 or 13 at this time and wasnt fully understanding of the length and what that meant. I just know his anger scared me.
I wont give the fully backstory but some incidents were as goes:
We came home from a drive one night and I was laying in bed trying to go to sleep. I was 13 at this time. My step dad came into the room pissed off and I sat up confused and simple asked 'What?'. He got mad and half yelled 'Don't fcking what me' then he continued to take eveything out of my room. Dumped all my clothes into a pile on the floor an drilled two pieces of wood onto the top and bottom of my closet doors so I could no longer open it as well as changed the door handle so that they could lock me in my room (which they did). During this I was standing in the corner scared and crying and he came got all up in my face and said 'Are you fcking scared now l?' Then proceeded to oush my head back then slap me. Afterwards I was locked in my room with a mattress, blanket, pillows and a pile of my clothing. I believe I was in there for a week though Im not sure. During that time they would open the door and ask if I needed to pee or shower, I always reufsed unless I absolutely did have to go because I just didnt want to move. They would at lunch and dinner bring in a plate with food and a cup or bottle of something to drink. I rarely actually ate it and slowly the food turned into bits of food and saltine crackers. I have now learned that according to my mother my step dad told her that I was being violent and getting all up in his face and that he was scared of me. She has also said that they did this because they were scared I was going to hurt or k*ll myself. Which at this point in time I had never done, attempted or really even thought about. Also, on the first night I dont know if more happened but I woke up in darkness to my step dad laying with me and hugging me as well as apologizing, I was scared and didnt know (and still don't know) what to make of it so I pretended to sleep. After awhile he left.
We were arguing basically everyday, which they would always start and I either wouldnt feed into it or would try to end it which only added fuel to the fire.
Many of these arguments led to me running out of the house and coming back late or not at all.
When I was 14 my school counseler noticed I seemed off I guess and I broke and told her. Then CAS came into my life. Long story short they did nothing and saw nothing wrong (my parents never admitted to anything and ir was a childs word against two adults) while only adding onto the tense atmosphere I called home.
Finally in fall of 2021. I left home for the last time. I love to paint and I was on the phone with my girlfriend at the time when my step dad came in and turned the light on (I had a simple lamp on my desk) he then noticed green paint on my floor. He immediatly got mad and told me to clean it to which I said I would. He left for about 5 minutes and I hadnt cleaned it yet having been in the middle of something when he asked. This started an argument and escalated to him screaming at me then grabbing my arm and pulling me into the hallway. I began to scream back and he was taking my wallet and other things using the excuse 'You didnt buy them. They're not yours' my mother was trying to get us both to stop but it ended with my dad opening and unlocking the front door telling me to leave and the door was open so I did. Cops were called that night and I moved in with my grandmother. I lived with her for about 3 weeks and the whole time my mother argued and tried to manipulate me into coming back.
Me, my mother and grandma had made a deal because I didnt feel safe in the house or comftorable that I would come home every Tuesday and Thursday. I stayed there Tuesday and on Wednesday after school went to a friends. My mother tried to get me home claiming the deal had never been made and called the cops on me. They showed up at my friends house and brought me back to my grandmothers where we explained the deal. I called my friend and her mom and began to apologize and not even 5 minutes into it my papa came into the apartment and screamed at me. My mother had apparently called him and said she never wanted to see him, my grandmother or me again and that my stuff would be on the side of the road if I wanted it.
Wuth everything going on I am sad to say this was my first ever time attempting to take my life that night. I went to psych ward for two weeks and moved in with my nana and papa afterwards.
The relationship with my mother and step dad is beyond strained as they both wont admit of the things that went on and since I got my doagnosises (Borderline personality disorder among other things) my mother has now began to blame my bast actions on it saying things like 'it all makes sense now'. Neither of them will apologize and they expect me to apologize. My relationship with my nana and papa is also strained the only person in my family I get along with is my cousin (19m) and my grandmother (84f).
Since turning 15 I gave struggled greatly with depression, suicidal thoughts and worst of all self harm. I have attempted many times and everytime my family only shows annoyance and disappointment only making me go deeper into this spiral.
Since turning 16 I have been kicked out of my nana and papas 3 times. First because they learned I smoke weed and got mad saying they didnt want someone like that in their house as well as I was just like my dad (my father is a drug addict and quite frankly I am terrified of anything other than weed). Second time they somehow got it into their heads that I was using substances other than weed. Third time was because we were arguing and my papa grabbed me to which I started yelling at him to never do that and he immediatly claimed he didnt do anything. I told him to f himself and my nana told me to get out.
Because of all this I havent had a stable place im years. I ended up moving to British Columbia for 4 months and living with my dead best friends family (rest in peace my love💜) where I got amazing support and do plan to live back there once I am 18. Sadly I moved back in with my nana and papa (thin thin line of me staying for good as the toxicity of this household has only grown since I left those months ago). The night before I moved back I had a breakdown and messaged my mother that I need her among other things. The next day while I was at the airport she responded and we blew up into a fight because she didnt give me time to explain what my plan was. All I had said was that I wasnt sure if I was moving back in with my nana and papa and she told me just dont and to stop using them. This escalated to where she blocked both me and her father. My papa. This was in February.
Since she blocked me I have talked to multiple friends and even just had time to reflect and realize that when I say I want my mom. I really want the mom I thought I had back but shes gone and we cannot seem to reach an impasse. Family is one of the most important things to me and it breaks my heart that I cannot be there for my younger brother. I accepted that I will most likely once I'm 18 offically just cut them off and leave this toxicity that I am in.
My family members always push me to apologize and fix my relationship with my mother and step dad.
Last weei my mother reached out again and seemed fine. We talked for a few days until she said 'Well I've heard a lot about new stuff but not past stuff' to which I asled what she meaned and she said 'An apology'. I just got upset and hung up. I know I do owe some apologies and I have aplogized for things like the past mistakes and some arguments but they want me to apologize for everything, even the things they twisted into being my fault which weren't. I refuse to apologize and they refuse to acknlowedge it. I don't know and can't think of what she wants me to apologize for that she was meaning in that phone call but its most likely something she just wants to pin on me. She refuses to acknowledge or belive that my step father ever hit me claiming that at the time 'I was crazy and she can't be sure'. These are statements and things that I won't forget and will most likely never forgive even if I do get the appropriate apologies.
I feel like I am doing the right thing by staying low contact then just cutting them off when I am 18 at this point. Though I am not sure as my nana and papa and others are making me second guess it through guilt tripping or manipulating me. I am well aware of what they are doing and if I could make myself stop believing them and feeling this way I would but they are my family and I really don't want to lose them, but I think its for the best.
AITA? And if you have any advice it would be greatly appreciated.

Hi guys. I’ve found myself in a predicament and would love some insight from someone else.
Background: I (28) met a girl (24) on Hinge three months ago. We hit it off and had a really nice time dating and getting to know each other over that period.
We recently became boyfriend/girlfriend. I love spending time with her (she’s funny, intelligent etc etc).
The problem: however, she looks very young. She’s 5’1, fairly skinny and has a baby face.
When we first started seeing each other, she usually wore makeup and dressed more her age. But as we’ve gotten more comfortable around each other she started dressing more casually / not wearing makeup (which is absolutely fine btw and I’d never tell her what to weado).
But it’s shown how young she actually looks and I’m worried people think I’m a perv.
Just today she got id’d at a bar and the bartender said she looked 12 or 13.
I’m legitimately scared that dating this girl will make my friends and family think I’m into young girls and am a perv. And I’m thinking about breaking things off.
Has anyone had similar experiences? What did you do?

Context: I am a single mother, in my thirties.
I cannot stand myself and the way that I just don’t care about anything. I fear I can’t change. I want to deep down but when it comes to facing the habits, temptation always takes over. That goes for food and booze. I’ve been “trying” to lose weight for YEARS. Almost ALL of my life. I know how to count calories but just can’t stick to it. Now with alcohol. I’m “trying” to cut back but then whoops — there goes another bottle.
This past week I’ve finally decided to choose the belief that will actually help me change - I can’t handle moderation. I can’t control my alcohol intake.
Alcohol hasn’t ruined my life in typical ways. Never was violent, never broke the law, never got behind the wheel of a vehicle drunk. In fact the only person I’ve hurt is myself. And my daughter, just by the sheer fact that I fail to set a good example to her.
But mostly me. I have blown up to 340 pounds. That is the damage alcohol has contributed to. Probably my liver too, I don’t know. For the first time in my life I missed a period. It’s been two months without one and previously it’s come every month like clockwork. I’ve destroyed my body and it just gets worse and worse.
My strict religious upbringing meant I was sheltered from alcohol. So when I finally tried it at the ripe age of 24, it was exciting. I thought being drunk was the funnest thing ever. Clearly I was not allowed to have much fun as a kid because now alcohol is my go to for fun and relaxation.
From there I just never stopped, it’s been 8 years of alcohol abuse now. I would buy a bottle every weekend and take straight shots until I was absolutely annihilated. That meant I surrounded myself with people willing to do the same and eventually ended up pregnant by a man who hurt me deeply with mental abuse and cheating. (Because he was also an addict who couldn’t take accountability.) I thought I was the responsible one in the relationship but I was just codependent. Over time I have come to see that I am just as unaccountable as I thought he was, the only difference is that the damage I do is to myself.
I was 230 pounds when I got pregnant by that guy and the doctor said I should be losing weight during pregnancy since I was already obese. Well, that didn’t happen. (It was easy to stay sober for the pregnancy. Just like it’s easy to stay sober when I need to - at work, around family, while driving. Since I can compartmentalize, I told myself I don’t have a problem.)
ANYWAY, after the baby I was 270 pounds. I figured it would come off over time. But this was 2020. I was still reeling from my relationship and new reality as a single parent to an infant, and COVID on top of it? I immediately went back to drinking.
I lived with family and would hide the empty bottles, my excuse being they were too religious and would kick me out, but also a part of it was my own shame in drinking so much. As a heavy girl, a few shots does nothing to me. So I can really put it down. I can drink a whole fifth at this point, being at my highest weight ever.
Anyway the reality of single parenting took over and every time I saw my weight I was mortified but it only ever went up and up. Hit 300 pounds and was beyond disgusted. Hit 320 and thought surely I can’t get worse. And here I am now at 340, still trying to make excuses for myself to drink. I am going to die if I don’t change. Not because of alcohol poisoning. But because of the way I can consume calories with it. I can eat so much when I’m drunk. And I DoorDash a ton because I’m lazy as hell. I still overeat sober but nothing like when I’m home alone and drunk.
A week ago I got a calorie counting app because I had to face another fact - I don’t understand how much I’m eating if I don’t analyze what’s going in my mouth. That’s how I got to this size. My dumb ass thought I could factor booze into this calorie counting. The first week of tracking, I pre-measured the booze into a separate glass and told myself that was it for the night. 500 calories worth of vodka. But after drinking my allotted amount, I was drunk enough to say fuck it and finish the bottle.
I’ve been deluding myself so SO hard my entire life.
Another excuse I’ve been using is that the term “alcoholic” is fake, since substance abuse is on a spectrum. And therefore it’s not who I am. But maybe right now it’s more helpful to identify as an alcoholic. I know that’s controversial. But how else am I going to feel enough shame to change.
I wish I cared more about myself. I wish I didn’t come home from work every day and just hide. Alcohol is just a way for me to avoid reality. Same with food. Same with scrolling on my phone. Take these things away and I’m just left with silence.
Yeah, I have my kid and I love her more than anything in this universe. But I can’t get all my needs met through a child. So here I am still fucking myself up. I want to change for her and for myself. I just don’t know how to feel better at home.
I have had so many instances in the past several months where I tell myself I’m done with alcohol for a while, and I end up having a mental battle with myself in the car that always ends up with me driving to the liquor store. I had maybe one time when I put mind over matter and skipped the liquor store. I felt good about myself in that instance but it’s so hard to resist. That’s what I’m afraid of, acknowledging this problem and still not being able to resist it.
I’m an adult with a car and money, I should have the self control to say no but those things enable me to say fuck it. The more money I have, the more booze I buy. And the more food I buy. I got a nice tax return plus a bonus from work that I wanted to invest, and what did I do? Blew it all. I’m so angry at myself for that.
Why am I like this? What is so broken in me that I am this lazy and neglectful? Yeah I’ve got some nutso religious parents, but none of my siblings have this issue with their weight. Just me.
And yes I know I need therapy. Been there and done that, and I can’t sustain it financially. I can blow $20 every week on a bottle and that seems to be my mental relief. But please don’t tell me therapy as if I haven’t already heard of it.
I hate this body and mind I was born with, it feels like a prison. I want to change. I hope that admitting these things to myself is an important step.

I had to make the tough decision to break up with someone I was dating for 2 years nearly. She was so sweet & kind. Ive never had someone talk to me so kindly. Calling me honey and boo bear and baby. She truly adored me. We had the same humor, we loved to hang out, cuddle, have sex. However the fundamentals, the foundation was weak. Too weak. We were different in some of the most important ways.
The first half of our relationship we were in college. She would NEVER go to class, she’d be depressed, anxious, & avoidant in her dorm all day. I would be in the library for up to 12 hours. I had to encourage her everyday to take life seriously until a year or so in she finally did. By this point I was so drained & depleted & jaded, also resentful of how much of my energy was spent poured into her, while I didnt get the same poured into me (I was achieving my goals ofc. I graduated and got a great job. However I wanted a partner to push me to the next level same as I did her).
She has ADHD so conversations were hard. I would tell her something very important just to reach the end of it & find she was zoned out. We never got to have deep conversations. I am OCD & very clean & particular about my space. She is messy & unclean. I took time to present myself well, wash my face brush my teeth wear clean clothes that looked good. We would meet sometimes and she would have her hair a mess, stained clothes, not showered, had to be told to brush teeth sometimes. I was upset because she would always say the things she loves about me. How I am “clean” , “look/dress sexy/hot”, “loves my hair”, etc. Yet I wouldnt get the same things in return. She would throw anything together. If i even hinted to it she got comfortable enough to say “Well this is the person you chose to fall in love with!!” She was complacent with it. I wanted someone I could showcase & dot over.
I began healthy habits like going to the gym & eating better, saving money. She would blow any money she had, eat extremely unhealthy, & be in her room daily (even though now she takes school seriously)… I like to be in the house cuddled up but I also like to enjoy life. Travel, meet new people, hang out with friends all weekend. She is completely out of place in social settings. I often get stressed trying to bridge the gap & make sure shes ok. She doesnt know how to function on her own without being awkward. She also doesnt have any friends because she stays inside all day. I have & value friends.
Though she was sweet and kind, the way she lived drowned & drained me. I didnt feel I could get to the next level with her. I felt I was hiking up hill while dragging her behind me to get to the top. Sometimes I feel like deciding to breakup with her was harsh, & rude. Maybe I should have waited for her to be better? She was so kind to me. Sometimes I feel I wont ever find that kindness again. Breaking up with someone who wasnt toxic or mean to you feels wrong. It feels fixable, so why give up?
Its been hard wrestling with these feelings.