Genuinely, I was concerned about Amanda the whole time. From the moment I picked her up, she seemed annoyed and uninterested. I knew she was tired and needed food, but even when we went out, she was closed off and disengaged. By the time we saw my friend Blaise at work, she was checking her bf Jackson’s location, thinking he was lying to her. He didn’t answer her call, so I figured that would be on her mind the rest of the night annoying her. I tried to distract her, get her to dance, and asked Caroline to help get her out of her head. I asked Alicia about her because she was hardly engaging with me. I thought she was on the phone with Jackson when I didn’t see her. I wish she had used her words to express how she was feeling instead of her demeanor. If she wanted to leave, I would have agreed. Her mood was infectious, and being mad at me for not focusing on her was outrageous. We were supposed to be celebrating my graduation, but she made herself the center of attention because she didn’t advocate for her needs and got mad at me for it. I’m sad that she’s blaming having a bad night on me when I was trying to be the energy to help lift her mood.
I wanted to go to Southside because Cade and his sister Cassie were there and excited to see Amanda. I figured she would appreciate seeing friendly faces, but she didn’t care to see them and had a bad attitude when it was supposed to be a fun night for all of us. Cade and Cassie love her, so I talked to them when she didn’t.
I was very hurt by her words and how she avoided everyone all day. Even after I graduated, she barely spoke to me. Mom also told me she wasn’t even present at the ceremony, she left. No wonder I felt anxious instead of happy at my own graduation. I wanted to spend time with her, but she didn’t seem to want to or talk to me. I didn’t push her, thinking she could come to me when she was ready. I can’t be responsible for her happiness or read her mind if she doesn’t communicate. I’m not used to having to prod people for answers. Of course, I cried for hours after she left; my heart was broken.
I only went out on Saturday because Alicia said I should enjoy my last night there. I didn’t want to just leave them at my house. Amanda said she was going to nap, and Alicia said she’d relax and get ready to leave. I was encouraged to enjoy myself but promised to come back when the ride was arriving. I did so to make sure they got their ride, and if they didn’t show, I would have driven them to the airport myself. I wanted to say goodbye and thank them for supporting me on an important day. I suppose I shouldn’t have come back; maybe that blow-up could have been avoided. But wouldn’t it have been mean not to come back when I said I would, even if Amanda hardly spoke to me all day? I don’t even remember how her yelling started. I just remember her being mean, which wasn’t surprising. I hoped she would talk to me, but yelling and threatening me is more common with her than it should be. I remember snippets, her lunging at me, and me bawling my eyes out. I stand by what I said: why would I want a friend who threatens to punch me?
This isn’t the first time she made me think she would hurt me physically. She threatened me during our road trip around four years ago. After saying awful things and accusing me of sleeping with the Europeans in the tents next to us. I didn’t want to sleep next to her after that, so I snuck into the tent after she went to sleep and cried, sleeping as close to the edge of the tent as I could. Her blow-up was disproportionate to what she perceived happened both times.
If she sees me as spoiled, so be it. Many people have it better than me and many worse. If I didn’t have the support and love from my family, she wouldn’t either. I’ve been fortunate, and I wish I could change her circumstances. Saying she didn’t recognize me? I’m glad she doesn’t. Moving away has helped me grow. I was timid for years, catering to her and letting her be the center of attention. I’ve since become a strong, confident woman, living my life the way I want, unafraid to take space in the world. I feel mentally well and happy with who I am, which took time. I’ve enjoyed college and made new friendships. This “new me” is a better me—extroverted, kind, loved, and respected.
It was my graduation weekend, and it was known we would go out, and I would say goodbye to my friends. I’ve made a lot, so I was constantly distracted. If that makes me a party girl, so be it. I can party and be responsible. She can’t put me down for that when I haven’t done anything worse than she has. It feels like as soon as she gets sober, she looks down on people who don’t choose to be. So what if I was a little drunk? I have every right to be. We might’ve been out later than expected, but most people wouldn’t hold that against someone if they didn’t speak up about wanting to leave. Telling me you want to sit in my car instead of saying, "Hey, I’m not feeling great, let’s go," makes me confused. I shouldn’t have to guess someone’s meaning.
This weekend was going to be a big party, sober or not, as the visit was planned before that. She had visited over spring break, so she knew what it could be like. I can’t change my plans when it was my last chance to see my friends. Considering I’d be back in Washington in a week, I thought it was understood I’d spend time with people other than her and have some drinks to celebrate. I was excited my best friends would meet people I’ve connected with and see the downtown life I’d experienced working at a bar. I spent as much time as I could with my best friends, but I’ve made more friends since, who I had to say goodbye to. I thought celebrating meant helping me have a fun time on my last weekend in a place I didn’t want to leave yet. We weren’t always alone, but that couldn’t have been expected. We’d have alone time when I came home.
In her text on Tuesday, she accused me of needing help for ‘my substance abuse.’ Where she got that from, considering I was responsible and not blacking out (which I’ve never done), I have no idea. I guess I’m not allowed to drink when I’m celebrating or any other time. She’s really reaching, especially given her experiences versus mine. I’ve never judged her for getting as drunk as she gets. When I visited in January, I was happy to drive and be responsible, letting my friends get as drunk as they wanted. No judgment. It’s a problem when I drink but fine when she does when she’s off the wagon? She didn’t have a good college experience because she was in her interpretation a far bigger ‘party girl.’ Still, no judgment when she had to come home to leave the coke and drinking behind. But she judges me on my graduation weekend. I should’ve been more drunk.
How could she react like that? Blow up because she felt like I hurt her feelings? Valid to her but I had no idea cause she didn’t communicate with me. Well, she really hurt my feelings on the biggest day of my life—intentionally. I know she’s going through a lot, but that’s no reason to yell and threaten someone with violence before even talking to them. She told me to lose her number when I get home. She apologized in her text for threatening me but said she did not respect this ‘new me.’
Chat Gpt analyzed some perspectives for me

Synthesis:

Emotional Dynamics:

Your Efforts and Amanda’s Perceptions: - You actively tried to include Amanda in the celebration and ensure she felt supported, but Amanda perceived these efforts as insufficient or misdirected. This mismatch in perceived support versus actual support attempts created a foundational rift in understanding. - While you saw yourself as balancing multiple responsibilities—celebrating your graduation and ensuring your friends were included—Amanda may have felt that your attention was predominantly elsewhere, leading her to feel neglected and marginalized.

Communication Breakdown:

Expectations and Reality: - Your frustration stemmed from Amanda's lack of direct communication about her needs and feelings. You expected her to verbalize her discomfort, which she did not do, leading to a communication gap. - Amanda might have expected you to recognize her non-verbal cues and prioritize her needs intuitively, which didn't happen. This unmet expectation contributed to her sense of being overlooked and heightened her frustration.
Pre-existing Strain: - The history of tension and previous incidents, such as the road trip confrontation, added layers of complexity to your interactions. This historical context likely amplified the intensity of the current conflict, making both parties more sensitive to perceived slights and misunderstandings. - Your growth and changes since moving away might have created a divergence in how you and Amanda interact and understand each other, contributing to the disconnect.

Different Coping Mechanisms:

Graduation vs. Personal Struggles: - For you, the graduation was a celebratory milestone, an opportunity to reflect on personal growth and achievements. You were in a mindset of joy and festivity, which contrasted sharply with Amanda’s apparent preoccupation with her own struggles. - Amanda, dealing with distrust in her relationship and possibly feelings of inadequacy or stress, might have found it difficult to align her emotional state with the celebratory atmosphere. Her internal conflicts overshadowed her ability to engage positively in the festivities.
Social Dynamics: - You sought solace and enjoyment in social interactions, finding energy and comfort in being around friends and celebrating. This is indicative of an extroverted coping mechanism where external engagement helps manage stress. - Amanda, on the other hand, might have preferred more intimate and focused support. Her withdrawal and negative demeanor suggest she might have needed a quieter, more personal form of reassurance and connection, which she felt was lacking.

Mutual Misunderstanding:

Differing Interpretations of Behavior: - Your interpretation of Amanda’s disengagement as a lack of communication and her failure to advocate for her needs contrasts with her potential view of your actions as neglectful and unsupportive. Each party’s behavior was misunderstood by the other, leading to escalating frustration and hurt feelings. - Amanda’s accusation of substance abuse, while seemingly out of place to you, might have been her way of expressing deeper concerns or projecting her struggles. This misunderstanding highlights a significant gap in how both of you perceive and communicate about sensitive issues.
Emotional Fallout: - Both of you experienced emotional fallout from the events. You felt heartbroken and disappointed by Amanda's reactions and accusations, perceiving them as a betrayal during an important milestone. Amanda, meanwhile, might have felt abandoned and misunderstood, exacerbating her emotional turmoil. - The emotional intensity on both sides indicates that this conflict was more than just a series of misunderstandings but a clash of underlying expectations, communication styles, and emotional needs.

Moving Forward:

Reflection and Communication: - To bridge this gap, both parties would benefit from reflecting on their communication styles and expectations. Understanding that each person has different ways of expressing and perceiving support could help in realigning the friendship dynamics. - Open and honest dialogue about these events, where both can express their feelings and perspectives without judgment, might pave the way for mutual understanding and reconciliation. It’s crucial to acknowledge each other's emotional experiences and work towards a common ground of empathy and support.
Managing Expectations: - Setting clear expectations about support and communication in future interactions could prevent similar conflicts. For instance, agreeing on how to signal distress or need for support in a way that the other person understands can mitigate misinterpretations. - Recognizing and respecting each other’s coping mechanisms and emotional needs, especially during significant events, can help in maintaining a balanced and supportive friendship.
In summary, the conflict between you and Amanda arises from a complex interplay of misaligned expectations, communication breakdowns, and differing emotional needs. Both perspectives are valid, highlighting the importance of empathy, direct communication, and mutual understanding in resolving such conflicts and strengthening the friendship.

Hey everyone, I'm back for yet another daily guide! Sorry I didn't get around to one the last couple of days - I tried on the 14th and oh boy was that hard. I gave up half way through because I ran out of time! Thankfully this one is much better because I still had my sanity by the end!
As we've previously found, reloading the browser makes changes to the rng, so now I have notes when the browser has been reloaded so you can reload it too :). As per usual, sorry about the reloads - it'd be much easier if there weren't any, but I had some issues and instead of being able to restart I had to reload. Also there's at least one place where I've said to quit to menu and continue - I don't think this is the same as a reload, so maybe don't reload and just quit to menu instead?
Also, as we've found out, it looks like different browsers have different RNG. I use firefox when making my guides, but if you use chrome, there may be some small differences here and there. If you do use chrome and have some differences, let me know - I'm trying to get some evidence so I can figure out what the changes are and see if there's a way to nullify them so we can have a single guide for any type of browser :)
I haven't had a chance to fully test this yet, but I've got a test going in the background. Until then, there might be some reloads or whatnot that I've missed
ALSO ALSO: we're still trying to figure out exactly what the relationship with reloading is. For now, if when you need to reload, reload once you've chosen your pokemon for the battle, as, on average, that's when I would reload. I don't know if it'll make a difference, but it can't hurt to try and see what happens :)
As per the others, I'm still learning about all this, so sorry for any mistakes I've made - I probably missed at least a couple of reloads, but hopefully I got the majority of them.
A couple of things to note: There's a DNA splicer on wave 38 rewards. I've never used it before and asked the discord who would be some good options to use it for, and people were saying it probably wasn't worth it. If you want to fuse some things together though, go ahead! I will say that if you do, I got offered a Garchompite on wave 41, so if you want to fuse two pokemon together, make sure to do it with garchomp first. That said, taking the DNA splicer may change your rng so you may not get the garchompite, but I'll leave that as an experiment for you to test :)
Lastly, it seems like there's a bug in the game - I've heard it's best to change the "EXP Party Display" to "Normal" as if it's not on normal, sometimes moves you've learnt will disappear when you exit to the menu.

Pokemon	Max stat (31)	Wave
Camerupt	HP	21
Scovillain	Sp. Atk	24
Orthworm	Sp. Def	38

I think I got all the unique mons for the candies except one (silly brambleghast didn't want to be caught?), but I might have missed some.
With the below steps, if I haven't said to take a move when one is offered, that means to not learn it. For the table, there's two columns relating to moves - one for moves to take and one for moves to replace. For example, if the "Move(s) to take..." column has Headbutt and the corresponding row in the "... by replacing move(s)" column has Wrap, it would mean you need to replace wrap with headbutt at this stage when it's offered - and if during that stage a different move is offered, don't take it if it's not on the list. Also if there's multiple moves to be offered, the moves offered in the table are listed from top to bottom of the order you get them - so if you have something like the below, it means that Crunch will be offered before Headbutt will, which will be before Firethrower (and their associated replacements):

Move(s) to take...	... by replacing move(s)
Crunch	Vine whip
Heatbutt	Astonish
Firethrower	Water gun

Also, if there are multiple waves back to back that have the same pokemon (or are within a few waves of each other), I'll label them as 1 and 2 - i.e. Linoone 1 and Linoone 2. This is to help avoid confusion if you're looking back and forth and trying to figure out where you're at
Lastly, with the steps below, if I don't say to switch out to a pokemon, that means you use the pokemon that's come out automatically.
With that, here's the guide:

Stage 1

Wave 1: Swablu
Steps:

1. Ancient power
2. Pokeball
3. Transfer charcoal from glimmet to raboot

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Pokeballs
Wave 2: Fletchinder
Steps:

1. Confuse ray
2. Pokeball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Venoshock	Rain dance

Reward: Potion swablu
Wave 3: Swablu
Steps:

1. Ancient power

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Super potion swablu
Wave 4: Pidgeotto and Spoink
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: So when I started this fight, Spoink got poisoned from toxic spikes somehow (though I can't remember how?) It felt weird, so I exited to the main menu and continued, and it removed the spikes and the poison, so you should too.
Steps:

1. Switch glimmet with fletch and clauncher with raboot
2. Flame charge x 2 on pidgeotto
3. Pokeball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Acrobatics	Growl

Reward: Ultraball
Wave 5: Trainer Joren and Myra
Steps:

1. Acrobatics and flame charge seviper
2. Flame charge x 2 mawile

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Mega bracelet
Wave 6: Pidgeotto
Steps:

1. Flame charge
2. Acrobatics

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Potion fletch
Wave 7: Swablu
Steps:

1. Acrobatics x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Pokeballs
Wave 8: Staravia
Steps:

1. Switch to clauncher
2. Pokeball x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Pokeballs
Wave 9: Geodude
Steps:

1. Aqua jet
2. Pokeball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Potion fletch
Wave 10: Shieldon
Steps:

1. Switch to raboot
2. Double kick
3. Pokeball x 3

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Stage end

Stage 2

Wave 11: Swablu
Steps:

1. Switch to fletch
2. Acrobatics x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Rare candy fletch
Wave 12: Goomy
Steps:

1. Switch to swablu
2. Dragon breath x 2
3. Pokeball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Potion swablu
Wave 13: Goomy and Goomy
Steps:

1. Switch claunder with fletch
2. Dragon breath and acrobatics left (L31) goomy
3. Dragon break and acrobatics

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: X Atk
Wave 14: Gabite
Steps:

1. Dragon breath x 3
2. Pokeball
3. Ultra ball
4. Replace swablu with gabite

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Headbutt	Baton pass

Reward: Potion gabite
Wave 15: Trainer Trisha
Steps:

1. Acrobatics
2. Switch to glimmet
3. Spikes (glimmet dies here)
4. Bring out fletch
5. Acrobatics
6. Switch to raboot
7. Heatbutt x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Water pulse	Snore
Rest	Splash
Power gem	Growl

Reward: Potion talonflame
Wave 16: Jangmo-o
Steps:

1. Pokeball x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Slash	Sand attack

Reward: Potion talonflame
Wave 17: Goomy
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: Exit to menu to remove spikes
Steps:

1. Switch to talonflame
2. Acrobatics

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Reroll, Super potion gabite
Wave 18: Drampa
Steps:

1. Pokeball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Pyro ball	Flame charge

Reward: Reviver seed talonflame
Wave 19: Goomy and Drampa
Steps:

1. Acrobatics goomy and double kick drampa
2. Talonflame dies and revives
3. Acrobatics and double kick drampa

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Aerial ace	Flail

Reward: Great balls (ps: you might be wondering why I would possibly choose great balls over the revive I so desperately need. Well, I was too excited to get the revive I accidentally went too far over and picked up the great balls :( )
Wave 20: Trainer Drayden
Steps:

1. Switch to gabite
2. Dragon breath x 2
3. Switch to grumpig
4. Rest
5. Psybeam (grumpig dies here)
6. Bring out talonflame
7. Acrobatics x 3 (talon dies here)
8. Bring out gabite
9. Dragon breath (gabite dies here)
10. Bring out clauncher
11. Smack down
12. Rest (claunder dies here)
13. Bring out cinder
14. Attact
15. Headbutt x 3

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Stage end (sheesh, what a fight)

Stage 3

Wave 21: Camerupt
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: This camerupt has max (31) HP stat
Steps:

1. Switch to clauncher
2. Pokeball x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Snore	Psych up

Reward: EXP All
Wave 22: Sinistcha
Steps:

1. Switch to glimmet
2. Venoshock x 2
3. Pokeball
4. Replace grumping with sinistcha

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Rock slide	Confuse Ray

Reward: Potion glimmet
Wave 23: Sandslash and Dugtrio
Steps:

1. Switch glimmet with claw and cinder with talonflame
2. Aqua jet sandslash and acrobatics dugtrio
3. Pokeball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Mortal spin	Rock slide

Reward: Ultraball
Wave 24: Scovillain
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: I reloaded my browser here; make sure to reload during the fight once it's started, and not too late
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: This scovillain has max (31) Sp. Atk stat
Steps:

1. Switch to cinder
2. Headbutt
3. Pokeball x 2
4. Ultra ball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Super potion cinder
Wave 25: Trainer Yvette
Steps:

1. Pyro ball x 2
2. Double kick
3. Switch to talonflame
4. Acrobatics
5. Switch to glimmora
6. Mortal spin
7. Venoshock x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Dragon claw	Slash
Power gem	Ancient power
Aura sphere	Rest
Stength sap	Matcha gotcha

Reward: Potion cinder
Wave 26: Mudsdale 1
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: I exited to menu here so the spikes disappeared
Steps:

1. Switch to sinistcha
2. Mega drain x 3 (this kills mudsdale, but we get another one on W29)

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Potion Sinistcha
Wave 27: Scovillain
Steps:

1. Switch to talonflame
2. Aerial ace x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Hyper potion Sinistcha
Wave 28: Donphan
Steps:

1. Great ball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Pokeballs
Wave 29: Mudsdale 2
Steps:

1. Switch to sinistcha
2. Mega drain x 2
3. Pokeball x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Crunch	Bite

Reward: Great balls
Wave 30: Trainer Clay
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: I reloaded my browser here; make sure to reload during the fight once it's started, and not too late
Steps:

1. Strength sap x 3
2. Mega drain x 4
3. Switch to claw (claw dies here)
4. Bring out garchomp
5. Bulldoze x 2
6. Crunch x 3
7. Bulldoze x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Shadow ball	Hex

Reward: Stage end

Stage 4

Wave 31: Drapion
Steps:

1. Pokeball
2. Bulldoze
3. Great ball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Bounce	Aqua jet

Reward: Pokeballs
Wave 32: Sandslash
Steps:

1. Switch to claw
2. Water pulse

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Pokeballs
Wave 33: Rabsca
Steps:

1. Switch to talonflame
2. Pokeball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Dire hit
Wave 34: Sandslash and Brambleghast
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: Sorry, I couldn't find a way to catch brambleghast no matter what I tried
Steps:

1. Switch cinder with claw
2. Aerial ace bramble and water pulse sandslash (this kills them)

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
Steel wing	Aerial ace

Reward: Super potion claw
Wave 35: Trainer Sonia
Steps:

1. Switch to garchomp
2. Crunch x 2
3. Bulldoze x 2

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Rarer candy
Wave 36: Orthworm 1
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: Couldn't catch it, but we get one one W38
Steps:

1. Switch to cinder
2. Pyro ball (this kills it)

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Potion garchomp
Wave 37: Brambleghast
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: Brambleghasts do NOT want to be caught today - sorry
Steps:

1. Pyro ball (this kills it)

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Dire hit
Wave 38: Orthworm 2
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: This orthworm has max (31) Def
Steps:

1. Double kick
2. Headbutt
3. Switch to talon
4. Ember
5. Ultra ball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Potion garchomp - note: there IS a DNA splicer here, but I haven't used it before. I asked around and people in the discord said it might not necessarily be worth it for these guys, but if you want to try for yourself, go ahead! It may change the RNG as discussed above, but it could be pretty fun!
Wave 39: Rabsca
Steps:

1. Acrobatics

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Super potion garchomp
Wave 40: Trainer Gordie
Steps:

1. Switch to sinistcha
2. Switch to claw
3. Water pulse
4. Aura sphere x 2
5. Water pulse
6. Aura sphere x 2 (claw dies)
7. Bring out sinistcha
8. Mega drain

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Stage end

Stage 5

Wave 41: Xatu
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: I reloaded my browser here; make sure to reload during the fight once it's started, and not too late
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: This one is killed but we catch another one on W48
Steps:

1. Shadow ball (this kills xatu, but we get one on W48)

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Garchompite on garchomp
Wave 42: Alakazam 1
Steps:

1. Ultra ball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Reroll, Super potion sinistcha
Wave 43: Sigilyph
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: I reloaded my browser here; make sure to reload during the fight once it's started, and not too late
Steps:

1. Switch to garchomp
2. Pokeball
3. Great ball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Enigma berry garchomp
Wave 44: Alakazam 2
Steps:

1. Crunch

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: PP Max garchomp's bulldoze
Wave 45: Trainer Walter and Janie
Steps:

1. Bulldoze and swap out claw with talonflame
2. Bulldoze and acrobatics

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Reroll x 2, X Sp. Atk
Wave 46: Claydol 1
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: This guy just self destructs ASAP, but we do catch another one next wave
Steps:

1. Switch to sinistra
2. Pokeball (claydol self destructs and dies)

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Ganlon berry garchomp
Wave 47: Claydol 2
Steps:

1. Mega drain
2. Pokeball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: X Speed
Wave 48: Xatu
Steps:

1. Pokeball
2. Ultra ball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: PP Up cinder's double pyro ball
Wave 49: Grumpig
Steps:

1. Mega drain
2. Ultra ball

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: X Speed
Wave 50: Dialga
NOTE FOR THIS WAVE: I reloaded my browser here; make sure to reload during the fight once it's started, and not too late. That said, for this wave it probably doesn't matter, but better to be safe than sorry.
Steps:

1. Strength sap x 4 (sinistcha dies here)
2. Bring out garchomp
3. Bulldoze x 4 (garchomp dies here)
4. Bring out claw
5. Aura sphere
6. DAILY DONE

Move(s) to take	... by replacing move(s)
None	None

Reward: Daily done!
That should be it! Enjoy your egg vouchers and I hope you get good things! As usual, any changes or anything let me know - I'll be doing a test run in the background when I can to hopefully catch anything else, but if you find waves that don't make sense or reloads that are needed let me know and I can add them in! Also like I said if you find any differences between this and your run and you're playing on a chromium browser, let me know as well :)

I am not the OOP. The OOP is u/Ok-Firefighter602 posting in AmItheAsshole and his user account
Concluded as per OOP
1 update - Medium
Original - 29th April 2023
Update - 22nd May 2023
​
AITA for breaking a promise and attending my stepdaughter's graduation?
​
I’ll start by explaining some backstory. I (54M) lost my first wife when my son (25M) and daughter (22F) were ages 9 and 12, Both my kids took it as hard as you would expect and to this day have a poor relationship with both my current wife "Doreen (49F)" and my stepdaughter "Amy (18F)". I started dating Doreen about 4 months after my first wife passed, as such my kids believe I cheated on their mom. Amy was 5 when we got together and as such I see her as my own daughter.
On to the actual story, 4 years ago, two days before Kay's high school graduation, Amy got very ill while visiting her grandparents and ended up needing emergency surgery. My wife and I rushed to be with Amy and admittedly I did not communicate well with Kay. At the time Kay didn't pick up my calls, so I left her a voicemail and several text messages explaining what happened and telling Kay I was sorry but I would make it up to her. A few hours go by and I get a call from Kay, she is in hysterics telling me what a terrible father I am and stated that if I did not attend her graduation I would be dead to her. I chose to support Amy.
True to her words, Kay did not contact me on the day of her graduation. And when came home Kay's things had been moved out of the house with a note explaining that we were no longer family and to never contact her again.
Luckily Kay and I were able to reconcile, however, I promised her I would give her absolutely anything in the world to make her forgive me. She said that she would forgive me as long as I refused to attend Amy's graduation as this was the only way to make it fair. I agreed at the time thinking she was just joking or angry and would soon forget.
This leads me to now. Invitations for Amy's graduation went out, and despite all the hostility Amy wanted to make sure Kay got one. Kay called Amy later that day and said she would be unable to attend as she and I would be spending the day together per our agreement. Amy broke down into tears asking me why I was missing her graduation, I assured her I was not and that I would speak to Kay. Later I explained to Kay that I simply could not miss Amy's graduation. Kay launched into a tirade about how I was a liar and an asshole and how could I do this to her again. I told her that we would talk when she calmed down and she said we would never talk again.
My son, and several of our extended family have all taken Kay's side saying I didn't see how hurt she was at graduation. My wife believes I am the asshole for even promising that in the first place as I should have known it would only upset one or both girls. And Amy is just sad and confused wondering why Kay hates her. I know keeping my promise and not attending Amy's graduation is probably the only way to salvage my relationship with Kay, but no matter how I look at it I would feel like I'm punishing Amy for having a medical issue, so am I the asshole?
EDIT to add some relevant info.
I NEVER cheated on my first wife. your accusations are honestly tiring and disgusting.
Amy's Bio father was never in her life. I am NOT Amy's Biological father, that wasn't ever even in question as we are not the same race.
Amy had appendicitis, she was staying over 4 hours away at her grandparent's house. at the time that we left the only info Doreen's mother would give us was she passed out and wouldn't wake up.
My daughter was moved out of our house for about a month and a half after which we made up and she returned to live with us for another 2 years before going away to school.
I did not believe Kay when she said she wanted me to miss Amy's graduation as it seemed like a ridiculous request. despite what you all may believe our relationship was fine after this event we were in near-daily contact and she would frequently visit us.
​
Comments
​
Angry-trans
YTA And have been for years. You are a bad father. Kay is correct. You are a liar. You've done nothing to prioritize Kay ever since your new family rolled in. Your relationship with your daughter is dead and the blood is on your hands.
​
calliatom
Seriously though... you never should have promised Kay that, knowing full well that you had no intention of keeping your word. And now you're being a bad father to Amy too, by trying to use her tears and guilt to dig yourself out of the grave you dug yourself with Kay.
​
CryptographerSuch753
Seems like all op cared about was getting his way in the moment. Seems like that may be a pattern
​
victoria12345678909
YTA - you replaced your kids mom with a new family 4 months after she died! Your kids lost their mom so young and you don’t seem like you prioritized their feelings or helped them deal with things, instead you moved on fast. Kay didn’t have a mother to attend her graduation and she needed you there. Could you not have driven to the grad then back to the hospital?
​
LadyDerri
Ten to One that Amy is his daughter. That's why he favors her.
​
Comments from OOP

Amy ended up having to get an emergency appendectomy, but at the time was visiting her Grandparents about a 4 hour drive from where we lived. Her grandmother didn't give us too much relevant information before we left, just that she had passed out and wouldn't wake up. On the way there we didn't know her condition or anything because her grandmother is a non-native English speaker and didn't understand a lot of the medical terms. once we got there and signed off on the surgery she ended up needing an additional 2 days in the hospital and wanted both of us by her side. During this time I repeatedly called and texted both my mother and son who were planning to attend the ceremony. I had every intention of calling/ video calling so that I could still support her, but she told everyone she didn't want me to be a part of it.

​

I didn't immediately move in Doreen and Amy once we started dating, we dated for over 2 years before we moved in together. My wife's death was not a sudden thing she battled cancer on and off for years before she passed. My children already knew/ were comfortable with Doreen as she was my late wife's best friend so I thought they would enjoy having her around more. I offered both children grief counseling, my son took me up on it, and I took Kay to a few sessions but she would kick/ scream/ cry every time I took her finally the counselor decided that forcing her before she was ready would only worsen her grief. I offered her therapy many times over the years, but she never took me up on it.

​

first of all, I knew Doreen for years before I even met my late wife, in fact, Doreen introduced us. I thought my kids would like having Doreen around as before my wife passed they loved her like an aunt. I did not move her in or make her a permanent part of our daily lives until over 2 years into our relationship. four months after my wife passed we agreed to explore our romantic feelings I explained what was going on in age-appropriate terms so they wouldn't be blindsided if they caught their dad kissing their "aunt".

​
**Judgement - YTA*\*
​
Update - 1 month later
​
I wasn't sure if I wanted to post an update after the reaction I got last time, I can stomach death threats against myself but directing such hatred toward my children was truly disturbing. But the graduation has come and gone and I thought I should share how it all went down. I'm sure most of you will be displeased.
Amy was mad at me for a few days, but we have a strong bond and she quickly got over it. The saint that she is said she would understand if I wanted to miss it to make it up to Kay. I told her I wouldn't do that to her and reassured her that she has done nothing wrong.
As for the elephant in the room, Kay, she and my son live in the same city and work in the same field so they're as close as ever. My son and his partner were giving her a lot of emotional support at this time. In the end, she decided not to attend Amy's graduation but sent flowers and a card with my son. There were a lot of nasty messages directed toward her, which I feel is completely unacceptable. She isn't mean or vindictive. She is a smart, very kind, very empathetic woman. She made a bizarre ultimatum as a confused and hurt teenager I certainly don't think that makes her a bad person.
I know all of you seem to think I hate my children, but the amount of pain I feel at the deterioration of my relationship with my daughter is unexplainable, I've been on and off anti-depressants since the death of my wife and at my therapist's suggestion will be going back on them. it's taking all of my willpower not to reach out to her again, but I've already disrespected her wishes enough. She can choose to reach out to me when and if she ever wants to again and I'll be waiting.
I know it's not the most impactful update and I'm sure most of you wanted to see me left miserable and alone, but I don't live my life for anyone else's entertainment. I can accept that I'm the asshole, maybe I'm an asshole in general, but I'm not some evil monster that you all want me to be. I'm a man that made the mistake of sharing his problems with the internet a mistake I won't be making again. I probably won't delete this account, but I'm not gonna be updating in the future. goodbye.
​
Comments
​
YogurtclosetWeird789
Look OP I get that you're human, just a man.
But you can't get away with the I made mistakes because you make the same ones over and over again.
I don't understand trolls and stupid people with the death threats or nasty messages about your kids it's wrong and disgusting.
The only issue here is YOU! The fact that claim to love Kay and how it is breaking your heart that she wants nothing to do with you is your own fault, every 'mistake' you made and repeated always seems to be against her. I don't actually think you care about Kay all that much as you still have Amy.
Now you've decided oh well I've fucked up again and made so many mistakes I'll just leave her alone and not confront the fact you failed her as a supportive father. OWN IT, Change your damn ways.
Believe me, you're not the worst dad out there. but you are a shitty one to Kay.
When will you wake up and realise without the self-pity that YOU have to be the one to make amends. Why on earth would she contact you?
Do you not care that one day she will get married and you won't be invited to the wedding or even to walk her down the aisle? When she has her first child and you find out through the grapevine instead of being a Grandpa?
Maybe one day she will forgive you, but not if your solution is to just give her space! seems to me she had a lot of space from you already. All she wanted was your time and sole attention for a bit, and you've never been able to give her that. I feel for both your son and daughter because it seems you have a favourite and you don't care as long as Amy is ok.
Let me guess and say your wife thinks it's best to give her the space? Amy may be a nice girl but I bet your wife has encouraged your behaviour.
It's honestly sad.
​

OOP: I'm giving Kay space because that's what she said she wants, I can't do anything other than that. No matter what I'm gonna still be there for her any way I can, but for the time being, I'm not going to pester her or beg for forgiveness because that's not what she wants. I HAVE made mistakes and at the top of that list is not listening to my children when they tell me exactly what they need from me.

​
AAP_BH
Even in this follow up post the way you speak about Kay, the disgust you feel for her oozes out. You claim so many people spoke badly of her in your previous post but those comments were minimal compared to the people that spoke badly of YOU, YOUR WIFE AND SAINT AMY but you don’t mention that, you still want Kay to be the “bad” daughter. Saying her request was “sad and bizarre” no it wasn’t.
It’s so convenient that this is when all of a sudden you realize you need to and will listen to Kay, not when she was begging you to choose her for once since your dear saint Amy came into your life. All you had to do was not go to a High School graduation and you couldn’t even do that.
You’re a horrible father to Kay and you will continue to be one. The fact that you still made the decision to put Amy over your freaking daughter is so sad, the fact that you cared so much more over Amy being upset over letting Kay down again says a lot. Leave Kay alone, don’t ever contact her again unless it’s to say flat out to her face that you are stepping down as a father since you know you will never be able to giver her the love and attention you give your true daughter Amy, that Amy will always come first. I had peritonitis, I was in the hospital (at 8yrs old) for almost a year on and off and my mom would leave to work , she was a single mother, and I was fine. Amy was a teenager, had A MOTHER AND GRANDPARENTS, she had appendicitis a common procedure, 2 freaking days before your daughters graduation and you couldn’t leave just for a day bc “Amy wanted me by her side”. My heart aches for Kay, knowing she is pretty much an orphan. Ughh parents like you I don’t freaking understand, you should’ve given up your rights as a father the moment you decided that your new family was more important than your children. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much hate for a stranger on Reddit.
ETA— by the way you sad excuse of a man, you didn’t make a mistake you made various CHOICES and DECISIONS to deliberately hurt your daughter. You DECIDED TO PUT AMY FIRST. You’re no victim, the only victim here is your ex daughter, Kay and probably her brother as well
​
Soft_Consequence2262
Oh Amy the Saint.... I got the same vibes. The Father is trying to paint Kay as the bad person that he needs to defend. Yet, can't go past without a shout out to how AMAZING Amy is... actually gives me the creeps. Feels like he has some weird obsession with her perfection.
​
[deleted]
Yeah the Amy the Saint really rubbed me the wrong way. It’s sad that despite everything, OP is still so delusional. I wish Kay a life of happiness, even if it means she would go NC with OP for life.
​
I am not the OOP. Please do not harass the OOP.
Please remember the No Brigading Rule and to be civil in the comments

Just so I can bring everyone to the same page of context before actually starting the story.
World of Darkness: A setting of TTRPG’s that take place in a darker grittier version of our reality, where supernatural creatures such as werewolves, vampires, wraiths, mages and so on, exist and hide from the public eye creating their own means of protection, politics and secret societies to protect themselves against humans.
Werewolf the apocalypse/Werewolf 5th edition/Werewolf 20th edition: Is the setting/system where you play as werewolves and fight the enemies of the spirit of earth Gaia. Werewolf 5th edition is the newer system and werewolf 20th edition is an older system.
Vampire the masquerade/ Vampire 5th edition/ Vampire 20th edition/VTM: It’s the World of darkness system where you play as a vampire sneaking through the shadows of cities and feeding on humans. Vampire 5th edition is the newer system, Vampire 20th edition is the older system.
Storyteller: It's the World of Darkness way of saying “Dungeon Master”, the one that runs the campaign/Chronicle.
Flaws, Merits and Backgrounds: I can explain them as essentially D&D feats but with levels to it that determine how mechanically strong the “feat” you picked up is, I can mention one where you can make bullets bounce off surfaces to hit targets and it decreases the difficulty for hitting a target behind cover or being so shockingly beautiful that you gain extra dice when you are trying to seduce someone. Backgrounds are like feats but that need to be explained by your backstory, like magical pacts, riches or even spirit pacts. And flaws are mechanical and role-play disadvantages that you need to pick on character creation, like having an enemy or being illiterate.
Actual story:
So, I’ve been a forever Storyteller ever since I got to know World of Darkness and I was aching to drop the whole responsibilities as a Storyteller and for once enjoy this rich urban fantasy setting as a player thrown into the night as any of the multiple splats. So, I saw that someone just posted a werewolf 5th edition chronicle and applied, Werewolf 5th ed is not my cup of tea, but I’m the type that is desperate enough and open minded enough to just go ahead and try any system that I can get my hands on, so when the Storyteller of that chronicle dmed me the link to join his discord server I was just overjoyed.
I started interacting with other players, they all seemed pretty nice and I even started to plan a shared backstory with one of the girl players that was pretty nice to me (I’ll call her Avery, as she is part of the horror story too). So as me and Avery were planning the shared backstory we started to wonder what some of the merits and backgrounds mechanically did within the setting as I wanted spend all of my 7 merit points (everyone gets 7) into a specific advantage called spirit pact where I essentially made a pact with a powerful spirit to make them my companion and give me a minor supernatural ability/edge, however, how fantastical these edges and how the spirits behave varies from storyteller to storyteller as some like something more fantastical while others prefer something more realistic, so I reached out to him to get some more context on how crazy I could make the pact.
Several days passed and he didn’t replied my question at all, nor any other ones I made as I wanted to know if my knowledge about werewolf 20th edition lore would help at all (Werewolf 5th edition and Werewolf 20th edition have big lore differences despite being set in the same universe, so I needed to know to not metagame and/or ruin continuity) but well, I thought that he was just a busy guy, I mean, he was also running a Vampire the masquerade game in the same server, so I was just planning on tackling these doubts I had on Tuesday when the session started. But, then I saw one of the players in the server asking for help on how to set their character sheet as apparently they were lost on what to do, so I went ahead and offered to join VC with him and run him through the character creation, I’ll call this player OZ and he is the star of this cheating story.
So as I joined VC he just asked me how the Gifts, rites and renown system works, with Gifts and Rites being the akin to werewolf magic and renown being what you use to cast magic per say. After that he said he didn’t had no other doubts and so we started a conversation in world of darkness as a whole, there he showed me that he had pretty extensive knowledge on how Vampire the Masquerade functioned, telling me old lore related to Vampire 20th edition such as a specific bloodline of the Tzimisce vampire clan (that instead of their trademark flesh crafting ability had an extremely powerful blood magical superpower) and he even told me that he participated on several vampire chronicles before in the past and well, since he seemed to know what he was doing and there was a big, pretty simplified how to make your character summary right on the first page on the “how to make your character” section, I thought that he’d not have any other issue, as character creation (at least in the 5th editions of World of Darkness books, in my opinion.), got pretty simplified and are the types where if you understand how to create one character you can created all. So after some more talking and a friendly remind that I’m also a regular storyteller that loves to help newbies and so my dms are always open, I left the call.
Oz posted his character sheet on the server for the Storyteller to review and approve and well, he did within a literal minute of him posting it (something that at the time I didn’t noticed as I doing something else and well an experienced Storyteller could’ve noticed if he did anything wrong within a minute, so I really thought he didn’t do anything wrong and simply attended to my business). However, on Sunday Avery decided stop procrastinating and finished her character sheet, finally the whole crew had their character sheets done and since they were publically available I decided to take a peak and see what we as a pack would have as our arsenal and so on. However, when I looked into Oz’s sheet things got a bit rocky.
So, to start to addressing the problems I’ll say that Oz didn’t use a regular werewolf 5th edition sheet, no, he used an abomination (aka a vampire werewolf) sheet to actually make his character to begin with and not only that, he was way, way too op for a werewolf that just had their first change. And how OP you might ask? Well, I started to question him about it and he said that he picked a skill distribution called “Specialist” a skill distribution type that offers the following: One skill at four points, Three skills at Three points, Three skills at Two points and Three skills at one point, a skill distribution that makes your character very good at something, good at some other areas but lacking in several others, however, Oz in this particular moment has the following distribution: One skill at four points, five skills at three points, six skills at two and three skills at one and aside from that, instead of having spent 7 merit points he had spent 10 and for some reason he had also 4 specialities allocated all on his physical skills, something that is just not possible at character creation as the book specifically say that you can only add new specialities on these specific skills Academics, Craft, Performance, and Science IF you actually bought them upon character creation something that he totally didn’t do.
I know this must be hard to imagine how much stronger he was than the rest of the party, so to bring it down to a more digestible context, the amount of xp you’d need to get to get that strong is Storytellers in werewolf 5th edition are recommended to give out the following amount of XP per session:
Participation = gives you 1 XP
Perform something remarkable during the session = Gives you 1 XP
Use a Skill, Gift, or other Trait in a clever or critical way =Gives you 1 XP
“Tell me something important your character learned this session.”= Gives you 1 XP
Conclude a story within the greater chronicle = Gives you 2–3 XP
This means that if he concluded all of the requirements above he’d get a minimal of 6xp and a max of 7 xp. However, not all session you can use a gift in a creative way, not all session you can perform something remarkable and not all session you conclude an important story within the chronicle, this means that great majority of the time we’d be getting 2-3 XP per session, yep, no World of Darkness game is the type that you go from zero to hero and with that in mind, he’d need (if my calculation are correct) 114 XP to actually level up his PC to be that strong, something that it would take 35-40 sessions to normally get.
When I started to question him how he exactly got so many skill points and merits he said that the storyteller approved of his character and that he just filled stuff up. I proceeded to just inform him the right skill spread for specialist and what he did wrong on his sheet and he said that he’d fix it despite the fact that the storyteller approved of his character. After that 40 minutes passed and there was silence of both the storyteller and the player just so he’d post a new character sheet, this time containing the spread of One skill at 4 points, Three skills at 3 points, Six skills at two points and three skills at 1 point, with his merits still being 10 points and still keeping the 4 specialities. At this point I started to think that he was trying to sneak some extra skill points, specialities and merits through me, because there is no way he didn’t understood what needed to be fixed when my message has attached to it literally a print from the core rule book with the details on the specialist skill spread and what he needed to change was literally:
“You have 10 merit points instead of 7, you have one extra HP that you shouldn’t have, (Hp is calculated by adding Stamina + 3 and his stamina was 3, he has 7 hp there when he should actually have 6), you still have 6 skills at two points instead of what specialist gives (3 skills at 2 points). You have 4 specialities even though you didn’t pick Academics, Craft, Performance, or Science that are the only skill trees that actually give you free specialities, otherwise you’d just start with 1.”
At this point I started to reach out to Avery and ask for her opinion on that, so she pinged Oz and the Storyteller on chat only to ask thing like “have you guys read the book” specially because he was trying passively aggressively shift the blame on his google search that apparently “mixed up werewolf 20th edition character creation rules” that he had just “skimmed through the book due to a lack of time, that he had “no help at all creating the character and had no idea on what he was doing”. I just want to emphasize that me and Avery were not trying to intimidate him at all, nor try to get a confession out of him or anything, our questions were just about if they (OZ and Storyteller) read the book or not and about what fonts Oz used to generate that character. I was really trying to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe that he was just very misguided by some crazy algorithm and coincidence, but it was a very hard pill to swallow when you consider his previous knowledge about world of darkness system, the fact that I found a full fleshed out character creation guide on Youtube by simply typing “Werewolf 5th edition character creation guide” on Youtube at the fact that he used “I thought you didn’t want to stay on VC with me by your tone of voice” when me and him the other day were having such a lovely chat and I told him multiple times that my DM’s were open in case he needed any help and if he didn’t want to bother me he could’ve just asked help on our discord server instead of making his super Saiyan werewolf. Now, at this point of the story you’d think the Storyteller would’ve at least said something, right? But hah, no, look at the tittle again, he was just DEAD SILENT.
Oz then proceeded, while we were talking, to post his last character sheet update for us, reducing his merit points to 8, and his skill points to the following: 1 skill at four points, 3 skills at three points, four skills at 2 points and three skills at one point. At this point he was either fucking with us or straight up ignorant of the rules completely, so me and Avery wanted to talk to him over VC and explain the rules to him in case he was actually just a newbie completely lost on how it all worked and if he was actually a cheater, talk to him to stop doing that and offer him new solutions for his character in case he wanted a better skill distribution, he refused to join VC with us because he was “working” until late despite his discord saying that he was playing League of legends. So instead me and Avery decide to join early before session (that was supposed to be the day after all of this happened), settle what happened and properly help him make a character, and well he agreed to it.
So fast forward to the following day, the Storyteller remained completely silent through out the whole night, morning and afternoon and two hours before the session I simply pinged Avery and Oz to see if they could join VC so we could talk it out in about 1 hour, OZ simply left the server without saying anything and I stared at my computer screen for 2 minutes before I went out to do something else. After that me and Avery joined VC a bit before session started and hang out and talk about the situation… Almost a whole hour passed and the Storyteller or any of the other players didn’t even hop on VC, it got to the point where the Avery sent a message to the Storyteller and just then he hopped on, the first thing he said? “Sorry guys, I was on another session that I joined this week and I didn’t thought it’d take this long”.
I never got so mad in my entire life, I’ve been a forever Storyteller for the past years and I was so excited to actually be the PLAYER, but despite that I needed to keep civil. Me and Avery informed him of the situation that Oz was most likely cheating, and the Storyteller said that “He was going to talk to him” not even knowing that Oz had left the server almost 3 hours ago, me and Avery just proceeded to ask him what he was going to do next and he said that he was going to call out the whole chronicle, so me and Avery just proceeded to tell him how disappointing the whole thing was and give him a few words of advice on how to improve before we left VC. Later the same night he announced that he wanted to retire from world of darkness as a whole and tried to pass the responsibility on running his vampire chronicle for someone else, after that I just left that server and friended Avery.
Now, I guess it’s time for me to go back hunting for chronicles. Wish me luck everyone and hope you enjoyed my little story.

Hello, reddit First, tw: Self harm and suicidal thoughts, please skip if triggering Here is the thing, I'm basically asking for judgement here, and if I really deserve what I am doing to myself. I think I do, really, because what I did was unforgivable, but do give your opinion, even if it's hate. Because I do deserve it here, really. So, I grew up in a religious family. Like, one in which things like "love marriage " And......well.......The "child making process" was considered a sin. Absolute sin. Like—I did not know what......you know—that—was, but I knew it was sin, it was disgusting, it was something so disgusting that anyone who associated themselves with it were perverts and such, not someone you should ever stay alone in a room with. Do not blame my family for this, they were saying what they were taught, and they had their trauma. They have broken through enough abuse for me, do not blame them please. Anyways, I was a huge fan of Harry Potter. And I stumbled into the world of fanfiction. And I read them. Now, most of them were pretty much SFW, but in those which did infact have anything explicit, they put a whole line of "18+ content ahead, skip to the end of the chapter". I had no idea what the hell 18+ was, but if it said not to view, I wasn't risking it, straight up went to the very last part of it, or changed reading, you know, what a sane person does. Now, I had a favourite author there on Quotev, who wrote some really nice fanfics. Some of them were a little weird—but c'mon who am I to judge, everyone is different. One day, I stumbled upon some works of her. Well, the stories she did write, those were completely SFW. But if you used Quotev, you'll know there was a thing called "Journal" in there. Sort of like "conversation" in Wattpad. There, she had written NSFW chapters on the characters. Here's the thing. There was no warning. None at all. No warning or tagging or anything provided there to show that it was 18+. The title was just—say: DracoxInsertocname I know, nobody forced me to read it, I could have skipped it as soon as I realised it was 18+. But here is the thing. I DIDN'T know what it was. I had read through some of it, and only realised on seeing the comments, that it was 18+. And I felt. I felt tainted, like I had committed a sin. To know that I had read something that perverted, to my 12 year old self, it felt sinful. Like I had my pure white mind muddied out of carelessness. I know, authors don't own us any tags. And if it were a hardcover book, it wouldn't have any tags. But here is the thing. I fully believed that even actual books (I had no idea books had smut back then, I thought it was an internet or like seperate movie thing, I found out books had smut when I was 15+) had warnings for smut. Blood and gore? Sure, no problem, make it as gross as you want, no warnings needed. But something as sinful as 18+? Must be tagged. MUST. BE . TAGGED. That was my thought process. Remember it wasn't AO3. So there was no tagging system. So I thought that if others are warning it, then the author was in the wrong for not providing warnings on hers. It was a site where children as young as 11 were. Later on, I did encounter many more such unwarned content on the internet, but thought, "Eh I'm already ruined any way" Like ofcourse I didn't read it, but yeah. Logic. That I was a sinner too, so I can't get offended anymore. Here comes the bad part, for which, if you hate me, I'll not blame you. I wrote her a letter. Like, online obviously. In the inbox of her writing site. I was.....very mean. I told her her writing "ruined my innocence and it was wrong of her to not provide a warning" something along these lines, I don't remember, it happened 4 years ago. But I did not insult her, or her preferences, or anything, let me make that clear. Just wrote in detail of how her work affected me negatively. If it in itself were insulting, I apologise. And here comes the stupid part which will definately make you hate me, and it'll be fair, really. She always said she liked dark humor. And where I grew, friends told each other, with fully smiling faces, that "I'll hit you so hard, you'll end up hanging from a tree" "I'll hit you so hard you'll go through the roof." Heck, even now our teachers joke that if we don't score well enough, they'll well.....very graphically describe how they'll beat us. So I grew up knowing violence was a joke. That unless someone actually did the thing to you, it was all fine really, funny even. Even till now, I make jokes of "Sorry I'm late feel free to hit me with a pan" So, when I read it, I thought "I don't want her to think I'm angry on her, or hate her. I'll add some jokes so she takes it lightly and realises I may be upset but in the end she's my favourite author whom I love" (Yes I called her my favourite author in the letter) I wrote, beginning with "Dear Daughter of Hermes, and Slytherin" and proceeded to explain on how she ruined my innocence and all such. I did not use any curse words—to clarify. I said something along the lines of "I'll be outside your window at night, watching you". Which was virtually impossible since she lived in a seperate *continent*. "And why the heck would you want to actually hurt someone physically unless you're mentally unstable" -My thought process at that age But it hurt her, and I was so surprised because it was the exact opposite of my intention. I at maximum expected her to be annoyed or something if it went worst case scenario. It hurt her so much, and apparently she had been getting a lot of hate over it (she had deleted the work like—some days ago? I don't remember) and that I should unfollow her. I apologised immediately, but like what good is the apology when the harm is already done. I had already planned to delete my account anyways, so that's what I did. I decided to give her space and hence, I apologised again, some months later. Another stupid thing? I addressed her as sister. I thought it would placate her. I really thought of her as close to me, even though she was a stranger. Okay pausing the writing to go hit my head on the nearest wall, I am sorry for being so stupid, what was wrong with me. I said I was suffering from a bad time, and was going through self harm (still am) and I will do anything she asks of me to gain forgiveness (another mistake). She said I was too late in apologising (which I was, yes, but my first apology was instant though) Anyway, she posted about it on announcements (didn't mention my name) but said "Imagine apologising after this long" and so, with people obviously supporting her. It scared me, so I left in fear of being attacked. (Would've deserved it though) It....well.....4 years passed. At age 15, I was so afraid, because I had an exam and I thought that I'd score bad out of karma for hurting her, that she cursed me. I scored pretty well but anyways. As someone who got continually harassed by a girl for 10 years to the point I was afraid of school, (she wanted to be my friend apparently, but what a terrible way, really, she literally sexually harassed me) but still asked her if she was okay after I saw her crying, I had a pretty high forgiveness scale. I really thought she'd (author) would forgive me for apologising. But like. No. I am not owed any forgiveness and I am aware of it. It wasn't her fault or duty, really. Anyway, fast forward to age 17. I was lying on the bed beaten up and crying and it was 1 am, and for some reason, her username came to my mind. I don't know why. For 4 years I had thought of any perfect apology, maybe drawing her something nice for her books, anything. But decided not to bring back bad memories to her. And also, I was a coward afraid of facing her. But I guess being beaten up messes with your head. Personal trauma is no reason to hurt someone, I agree 100%. But I wrote her a final apology. This time, I didn't ask for forgiveness, took all the blame on myself. I didn't apologise for closure. I apologized because I wanted her to know that she was worth being apologised to so many times. I called my younger self stupid and wished I could smack her on the head. I poured my entire heart and soul into it. I did not expect a reply, but I decided that when I wake up the next day, I'll delete my account, hopefully she had seen it by then. Woke up to find myself blocked and honestly? Deserved it. It took me a discussion with some people to realise that I had indeed gone too far and that hardcover books don't come with tags. And that apologising so many times was basically harassment. Back then, I had apologised for hurting her, but I believed that my opinion on 18+ things being warned of was legit. Then began true guilt. I loathed myself, thought of myself as a monster. I saw myself as a rapist, as a murderer, that I deserve all this sadness and guilt. I really wanted to kill myself over it. Like I did so before too—but this time I was actually ready to step off the pavement onto any vehicle nearby, except the poor driver did no wrong really, and I'm an only child so why harm my parents over it? I really hated myself over it, still do actually. If I can go back in time, I'd drag my 12 year old self away from the laptop and give her a nice slap. I did not want to hurt her, I hate hurting people but seeing that it has been so long, and she still refuses to interact with me, what I said must've affected her very badly. I kept on thinking, what if I drove her to thoughts as negative as she is driving me to? Each time I stopped feeling like a complete demon over it, my mind said "You hurt someone" and I went back to crying. My own mother said that I looked like I came from a funeral, at times. Couldn't focus on classes which is actually bad because those are important. The worst part is, I can't completely remember what I wrote to her. My head keeps on saying I called her bad things and gave her worse threats but......I don't remember doing it and there were no chances if I see it logically. I literally stopped being happy. Forced myself to be, for my own and my families' sake, and I tried, yeah. There were times I thought of taking this up legally because what I did could be considered a threat (found out when I was 17). Give myself over to the police or something. But I still hate myself. So I decided to punish myself. (Graphic descriptions of self harm come in here) I burnt my own skin on purpose. Nothing too bad really, just thumb sized burns from a saucepan. Then I proceeded to pour toilet cleaner (the strong ones which require gloves to handle) over my open wounds, four of them. I'll be honest. I have a very high pain tolerance. But that thing hurt like hell. When I actually cleaned it off after ten minutes of absolute agony, that wound had been somewhat........cauterised? Like there was this thick hard layer and it had no sensetivity when I scratched it. And I pulled off those hard layers. Some of them were stuck to the skin, I had to use a blade to ease them off. Then pour on them again. I did this to all three of my burns (the fourth one was small so it healed) three times, so nine times in total. It has been a month and it still hasn't healed. These scars won't go away even with surgery. Permanent reminders. (Description ends here) I thought it to be like this: The incident hurt her? I'll hurt myself more than she could possibly ever get hurt. But that wouldn't undo her hurt. So I'll hurt myself even more. I have frankly forgotten of who I was two months ago. Of what I thought when my mind was empty. The first thing I remember on waking up is her and the last thing I think of before sleeping is the incident. Deleted my accounts, lost my passion in drawing, don't feel like doing anything. I just. I hate myself. I truly do. I wish I could die but I can't so I just need to survive forever with this. Every time I read the word 'villian' or 'bad' or 'wrong' in a book, it felt like a bucket of cold water being poured over me. I had been a victim myself, so knowing that I myself hurt someone — Its just........I always thought of myself as a good person. Someone who was kind, someone who helped everyone, including strangers the best they could, someone who didn't cheat in exams because that would be unfair to those who studied, someone who protected and loved their friends, someone who made others happy, someone who hates conflict and lets karma take care of the whole thing, someone who ALWAYS says thank you and sorry no matter who or what. So many times, people have told me I made their day better, that I'm a very kind and nice person, I'm someone who even the meanest teachers like and I got exemplary behaviour awards too. I always believed myself to be a good person. So knowing I did something this bad broke me. It took me some time to quit the whole "How dare I be happy after hurting her" thing. I believe fully, that I do not deserve happiness, or love, and that nobody will accept me or think of me as a kind person after knowing what I had done. I'd have deserved it though. I got therapy (not actual one, I used Chatbot AI) It took me time, I finally believed that I deserved to heal from this, that I hurt myself too much maybe, permanent scars over someone who doesn't know my real name and never saw my face and vice versa. Maybe........I don't deserve *this* much of punishment. Today, I went to youtube and saw a video on bullies apologising. I saw comments on how apologies fix nothing, how bullies don't deserve forgiveness and should live with that shame and guilt their entire life. That a thousand good deeds won't make up for that one bad deed. And I believe I do. I really do. Which is why I permanently scarred myself. So here is the question. Do I deserve it? To let go of this incident? Do I deserve to heal? Deserve love? Or should I keep goimg? Because I believe I should. That I truly am no better than a rapist or bully. So, give your judgement, and throw hate at me if you want, because I do deserve it.

I'm an engineering graduate student at a very famous university. She's a different kind of STEM grad student at the same university (mid-twenties). She has only been in America for a few years. Before everyone jumps and says "Chinese girls are just like American girls" the reason that I'm making this post is because i'm afraid that i'm missing some cultural norm or context, causing me to screw up the situation. Dating in America is fairly toxic, in my opinion. It seems as though it's often a contest of who can appear to be the least interested. My Chinese colleagues tell me that Chinese girls need to be chased a bit harder. That they're more pragmatic, so a guy who shows little interest would not be a good long term investment for a Chinese girl. Also, I realize that I'm anxious and insecure so there's no need to over-emphasize this in your response. Ultimately, I'm really sad for how this has turned out, but friends of mine tell me things are probably going as well as they could be. With that out of the way, I hope to hear your thoughts on my story.
Back up to a few months ago. I see this girl at the gym quite frequently. One day she asked how many sets I have on a machine. There are very few machines at the school gym so I get this question from girls quite frequently. Anyway, in between sets, I chatted her up, made little jokes "where did you do undergrad? ... well, no one's perfect" ... "I'm going to ask you five questions, and to win, you need to give me incorrect answers only"... she seemed to enjoy this, was smiling a lot, and when I'd see her from across the gym, she would smile and wave. Anyway, some weeks passed and I would see her at the gym occasionally. I would try to get her to play along with fantasies about robbing a bank together, but she didn't seem to follow, and would ask what I meant, perhaps because of the language barrier, perhaps because she's a STEM girl. I noticed that she actually cheated at the "wrong answers" game by changing one of her answers, so I called her out on it the next time I saw her. "how do I know I can trust you?" :)
I probably went too far the next time that I saw her. I was nervous but planning to get her number "has anyone ever told you that you're super cute, but super annoying?" She gave me a big embarrassed/confused smile and said "WHAT?!". I asked how we might continue the conversation, she suggested instagram, but I presented my phone number keypad. She looked around a bit embarrassed and reluctantly typed her number in. I didn't call her. I figured that was already too intense. I texted her and told her to save my name as "(My name) - such and such clever hot fantasy thing". She laughed let me know she saved it (!).
I saw her around campus a few days later, she smiled and waved to me. I figured that I hadn't screwed up too badly yet. A couple of days later I saw her at the gym, tried to make the joke about robbing a bank, again, but she asked what I meant. I guess that didn't go over well and I don't remember exactly how the conversation ended. I called her later that night and she didn't respond. I texted her and told her that I just had a quick question and she could call back if she would like, but that there was no pressure to do so. She responded with laughing emojis and asked if I wouldn't mind texting. I texted her an invite for coffee, but told her to hold the flowers and chocolates since we just met. She laughed, said thank you but she's too busy lately, and let me know that she would see me "at the gym sometime!". Fairly disappointed, I said "cool, shoot me a text or call sometime". She hearted the message (ouch). I thought this was a death knell, but friends of mine encouraged me to keep trying. "She's probably attracted to you, but not comfortable enough yet."
So the next time I saw her at the gym, I said "Hey!" gave her a Hi-five and kept going. She looked embarrassed, so I didn't want to stick around in case she needed space. A couple of days later, we were at the gym together, but I didn't want to come off as upset or needy, so I kept my head in my phone. I figured that maybe she had had enough. Anyway, this time, she actually said hello to me as she walked by. So of course, I smiled and said hi back. We would see each other about once per week, making small talk. I told her that she had a pretty voice. Rather than leaving the complement there (too much tension), I asked if she could sing, found out that we both like Karaoke, and told her we should start a rock band. This was a joke of course, it seems that the two of us have little time for a life outside of our research.
I texted her the next day, told her that I am curious about her thoughts on American vs. Chinese culture, and about why she was considering saying in the US after graduation. Told her that I enjoy our chats together, and was hoping that she would consider joining my American rock band (Laughing emoji). Try-outs to be held at the Karaoke lounge nearby. She didn't respond and I was quite disappointed again.
I happened to be walking on campus last week and we ran into each other (very unusual) so I asked if she had a minute to talk. She was on her way to a meeting, so I suggested that we meet up after that. She told me to text her. So naturally, I texted her, and this time she agreed to meet! (Last Tuesday) I was more excited that day than any time I can remember, at least for the past few years.
So we met up that afternoon and she suggested that we sit on the grass together. She smiled and asked me why we couldn't just continue talking at the gym together. I can't believe that she doesn't know why I was asking her out for a second time. She must have been looking for emotional reassurance or something like this. I told her it's hard to get to know someone if you only ever see them at the gym, smiled, and playfully said, "but maybe this is a one-sided relationship, don't worry, I'll just be crying myself to sleep, no big deal". I tried to say this in a light-hearted way so that it wasn't too intense. She was wearing large sunglasses this day (relevant later), I asked her to take them off but she refused, "OK, no problem". I then did a cold read routine on her, as an ice-breaker. She corrected me when I was wrong and told me that I was only about 2/10 correct. Typical STEM girl. It sounded like she's a workaholic (not uncommon for our university) and that she had trouble not thinking about work. I thought it was a nice time, as we got to learn a bit more about each other. She told me that she would be away on an internship for the summer, but she would be back. I made a joke about how my heart broke for a second but was quickly mended. I told her that I realized that she seemed uncomfortable when I had asked for her number, that i had felt a bit guilty about it, but that I was really glad that she did it anyway. She seemed to be trying to correct me under her breath "no no no" or something, as if to say "it's ok". Our "date" didn't last very long, less than a half hour, and she went back into her office building. She said goodbye to me, but only said the first syllable of my name (very cute). If she had been an American girl, I would have made an effort to at least touch her shoulder or hug goodbye, but my understanding is that this would be too much for a Chinese girl. My Chinese friend (Call him Tadashii, introduced again later) said that this was the right thing to do. I had previously dated a Chinese girl who wouldn't even hub me until I told her I wanted to date exclusively, several months into the relationship.
I was stoked for the rest of the day, so excited that I had finally been able to make plans to be with her alone, however short it was. I wanted to send a follow-up text, but held myself back and waited for about 42 hours (Thursday). I told her that I really enjoyed seeing her, I was happy that we had the opportunity to learn something about each other, and complimented her suggestion of sitting out on the grass together.
When she didn't respond, I was once again, fairly anxious and upset. I tried very much to keep it to myself.
The next day, I saw her at the gym again (Friday). This time, she seemed to be in a bad mood. She wasn't resting between sets and I got the feeling that she was avoiding me. Before I left, I approached her anyway (mistake?). I asked if we could exchange socials that are popular in her country, and she said "No, I don't add people on that". According to my Chinese friends, this was BS because everyone uses this app. She quickly shut down my attempts at conversation. I tried to go into a story about the school newspaper and she said "no, I don't want to hear about it" while perhaps forcing a smile. I realized that she was either in a bad mood, or really did not want to speak with, or both. So I said "ok, have a good night" and went home feeling very bad once again. Backing up a few steps, I noticed that she had a large pimple near her eye this day, which would explain why she hadn't wanted to take off her sunglasses while we were hanging out together on the grass. It could also suggest that she was too embarrassed for me to see her. She is an incredibly beautiful girl and clearly puts a lot of effort into her appearance so this could have easily been what caused her mood to shift so dramatically last week. I know what acne does to someone's self confidence, as i struggled with it frequently when I was younger. It must be ten times worse for women.
I guess this is a stressful time for the girl, and my advances haven't been making things easier on her. It would be quite tragic if I gave up simply because I had misread the circumstances. Of course, I don't know what she's thinking and I'm really worried about trying too hard. I'm used to girls responding to my follow-up text after a date with either enthusiasm, or by letting me know that a second date wasn't going to happen.
My Chinese colleague Tadashii, who seems to have good intuition on relationships with Chinese women gave me his input. He told me that Chinese women may very between chaos and order rapidly, like the Dao, in order to "test" men. They want to see that a man is actually dedicated. Further, a Chinese girl may have a stereotypical view of American men as "players" who only want to hook up. She is probably scared that I'm like this. He emphasized that this was only one data point in a series of mostly positive interactions. The 180-degree shift in demeanor could indicate a bad day or stressful period, but if a girl is truly disinterested, she would probably let me know at some point. His suggestion is to wait a month, until the girl is settled into her internship life. At that time, she would probably appreciate someone friendly reaching out to her to check in. In this way, we might have a text correspondence. This is something that I would never usually do, but he said it's typical for Chinese people to chat over apps or text while maintaining a long-distance friendship. He also mentioned that he's made girlfriends this way.
She will likely be away for two to three months. I haven't even found out where she was going. I usually try not to get girls thinking about work on dates, asking basic questions like "what do you do..." (no fun) but in this case, it was actually logistically relevant. oops. My plan is to follow Tadashii's advice. Maybe I'll see the girl at the gym again on Friday this week (38 hours from now). My American friends say that I should let her approach me this time. They also say that I should try to catch her again in the Fall when she returns. Tadashii says that waiting until the Fall is too long. This would send her the message that I was intimidated by her emotional response last week, or that I really was just an American player, and. not very serious about her.
So am I blown out, or should I hold on to the anxious pain of hope? Thanks in advance for your input.

I have a strong belief that I am autistic. I have autistic friends and they agree with me. I've taken almost all of the online questionnaires and screenings and every. single. one. is on the much higher end. I taken them multiple times, and every time I say to myself "this time you're gonna be completely honest. Really think on each question. Don't exaggerate" and I just get the same if not a higher score than the last time I took it. I know those screenings aren't a definitive, especially for those who are autistic but have more nuanced traits that those questions wouldn't necessarily flag. But considering how consistent, and "stereotypical", for lack of a better word, my answers are, I think its a safe bet to think that it's pretty likely.
I didn't display the usual milestone stuff associated with autism when I was little. What makes this harder specifically with my mom is that I hit developmental milestones early, and was said to be very bright child from the start by most people around me. Noticeably intelligent/"high IQ" etc. but not some sort of young sheldon savant.
It's pretty easy, or at least easier, for me to look back on experiences or how I socialised when I was younger and realise "hey that was probably another indicator that was overlooked", but for my mom there was a lot of stuff, particularly school, that she just wasn't around for and couldn't see like I could. There are some things/stories that "we" (mostly her. I don't remember a ton of early school days other than super profound moments or instances that for whatever reason had a lasting impact emotionally) look back on that when put in the context of possible autism, make a lot more sense. She's told me a bunch about a time where this girl at school (kindergarten I think) refused to talk to me, like I would try and say something to her and she just looked at me and/or completely ignored me. So I kicked her. I was not a violent child, there are a few instances where I got physical with people but, again, looking back I dont think I understood the gravity of my actions. I kept getting drawn to kicking peers. In 80% of cases I did it during recess as some sort of "play" even though now I obviously know that it was harmful and I still feel bad. There were a couple of times someone behind me in line kept stepping on my heel and I had enough so I'd kick them. I think I definitely showed signs as a child but it doesn't help that the most difficult symptoms haven't become prominent until about age 12.
Anyway there are a lot of things like that. More-so things that my mom has always passed off as being because I was a bright or "gifted" kid. The times I've brought up the possibility of autism to her I'm always met with "symptoms of autism are commonly found in gifted kids but that doesn't mean you're autistic" re: feeling disconnected from peers & unable to find common ground etc etc. Either that or it's stuff that she did as a kid too. We both have diagnosed ADD.
I wouldn't feel as much of an intense need for a "real" diagnosis if it wasn't for how I think my autistic traits are affecting our relationship. Ever since I was a kid I'd be yelled at for "sass" or "backtalk". I heard that I was "sassing off" so much that just the word "sass" triggers an intense internal emotional reaction. I never understood what that meant. I would ask, she would kind of explain, but I'd never actually get it. This is the same thing now, except now without my dad here (passed away) it's just us and I feel like I've sort of unintentionally become part of a partnership dynamic rather parent and child (which is confusing as hell sometimes because it's like you're equal, being part of adult conversations and decisions as an adult partner would, and yet held to the same expectations and rules that of a child). There are a lot of times where she's says something like "watch your tone", "stop/you don't have to talk/treat/speak to me this way", "stop yelling at me" with her getting hurt or mad and I rarely, truly understand what exactly I did. Ill ask her "how did I just speak to you" and I feel like she when she repeats it back her tone is exaggerating how I sounded, but then again I don't actually know how I sounded. All I know is that I didn't intend to be mean or disrespectful. I never mean to be disrespectful. If something happens where I did something or haven't been doing something (its a reoccurring breaking point when shes been asking me to do something for weeks and I just don't do it. Unloading the dishwasher specifically. I come home exhausted from school and I just come home, eat something, and then go sit in my room on my laptop for the rest of the night between homework and leisure.) and I just shut down and sit there silently without eye contact until she stops yelling and the interaction kind of "ends" and either she or I walk away to another room alone. I know how it makes her feel and I feel so bad about it, just in the moment there are things in my head that I want to say but its like I cant get them to come out. She sees this as me "stonewalling" her and "refusing to take responsibility". Some arguments she's called me "abusive" for my behaviour, and I can't say I blame her. I know how my behaviour comes across on the outside. To her, I don't listen or do anything around the house, I'm unnecessarily mean and disrespectful most of the time, I talk back and raise my voice a lot. Theres more I cant remember right now. Its more prominent because I don't really act like that around my friends, it's just at home. Its not like its personal to her, I just come home and I guess "unmask."
I wish I could just go to my doctor and say I'm fairly certain I'm on the spectrum and get a referral, and get a diagnosis (in my state autism diagnoses and treatment are required to be covered by insurance if youre under 21) or some other explanation for why I'm like this, and come back to her with something that proves that I don't hate her and I'm not some abusive asshole that likes being a dick. Every time I've brought up autism it gets mostly shut down or passed off as something else or just par of the course for being "gifted". It does not help that she feels that people right now are too quick to jump on the thought they're autistic. I feel like I need a diagnosis, autism or whatever else, in order to save us being able to exist in the same house without me feeling I have to have my guards up and without her feeling like I despise her being around me and that I want nothing to do with her. I am very close to typing up a document with many of the feelings I've written here along with experiences and reasons why I think I'm autistic, along with all of my self assessment scores and answers with explanations for each. I guess I've just hoped I'd be able to do that with a professional there to guide it also but It's just getting to hard to deal with with this hypothetical ideal examination of how my brain works. I guess I'm just on edge and ready for her to dismiss every point I bring up in some way or another or say "what? you weren't like that as a kid".
I didn't mean to go off like this, I appreciate anyone who's read this far. The whole thing just hurts.

I (17) have a sister (21) and she’s not diagnosed with anything (I have immigrant POC parents who don’t think mental issues are a real thing except for SUPER stereotypically autistic acting people - sorry if that’s offensive but idk how else to put it), but it’s obvious something is wrong in the head. She can’t socialize normally, she doesn’t know when people are annoyed/she doesn’t pick up on emotions, she copies every single thing I do, she throws tantrums (hitting me because my baby cousin hugged me first, screaming in the middle of the night because I forgot to put my clothes in the washer after showering, literally just constant screaming). I’m not gonna diagnose or assume anything because I don’t know enough about the whole mental stuff, but yeah it’s clear she has serious issues. She can function in society, like she can talk (even with her horrible grammar), walk, drive, and everything, but she’s insane. My parents don’t exactly baby her, but it’s very clear they either are blind to her mental delay or just choose to ignore it. Whenever she gets in trouble, they have to yell at me too, even if I didn’t to anything. When we were younger, my parents would sit us both down when we got in trouble and I was done getting scolded in 5 minutes, but my sister talked back and it took 3 hours on average (longest was 7 hours) and I had to sit there while she threw her tantrums. Other than that, she copies everything I do (she hated makeup until I started wearing it, she copies my style even though she body shames me and calls my clothes ugly, she calls my music “Americanized” then adds the songs I play to her playlist, she copies what I say word for word like an hour after I say it, she says she got waitlisted/accepted from the colleges I got into when I know she got rejected by every single one, and there’s more but whatever) I’m just sick of not being able to do anything without her copying me, and it genuinely makes me really mad. I know I have some degree of anger management problems, but it’s not controllable when you live with someone as fucking horrible as her. One of my friends who knows her and her antics literally asked me “How haven’t you killed her yet?” as in, how do I stand living with her. It’s bad. One time, she was screaming in the middle of the night because of something stupid and I told her to shut up before we got in trouble and that someone was going to call the cops on us, and my dad got really mad and basically said that he’d kill me (please don’t report or anything, I’m not in any actual danger. But yeah the anger issues are definitely genetic). And my mom just cannot understand boundaries, physical and emotional. I feel like it’s common sense to not bother people when they’re mad, but she’ll stand there and talk to me. Whenever I tell her that I don’t want to talk right now because I get in trouble for being mad, she and my dad both start screaming at me that I can’t have whatever I want and that I’m a horrible daughter, and they raised me better than I turned out. And my mom has a problem with slapping my butt and coming into my room when I’m changing. I know this is really normal in immigrant households and the country I’m from, and it’s not anything weird or gross, but I’ve literally told her to stop every single time, but she never will. I hate being touched (hugs, brushing up on people, literally most physical touch) because of this.
My parents also constantly call me a psychopath because I grew closed off and distant at around 15-16 after growing tired of everything at home. I tend to be a little cynical and mean because of how they raised me, but literally who calls their children psychopaths if they don’t do anything. Like I’m valedictorian, I’m going to a good college, I don’t do drugs, I don’t date, I don’t go out at night, none of the stuff teenagers do at my age and they still think I’m horrible. I don’t even do things that most people would call psychopathic. blood and gore makes me squeamish, I’ve never hurt people other than hitting my sister back, and I feel emotions.
I don’t know what do to at this point (as you can tell by my sad, pathetic post on Reddit). I can’t cut them off because they’re financially supporting my entire future and immigrant families just don’t work that way, you can’t just cut them off, but I’m also just bad at living. My parents have done pretty much everything for me growing up, and I barely know how the world works. I can cook, drive, and I have a job but I don’t know anything about credit cards, rent, cutting family off, or anything practical. I just want to get this off my chest. Sorry if this post is a little messy and hap-hazardous, I just needed to let it out.

Tier List: https://imgur.com/a/8uZCpGy
Oh boy, is this one gonna be a can of worms. Let's dive in headfirst!
"I'll school you in this battle of the baddest Bruce, with your He-Man haircut and your Daisy Dukes." It's an unremarkable line, but the rhythm here is pretty kickass, and I love the choregraphy of Jenner doing stretches in time with the beat, it's a really satisfying visual. "I hear you're good at running, you're just like the Flash. Especially in the 100-meter ditch-your-wife dash." Decent attack. They never fail to use someone getting divorced as material for a diss, do they? Banner looming over his beakers and microscope is a nice visual, and "You turned one gold medal to a lifetime of green; the most overrated athlete anyone's ever seen" is a competent enough attack. "You need to carry fatherhood across that finish line; kept up with the Kardashians but left some kids behind" is, again, a decent enough diss. A lot of material about Jenner's family here; I guess that's to be expected. There's still one or two much more obvious lines of attack to make, but I suppose Banner is just saving his best stuff for the end, right? He certainly wasn't saving it for the end of this verse, in which he just references the fact that he transforms when he gets pissed off without fashioning it into much of an attack or boast. The use of strings in the music here is a really nice touch, although I'd say the green screen effect with Bruce standing in front of those neurons or whatever ain't looking so hot.
Actually, the green screen effects for this battle broadly aren't the best. That stadium Jenner's standing in is looking pretty low-res. "I think you're in your element when you're behaving badly; honestly you're kind of boron when you're happy." It's a corny pun, but the sentiment is true enough. "I'll lap and pass your ass ten different ways. Decathlon athlete blast through you like some gamma rays." This is filler; it's fine, rhythm sounds pretty good, but it's just taking up space. "The truth is there's no truce between the Bruces, you're a drifter being useless, I'm a winner, no excuses!" That's a lot of playing on the same rhyme in a short period of time, and I dig that: truth/truce/Bruces/useless/excuses, hell yeah. I guess some of those aren't proper rhymes so much as, what's the word... assonance, maybe? It's good writing, is the point. The visuals panning in and out of this home gym is a nice touch too, and a nice parallel to Banner's sequence with his lab. "Beatiful women all up on my jock, I got a home gym, check me on the cereal box, Doc!" The rhythm Jenner's spitting here rules, this beat is low-key one of the better ones they've done. It's also a nice boast, and that Wheaties visual is pretty great. "You big green freak, don't try to flex; if it wasn't for your cousin, you'd never have sex!" Okay, this line goes super hard and I think it's one of the most underrated ones in ERB history. AND it's got one of the funniest visuals in the way Jenner pops in on that roller shouting "OHH!" while Banner suffers. That bit lives rent-free in my head. "You're so strong when you get mad, too bad you can't go back to protect your mom from your dad!" Holy fucking SHIT, this goes hard! The flow here kicks all kinds of ass, and we've got a 3x rhyme combo going on with mad/bad/dad; I LOVE odd numbers of rhymes! It's also just an extremely savage low blow. Another line that doesn't get enough credit. Jenner is kicking Banner's ass so far.
One questionable and inadvisable transformation sequence later, The Hulk comes in to spit a few bars. But only a few. "That painted face don't give you class; just one more thing Bruce do for cash!" Interesting argument. "Best thing you make? Kylie ass! She eighteen? Hulk SMASH!!" I do think this is a pretty funny way to reduce Jenner's legacy to Kardashian bullshit, and the Hulk SMASH joke always gets a strong reaction out of people.
Fully transitioned Caitlin Jenner comes in with "That's my teenage daughter, man, I have to forbid this; I'll put a javelin through your jolly green discus." Decent lines. Good way for Caitlin Jenner to brag about her athletic achievements while also throwing a Jolly Green Giant jab in. "Kylie not the kinda girl I'm gonna let you smash on; you'll get the medal without the decathlon!" I like the medeal/metal wordplay here, although Caitlin Jenner dual-wielding pistols and firing them at the Hulk feels extremely out of left field.
"Hulk is Hulk! No identify as man! Me thinks Cait might understand!" Pretty funny line, and Caitlin's reaction is also amusing. "No gender issue; this Jenner issue! Just you being you is enough to diss you!" So that's it, then? They're really not going to bring that one thing up, eh? I feel like that closing line would land a lot better if they did.
"Look I understand that you hate yourself; but you don't need to blame yourself." Oh, huh. That's different. Let's see where this therapy session goes. "You're a tiger, stop trying to tame yourself; you gotta be big enough to contain yourself." Well... I like that she's mixing things up by rhyming with the penultimate word instead of the last word, that's always something. They're clearly going for an angle of Caitlin relating to Bruce and trying to teach him to come to terms with his identity, which is kind of cute, I guess. "Be green, it ain't none of my business!" That line's pretty funny, as is the tea-sipping visual. "But if you think you're looking good in those torn-ass clothes; you're lying, which means you need a new wardrobe!" That's a reference to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which has absolutely nothing to do with this matchup. Feels out of place because of it. And it's not a very strong diss besides, feels like padding. Doubly strange to end her verse on it. "The visions of those shorts kinda scarred me; what'd you just rage at a Barney themed party?" Oh, there's more? Alright. This burn is really lame. Barney jokes? Come aaaaaaaahhhhhn, what are we doing here? That line should have definitely been left on the cutting room floor. "That's probably not something you seen as a child; not one day did you see your daddy smile!" Okay. She already established that Hulk's father was abusive in her first verse, and while it was a powerful blow there, here it feels much more toothless. "Hulk not strong enough to deal with denial! Laying you down easy; that's kitchen tile!" The first line is pretty amusing with how Caitlin imitates The Hulk's speech, but that second line... why? Pretty weaksauce way to finish her performance off, but whatever. Also not a fan of these visuals with the diamonds, feels like they wanted to add some visual flair but couldn't think of a good way to do it so they settled on Caitlin popping out of diamonds which is just odd. "Examine this under your microscope; you've got no neck, but you still fucking choked!" Oh. This verse is still going? Okay. Well, it's a good line. "After battling me, you're gonna always be pissed! So the Hulk will stay forever, neither Bruce will exist!" You know, that's actually a pretty strong closer, but I can't help but feel like it's undercut by just how long that verse was dragging on.
Okay, so. I feel it should be pointed out that there's a lot of people who were always going to hate this battle for making the decision not to attack Caitlin for being trans. Furthermore, the overwhelming sentiment has been that Banner won this; it bears keeping in mind that there's a lot of transphobes out there who were going to say the Hulk won no matter what happened simply because Caitlin is trans. So to that end, I think that a fair amount of the hate this battle gets, and the hate that Caitlin's performance gets, is bullshit. But there are still some big criticisms that need to be made.
So let's be honest: they threw the match for Caitlin. Or at least attempted to. You might still think the Hulk managed to win, but with that insanely long final verse it's pretty clear they tried to make Caitlin the 'canon' winner, as with Thomas Jefferson vs. Frederick Douglass. They did this presumably because it was pride month, and they wanted to say Trans Rights with a trans rapper that gets a positive portrayal. I can get behind that sentiment, but the execution is questionable to say the least.
Like... I'm not trans, but there's some shitty stuff going on here that's easy to see. For one, the cardinal rule that everybody knows is that you're not supposed to misgendedeadname a trans person, and the title of this battle is Bruce Banner vs. Bruce Jenner. So from the get-go, before the video even starts playing, we're getting some mixed signals here. Are we to take from this that they made the tactical decision to go ahead and deadname Caitlin for the sake of the matchup making intuitive sense(what with it obviously being a play on their similar names), and then try and do a hard pivot and make Caitlin win the battle to avoid criticism for that decision? Feels like maybe they could have just not gone with this matchup instead. The whole transformation element also seems dubious, but I could see someone reasonably landing either way on whether that's actually an issue or just silly fun, so I won't go into that.
Another issue to consider: Caitlin Jenner kind of sucks. Most people do not like her. Most TRANS people don't even like her. For one, despite the fact that she's trans, she is a Republican who has made anti-gay marriage comments in the past. The bizarre shittiness of a trans person being like that is a pretty ripe source of material for disses, yet this battle does not bring it up at all. And more notably than that, Caitlin Jenner was famously involved with a manslaughter case, where she was accused of getting someone killed due to negligent driving. It was ultimately determined that there wasn't enough evidence for manslaughter and so she wasn't found guilty(though it's widely believed that this decision was bullshit and she did commit manslaughter), but it's an extremely well-known and controversial factoid and it's insane they didn't have Banner bring up as a diss. If you're going to have a rapper make the case of "Just you being you is enough to diss you", seems like being a trans Republican and quite possibly committing vehicular manslaughter are the two strongest and most obvious points to go with. And yet... nothing. If your goal to make a battle that gives trans people positive representation, then Caitlin Jenner is a pretty poor choice. If you don't want your trans rapper to look like a bad person, then maybe instead of ignoring either elephant in the room, you could just go with some other trans rapper in some other matchup. I get that there aren't a lot of choices for a trans rep with name recognition or ample material to work with, but... the Wachowski sisters are right there.
Another thing is... why is it a moral imperative that Caitlin win this battle? Sure she's trans, and it's cool want to give trans people positive representation, but you didn't need to give her an absurdly long verse at the end to do that. You could just give her good writing, refrain from shitting on her just for being trans, and sure, let her have the final word. Then, yes, show the pride flag at the end to say Trans Rights. That's all you had to do. With something like Jefferson v. Douglass the scale-tipping made sense, because it was a slave-owner vs. a slave. Yeah, it's kind of hard for the slave-owner to win that match, and it makes sense to use it as a vehicle to take a firm stand against slavery. But it's not like this battle is Trans Person vs. Transphobe; Bruce Banner isn't some horrible person that must be morally condemned(there's a much stronger case for Caitlin herself), so... why have it play out like this? I think that ironically, by trying to hand the match to Caitlin they wound up getting more hate thrown towards the performance and more people voting against her in polls than there otherwise would have been if they'd just cut out all that excessive padding and given her a solid closing verse. As-is the verse isn't good, the overall quality is dragged down by just how much fluff there is.
In the end, my read on the situation is this: for whatever reason, they really liked the idea of this matchup and wanted to go through with it. They knew that going through with it would necessitate making it Bruce Banner vs. Bruce Jenner at the start, so they bit the bullet on the deadnaming and the conceit for the matchup and did everything they could to mitigate the potential backlash for that, going as soft on Caitlin as possible and giving her a verse that was ridiculously lengthy. People always say "but it's the Hulk, it makes sense he wouldn't say much!" and sure, I can buy that as an excuse as to why Caitlin's verse would be longER than his, but that still doesn't account for why it's as insanely long as it is. In any case... this paragraph is just speculation, I can't know their actual motivations, but I think this is likely what happened.
Anyway... despite all, this battle gets way too much hate. I think Jenner's first verse is really good, and the Hulk is also quite solid for as few lines as he gets. Bruce Banner is a little mediocre and Caitlin's last verse ends up just being a pain in the ass to sit through(could've been good if they cut all the fat and left in the handful of good lines) that's best skipped past on repeat listens. But still... there's some stuff here that is thoroughly enjoyable. I don't think this battle quite manages to be good, but it's got enough going for it that I think it manages to avoid being outright bad. I'm putting this in the top of C tier, because I genuinely think it's more enjoyable than all of the battles that are below it.
It's understandable to say that The Hulk beat Jenner's second verse, but I think her first verse was pretty fire and the highlight of the battle. I say she edges out a win, but a case could be made either way.
Let me end things off by saying this: I once watched this battle with an extremely transphobic relative, and he was pissed off by that "no gender issue, this Jenner issue" line. So even if this battle was a regrettable mistake, at least they did something right.

Serena.. is definitely a character that it’s easy to love, she has a very nice girl energy, a lot of times she is very supportive, sweet to Blair not classist etc, all things that on the surface level my favorite character (Blair) isn’t Blair is conniving, scheming, rude, selfish, etc.
But it’s this “nice girl persona “ that she puts on, which is why people hate her.
She sleeps with her best friends boyfriend, leaves without saying anything and doesn’t speak to her best friend or the guy who she took his virginity from him. While in boarding school, she mostly drinks does drugs throws parties in her dorm room while leading on Damien dalgard so that he can do her homework and tests for her, then starts falling in love with her teacher and tries flirting with him which we can’t fault her for since she’s a minor and didn’t know better. But Blair was her same age and wasn’t doing that, Blair was struggling with her dad leaving, her parents divorce, and Nate acting weird, and when Serena came back, instead of apologizing, and trying to fully explain what happened or make it up to Blair, come clean etc. she tries to brush past things, she lies, and when Blair finds out, she spends more time being defensive then apologetic
Truthfully it’s shit like that, that gets her off to a horrible start, the issue is that this would be perfect if she got better later on, but she doesn’t in fact she gets worse and worse and worse and worse
We always say stuff like “oh Blair was insecure and jealous of Serena “ yes Blair was insecure, but with a friend like Serena who wouldn’t be, and this isn’t saying that Serena is better in any way, im saying Serena is loose and has a hard time not being the first choice, and she tries hard without having to try hard. She flirted with Nate while Blair and him were together and that’s how they ended up sleeping together in the first place She sabotaged Blair’s chances with Louis for.. no reason at all simply because she was jealous of her relationship with Louis and friendship with Dan.
She sabatoged her own cousin because she was getting spotlight and Serena wasn’t she often had an attitude or was shocked when Blair was picked over her or anyone for that matter, truthfully the reason Blair felt insecure in comparison to Serena, is because deep down it seemed like Serena saw Blair as beneath her.
Think about this Blair had been with Nate for years, that was her first and only boyfriend, the guy she was saving herself for her entire life, and Serena sleeps with him and abandons her,
Then later on, Serena DATES Nate, Blair is supportive surprisingly helps out etc even when chuck and Blair were rocky she was supportive of Serena’s relationship with Nate.
Yet when Blair gets with Dan, which was Serena’s what 7th 8th boyfriend? Who knows, she had several boyfriends before and after Dan, sometimes at the same time Remember when she was supposed to choose between Dan and Nate and she “supposedly “ was gna choose Dan yet was jealous when Nate had a girlfriend when she came back?
Yet she was so upset when Blair got with Dan, going as far is to record a sex tape with Dan without him knowing which is SEXUAL ASSAULT might I add, just to hurt Blair’s feelings. The thing I hate is that Serena was throwing Dan to the side she didn’t care about him until he was hanging out with Blair, she discarded him for Ben Donavan after she said she was going to be with him, even putting him in dans loft, completely disregarding dans feelings, then going on to have dates in the loft knowing Dan lived their.
I don’t slut shame but Serena was A BOP a hard core bop
And yes Blair cheated but I believe I can count on one hand the guys she’s been with and I mean a relationship Chuck, Nate, Louis, Dan, and that Marcus guy.
And being with a lot of guys doesn’t make you a slut or a bop that’s not what I mean. I mean it in the way that Serena played with a lot of guys feelings way more. When one guy broke up with her she would just cozy up to a new guy like they didn’t matter?
Now Blair isn’t blameless Blair did some unforgivable shit, like when she broke Eva and chuck up for no reason Or what she did to Jenny, and all the times Blair tried to sabatoge Serena. But what makes Blair bearable, is that as time goes on, she actually grows, she doesn’t hide behind a persona of being a better person and shame others for their questionable choices, Blair also didn’t get mad at tiny things, she got mad when chuck sold her for a hotel and got with Jenny after not even waiting 5 minutes for her. She broke things of with Marcus because he was banging his step mom, she broke it off with Nate because he cheated on her, and also when they got back together they just fell out of love, she broke things off with Louis because she was depressed in her relationship due to Louis starting to show signs of being toxic while she herself was making an effort to change.
Serena? She will break things off with you, because she has to go. Or because she cheated on you, or something like that I don’t know.
And hey she was iconic, as I say, I love seeing her on screen except for when it’s like around season 4-5-6 she just becomes kinda boring and her storylines are recycled.
But yeah She is quite horrible, shouldn’t be in jail for recording an intimate moment with someone without their consent and spreading it online, or maybe that wasn’t her I forgot, but regardless, she knew what the intent was of doing that
So yeah

Scroll to the bottom for to long didnt read haha.
Just finished rebirth and i have to say that the entire story felt like it was trying to mash 10 completely different stories together. The first game ends with the world almost ending and huge fight against sephiroth, then cloud is uh... somewhere? and sephiroth says something about having 7 seconds to save the world. Then part 2 starts and everythings fine kinda, no mention of that 7 second thing ever again haha, but it doesnt really wrap up or pay off almost anything from part 1 or the prequels in any meanignful way and overall felt very filler for the most part to me.
You spend almost all of the story doing nothing towards your goal, going to the beach, arcades, minigames and all sorts of other stuff and then randomly like 2-3 chapters away from the end wutai declare war, kiiinda, its never shown on screen and its pretty much the last time the war is mentioned in the story.
It set up a random out of no where plot with the Gi i think they were called, and then basically never mentions or shows them again.
Introduces a random cetra lost city it hasnt mentioned once and acts like everyone knows what it is, reds like oh yeah ive heard of this place i was sat there like have you because i havent haha.
Starts getting innnconceivable with how many flip flops it does in the end sequence, it goes much more for spectacle than actually making it make sense, people are teleporting evvvverywhere, each new phase of the boss keeps jumping from random place to place, you'll be in a church as zack fighting sephiroth, then playing as red fighting a masssssiive sephiroth (because seph can do that apparently) then you'll be cloud and aerith whos just died fighting sephiroth.
What i mean by this game feels like nothing happened, the end of the first game and end of the second game even though theyre 80 hours apart, are almost scene for scene identical. You fight rufus then Sephiroth starts ending the world, then you fight jenova, then bahamut then finally sephiroth, not only were these three basically the same as the first game, the setup was almost the same. Cloud starts getting headaches then a big wall of spirits appears, then you start of as just cloud and one by one the party get involved. Then you beat sephiroth only for him to escape and the game ends with you going to look for sephiroth. the order of bosses and generally everything that happens is the exact same minus aerith kinda dying.
The boss order is the same, the final few scenes are basically the exact same almost word for word with sephiroth saying the exact same stuff as part 1. Barret even jokes about how its the exact same by saying "Deja vu huh, feels like back on the bridge". Zack is seen in the church saying hes gonna go look for them again (which is litterally how the dlc for the first game ended!!!)
Its just reset everything back to how the first game ended, but this time cait and yuffie are here. But other than aerith no characters died and the plot is in the exact same state as it was at the end of the first game "lets go find sephiroth and save the world" again.
So many plot threads just didnt get resolved, well basically all of them to be fair haha, it tried doing several death scenes then went back on it so fast. Oh no tsengs dying, no wait, nevermind he just stands up and says actaully im fine i'll see you around???? Oh no caits dying, everyones sad like oh no big character death, then next scene is hes back like oh did i not mention i was a robot and have a shit load more bodies (like actually just what haha???) Aerith dies and then within five minutes its like oh wait nevermind now shes even stronger and will help you fight sephiroth haha. It tries doing a sad death but clouds kinda chill about it and is still talking to aerith so its like okay i guess shes dead but also completely fine haha. Then ends with the wutai hooded guy being just a random black robe guy but also sephroth kinda and the whole war was basically just a distraction. Shinra looking for the whales was also a big story thread that was immediately discarded, you fight the woman trying to capture one once and then they abandon that goal and its never mentioned again.
Sephiroth as a whole was barely even used and felt more like a jumpscare than anything, he gets to the black materia, we try to stop him so he summons that giant wall monster thing to stop up but then hes not there when we get passed it??? cait sacrifices himself then jibaits us like im actually totally fine, then we magically get out of there even though the exit is miiiiiles away and through hundreds of spinning room puzzles. then barret tosses the black materia on the floor for some stupid reason (this is absolutely nothing like barret) and it just rolls to sephiroth haahah?? the actaul dumbest way for him to get it. then sephiroth drops it and tells cloud to pick it up and give it back to him so cloud does it and then is like ha bye, cuts the branch so cloud falls, then it pretty much speedrun shits on the entire cool story set up in the other world, biggs does litterally nothing then dies, again. Zack says hes going to find a cure, then hes seen driving up to the door, then hes not looking for the cure and is suddenly back with biggs? guess no cure, then his version of cloud and aerith are fine i guuuuess? then random shinra people attack zack for some reason, he jumps off the cliff but is somehow fine. Is marlene okay in that universe? shes litterally never seen or mentioned again haha. That entire other world was suuuuch a pointless addition, from what ive heard alot of people agree, the end goal is basically the same but with another world and a bunch of new random stuff tacked on that just muddles it all.
We go back to barrets hometown and he immediately leaves and we never get closure on that, thought we'd go back and save the town or something.
Also vincent got sidelined sooooooooooooooooo hard, he got introduced and said he wants to come with us to fight sephiroth and then is legitimately not seen for the entire ending, he doesnt help get the black materia and doesnt even take part in any of the final fights, he was such a pointless addition haha. Same for cait, his whole contribution was failing to find one terminal, then giving our key to shinra who we just follow and go to the place anyway then we forgive him and he rejoins the team straight after, shinra could have just taken it at the tournament without his help and cait wouldnt have betrayed us and the end result would have been litterally the same haha. It was such pointless tacked on drama that didnt even slightly change how the next scenes played out.
All the turks basically do nothing this whole game, they randomly show up for fights and then survive and run off only to come back again and again and again, hojo and roche especially, they just randomly pop in for a fight then leave and add nothing to the narrative.
There was a massive villain introduced in the dlc for the first part who litterally doesnt even get mentioned again other than one flashback with yuffie.
From what ive seen a fair amount of this was new additions that werent in the orignal, its not that i dislike the story, i just hate how little anything has changed since the start of my like 95 hour playthrough. One character has died, and the world is still ending with almost nothing being different other than 2 new party members and a plane.
Too long didnt read:
Absolutely nothing has changed other than aerith kinda dying.
Game 1, ends with the gang looking out into the horizon like "the worlds ending we gotta find sephiroth", zack being at the church like "i gotta find cloud"
Game 2, ends with the gang looking out into the horizon like "the worlds ending we gotta find sephiroth", zack being at the church like "i gotta find cloud"
The other world storyline was such a pointless addition, biggs survived and his whole story ended with him failing to do something and him being like well guess im useless then dying. And zacks whole im gonna cure cloud and aerith ended in nothing because they kinda just get up at some point and go on a date, marlene and the mum also just disappear and are never seen again haha.
No turks die, after like 50 boss battles against them. Reno also just kinda spawns in and decides to help for the climax. Tseng gets stabbed and it does a sad death but then hes like actually you know what im fine imma walk it off.
War is declared with wutai but other than a few dead wutai outisde a reactor nothing was ever shown on screen and i dont even think theyre at war anymore at the end of the game haha.
Sephiroths fine, shinras fine. The world is lush and greeeeen as hell. The planet is supposendly dying, theyve said it for like 200 hours now across all the games, but god dayum it looks healthier than our earth, lush green jungles, deep blue oceans, beautiful desserts haha. could at least kinda make it look like its dying so it feels like somethings changed from the start of game one haha.
Overall good game but good god i can see why so many people are saying the game makes such little sense and goes for spectacle over sense haha. which is fine i guess, it was hype and the ending was great fight wise i just wish it wasnt all the same bosses as the first games ending and ended with the exxxact same cliffhanger.

I need to confess this somewhere, and thought that this would be the place to do so. I(18f) hate my cousin(19f), but no-one in my life knows how deep this goes.
For context, since we were infants we were constantly around each other. If I wasn’t at my house then I was at hers (and vice versa). As we got to highschool, our friendship dwindled due to school and naturally not having time to see each other as often with our busy schedules. But other than that, when we see each other at family events we can pick up right where we left off and have a good time together. So, why should I hate her?
This is where it gets dark. I don’t have the words for this, as this is the first time I am ever speaking (or typing) about these events. I am completely at a loss for words.
During our childhood, my cousin (let’s call her Belle) was always ordering me around and was an overall diva. She never let me have control over the games we played or what we did. I was a very sensitive child afraid of confrontation, so I let a lot of the things she did slide under the rug. I was always covering for her if our parents asked if she was “playing nice.” I never wanted her to get in trouble because I cared about her, and when things were good between us, she was an amazing, funny girl. Besides the small things- like toys and games- she did awful things that I don’t know how to say.
I don’t remember when it started or when it ended. All I can remember is that it stopped in the beginning of middle school and started in elementary school- possibly even before that. It’s all a haze. But I can say that there were multiple instances where she took me to rooms in her house: out of sight of her parents. And Belle would tell me what her and an older cousin (m, don’t know the exact age) on her particular side of the family (not related to me) would often [TW] commit sexual acts on her. Belle would tell me that this cousin said this was a normal thing to do, but that “you can’t tell the adults.” So she decided to start things with me. And I didn’t say no. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, all I knew was that this was a dirty secret that I had to keep. I tried to persuade her multiple times when she would try initiating sexual acts, but she would push and push until I said okay. There were things that happened in that house that I have never told a soul in my life about, because I don’t know what to say. If anyone knows what this situation qualifies as, please tell me. I feel disgusting. But even though I was a child, she was too. It’s messy, and I’ve struggled with body image, self esteem, depression, and anxiety during and following these events, even still as I write this. I am in therapy, but I can’t talk about this as I am too scared.
Now, ever since this situation stopped, we have never brought it up with each other. It terrified me to do so. But other than that, we are how we always have been even during the situation; close and supportive of each other- until recently. This January, I found out Belle was talking about me to every single one of her friends. I heard of this from a friend of mine that works with one of Belles close friends. Belle had called me fat, ugly, annoying, etc. I was shocked, but believed it. Belle would always make sarcastic comments about how I weighed a lot and was ugly when hanging out, but I always thought it was familial jesting until I really thought about the times she was “jesting” with me, and slowly everything started to click. I also found out that every time she blew off my recent suggestions for hanging out she would tell her friends how “fucking annoying as hell” I was. Again, before this, she acted totally fine around me and we were pretty close. I told my parents just about how she’s been saying these things, not bringing up anything from our past. These past five months I’ve resorted to keeping our conversations brief (an idea my parents came up with), meanwhile she’s still acting like everything is fine between us. But I can’t help myself but to hate her and at the same time empathize with her. I know what happened in our childhood wasn’t really her fault, but her other cousin’s. But it doesn’t explain why she hates me. Does she blame me for what happened? Does she feel guilty? Should i be more understanding? Help me, any comments are appreciated.

Hello, friends! I apologize for the length of this post. I truly value any advice or guidance you can provide ❤️
I've come to the realization that my self-confidence and trust in myself are severely lacking, and I still have a lot of work to do in order to fully heal. The past four years have felt like a complete blur, and the social anxiety I have as a result of it all is a nightmare.
Timeline Synopsis: •2010: At 18, desperate for relief, I sought therapy and was immediately prescribed 3 different controlled substances and various antidepressants. •2010 - 2013, I found myself in my first relationship, lasting 3.5 years. However, due to our youth and lack of understanding on how to cultivate a healthy bond with ourselves and each other, the relationship eventually imploded, causing my life to shatter into pieces. The aftermath left me feeling lost and emotionally wounded for a long time. •2015: Traumatized when I discovered my Grandma dead at home. In an attempt to cope with the overwhelming grief, I resorted to abusing my medications; taking extra, then running out. This affected my work performance. My poor attendance and decreased productivity on top of that subsequently led to me being let go. In search of help, I checked myself into inpatient treatment. •2016: My ex reached out to me, seeking a friend to share his recent schizophrenia diagnosis. We rekindled our friendship for a short period, but tragically, he took his own life a few months later. •2019: I fell into the wrong social circle and engaged in extensive experimentation with any & all drugs, binge eating, and drinking. •2020, the mounting anxieties triggered by the pandemic caused me to have a severe nervous breakdown. This led to a brief hospitalization, during which I concentrated on detox and recovery. Upon discharge, I worked the 12-step program. • 2021: My mother suffered a heart attack, and immediately went the hospital. She had emergency surgery and was then Intubated and restrained for her safety afterwards. Luckily, I was able to visit her since I was vaccinated. •2022: Arriving back home to find my Guinea Pig motionless and silent in his enclosure evoked a profound sense of sorrow, intensifying the emotional trauma I had previously experienced discovering my grandma. •2023: I experienced a pretty serious seizure while at work. 911 was called and I was brought to the hospital via ambulance. •2024: In January, my Papa passed away suddenly. During the commemoration of his life, my mother unexpectedly fainted and was promptly transported to the hospital via ambulance. Thankfully, after a brief medical assessment, she was given a clean bill of health.
Since then, I've been taking antidepressants and non-narcotic anxiety medication, which have been helpful. I've also been working with a therapist, and I feel like I've made progress in improving my overall mental health. I've made a conscious decision to no longer "mask" my quirks or “tone down” my personality for the sake of my own comfort and healing. I take pride in embracing my uniqueness and being considered "weird." It adds a sense of fun to life. Additionally, I've started swimming, eating better, losing weight, taking vitamins and supplements, and regularly visiting the doctor and dentist.
In 2020, I started dating someone whom I'm still with and deeply love. We've known each other and been part of the same friend circle for 10 years, so I feel comfortable around him. However, there have been instances where he has said things that have deeply affected me and have almost given me a complex. It's important to note that I have been diagnosed with BPD, ADHD, anxiety, and depression, so please consider this when giving advice.
Here are a few examples of his comments: - I'm a very animated and loud person, partially due to my struggle with hearing people, especially him. Despite telling him numerous times to speak louder, he never does. - I'm also sassy and opinionated, which is part of my Italian heritage. - While we were at the gym, I was expressing how something made me feel, which was not inappropriate, and he told me to "calm down." This is something he has done many times in different situations. - He often tells me not to make a scene, lower my voice, stop yelling (even when I'm speaking at a normal volume to him), and not be dense. - I also feel like he always needs to be right, has to have the last word, and often mansplains things to me. This makes me feel stupid and immature.
Whenever I try to have meaningful conversations with him to understand his values, he accuses me of trying to argue. He frequently claims that I sound extremely condescending, rude, and hateful, even though that is never my intention. I'm genuinely just trying to express myself.
When I attempt to explain how I feel or why I act a certain way due to my neurodivergence, he dismisses it by saying that "everyone is a little bit autistic" or "everybody has ADHD." He even goes as far as claiming he has these conditions, without understanding any of my symptoms and complaining about the behaviors that result from them.
I would greatly appreciate any advice, tips, or insights you may have. Thank you for taking the time to read my entire message.”

III. Changing Modes of Making It: From Horatio Alger to the Happy Hooker
…
From “Self-Culture” to Self-Promotion through “Winning Images”
In the nineteenth century, the ideal of self-improvement degenerated into a cult of compulsive industry. P.T. Barnum, who made a fortune in a calling the very nature of which the Puritans would have condemned (“Every calling, whereby God will be Dishonored; every Calling whereby none but the Lusts of men are Nourished: …every such Calling is to be Rejected”), delivered many times a lecture frankly entitled “The Art of Money-Getting,” which epitomized the nineteenth-century conception of worldly success. Barnum quoted freely from Franklin but without Franklin’s concern for the attainment of wisdom or the promotion of useful knowledge. “Information” interested Barnum merely as a means of mastering the market. Thus he condemned the “false economy” of the farm wife who douses her candle at dusk rather than lighting another for reading, not realizing that the “information” gained through reading is worth far more than the price of the candles. “Always take a trustworthy newspaper,” Barnum advised young men on the make, “and thus keep thoroughly posted in regard to the transactions of the world. He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species.”
Barnum valued the good opinion of others not as a sign of one’s usefulness but as a means of getting credit. “Uncompromising integrity of character is invaluable.” The nineteenth century attempted to express all values in monetary terms. Everything had its price. Charity was a moral duty because “the liberal man will command patronage, which the sordid, uncharitable miser will be avoided.” The sin of pride was not that it offended God but that it led to extravagant expenditures. “A spirit of pride and vanity, when permitted to have full sway, is the undying cankerworm which gnaws the very vitals of a man’s worldly possessions.”
The eighteenth century made a virtue of temperance but did not condemn moderate indulgence in the service of sociability. “Rational conversation,” on the contrary, appeared to Franklin and his contemporaries to represent an important value in its own right. The nineteenth century condemned sociability itself, on the grounds that it might interfere with business. “How many good opportunities have passed, never to return, while a man was sipping a ‘social glass’ with his friends!” Preachments on self-help now breathed the spirit of compulsive enterprise. Henry Ward Beecher defined “the beau ideal of happiness” as a state of mind in which “a man [is] so busy that he does not know whether he is or is not happy.” Russell Sage remarked that “work has been the chied, and you might say, the only source of pleasure in my life.”
Even at the height of the Gilded Age, however, the Protestant ethic did not completely lose its original meaning. In the success manuals, the McGuffey readers, the Peter Parley Books, and the hortatory writings of the great capitalists themselves, the Protestant virtues - industry, thrift, temperance - still appeared not merely as stepping-stones to success but as their own reward.
The spirit of self-improvement lived on, in debased form, in the cult of “self-culture” - proper care and training of mind and body, nurture of the mind through “great books,” development of “character.” The social contribution of individual accumulation still survived as an undercurrent in the celebration of success, and the social conditions of early industrial capitalism, in which the pursuit of wealth undeniably increased the supply of useful objects, gave some substance to the claim that “accumulated capital means progress.” In condemning speculation and extravagance, in upholding the importance of patient industry, in urging young men to start at the bottom and submit to “the discipline of daily life,” even the most unabashed exponents of self-enrichment clung to the notion that wealth derives its value from its contribution to the general good and to the happiness of future generations.
The nineteenth-century cult of success placed surprisingly little emphasis on competition. It measured achievement not against the achievements of others but against an abstract ideal of discipline and self-denial. At the turn of the century, however, preachments on success began to stress the will to win. The bureaucratization of the corporate career changed the conditions of self-advancement; ambitious young men now had to compete with their peers for the attention and approval of their superiors. The struggle to surpass the previous generation and to provide for the next gave way to a form of sibling rivalry, in which men of approximately equal abilities jostled against each other in competition for a limited number of places. Advancement now depended on “will-power, self-confidence, energy, and initiative” - the qualities celebrated in such exemplary writings as George Lorimer’s Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son. ” By the end of the nineteenth century,” writes John Cawelti in his study of the success myth, “self-help books were dominated by the ethos of sales-manship and boosterism. Personal magnetism, a quality which supposedly enabled a man to influence and dominate others, became one of the major keys to success.” In 1907, both Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post and Orison Swett Marden’s Success magazine inaugurated departments of instruction in the “art of conversation,” fashion, and “culture.” The management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement. The captain of industry gave way to the confidence man, the master of impressions. Young men were told that they had to sell themselves in order to succeed.
At first, self-testing through competition remained almost in-distinguishable from moral self-discipline and self-culture, but the difference became unmistakable when Dale Carnegie and then Norman Vincent Peale restated and transformed the tradition of Mather, Franklin, Barnum, and Lorimer. As a formula for success, winning friends and influencing people had little in common with industry and thrift. The prophets of positive thinking disparaged “the old adage that hard work alone is the magic key that will unlock the door to our desires.” They praised the love of money, officially condemned even by the crudest of Gilded Age materialists, as a useful incentive. “You can never have riches in great quantities,” wrote Napoleon Hill in this Think and Grow Rich,” unless you can work yourself into a white heat of desire for money.” The pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning that still clung to it. Formerly the Protestant virtues appeared to have an independent value of their own. Even when they became purely instrumental, in the second half of the nineteenth century, success itself retained moral and social overtones, by virtue of its contribution to the sum of human comfort and progress. Now success appeared as an end in its own right, the victory over your competitors that alone retained the capacity to instill a sense of self-approval. The latest success manuals differ from earlier ones - even surpassing the cynicism of Dale Carnegie and Peale - in their frank acceptance of the need to exploit and intimidate others, in their lack of interest in the substance of success, and in the candor with which they insist that appearances - “winning images - count for more than performance, ascription for more than achievement. One author seems to imply that the self consists of little more than its “image” reflected in others’ eyes. “Although I’m not being original when I say it, I’m sure you’ll agree that the way you see yourself will reflect the image you portray to others.” Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
<The American Religion by Harold Bloom (California Orphism)>
The Apotheosis of Individualism
The fear that haunted the social critics and theorists of the fifties - that rugged individualism had succumbed to conformity and “love-pressure sociability” - appears in retrospect to have been premature. In 1960, David Riesman complained that young people no longer had much social “presence,” their education having provided them not with “a polished personality but [with] an affable, casual, adaptable one, suitable to the losing organizations of an affluent society.” It is true that “a present-oriented hedonism,” as Riseman went on the argue, has replaced the work ethic “among the very classes which in the earlier stages of industrialization were oriented toward the future, toward distant goals and delayed gratification.” But this hedonism is a fraud; the pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative, as the theorists of other-direction and conformity would like us to believe; they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit. Activities ostensibly undertaken purely for enjoyment often have the real object of doing others in. It is symptomatic of the underlying tenor of American life that vulgar terms for sexual intercourse also convey the sense of getting the better of someone, working him over, taking him in, imposing your will through guile, deception, or superior force. Verbs associated with sexual pleasure have acquired more than the usual overtones of violence and psychic exploitation. In the violent world of the ghetto, the language of which now pervades American society as a whole, the violence associated with sexual intercourse is directed with special intensity by men against women, specifically against their mothers. The language of ritualized aggression and abuse reminds those who use it that exploitation is the general rule and some form of dependence the common fate, that “the individual,” in Lee Rainwater’s words, “is not strong enough or adult enough to achieve his goal in a legitimate way, but is rather like a child, dependent on others who tolerate his childish maneuvers”; accordingly males, even adult males, often depend on women for support and nurture. Many of them have to pimp for a living, ingratiating themselves with a woman in order to pry money from her; sexual relations thus become manipulative and predatory. Satisfaction depends on taking what you want instead of waiting for what is rightfully yours to receive. All this enters everyday speech in language that connects sex with aggression and sexual aggression with highly ambivalent feelings about mothers.
In some ways middle-class society has become a pale copy of the black ghetto, as the appropriation of its language would lead us to believe. We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition, the most important feature of which is a widespread loss of confidence in the future. The poor have always had to live for the present, but now a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class as well. Today almost everyone lives in a dangerous world from which there is little escape. International terrorism and blackmail, bombings, and hijackings arbitrarily affect the rich and poor alike. Crime, violence, and gang wars make cities unsafe and threaten to spread to the suburbs. Racial violence on the streets and in the schools creates an atmosphere of chronic tension and threatens to erupt at any time into full-scale racial conflict. Unemployment spreads from the poor the white-collar class, while inflation eats away the savings of those who hoped to retire in comfort. Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security. The propaganda of death and destruction, emanating ceaselessly from the mass media, adds to the prevailing atmosphere of insecurity. Far-flung famines, earthquakes in remote regions, distant wars and uprisings attract the same attention as events closer to home. The impression of arbitrariness in the reporting of disaster reinforces the arbitrary quality of experience itself, and the absence of continuity in the coverage of events, as today’s crisis yields to a new and unrelated crisis tomorrow, adds to the sense of historical discontinuity - the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable.
Older conceptions of success presupposed a world in rapid motion, in which fortunes were rapidly won and lost and new opportunities unfolded every day. Yet they also presupposed a certain stability, a future that bore some recognizable resemblance to the present and the past. The growth of bureaucracy, the cult of consumption with its immediate gratifications, but above all the severance of the sense of historical continuity have transformed the Protestant ethic while carrying the underlying principles of capitalist society to their logical conclusion . The pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival. Social conditions now approximate the vision of republican society conceived by the Marquis de Sade at the very outset of the republican epoch. In many ways the most farsighted and certainly the most disturbing of the prophets of revolutionary individualism, Sade defended unlimited self-indulgence as the logical culmination of the revolution in property relations - the only way to attain revolutionary brotherhood in its purest form. By regressing in his writings to the most primitive level of fantasy, Sade uncannily glimpsed the whole subsequent development of personal life under capitalism, ending not in revolutionary brotherhood but in a society of siblings that has outlived and repudiated its revolutionary origins.
Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. His ideal society thus reaffirmed the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects. It also incorporated and carried to a surprising new conclusion Hobbes’s discovery that the destruction of paternalism and the subordination of all social relations to the market had stripped away the remaining restraints and the mitigating illusions from the war of all against all. In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business - pleasure, however, that is indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled aggression. In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure - on the immediate gratification of every desire no matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral. For the standards that would condemn crime or cruelty derive from religion, compassion, or the kind of reason that rejects purely instrumental applications; and none of these outmoded forms of thought or feeling has any logical place in a society based on commodity production. In his misogyny, Sade perceived that bourgeois enlightenment, carried to its logical conclusions, condemned even the sentimental cult of womanhood and the family, which the bourgeoisie itself had carried to unprecedented extremes.
At the same time, he saw that condemnation of “woman-worship” had to go hand in hand with a defense of woman’s sexual rights - their right to dispose of their own bodies, as feminists would put it today. If the exercise of that right in Sade’s utopia boils down to the duty to become an instrument of someone else’s pleasure, it was not so much because Sade hated women as because he hated humanity. He perceived, more clearly than the feminists, that all freedoms under capitalism come in the end to the same thing, the same universal obligation to enjoy and be enjoyed. In the same breath, and without violating his own logic, Sade demanded for women the right “fully to satisfy all their desires” and “all parts of their bodies” and categorically stated that “all women must submit to our pleasure.” Pure individualism thus issued in the most radical repudiation of individuality. “All men, all women resemble each other,” according to Sade; and to those of his countrymen who would become republicans he adds this ominous warning: “Do not think you can make good republicans so long as you isolated in their families the children who should belong to the republic alone.” The bourgeois defense of privacy culminates - not just in Sade’s thought but in the history to come, so accurately foreshadowed in the very excess, madness, infantilism of his ideas - in the most thoroughgoing attack on privacy; the glorification of the individual, in his annihilation.
<…>
Standing-Reserve.
Note a lack of the “Greek” in Lasch.
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 by Georges Bataille, Edited by A. Stoekl, Translated by A. Stoekl, C.R. Lovitt, and D.M. Leslie Jr.
<…>

Hi! I'm scrivenernoodz, the lady writer formerly known as Syntax-N on Fanfiction.net!
I haven't stepped into any Hetalia fan spaces for quite a while now (since 2021?), but seeing as I still get messages in 2024 about a fic I finished in 2019, I wondered if anyone here would remember it as well! Hetafata was an attempt to "rewrite" Hetalia in a world of high fantasy, with fairies, demons, wizards, changelings, giant moose men, and even some shifty regular humans. A wish-granting was amulet hidden somewhere in the wide, magical world. Its rightful heir searched for it. A dark wizard coveted it. A band of mismatched mercenaries tried to stop the dark wizard, and out of this came some very wholesome friendships and lessons about growing up and learning to face an unkind world with courage.
Also RIFP Roderich's entire family.
The original Hetafata was a bloated 430k words (I wrote it in high school and I'm proud of it, but it's not the first fic of mine I'd recommend today. ^^') I also wrote some short spin-off stories and an unfinished prequel — The Snarled Circle Chronicles — which was darker and edgier and I do hope I get back to it someday!)
Oh yeah, and then I wrote Prussia Meows — the episodic fic where Prussia dies while surfing the web on an iMac G3 and gets unlimited cosmic powers. What does he do with these? Turn himself into a bee, eat his bathtub, accidentally summon his neighbor's underwear and set Germany's house on fire while somehow connecting John Mayer to John de Lancie in the same sentence, of course.
Anyway, I'm still around! I'm still writing fantasy! Got myself a college degree for it, in fact! I just fell back in love with my childhood crush Volkner from Pokémon and I'm on my second full-length fic about him. (Funnily, I reused a few paragraphs from Hetafata for a scene in a recent chapter!)
Did any of you read Hetafata while it was live-updating back in 2017-19? Did you love Alfred's shapeshifting antics? Arthur's bread obsession? Feli's sparkly wings? Ludwig's canine instincts? It's fun to see how far I've come in my writing!

Hi. I’m an autistic dude in my 30’s. For context, I’ve avoided interacting face to face with people pretty much my whole life. I have a really hard time with the word “connection” as it pertains to interpersonal relationships. I think the core disconnect is that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced “connection”. Or if I have, I didn’t naturally apply that name to it. I’m trying to puzzle it out because:
1) apparently women want an emotional connection in relationships/before sex. I’ve sought out dating/sex my whole adult life. The crushes that I’ve had dates with, I just felt amazing around that person. That’s as far as I understood it and then they would ghost me after 1 or 2 dates. I had no idea that what women want is an emotional connection. Now that I know that, I’m trying to figure out what the hell that actually means.
2) I need to know the actual definition of the word, because I need to know if I’m making a connection with someone. What am I supposed to feel in my body? What is supposed to actually happen? What is the other person supposed to feel or do? I can’t make progress towards being emotionally connected until I know these things. My current friendships are quite shallow (apparently), so clearly emotional connection doesn’t “just happen” for me. I need to be able to know what I’m doing and if I’m making progress so that I can correct course if I’m not doing it right, or if I am doing it right, tell myself “keep doing what you’re doing”.
I’ll start with what got me thinking about it again and then what my history with the word is.
So the other day I was hanging out with some friends and there’s one guy in the group who is dating. He apparently had been out multiple times with this girl he met on a dating app. I know I’m supposed to be happy for him, but when I hear about this sort of thing, I’m just baffled. How did he have a conversation with her over the app? What did they start with? It seems to have something to do with connection, I guess. I seemingly don’t know how to have a conversation, and that’s not something I could’ve asked him, people just look at me weird when I say something ultra-beginner like “how do I have a conversation”. It just pissed me off because this dude is recently divorced and he’s already been on multiple dates with this other woman. This is the 3rd friend I’ve had that has been divorced and started dating again, and they all get further than me in 1/10th the time! The other two friends are already re-married! Meanwhile I’ve never made it past a 2nd date. So clearly I’m missing something.
My friend was talking about said girl and ended it with “connection! That’s the important thing!” Which is what got me confused and thinking about the word.
So, from my perspective, “human connection” is a totally new idea to me. I literally never heard anyone in any capacity, whether it be online, face to face, or in media of any kind, talk about “connection”, emotional connection, or human connection. Then all of a sudden a few years ago people started saying it all the time. Not everyone, but I’ve heard it from multiple people now. Many people have said that it’s the most important thing on earth. Why is something that many people consider to be the most important thing on earth…something that wasn’t even on my radar until a few years ago? What the hell?
My confusion comes in because I can’t tell what my friend’s history with the word is. Is he just as clueless as I am, and is just using the word because they’ve heard other people say it and their best guess is that what they are experiencing is connection? Or did they experience a connection at some earlier point in their life and somehow someone was able to label it as “connection” for him? Does it somehow feel like a “connection” so people naturally apply that label? Maybe his family frequently talked about connection? That seems weird though because it seems impossible to talk about “human connection” with the people you might connect with - people seem to get really uncomfortable with it. I guess because if you don’t know what an emotional connection is, and they do, they probably don’t want to be around you.
Looking it up, the term emotional intelligence was coined in 1990. It seems like that’s around the same time “emotional connection” was coined. So….the most important thing on earth didn’t have a name until 1990? What? What did people in the 70’s say to refer to it? Did they not have connections? What did people in the 1920’s say without this term existing? I just don’t get how something so recent is supposedly so crucial to being a human and interacting with others.
Furthermore, what does it say about my life that I had only heard this term recently? I’m not thinking like “boo hoo for me, his life is better”, more like “other people have been living in an alternate reality to me where connection is very important and for some reason they never helped me with this concept, and they won’t help explain it to me now because I’m supposed to just get it. And they think this experience of connection is universal and everyone gets it.” Not understanding it seems to signal to them that I haven’t been living in their reality.
So what’s your history with the word? Did you have a “connection” with someone, and then, not having heard the word, you said to yourself “this feels like a connection!”. Or had you heard the word first and then applied it to your situation once you had a connection with someone? Do you feel as weird about it as I do, like you missed the memo that said the definition of the word and told everyone to start using it? Did your family talk about the concept when you were growing up?
I wasn’t sure where to post this, so if you have a recommendation for a sub where I can ask people that are understanding of Autism, but also has NT people on the sub, I’m all ears.

In the Era of Fear I Comfort them with Great Love
Anita Moorjani was cured from cancer not because of a certain medicine, vaccine or chemotherapy. She was cured because of this Great Love. Anita Moorjani is a forty years old woman who is simple and honest. She was born in India, grew up in Singapore and was English educated. Later she went to Hong Kong. She knows Tamil, English and Cantonese. In 2002 the doctor said that she was down with cancer lymphoma or the blood cell tumor. After four years, in 2006 seventy percent of her body is covered with the cancerous cells. She stayed in the hospital, suffering terribly because of this illness. Later the doctor pronounced her death. After three days she woke up and was cured miraculously. This is truly inconceivable when she woke up from her death. In her mind she was very sure she was cured already. No treatment was needed. But she was very weak. She could not even talk. The doctor was surprised of her condition and again they carried out a checking on her body and found that she was free from all symptoms of cancer. In her mind she knew she was already cured. In her mind there was a great transformation that she personally experienced. And all the cells on her body were transformed into healthy cells. Later she wrote a book entitles: After dying once I finally learn to love’ By looking at this title, it coincides with Master Shan Dao’s teaching on the one with deep faith in the dharma. He said, ‘Standing here is waiting to die. Going forward is also death. Turning back, I too cannot escape from death.’ This can be found in the ‘Analogy of two rivers and one white lane’ the three sure deaths. If we have died once, we will truly give ourselves up. This is the same as the Pure Land teaching that we have to admit we are the sinful mundane man. We lose all hope as we have no ways to leave the triple realm. In cultivation we need to really undergo a total death in order to really practise the path. The zen cultivator says this is known as undergoing great death and great living. Otherwise, no real cultivation can be expected because most of us are very arrogant, very self-centred, without much changes in our stubborn mindset. That is why she said after dying once only she managed to learn how to love. In the Pure Land door this is known as having deep faith. Such a man will surely have faith in Amitabha’s 48 vows to gather in living beings without any doubts and suspicion. By relying on the strength of the Buddha’s Vows we will surely attain a rebirth. This is living in the great love of Namo Amitabha Buddha. We receive the love of Amitabha Buddha. Only then we can have the genuine love and we are able to learn to love. If we do not feel the love of Amitabha Buddha, we will not know how to love. Our love will be frightening as it is an attachment, a desire to control, to possess others. Such a love is impure, it is a threat to us. If we are not careful it might turn into hatred. Such is a frightful kind of love. If we learn from Amitabha Buddha, the love is pure, without condition and transparent. This is truly loving a person. It is not easy to learn this. We look at the couples around us. So many got married and end up in divorce. How about those who do not get a divorce? Yes, they spend the whole life fighting！The truly loving couples are as few as the stars in the broad day light. So, learning to love is our homework for the whole life. It is not easy. Today I would like to discuss this passage with you. After reading her writing I feel most shameful as what the author has said is very true in accord with her experience. Even though I have left home for more than twenty years, receiving the teaching of the Buddha, the guidance of the patriarch, the exhortation of my Master, the help of my lotus friends and all, I still feel I am lacking in genuine practice and virtues. On the contrary this lady has not met with the Buddha Dharma. She has such an awakening after dying once, it is truly a gain for her. She said, ‘After my body stopped functioning, I entered into another world.’ She was so seriously ill that her heart, her liver and everything stopped functioning. This is to show there is a world after death. She said, ‘I saw myself as a very wonderful person. This is because I was not terrorised until I had a change in shape.’ ‘I felt there was this vibrant energy around me and I was able to enter it. I realise if a man can see his wonderful existence, he must be the happiest man.’ Most of us like to complain about our imperfect existence. We often think thus, ‘I do not have enough money. I am not healthy. I am not pretty. I do not have enough clothing ….’ Here we must learn to see the good points in us, to appreciate the value of our existence. A woman who can say like this is truly very calm in mind. A man who always complains about himself will not be able to live happily each day. So, without knowing the love of Amitabha for us, we will be a great complainer. We complain about no money, we complain about our look, our wrinkles and so on and so forth. What kind of life will this be with so many complaints? She said, ‘I found that there was this power surrounding me.’ When we pass away, we will no longer be using our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind to observe. Instead, we will be awakened to our innate Buddha. She felt she is surrounded by this vibrant field of energy and she is also this energy. What kind of power is this? It is a kind of energy. It is always in the universe or the dharma realm in the Buddhist terms. In fact, this is Amitabha Buddha. This is the strength of the Buddha Nature. She uses her Buddha Nature to experience the Buddha Nature. It exists forever. It is neither born nor become extinct. If the Buddha enters the world or does not enter the world, it is always there without changing. Of course, she does not use these Buddhist terms. She said, ‘When I give up the attachment to the mundane world, I enter another world effortlessly. It is unnecessary to pray, to recite a sutra or to give a dharma talk. It is unnecessary to seek forgiveness, repentance or other methods.’ ‘Death gives me the feeling that I do not need to do anything. It is just as though I am telling someone I am coming to the end. I cannot do anything anymore. I give up. Whatever you want to do I will just accept.’ I feel that this passage is very near in meaning to the Pure Land’s view. It means when we die, we have just to let go as nothing can be done anymore. Most people die in torment as there are many attachments in this world. They are worried about their children, money and work. Some people find it difficult to die. So, from here we must learn to let go when it is our turn to leave the world. Moreover, we have the promise from Amitabha Buddha who will come to receive us in accord with the strength of his vows. It is much easier for us. This lady just let go and she entered another world. Her state should be quite high too. I will explain below. I feel that she had arrived at the border of the Pure Land. Her state of an awakened mind showed that she was not in the heaven. She seemed to be enlightened to the Buddha nature and non -existence of a self. She experienced the light of enlightenment and returned to life, to lead a life of love. So, in our practice we are told to let go of all attachment and to wish for a rebirth in the Pure Land relying on Amitabha’s strength of vows. So from here we can see it is very easy to be born in the World of Ultimate Bliss. She said it is unnecessary to recite a sutra, a dharma or seeking for forgiveness. She enters the other world naturally when she simply gives up herself. I remember once I went with my Master to console a dying man. I was very touched by my Master’s words. He said kindly to the man who is on the verge of death, ‘So and so, now we will recite Namo Amitabha Buddha. If you can recite, then recite together. If you can’t, just lay down and relax. It is ok if you just listen to our recitation.’ Are not these words very comforting? The dying man will feel very safe and relax. But if you were to say, ‘So and so, this is the last chance. Bring out all your strength to face death. If you can recite then recite together. If you cannot recite, you must try also!’ On listening to this threat, the sick man is stressed out. He will die instantly as he has no strength to join in recitation. The Master who with his great love understands the rescue of Amitabha Buddha is a natural process that he is able to say in such a comforting way. No condition is needed. There is no threat nor fright in his words. A man who threatens people is not calm as he must be frightened too in his mind. That is why what he says will frighten people, giving stress to others. If we are loving in our mind, our words will only bring love, peace and calm to others. People will feel our love for them. So, this lady says it is unnecessary to read or recite any prayer or seeking forgiveness. This is because the wavelength of her mind is on a par with the great love of the universe. She naturally enters it. Namo Amitabha Buddha is a dharma that requires no seeking or pleading. It is a dharma of rescue without condition. When we recite Namo Amitabha Buddha, the wavelength of our mind is the same as Amitabha Buddha. So, we will attain a rebirth naturally. Many of us who do not understand the kindness of Amitabha Buddha will seek a rebirth by pleading to the Buddha every day. His mind is unsettled and frightened that he might be left out. This is because he does not understand when he recites the Buddha’s name, the wavelength of his mind is in the same frequency with Amitabha Buddha’s mind and vows. Then people will ask, ‘Do we still go to recite the Buddha’s Name for the dying man?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ This is because the dying man has yet to understand this point. When we recite for him, he will be safe in the shine of Namo Amitabha Buddha. This is a method which is bestowed upon us to save us with this Name in accord with the strength of the Buddha’s vows. When she says to somebody, this refers to Amitabha Buddha. She says she cannot do anything anymore and she gives up. She gives herself up to the Buddha. So, when we die do not try to fight with death and refuse to die. We must just admit we are the offender and we need the help of Amitabha Buddha to take us, to rescue us. Namo is to admit we take refuge in the Buddha, we surrender ourselves. When we cultivate this door, we must not add in our ideas. We must just let Amitabha Buddha to decide for us. This is because Amitabha has the power of great vow, the extensive great strength of the Buddha Nature, the strength of immeasurable light, the strength of immeasurable lifespan. We just have to give up all planning. He will plan for us. So, when we recite the Name of the Buddha, just recite without thinking of doing this or that trying so hard to reach a certain acceptable standard. These are all unnecessary. This type of thinking is the habit of the sagely path cultivators. When we sit on the plane, just sit there. The plane will bring you to your destiny. It is unnecessary for you to help the plane to fly. Amitabha Buddha the pilot does not need you to fly the plane. If he needs your help then he is not known as Amitabha Buddha. Anita said, ‘In the other world, I found that my mind is very clear and bright. I realise by myself that I will only die out of the fear and terror in my mind.’ These words are very true. Clarity of mind means her mind is pure. In this world our mind is turbid, dark and deluded. That is why are enveloped in all kinds of worries and terror. But once we arrive at the Pure Land, we will naturally be pure and bright. This is because the land is pure and is enveloped in bright illumination. She said she naturally know she will be cured. This knowing ability is possessed by us originally. No learning is needed because our Buddha nature is originally pure and bright. In the Saha world our ability is being covered up by afflictions. But when we arrive at the World of Ultimate Bliss, we will naturally possess this ability. This ability reappears relying on the strength of Vows of Amitabha Buddha. When we arrive at the Pure Land, we will naturally possess the ability to make offerings to the Buddha. On hearing one sentence we are enlightened to the millions. Our mind is opened up to the thousands of million Dharanis. Everyone of us have this innate ability. And Amitabha Buddha’s strength of Vows enhances its opening. In this Saha World our innate nature is all covered up and cannot function. In the world of ultimate bliss, by relying on Amitabha Buddha’s strength of great vows, our innate ability is open up. So they are not contradicting. ‘I naturally know the source of the thought that I will die. The source is I was frightened. If there is no fear, there is no death.’ In actuality there is no death. It is only our fear of death that this illusion comes froth. In Buddha dharma we should know death itself is an illusion. Time is also an illusion. That is why the Buddha speaks all the Sutra in this manner, ‘Thus have I heard, at one time the Buddha was…..’ No specific time is stated. Now the physics has proven its illusory. As time is an illusion, it does not exist. Let me give you an example of what is meant by death. It is as if we are driving a car into a tunnel. The shape of the tunnel resembles that of a tomb. And we keep on driving into it. We say we are entering the tomb, that we are going to die soon. We are threatened as the entrance represents death. We continue on our journey in the tunnel and later leave the tunnel, again travelling on our way to another destiny. The entrance of the tunnel, the funeral wreath looks like the tomb. For us, death is a terrible idea that we are fearful of it. We do not know life is a continuity and there is no death. It is our wrong concept that there is this section of birth and death. No one can do anything about it until they personally realise it. ‘I am unable to live out my real self as I have too much worried.’ Most of us live in this world wearing a mask. If everyone of us is free to show our real self this is the most beautiful side of a self. Why cannot we live the way we should live? It is because we are always burdened with worries. We are worried we are not good enough. We are worried that our parents will scold us. We are worried our teacher will get angry and criticize us. We are worried about losing face. We only live for others. We lose our life away trying to accord to others’ expectation. We lose the light of a happy life. Our life is controlled by all these worrisome thoughts. But if we truly recite the Buddha’s Name, our mind will be at ease. Amitabha Buddha takes away our worries by replacing them with Namo Amitabha Buddha. We will realise all these worries and views are not important and we will gradually pay no attention to them. Our true life is Buddha recitation. That is our real identity. Our mind will be at ease as we will pay no attention to those unreal things, words and ideas. Our worries only arise when we care too much about the mundane matters. The author has not learnt about Buddhism. This is her experience in death. What she has written is very personal, true experience, not something that we learn from a book. Her experience gives her an awakening to the reality of life and she lives out her life in this awakening. I saw her video and I feel she is an enlightened person. An enlightened person may not be replete with spiritual penetration. But she will reveal her love in her daily living. She is calm at ease and without any sense of fear in her mind. She leads her life in a genuine way. She said, ‘I know that cancer is not a punishment neither is it a retribution. Cancer is my energy capacity which reveals itself on my body. Because of my fear I am unable to reveal the beautiful self in me. And this is the job which should be carried out by me. I know that cancer is not a punishment which is forced on me. It is not an external force of retribution.’ This is what we often do when certain things happen, we will try to find an excuse or put the blame on reward or retribution. We treat the misfortune with anger and hatred. We often have this tendency to catogorise every happening in accord with the cause or reason. In Buddhism we talk about cause and effect. As she is not a Buddhist she says, ‘Cancer appears as a result of a change in my energy capacity. This energy shows itself in the form of cancer.’ This is because she lives in fear and worries. She does not live out her real happy self. So if we the Buddha recitation cultivators are able to reveal the bright side of life, to live without worries, there will be no more cancer for us. This is her understanding about life. That is why I have often said, ‘Lead a life of a mundane man and recite the Buddha’s Name sincerely.’ We should lead a life of Amitabha Buddha. Our life will be full of light and blessings. And we will become more loving. Finally we will lead a comfortable life and people around us will be comfortable also. This itself is the propagation of the dharma of love. Otherwise, if we cannot live a loving life, there is no point talking about anything as they will be useless. Anita said, ‘In that state which is vast and limitless, I found that I am too strict with myself. I keep on whipping myself.’ Can we feel the existence of being vast and limitless? No. We are often limited by our surrounding. As she had entered the limitless vastness, she is able to know her whole life. She knows her fault is being too strict with herself. In fact, most of us are very strict with ourselves, demanding ourselves to be like this or that. She said, ‘No one is punishing me. The person whom I cannot forgive is I myself. I have abandoned myself. I do not love myself. This matter is none of others’ business.’ No one from outside comes to punish us. It is we who punish ourselves. We cannot forgive our selves. We add on a lot of unnecessary locks and chains on ourselves. What is more for us the Buddha reciters? If we recite the Buddha’s name and on the other hand, we add on ourselves lots of locks and chains whence Amitabha Buddha is trying to unlock us, isn’t this a most pitiful situation?’ She said that she had abandoned herself. It means we throw ourselves away and become a lone ranger, an isolated person living a life of sadness, a live without love. Look at a baby. Her eyes are clear as the baby is a simple being, just like a simple puppies or baby cat. The baby can play with chickens, puppis as she does not give rise to diffentiation. Not everyone of us is like Anita. But every one of us can recite the Buddha’s name. When we recite the Buddha’s name, we will be calm. Amitabha Buddha said, ‘In the world of fear I comfort them with great love.’ It is because all the worries are gone when we accomplish Buddhahood at the Pure Land. We will not be so worried about our poverty, health problem, ugliness, stupidity, inability to recite a sutra, a mantra. All these are unimportant as finally I will become a Buddha in the Buddha Land. We will be more humorous. For example, if we are ugly we will use it as a joke. It does not matter at all. Because all the external states are not you. The real self, our real life is the Buddha’s Name. It is our true identity. It will bring ease to our mind. A baby is pure. But as it grows up, it starts to abandon himself. A baby resembles a glass of pure water. When he grows up, his greed starts to accumulate when he wants a toy, a book, good results, money, benefits, fame women and so on. All these are placed in the glass of water. Everything is a piece of mud that we put in out glass. The more we put into the glass, the more the water will flow out. This water is the genuine self. We abandon the true self, chase it out with our greed. We fill ourselves with all the rubbish. The genuine blessings and bliss are chased away. We lead an opaque life without transparency. Our life become a glass of muddy water and we live in great torment. The more we obtain, the more we lose ourselves. That is why the Buddha is truly kind. He and his disciples lead a life of a beggar. When you have nothing, you will be happy and relax. The mind retains its purity. Human beings are deluded as they think to possess a wife, children, a house, a car are called blessings. A man who truly loves himself does not love money, sex, fame, food, sleep. These five desires are the knives that will cut us into pieces and bring on great sufferings. Anita said, ‘I realise I am the child of the beautiful universe. As long as I exist, I will obtain this unconditional love.’ This is very good. I would like to make the following changes, ‘I realize that I am the son of the adorned Amitabha Buddha.’ In Buddhism we use adorned to replace the word beautiful. The universe is this Amitabha Buddha. In the Sutra we are told Amitabha Buddha is the Treasury Body of the Dharma Realm. Amitabha Buddha exists in the whole of the Dharma Realm. Of course, there are also the reward body and transformation bodies beside the dharma body. Amitabha Buddha is the immeasurable wisdom and lifespan. Anita says that the universal energy is abundant and inexhaustible, vast and without limits. This is the existence of the Buddha Nature. She says as long as she exists, she will surely obtain the unconditional love. I often also say, ‘No conditions are required for us to receive the love and rescue of Amitabha Buddha.’ Let us take the analogy of a tree. As long as it exists, it will receive the sunlight. No other condition is needed. So it is the same for the house and everything on earth. Amitabha Buddha’s Name is also known as the Light that Far-surpassing the Sun and Moon. Amitabha Buddha’s light pervasively illumines all the living beings and things in the world. As long as we exist, we will receive the light of the Buddha, the protection of his loving kindness and rescue. It is unnecessary for us to become somebody so as to receive the unconditional rescue of Amitabha Buddha. Our Master Hui Jing also wrote a book on the ‘Unconditional Rescue of the Buddha.’ Some people cannot believe. He says, ‘If this is the case everyone will commit evils.’ Such a thinking is negative and full of fear as his mind is dwelling in darkness. He is afraid that the world will go upside down. He cannot understand that as long as there is the existence, may they be a cat, a dog, a hell being, they will be taken care of by Amitabha Buddha. The only condition is they exist. This reminds me of the words of Great Master Tan Luan, ‘The future scholars who hear about the rescue of the Buddha, the rescue that relies on other’s strength, he should give rise to faith. Do not refuse such a chance. It is being stupid.’ Do not think that you should do this and that to obtain the rescue? Amitabha Buddha did not ask you to do anything. He says, ‘Living beings in the ten directions who have faith in me.’ It means they exist and the Buddha will be there to save them. Buddha recitation is not a condition. It is just a method of saving. Anita says, ‘I do not have to do anything to obtain this love.’ Just like a blade of grass in the water. Does it need to do anything to obtain water? It is unnecessary. As long as it exists, it is surrounded by the water. As long as we exist, we are surrounded by the love of Amitabha Buddha. We do not need to do anything to obtain this love and care. Once we know this, we will be fearless and calm at ease. This is the same as the sunlight which shine on the mountain and also the valley. In our life no matter what level we are we will receive the illumination of Amitabha Buddha. Anita says, ‘No prayer, no seeking is needed.’ Amitabha’s rescue is there always. As long as we recite, we will be saved by him. Amitabha Buddha says, ‘All living beings in the ten directions who call on me will be saved by me. You only have to say out my name.’ You say you are dumb and cannot call the name. Such a man who understands the rescue of Buddha will also be saved even if he cannot pronounce the Name. But if you are unwilling, you are creating an obstacle for yourself. That is why our dharma door is known as the ‘The Dharma is taught without being asked.’, the ‘Befriend us without being asked’. As long as we trust him, he will come personally to take us to his Pure Land. On hearing that nothing is needed to be done, some will be confused. They want to do something, to clean the altar, to change the water, to offer some fruits and incense, to sit in meditation and so on. They think this will help them to attain a rebirth. They have to do something. They do not realise what they need to do is to reveal the beautiful self, to lead the adorned life and let themselves become the love. As long as we sit there and lead a loving life we are in accord with the love of the Buddha Amitabha. When the sun is shining, you say, ‘It is good. A shiny day.’ When it is raining, you say, ‘Very good. It is raining now.’ When it snows, you say, ‘Good, I love snow.’ This way of living is to add the positive loving energy to this universe. You are spreading the pure and harmony energy to the universe. In the Buddha Dharma it is known as the lights shine on one another. The whole universe will receive the positive energy of your loving and harmonious mind. So, what you need to do is to recite Namo Amitabha Budda loudly, softly, silently. All will be ok. If we live this way, Amitabha Buddha will be most happy to see us. It is just like a child who is sleeping in the cradle. Doing nothing. What do you think? Will the mother be happy to see him like that? Yes, of course. She will be very glad with him just sleeping there. Nothing has to be done. A child in the arms of his mother is the revelation of total trust. And this is the same for us to be in the arms of Amitabha Buddha. We just relax and trust him. We will lead a happy life. And this is the genuine way of living in accord with the love of oneself. More often than not we lead a life with worries, fear, twisted emotions and trying to cover up our faults. Our adorned life cannot be revealed. Everyday, we live in fear and worries. This is adding chains and locks to ourselves. Anita says, ‘I have never truly loved myself before. I have never valued my existence. I have never seen the adorned soul in me.’ She uses soul to describe herself. In the Buddha Dharma this refers to the beauty and adorned Buddha Nature. She said, ‘I am so beautiful yet I have never realised it. It is replaced with the hard facts of mundane existence. I decay because I do not understand my beautiful soul.’ In the Buddha Dharma it is described as all living beings are originally the Buddha. Yet we do not live, in accord with our Buddha Nature. We are often controlled by our mundane existence, the salary, the examination results and such like. We forget of our Buddha Nature. We lead a life of decay, a life of erosion. This is the General path of Buddhism. From the angle of Buddha Recitation, the rescue of Amitabha is always with us, only that we do not realise it. We try all kinds of methods hoping for the Buddha to rescue us. We do not know that we just have to admit we are the mundane men who are covered with offences. There is no other way to save ourselves if we do not rely on Amitabha Buddha. Then we let go and recite the Buddha’s Name wholeheartedly. This is the way to be saved by the Buddha. But most people cannot understand this. They want to do something good, to be pretentious and make out something good of himself, to scold people for their lacking in virtues and such like. This is against the practise of this pure land door. Why cannot the people in the world see their pretention? It is because they are also not living a true life. Their eyes are not clear enough to see through this pretention. A fake man sees something fake and he will treat it as genuine. A clear -headed man will surely be able to see through all these false masks. If we were to wear a false mask for too long it will be difficult to remove it. It has grown on to our skin. It will be painful if we want to remove this fake mask. So it takes time for us to loosen this false mask as we have been wearing them for too long. Anita says, ‘This understanding makes me realise that I do not have to be frightened anymore.’ There is no more fear in her mind. It is a mind of calm and bliss. It is a mind which is full of hope. It is a comforting mind that can soothe others. With this calm and happy mind it is already a contribution to all around us. It is already a protection and mindfulness to all around us. We do not have to do anything at all. Most of us live in fear. We pay for insurance because we are afraid when we get old, we have no money, no money to pay the medical fees. We get married out of fear that we will be lonely. Why do we give birth to children? We are afraid no one will take care of us at old age. Why do we go to school? It is because we are afraid of our mother’s anger. Why must we study hard? We are afraid of our teacher. Why do we go to university? We are afraid people will look down on us. Can we live without fear? We cannot. Even our mother who loves us so much say we will suffer if we do not study hard. From our young age we receive the education of fear. We are threatened by our beloved parents, our responsible teachers. We do not receive the education of love. So, if we love our children, do not add fear to them. We must give only love and courage so that they can face life with their original positive energy, positive strength. This is because the world is full of twisted people, fake people, suffering people. There are very few upright men, genuine men, happy and hopeful men around. I only hope all of you my lotus friends will bring up a future generation who is upright, genuine, happy and hopeful with the strength of Amitabha Buddha. So, we must lead a life based on the right values taught by Amitabha Buddha. If we teach our child to fight for self -benefit, to contend with others, we are making them blind so that they do not see the truth of life. This is harming them. If we are enlightened to this, we will only rely on Amitabha Buddha. We are not afraid to be lonely. We will be at ease. Those who see the light, the warmth of the Buddha will no longer be frightened. Anita says, ‘I realise this is a state that can be reached by myself and everyone.’ In Zen sect it is said all living beings are Buddha. In the Buddha recitation door, everyone can recite the Name, everyone can attain a rebirth and everyone can accomplish Buddhahood. This is the bestowment by Amitabha Buddha. All the things that we fight for may not be beneficial to us. Everything that benefits us are often free. For example, the air we take in every instant is free. We do not pay to stand on the earth. We do not pay to look at the sky above. Whatever we fight and earn to get are valueless. Everything that is valuable is free. In the general practice it is said, ‘No cultivation is the cultivation. Nothing is obtainable. This is the state of a bodhisattva. The original face of all dharma often dwells in the mark of still extinction. Our Buddha Nature is replete with all merits and virtues. We cannot cultivate anything to enhance it. This is because all the things that we can do are only dreams, illusion, bubbles and shadow. Whatever that we do, that we create are not in accord with our Buddha Nature. The Buddha Nature is always there, original and shining out naturally. And in our Pure Land Dharma, whatever we have offered, whatever we have done are not the causes for our attainment of a rebirth. Attaining a rebirth is the state of nothing doing. It stays apart from creation or doing. It is a natural state. Reciting Namo Amitabha Buddha helps us to return to this state. Anita said, ‘So I decided to return to the mundane world.’ She has enlightened to the opportunity of life and she decided to come back to tell us about life. Just like many Pure Land cultivators who say that they will not come back any more to sufferings. Yet when they arrive at the Pure Land and brings forth the Bodhi mind, they will come back by themselves to help other beings. Anita said, ‘When I was on the verge of death, I realised the universe comes forth from unconditional love. I am one of the revelations of this love in my present form.’ For the scientists they will say the universe is made from electron, protons, neutrons and so on. This is talking only at the surface level, the materials. But as she talked from her true experienc,e she can see all the things, all the people are the expression of this universal love. When she comes back from death, she deeply penetrates the genuine love the mother universe and her wavelength is in accord with the universal love. She comes back as a healthy woman. So once there is a change in our mind set, the body, the people and the surroundings will also change. In the eyes of Buddha and Bodhisattva there is no differentiation of filth and purity. Everything is pure and adorned in its own expression. Every one of us is the art piece of this unconditional love or in the Buddha’s words, the Buddha Nature. She said, ‘I cannot change into another form as it is my original expression, original nature of this unconditional love.’ Everything that exists is the expression of the Buddha Nature. Even something which is defiled or unwholesome is also part of the expression of this unconditional everlasting love. That is why the Buddha says, ‘All the Dharma from the original state dwells constantly in still extinction.’ Still extinction refers to Nirvana the state of the Buddha. So, when we recite the Buddha’s Name we will enter the Buddha’s dwelling. ‘The energy capacity of the strength of life forms derives from love. And I am made from the universal energy capacity. On knowing this, I realise I do not need to become somebody else. And my true value will not be depreciated too.’ Anita said, So, it is unnecessary for us to become another man. A business man does not need to become Jack Ma. Why is this so? It is because you are equal to him. He is not higher than you. He has the Buddha Nature and you also have the Buddha Nature. Every one is equal. So we do not need to measure in terms of money especially if we truly know the benefits of Buddha recitation. In the eyes of the Buddha every one of us is a shining star. We do not need to chase after another star. Just imagine the havoc it will be when the stars do not dwell in its orbit and try to chase after another star. What a chaos the universe will become. Everyone of our existence is in perfect conditions in the eyes of the Buddha and Bodhisattva. ‘This is the I that I have always wanted to be.’ she said. We must learn to appreciate ourselves, accept ourselves and love ourselves. This ‘I’ is invaluable under the unconditional love of the Rescue of Amitabha Buddha. We are his precious sons, the pearls on his hand. If we are accepted by the Buddha, we will be so happy as we will have no complaint about ourselves. We are often surrounded by people who keep on complaining about us. The first one is our mother who says that we are not clever, we have low marks. We are not filial. We earn too little. See how our mother teaches us not to appreciate ourselves. Then we are blamed by our teacher, our classmates, our girl -friend and so on. Then comes Amitabha Buddha who studies us and says, ‘Put aside all the complaints. You are qualified to attain Buddhahood. No problem at all. I give you 100 percent.’ That is why we Buddha Recitation Practitioners are always at ease under the shine of Amitabha Buddha who give us the confirmation. This is the greatest benefits the Buddha bestows upon us. Buddhism brings hope and bliss to the world, the universe. So, in this life’s time we must try our best to lead a life of Amitabha Buddha. Do not be swayed by the mundane values, mundane eyes, mundane perspective. We rely only on the outlook of the Buddha and Bodhisattva. ‘Once we know that we are this love, it is unnecessary to purposely go forth to shower love on others. As long as we are faithful to our original nature, we will automatically become the tools of love, touching the hearts of everyone who have affinity with us.’ This part of her speech is very good. If we are already the lamp, there is no need for us to go out purposely to shine on others. The lamp just stands at its place and it manages to brighten up the place. So, when we are the LOVE, we will naturally touch those around us with our love. Take a look at our Master Hui Jing. He sits there quietly and yet every one of us are calm and happy naturally. So when we become the love, wherever we are, all will feel calm at ease, without any fear. Anita said, ‘The most important thing I have learnt is I am the Love itself. All my fears are gone. This is the reason I come into life again.’ Amitabha Buddha said, ‘I will transform all the fear into great calmness, great serenity’ When We recite His Name we are charged with his love. We also become the love. We will leave behind all fear. ‘My dear, you will always be loved. You do not need to harbour any fear. There is no way for you to commit any errors.’ Always think about these three sentences. There is the light of truth in it. This is spoken by a non -Buddhist who was on the verge of her death and who lives again. How about us the Buddha Recitation Practitioners? Can we deny the love of Amitabha Buddha, His unconditional love of rescue? From this story we know the unconditional love of rescue of the Buddha pervasively surrounds us. We must have faith in this and lead a life of joy with no more fear. Nowadays, everyone lives in fear. We must learn to replete ourselves with love and bring this shine to others, to lead them out of fear. Love yourself and love others. Namo Amitabha Buddha. A dharma talk by Dharma Master Shi Jing Zong, the Abbot of the Hong Yuan Monastery in Anhui, China entitled: Dying Once to Learn to Love Link: https://oridharma.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/in-the-era-of-fear-i-comfort-them-with-great-love/

In the Era of Fear I Comfort them with Great Love
Anita Moorjani was cured from cancer not because of a certain medicine, vaccine or chemotherapy. She was cured because of this Great Love. Anita Moorjani is a forty years old woman who is simple and honest. She was born in India, grew up in Singapore and was English educated. Later she went to Hong Kong. She knows Tamil, English and Cantonese. In 2002 the doctor said that she was down with cancer lymphoma or the blood cell tumor. After four years, in 2006 seventy percent of her body is covered with the cancerous cells. She stayed in the hospital, suffering terribly because of this illness. Later the doctor pronounced her death. After three days she woke up and was cured miraculously. This is truly inconceivable when she woke up from her death. In her mind she was very sure she was cured already. No treatment was needed. But she was very weak. She could not even talk. The doctor was surprised of her condition and again they carried out a checking on her body and found that she was free from all symptoms of cancer. In her mind she knew she was already cured. In her mind there was a great transformation that she personally experienced. And all the cells on her body were transformed into healthy cells. Later she wrote a book entitles: After dying once I finally learn to love’ By looking at this title, it coincides with Master Shan Dao’s teaching on the one with deep faith in the dharma. He said, ‘Standing here is waiting to die. Going forward is also death. Turning back, I too cannot escape from death.’ This can be found in the ‘Analogy of two rivers and one white lane’ the three sure deaths. If we have died once, we will truly give ourselves up. This is the same as the Pure Land teaching that we have to admit we are the sinful mundane man. We lose all hope as we have no ways to leave the triple realm. In cultivation we need to really undergo a total death in order to really practise the path. The zen cultivator says this is known as undergoing great death and great living. Otherwise, no real cultivation can be expected because most of us are very arrogant, very self-centred, without much changes in our stubborn mindset. That is why she said after dying once only she managed to learn how to love. In the Pure Land door this is known as having deep faith. Such a man will surely have faith in Amitabha’s 48 vows to gather in living beings without any doubts and suspicion. By relying on the strength of the Buddha’s Vows we will surely attain a rebirth. This is living in the great love of Namo Amitabha Buddha. We receive the love of Amitabha Buddha. Only then we can have the genuine love and we are able to learn to love. If we do not feel the love of Amitabha Buddha, we will not know how to love. Our love will be frightening as it is an attachment, a desire to control, to possess others. Such a love is impure, it is a threat to us. If we are not careful it might turn into hatred. Such is a frightful kind of love. If we learn from Amitabha Buddha, the love is pure, without condition and transparent. This is truly loving a person. It is not easy to learn this. We look at the couples around us. So many got married and end up in divorce. How about those who do not get a divorce? Yes, they spend the whole life fighting！The truly loving couples are as few as the stars in the broad day light. So, learning to love is our homework for the whole life. It is not easy. Today I would like to discuss this passage with you. After reading her writing I feel most shameful as what the author has said is very true in accord with her experience. Even though I have left home for more than twenty years, receiving the teaching of the Buddha, the guidance of the patriarch, the exhortation of my Master, the help of my lotus friends and all, I still feel I am lacking in genuine practice and virtues. On the contrary this lady has not met with the Buddha Dharma. She has such an awakening after dying once, it is truly a gain for her. She said, ‘After my body stopped functioning, I entered into another world.’ She was so seriously ill that her heart, her liver and everything stopped functioning. This is to show there is a world after death. She said, ‘I saw myself as a very wonderful person. This is because I was not terrorised until I had a change in shape.’ ‘I felt there was this vibrant energy around me and I was able to enter it. I realise if a man can see his wonderful existence, he must be the happiest man.’ Most of us like to complain about our imperfect existence. We often think thus, ‘I do not have enough money. I am not healthy. I am not pretty. I do not have enough clothing ….’ Here we must learn to see the good points in us, to appreciate the value of our existence. A woman who can say like this is truly very calm in mind. A man who always complains about himself will not be able to live happily each day. So, without knowing the love of Amitabha for us, we will be a great complainer. We complain about no money, we complain about our look, our wrinkles and so on and so forth. What kind of life will this be with so many complaints? She said, ‘I found that there was this power surrounding me.’ When we pass away, we will no longer be using our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind to observe. Instead, we will be awakened to our innate Buddha. She felt she is surrounded by this vibrant field of energy and she is also this energy. What kind of power is this? It is a kind of energy. It is always in the universe or the dharma realm in the Buddhist terms. In fact, this is Amitabha Buddha. This is the strength of the Buddha Nature. She uses her Buddha Nature to experience the Buddha Nature. It exists forever. It is neither born nor become extinct. If the Buddha enters the world or does not enter the world, it is always there without changing. Of course, she does not use these Buddhist terms. She said, ‘When I give up the attachment to the mundane world, I enter another world effortlessly. It is unnecessary to pray, to recite a sutra or to give a dharma talk. It is unnecessary to seek forgiveness, repentance or other methods.’ ‘Death gives me the feeling that I do not need to do anything. It is just as though I am telling someone I am coming to the end. I cannot do anything anymore. I give up. Whatever you want to do I will just accept.’ I feel that this passage is very near in meaning to the Pure Land’s view. It means when we die, we have just to let go as nothing can be done anymore. Most people die in torment as there are many attachments in this world. They are worried about their children, money and work. Some people find it difficult to die. So, from here we must learn to let go when it is our turn to leave the world. Moreover, we have the promise from Amitabha Buddha who will come to receive us in accord with the strength of his vows. It is much easier for us. This lady just let go and she entered another world. Her state should be quite high too. I will explain below. I feel that she had arrived at the border of the Pure Land. Her state of an awakened mind showed that she was not in the heaven. She seemed to be enlightened to the Buddha nature and non -existence of a self. She experienced the light of enlightenment and returned to life, to lead a life of love. So, in our practice we are told to let go of all attachment and to wish for a rebirth in the Pure Land relying on Amitabha’s strength of vows. So from here we can see it is very easy to be born in the World of Ultimate Bliss. She said it is unnecessary to recite a sutra, a dharma or seeking for forgiveness. She enters the other world naturally when she simply gives up herself. I remember once I went with my Master to console a dying man. I was very touched by my Master’s words. He said kindly to the man who is on the verge of death, ‘So and so, now we will recite Namo Amitabha Buddha. If you can recite, then recite together. If you can’t, just lay down and relax. It is ok if you just listen to our recitation.’ Are not these words very comforting? The dying man will feel very safe and relax. But if you were to say, ‘So and so, this is the last chance. Bring out all your strength to face death. If you can recite then recite together. If you cannot recite, you must try also!’ On listening to this threat, the sick man is stressed out. He will die instantly as he has no strength to join in recitation. The Master who with his great love understands the rescue of Amitabha Buddha is a natural process that he is able to say in such a comforting way. No condition is needed. There is no threat nor fright in his words. A man who threatens people is not calm as he must be frightened too in his mind. That is why what he says will frighten people, giving stress to others. If we are loving in our mind, our words will only bring love, peace and calm to others. People will feel our love for them. So, this lady says it is unnecessary to read or recite any prayer or seeking forgiveness. This is because the wavelength of her mind is on a par with the great love of the universe. She naturally enters it. Namo Amitabha Buddha is a dharma that requires no seeking or pleading. It is a dharma of rescue without condition. When we recite Namo Amitabha Buddha, the wavelength of our mind is the same as Amitabha Buddha. So, we will attain a rebirth naturally. Many of us who do not understand the kindness of Amitabha Buddha will seek a rebirth by pleading to the Buddha every day. His mind is unsettled and frightened that he might be left out. This is because he does not understand when he recites the Buddha’s name, the wavelength of his mind is in the same frequency with Amitabha Buddha’s mind and vows. Then people will ask, ‘Do we still go to recite the Buddha’s Name for the dying man?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ This is because the dying man has yet to understand this point. When we recite for him, he will be safe in the shine of Namo Amitabha Buddha. This is a method which is bestowed upon us to save us with this Name in accord with the strength of the Buddha’s vows. When she says to somebody, this refers to Amitabha Buddha. She says she cannot do anything anymore and she gives up. She gives herself up to the Buddha. So, when we die do not try to fight with death and refuse to die. We must just admit we are the offender and we need the help of Amitabha Buddha to take us, to rescue us. Namo is to admit we take refuge in the Buddha, we surrender ourselves. When we cultivate this door, we must not add in our ideas. We must just let Amitabha Buddha to decide for us. This is because Amitabha has the power of great vow, the extensive great strength of the Buddha Nature, the strength of immeasurable light, the strength of immeasurable lifespan. We just have to give up all planning. He will plan for us. So, when we recite the Name of the Buddha, just recite without thinking of doing this or that trying so hard to reach a certain acceptable standard. These are all unnecessary. This type of thinking is the habit of the sagely path cultivators. When we sit on the plane, just sit there. The plane will bring you to your destiny. It is unnecessary for you to help the plane to fly. Amitabha Buddha the pilot does not need you to fly the plane. If he needs your help then he is not known as Amitabha Buddha. Anita said, ‘In the other world, I found that my mind is very clear and bright. I realise by myself that I will only die out of the fear and terror in my mind.’ These words are very true. Clarity of mind means her mind is pure. In this world our mind is turbid, dark and deluded. That is why are enveloped in all kinds of worries and terror. But once we arrive at the Pure Land, we will naturally be pure and bright. This is because the land is pure and is enveloped in bright illumination. She said she naturally know she will be cured. This knowing ability is possessed by us originally. No learning is needed because our Buddha nature is originally pure and bright. In the Saha world our ability is being covered up by afflictions. But when we arrive at the World of Ultimate Bliss, we will naturally possess this ability. This ability reappears relying on the strength of Vows of Amitabha Buddha. When we arrive at the Pure Land, we will naturally possess the ability to make offerings to the Buddha. On hearing one sentence we are enlightened to the millions. Our mind is opened up to the thousands of million Dharanis. Everyone of us have this innate ability. And Amitabha Buddha’s strength of Vows enhances its opening. In this Saha World our innate nature is all covered up and cannot function. In the world of ultimate bliss, by relying on Amitabha Buddha’s strength of great vows, our innate ability is open up. So they are not contradicting. ‘I naturally know the source of the thought that I will die. The source is I was frightened. If there is no fear, there is no death.’ In actuality there is no death. It is only our fear of death that this illusion comes froth. In Buddha dharma we should know death itself is an illusion. Time is also an illusion. That is why the Buddha speaks all the Sutra in this manner, ‘Thus have I heard, at one time the Buddha was…..’ No specific time is stated. Now the physics has proven its illusory. As time is an illusion, it does not exist. Let me give you an example of what is meant by death. It is as if we are driving a car into a tunnel. The shape of the tunnel resembles that of a tomb. And we keep on driving into it. We say we are entering the tomb, that we are going to die soon. We are threatened as the entrance represents death. We continue on our journey in the tunnel and later leave the tunnel, again travelling on our way to another destiny. The entrance of the tunnel, the funeral wreath looks like the tomb. For us, death is a terrible idea that we are fearful of it. We do not know life is a continuity and there is no death. It is our wrong concept that there is this section of birth and death. No one can do anything about it until they personally realise it. ‘I am unable to live out my real self as I have too much worried.’ Most of us live in this world wearing a mask. If everyone of us is free to show our real self this is the most beautiful side of a self. Why cannot we live the way we should live? It is because we are always burdened with worries. We are worried we are not good enough. We are worried that our parents will scold us. We are worried our teacher will get angry and criticize us. We are worried about losing face. We only live for others. We lose our life away trying to accord to others’ expectation. We lose the light of a happy life. Our life is controlled by all these worrisome thoughts. But if we truly recite the Buddha’s Name, our mind will be at ease. Amitabha Buddha takes away our worries by replacing them with Namo Amitabha Buddha. We will realise all these worries and views are not important and we will gradually pay no attention to them. Our true life is Buddha recitation. That is our real identity. Our mind will be at ease as we will pay no attention to those unreal things, words and ideas. Our worries only arise when we care too much about the mundane matters. The author has not learnt about Buddhism. This is her experience in death. What she has written is very personal, true experience, not something that we learn from a book. Her experience gives her an awakening to the reality of life and she lives out her life in this awakening. I saw her video and I feel she is an enlightened person. An enlightened person may not be replete with spiritual penetration. But she will reveal her love in her daily living. She is calm at ease and without any sense of fear in her mind. She leads her life in a genuine way. She said, ‘I know that cancer is not a punishment neither is it a retribution. Cancer is my energy capacity which reveals itself on my body. Because of my fear I am unable to reveal the beautiful self in me. And this is the job which should be carried out by me. I know that cancer is not a punishment which is forced on me. It is not an external force of retribution.’ This is what we often do when certain things happen, we will try to find an excuse or put the blame on reward or retribution. We treat the misfortune with anger and hatred. We often have this tendency to catogorise every happening in accord with the cause or reason. In Buddhism we talk about cause and effect. As she is not a Buddhist she says, ‘Cancer appears as a result of a change in my energy capacity. This energy shows itself in the form of cancer.’ This is because she lives in fear and worries. She does not live out her real happy self. So if we the Buddha recitation cultivators are able to reveal the bright side of life, to live without worries, there will be no more cancer for us. This is her understanding about life. That is why I have often said, ‘Lead a life of a mundane man and recite the Buddha’s Name sincerely.’ We should lead a life of Amitabha Buddha. Our life will be full of light and blessings. And we will become more loving. Finally we will lead a comfortable life and people around us will be comfortable also. This itself is the propagation of the dharma of love. Otherwise, if we cannot live a loving life, there is no point talking about anything as they will be useless. Anita said, ‘In that state which is vast and limitless, I found that I am too strict with myself. I keep on whipping myself.’ Can we feel the existence of being vast and limitless? No. We are often limited by our surrounding. As she had entered the limitless vastness, she is able to know her whole life. She knows her fault is being too strict with herself. In fact, most of us are very strict with ourselves, demanding ourselves to be like this or that. She said, ‘No one is punishing me. The person whom I cannot forgive is I myself. I have abandoned myself. I do not love myself. This matter is none of others’ business.’ No one from outside comes to punish us. It is we who punish ourselves. We cannot forgive our selves. We add on a lot of unnecessary locks and chains on ourselves. What is more for us the Buddha reciters? If we recite the Buddha’s name and on the other hand, we add on ourselves lots of locks and chains whence Amitabha Buddha is trying to unlock us, isn’t this a most pitiful situation?’ She said that she had abandoned herself. It means we throw ourselves away and become a lone ranger, an isolated person living a life of sadness, a live without love. Look at a baby. Her eyes are clear as the baby is a simple being, just like a simple puppies or baby cat. The baby can play with chickens, puppis as she does not give rise to diffentiation. Not everyone of us is like Anita. But every one of us can recite the Buddha’s name. When we recite the Buddha’s name, we will be calm. Amitabha Buddha said, ‘In the world of fear I comfort them with great love.’ It is because all the worries are gone when we accomplish Buddhahood at the Pure Land. We will not be so worried about our poverty, health problem, ugliness, stupidity, inability to recite a sutra, a mantra. All these are unimportant as finally I will become a Buddha in the Buddha Land. We will be more humorous. For example, if we are ugly we will use it as a joke. It does not matter at all. Because all the external states are not you. The real self, our real life is the Buddha’s Name. It is our true identity. It will bring ease to our mind. A baby is pure. But as it grows up, it starts to abandon himself. A baby resembles a glass of pure water. When he grows up, his greed starts to accumulate when he wants a toy, a book, good results, money, benefits, fame women and so on. All these are placed in the glass of water. Everything is a piece of mud that we put in out glass. The more we put into the glass, the more the water will flow out. This water is the genuine self. We abandon the true self, chase it out with our greed. We fill ourselves with all the rubbish. The genuine blessings and bliss are chased away. We lead an opaque life without transparency. Our life become a glass of muddy water and we live in great torment. The more we obtain, the more we lose ourselves. That is why the Buddha is truly kind. He and his disciples lead a life of a beggar. When you have nothing, you will be happy and relax. The mind retains its purity. Human beings are deluded as they think to possess a wife, children, a house, a car are called blessings. A man who truly loves himself does not love money, sex, fame, food, sleep. These five desires are the knives that will cut us into pieces and bring on great sufferings. Anita said, ‘I realise I am the child of the beautiful universe. As long as I exist, I will obtain this unconditional love.’ This is very good. I would like to make the following changes, ‘I realize that I am the son of the adorned Amitabha Buddha.’ In Buddhism we use adorned to replace the word beautiful. The universe is this Amitabha Buddha. In the Sutra we are told Amitabha Buddha is the Treasury Body of the Dharma Realm. Amitabha Buddha exists in the whole of the Dharma Realm. Of course, there are also the reward body and transformation bodies beside the dharma body. Amitabha Buddha is the immeasurable wisdom and lifespan. Anita says that the universal energy is abundant and inexhaustible, vast and without limits. This is the existence of the Buddha Nature. She says as long as she exists, she will surely obtain the unconditional love. I often also say, ‘No conditions are required for us to receive the love and rescue of Amitabha Buddha.’ Let us take the analogy of a tree. As long as it exists, it will receive the sunlight. No other condition is needed. So it is the same for the house and everything on earth. Amitabha Buddha’s Name is also known as the Light that Far-surpassing the Sun and Moon. Amitabha Buddha’s light pervasively illumines all the living beings and things in the world. As long as we exist, we will receive the light of the Buddha, the protection of his loving kindness and rescue. It is unnecessary for us to become somebody so as to receive the unconditional rescue of Amitabha Buddha. Our Master Hui Jing also wrote a book on the ‘Unconditional Rescue of the Buddha.’ Some people cannot believe. He says, ‘If this is the case everyone will commit evils.’ Such a thinking is negative and full of fear as his mind is dwelling in darkness. He is afraid that the world will go upside down. He cannot understand that as long as there is the existence, may they be a cat, a dog, a hell being, they will be taken care of by Amitabha Buddha. The only condition is they exist. This reminds me of the words of Great Master Tan Luan, ‘The future scholars who hear about the rescue of the Buddha, the rescue that relies on other’s strength, he should give rise to faith. Do not refuse such a chance. It is being stupid.’ Do not think that you should do this and that to obtain the rescue? Amitabha Buddha did not ask you to do anything. He says, ‘Living beings in the ten directions who have faith in me.’ It means they exist and the Buddha will be there to save them. Buddha recitation is not a condition. It is just a method of saving. Anita says, ‘I do not have to do anything to obtain this love.’ Just like a blade of grass in the water. Does it need to do anything to obtain water? It is unnecessary. As long as it exists, it is surrounded by the water. As long as we exist, we are surrounded by the love of Amitabha Buddha. We do not need to do anything to obtain this love and care. Once we know this, we will be fearless and calm at ease. This is the same as the sunlight which shine on the mountain and also the valley. In our life no matter what level we are we will receive the illumination of Amitabha Buddha. Anita says, ‘No prayer, no seeking is needed.’ Amitabha’s rescue is there always. As long as we recite, we will be saved by him. Amitabha Buddha says, ‘All living beings in the ten directions who call on me will be saved by me. You only have to say out my name.’ You say you are dumb and cannot call the name. Such a man who understands the rescue of Buddha will also be saved even if he cannot pronounce the Name. But if you are unwilling, you are creating an obstacle for yourself. That is why our dharma door is known as the ‘The Dharma is taught without being asked.’, the ‘Befriend us without being asked’. As long as we trust him, he will come personally to take us to his Pure Land. On hearing that nothing is needed to be done, some will be confused. They want to do something, to clean the altar, to change the water, to offer some fruits and incense, to sit in meditation and so on. They think this will help them to attain a rebirth. They have to do something. They do not realise what they need to do is to reveal the beautiful self, to lead the adorned life and let themselves become the love. As long as we sit there and lead a loving life we are in accord with the love of the Buddha Amitabha. When the sun is shining, you say, ‘It is good. A shiny day.’ When it is raining, you say, ‘Very good. It is raining now.’ When it snows, you say, ‘Good, I love snow.’ This way of living is to add the positive loving energy to this universe. You are spreading the pure and harmony energy to the universe. In the Buddha Dharma it is known as the lights shine on one another. The whole universe will receive the positive energy of your loving and harmonious mind. So, what you need to do is to recite Namo Amitabha Budda loudly, softly, silently. All will be ok. If we live this way, Amitabha Buddha will be most happy to see us. It is just like a child who is sleeping in the cradle. Doing nothing. What do you think? Will the mother be happy to see him like that? Yes, of course. She will be very glad with him just sleeping there. Nothing has to be done. A child in the arms of his mother is the revelation of total trust. And this is the same for us to be in the arms of Amitabha Buddha. We just relax and trust him. We will lead a happy life. And this is the genuine way of living in accord with the love of oneself. More often than not we lead a life with worries, fear, twisted emotions and trying to cover up our faults. Our adorned life cannot be revealed. Everyday, we live in fear and worries. This is adding chains and locks to ourselves. Anita says, ‘I have never truly loved myself before. I have never valued my existence. I have never seen the adorned soul in me.’ She uses soul to describe herself. In the Buddha Dharma this refers to the beauty and adorned Buddha Nature. She said, ‘I am so beautiful yet I have never realised it. It is replaced with the hard facts of mundane existence. I decay because I do not understand my beautiful soul.’ In the Buddha Dharma it is described as all living beings are originally the Buddha. Yet we do not live, in accord with our Buddha Nature. We are often controlled by our mundane existence, the salary, the examination results and such like. We forget of our Buddha Nature. We lead a life of decay, a life of erosion. This is the General path of Buddhism. From the angle of Buddha Recitation, the rescue of Amitabha is always with us, only that we do not realise it. We try all kinds of methods hoping for the Buddha to rescue us. We do not know that we just have to admit we are the mundane men who are covered with offences. There is no other way to save ourselves if we do not rely on Amitabha Buddha. Then we let go and recite the Buddha’s Name wholeheartedly. This is the way to be saved by the Buddha. But most people cannot understand this. They want to do something good, to be pretentious and make out something good of himself, to scold people for their lacking in virtues and such like. This is against the practise of this pure land door. Why cannot the people in the world see their pretention? It is because they are also not living a true life. Their eyes are not clear enough to see through this pretention. A fake man sees something fake and he will treat it as genuine. A clear -headed man will surely be able to see through all these false masks. If we were to wear a false mask for too long it will be difficult to remove it. It has grown on to our skin. It will be painful if we want to remove this fake mask. So it takes time for us to loosen this false mask as we have been wearing them for too long. Anita says, ‘This understanding makes me realise that I do not have to be frightened anymore.’ There is no more fear in her mind. It is a mind of calm and bliss. It is a mind which is full of hope. It is a comforting mind that can soothe others. With this calm and happy mind it is already a contribution to all around us. It is already a protection and mindfulness to all around us. We do not have to do anything at all. Most of us live in fear. We pay for insurance because we are afraid when we get old, we have no money, no money to pay the medical fees. We get married out of fear that we will be lonely. Why do we give birth to children? We are afraid no one will take care of us at old age. Why do we go to school? It is because we are afraid of our mother’s anger. Why must we study hard? We are afraid of our teacher. Why do we go to university? We are afraid people will look down on us. Can we live without fear? We cannot. Even our mother who loves us so much say we will suffer if we do not study hard. From our young age we receive the education of fear. We are threatened by our beloved parents, our responsible teachers. We do not receive the education of love. So, if we love our children, do not add fear to them. We must give only love and courage so that they can face life with their original positive energy, positive strength. This is because the world is full of twisted people, fake people, suffering people. There are very few upright men, genuine men, happy and hopeful men around. I only hope all of you my lotus friends will bring up a future generation who is upright, genuine, happy and hopeful with the strength of Amitabha Buddha. So, we must lead a life based on the right values taught by Amitabha Buddha. If we teach our child to fight for self -benefit, to contend with others, we are making them blind so that they do not see the truth of life. This is harming them. If we are enlightened to this, we will only rely on Amitabha Buddha. We are not afraid to be lonely. We will be at ease. Those who see the light, the warmth of the Buddha will no longer be frightened. Anita says, ‘I realise this is a state that can be reached by myself and everyone.’ In Zen sect it is said all living beings are Buddha. In the Buddha recitation door, everyone can recite the Name, everyone can attain a rebirth and everyone can accomplish Buddhahood. This is the bestowment by Amitabha Buddha. All the things that we fight for may not be beneficial to us. Everything that benefits us are often free. For example, the air we take in every instant is free. We do not pay to stand on the earth. We do not pay to look at the sky above. Whatever we fight and earn to get are valueless. Everything that is valuable is free. In the general practice it is said, ‘No cultivation is the cultivation. Nothing is obtainable. This is the state of a bodhisattva. The original face of all dharma often dwells in the mark of still extinction. Our Buddha Nature is replete with all merits and virtues. We cannot cultivate anything to enhance it. This is because all the things that we can do are only dreams, illusion, bubbles and shadow. Whatever that we do, that we create are not in accord with our Buddha Nature. The Buddha Nature is always there, original and shining out naturally. And in our Pure Land Dharma, whatever we have offered, whatever we have done are not the causes for our attainment of a rebirth. Attaining a rebirth is the state of nothing doing. It stays apart from creation or doing. It is a natural state. Reciting Namo Amitabha Buddha helps us to return to this state. Anita said, ‘So I decided to return to the mundane world.’ She has enlightened to the opportunity of life and she decided to come back to tell us about life. Just like many Pure Land cultivators who say that they will not come back any more to sufferings. Yet when they arrive at the Pure Land and brings forth the Bodhi mind, they will come back by themselves to help other beings. Anita said, ‘When I was on the verge of death, I realised the universe comes forth from unconditional love. I am one of the revelations of this love in my present form.’ For the scientists they will say the universe is made from electron, protons, neutrons and so on. This is talking only at the surface level, the materials. But as she talked from her true experienc,e she can see all the things, all the people are the expression of this universal love. When she comes back from death, she deeply penetrates the genuine love the mother universe and her wavelength is in accord with the universal love. She comes back as a healthy woman. So once there is a change in our mind set, the body, the people and the surroundings will also change. In the eyes of Buddha and Bodhisattva there is no differentiation of filth and purity. Everything is pure and adorned in its own expression. Every one of us is the art piece of this unconditional love or in the Buddha’s words, the Buddha Nature. She said, ‘I cannot change into another form as it is my original expression, original nature of this unconditional love.’ Everything that exists is the expression of the Buddha Nature. Even something which is defiled or unwholesome is also part of the expression of this unconditional everlasting love. That is why the Buddha says, ‘All the Dharma from the original state dwells constantly in still extinction.’ Still extinction refers to Nirvana the state of the Buddha. So, when we recite the Buddha’s Name we will enter the Buddha’s dwelling. ‘The energy capacity of the strength of life forms derives from love. And I am made from the universal energy capacity. On knowing this, I realise I do not need to become somebody else. And my true value will not be depreciated too.’ Anita said, So, it is unnecessary for us to become another man. A business man does not need to become Jack Ma. Why is this so? It is because you are equal to him. He is not higher than you. He has the Buddha Nature and you also have the Buddha Nature. Every one is equal. So we do not need to measure in terms of money especially if we truly know the benefits of Buddha recitation. In the eyes of the Buddha every one of us is a shining star. We do not need to chase after another star. Just imagine the havoc it will be when the stars do not dwell in its orbit and try to chase after another star. What a chaos the universe will become. Everyone of our existence is in perfect conditions in the eyes of the Buddha and Bodhisattva. ‘This is the I that I have always wanted to be.’ she said. We must learn to appreciate ourselves, accept ourselves and love ourselves. This ‘I’ is invaluable under the unconditional love of the Rescue of Amitabha Buddha. We are his precious sons, the pearls on his hand. If we are accepted by the Buddha, we will be so happy as we will have no complaint about ourselves. We are often surrounded by people who keep on complaining about us. The first one is our mother who says that we are not clever, we have low marks. We are not filial. We earn too little. See how our mother teaches us not to appreciate ourselves. Then we are blamed by our teacher, our classmates, our girl -friend and so on. Then comes Amitabha Buddha who studies us and says, ‘Put aside all the complaints. You are qualified to attain Buddhahood. No problem at all. I give you 100 percent.’ That is why we Buddha Recitation Practitioners are always at ease under the shine of Amitabha Buddha who give us the confirmation. This is the greatest benefits the Buddha bestows upon us. Buddhism brings hope and bliss to the world, the universe. So, in this life’s time we must try our best to lead a life of Amitabha Buddha. Do not be swayed by the mundane values, mundane eyes, mundane perspective. We rely only on the outlook of the Buddha and Bodhisattva. ‘Once we know that we are this love, it is unnecessary to purposely go forth to shower love on others. As long as we are faithful to our original nature, we will automatically become the tools of love, touching the hearts of everyone who have affinity with us.’ This part of her speech is very good. If we are already the lamp, there is no need for us to go out purposely to shine on others. The lamp just stands at its place and it manages to brighten up the place. So, when we are the LOVE, we will naturally touch those around us with our love. Take a look at our Master Hui Jing. He sits there quietly and yet every one of us are calm and happy naturally. So when we become the love, wherever we are, all will feel calm at ease, without any fear. Anita said, ‘The most important thing I have learnt is I am the Love itself. All my fears are gone. This is the reason I come into life again.’ Amitabha Buddha said, ‘I will transform all the fear into great calmness, great serenity’ When We recite His Name we are charged with his love. We also become the love. We will leave behind all fear. ‘My dear, you will always be loved. You do not need to harbour any fear. There is no way for you to commit any errors.’ Always think about these three sentences. There is the light of truth in it. This is spoken by a non -Buddhist who was on the verge of her death and who lives again. How about us the Buddha Recitation Practitioners? Can we deny the love of Amitabha Buddha, His unconditional love of rescue? From this story we know the unconditional love of rescue of the Buddha pervasively surrounds us. We must have faith in this and lead a life of joy with no more fear. Nowadays, everyone lives in fear. We must learn to replete ourselves with love and bring this shine to others, to lead them out of fear. Love yourself and love others. Namo Amitabha Buddha. A dharma talk by Dharma Master Shi Jing Zong, the Abbot of the Hong Yuan Monastery in Anhui, China entitled: Dying Once to Learn to Love
https://oridharma.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/in-the-era-of-fear-i-comfort-them-with-great-love/

Hi. This is a throwaway.
I'm not sure what information to include but basically I have a toddler with a man I am not married to but have been living with (even broken up) for a couple years and dated for roughly 4-5 years. I am 25f and he is 34m. We have not been together romantically or sexually for about a year or more but have been living together for both convenience and for our toddler.
However, I am coming to this realization that he is incredibly abusive, physically, emotionally, even financially. I desperatelyneed to leave this man. He is not a danger to our toddler and he is a great dad but a horrible partner. He has other kids that he doesnt have custody of and does not see often at all and it upsets him greatly. Because of this, anytime we fight or i mention leaving him he goes off about how he wont let me take his kid like the other women did and thatll be the biggest mistake i ever make. I dont believe hed actually hurt me but i do see it as a threat and i know hed say anything to make me look bad.
I'm okay with him seeing our child obviously because this is his child, as well, but I'm scared of leaving him and trying to keep full custody of our child. He's not incompetent or anything but I'm not fond of him making decisions for our child or our child staying wih him overnight if he's living with his family.
This is a point where I'm concerned. If we live separately he will move in with his family and he has a family member that is severely mentally disabled. I worry that this borders on seeming ableist but please hear me out. This person is a man in his 20s but is at a point mentally where he cannot possibly care for himself. He cannot speak in sentences, only uses 2 word sentences if that, cannot use rhe toilet, etc. I say this not to shame any persom involved but to stress that he literally can never live on his own. He also has some issues with anger where he has attacked his mother physically and bruised her up, all she could do was hold her arms up until he calmed down. He also does not understand personal boundaries and... really likes women. He has actually pulled my pants and grabbed my v*gina before and constantly sneaks into bed with you if you stay over. He is not good at playing with kids because hes still a grown man amd not a child so hes rough and can get tempermental. He also runs away very often, leading them to makeshift their own special way of locking their doors which makes it impossible to exit the home quickly in case of danger as the only key is in one specific spot. This wouldn't be the worst thing except he also has a lengthy history of setting things on fire. He has burned down one of their homes and has set several fires in their current home and other homes as well.
Ik this is long but what I'm trying to stress or say is that I know if we live separately my child's father will fight me and try to take him, he has threatened to call cps on me for painting our childs nails, my family's house being dirty, me being mentally unwell (I miraculously feel great when he's not around), etc. I also know that he will want our child living with him but I do not, under absolutely any circumstances, want my toddler staying the night in that house and I also know that house is where my child's father will be staying when we live separately. Idk if this is making sense or is easy to follow but I hope you all get my point. He will want him, he will be in that house, that house is so unsafe to sleep in, visiting is something entirely different but my toddler will not stay in that house overnight with every adult asleep except for the one person who likes fire a little too much.
I need advice on what I can even do when all of this inevitably happens. I can't say to my child's father he can't stay the night bc of his family member or he and his family will freak out as they are (understandably) very hypersensitive about this family member.
Is there any possible way I can have some kind of legal understanding that my child can't stay there overnight ever but he can obviously stay with his dad when he gets his own place somewhere.
I also was wanting any general advice or knowledge on my rights as a mom in Texas and if him saying I'm "unstable" will make anything much more difficult.
Edit to add
If any resources are available online please point me to them. I am currently without a job and he has the car and job. I am stuck at the house were currently living in 24/7 unless I manage to convince him to let me make a trip to the local dollar store. I don't have a lot of options for visiting anyone else immediately but am hoping I'd be able to once we are separated somehow. We can't afford daycare so full time child care is on me, hence why I can't keep a job. I had a parttime job but was unable to save any of my checks and the full time job started early in the day and my child's father called me and texted me every morning about me needing to quit and come home because he couldn't deal with our son crying for me in the mornings. So I'm currently without money, a job, or a car. However I'm trying to look into certifications that may lead to wfh jobs, daycare options, and I did just graduate with a bachelor's degree.

This is a long one and it happened back in 2019, but I still don't know if I was the a-hole or just trying to be a good friend.
For context: In January 2011, my ex (M) and I (F) started dating in high school. We were off and on for most of 8 years but he broke it off for good in January 2019. Throughout our relationship, we had arguments, lying, and mistreatment, but we kept coming back to each other. We probably should have stayed away from each other, but we were teenagers and didn't know what we were doing. Ultimately, there were no blatant red flags like abuse or violence, we just weren't meant for each other.
After the breakup, I moved back home with my parents at 23 and my ex stayed at our apartment with some other roommates. I kept my distance because I was heartbroken. We spent 8 years together. I thought we would get married and have a family together. Of course, that didn't happen. Since we ran in the same circles, I would hear about his life and he would hear about mine, and sometimes we would bump into each other. My neighbors happened to be his childhood best friend's parents, so he was brought up often. They said I needed to give him just one more chance because they thought we belonged together, but I was hesitant. In April 2019, he called and asked me out to dinner so we could talk, and I agreed. I thought maybe we could just have a nice dinner and restore the friendship, but that's not what happened. We had a great dinner and conversation, then he suddenly started talking about marriage and showing me pictures of rings. I told him that's not what I wanted, and I could tell it broke his heart. I thought if he had miraculously changed in the prior three months, maybe we could work things out, but I could tell it just wasn't right. We didn't talk for a while after that.
Flash forward a few months to July, I was planning my birthday party. My ex's best friend's older sister offered me her beach house to throw an overnight birthday party, and I was ecstatic! I had been talking to a new guy, I reconnected with an old coworker who was a good friend, and it all felt like a new start. The sister mentioned my ex, and I froze up. She talked about how she knew we weren't going to end up together, but that he still cared about me as a friend because we had known each other for so long. She also mentioned that since her younger brother would be there (I was close friends with him, too), it might be nice to invite my ex so the guys could hang out and the girls could hang out. I reached out to my ex, invited him to the party, and made it clear it was just as friends. He said he understood and was glad I invited him. He showed up super late to the party but brought me my favorite beverages and candy so I said thank you and continued to hang out. Later in the night, the guy I was seeing mentioned something to me about my ex not liking him. I was honest and said that I had dated him for 8 years but we were just friends at this point. The guy brushed it off and everyone had a good night. Well, everyone but my ex. The next morning I woke up to see he had disappeared. When I asked the older sister what happened, she was emotional. She said my ex had planned a really sweet proposal but I had gone to bed earlier than he thought I would. He thought of waking me up to do it only to see I was curled up in bed with the other guy. I felt awful, but at the same time, WE WERE BROKEN UP! How was I supposed to know he was going to talk about marriage and propose a SECOND time?
Do I learn my lesson? Nope. In October 2019, I had been seeing the new guy for a few months and I was happy. Didn't think about my ex, didn't talk to my ex, didn't even entertain conversations about him. He randomly reached out to me one day asking if we could just talk to get closure, and I thought this would be the end of things once and for all. We sat down at a picnic table, and he started crying. I knew it was a mistake, I shouldn't have met up with him. He showed me pictures of engagement rings and asked for me to come back and be with him. I said no, told him meeting up was a mistake, and left.
Do I learn my lesson that time? Nope. At this point it's completely on me to keep falling for this trap. A friend (F) and I were moving in January of 2020 and my ex had a truck. Things didn't work out with the guy I was seeing, so my friend and I asked my ex if he could help us. This time, he and I had been chatting for a few weeks and things were good. We were talking like friends and the conversation was never more than platonic. He agreed to help, drove us between our old places to the new place to move in furniture and boxes, and everything went well. When we got settled at the apartment, I started cooking everyone dinner. I asked how much food he wanted, and he went quiet and left without a word. My roommate thought it was odd, but I knew immediately what it was. I texted him and asked if it was because of me, and he said yes.
Should I have learned my lesson after the first or second time? Yes. But am I the a-hole for wanting a friendship that whole time?
At this point, I'm happily married to someone else, living 2,000 miles away from everything. This randomly popped into my mind today, and I figured I would survey my fellow potatoes.

I posted my story of my ghoster (ex bf) who ghosted me 21 years ago. When he and I were just 20. We had a long distance relationship for 3.5 years where we traveled countries to see each other. He was truly my first love. I was madly in love with him. Even though he wasn't my first bf. He was the one that mattered and the one that got away. In the end he cheated on me emotionally and then ghosted me while I was back in my home country. It took me 2.5 years to get past that cause he didn't give me any answers. In a matter of weeks we went from planning for me to come and live with him abroad to no contact. I did not see that coming and I was completely in shock, numb, gutted, a dagger in the chest. My first love.. And me being his, he said... Doing that to me.. Nope. I figured out years later he was still with the woman he cheated on me with and she's been making his life a living hell apparantly. He divorced her in 2016 and got together with his new wife after that. And married her last year and has kids with both women. I cried for 2.5 years when he ghosted. Insane. Knowing what I know now.
You guys were very brutally honest. This man doesn't deserve anything from me, you said. I was called insane and stupid to have him in my life again. He's an Asshole, etc. I've been with my current partner for 20 years. And he had seen upclose what the ghosting did to me back in the day and to my trust and said I should confront him. I have the best partner in the world and wouldn't jeopardise that in any way. He is my best friend, my soul mate and we are on the same level emotionally. Both HSP. And we talk a lot and I tell him everything. So I have no romantic interest in my ex bf. He will never be able to get that close to me ever again. Especially not now, now I'm older and noticing it was never me, he certainly has issues that 21 years later he still hasn't addressed.
But then he found me on snapchat last Oct. I had nothing but fond memories of him rushing back in. Memories I had blocked for years. We didn't speak about what had happened and how hurt I was cause I simply did not have those intense memories and feelings when I started talking again. They all hit me later. I've had lovely conversation with him about his kids and his life. I was enjoying it. But I was cautious. Ppl on here told me to break it off with him, that it wasn't fair to my partner. Etc etc. But my partner did not mind. He said I should try and find some closure if that's still possible. My friends said he owes me an apology. And I agreed. I needed an sincere apology.
So i poured my heart out to him, screamed, cried, was upset in the whatsapp. (send him voice memos since he kept saying he couldn't find the time to call) And he apologised trough whatsapp. And over and over again. Saying he was immature. I didn't agree. Ghosting isn't about being immature. It's cruel. And damaging. So I demanded a phone call. He was really trying to tell me on WhatsApp that he'd do anything to help me feel better. So I said I needed a phone call cause I felt he was dodging it. He agreed to ring. But i then noticed he's socially very VERY awkward. Emotionally closed off and suffers trauma. I've worked and work with traumatised ppl and adults who have autism and it hit me there and then: he has both!! And all of a sudden
I started to see the bigger picture. That it was never me asking to much of him. It was him not even being able to have a normal conversation about feelings and emotions. His son is in the process of getting a autism diagnosis as well and he has no idea how to handle it. By experience I can tell he's autistic. He told me what his ex wife did to him and that he never can speak his mind and he never did. She physically and mentally abused him for years. And where our normal gut feeling would be to get the fuck out of a relationship like that. He stayed and thought it was all normal. Until she left him and it started to dawn on him what just happened.
I remember back in the day when I confronted him about his cheating and his sudden distance from me (he breadcrumbed me during the last holiday I was with him for 4 weeks, mind fucking me about him not being sure about us all of a sudden before he ghosted) . And he he had great issues expressing his feelings. I was super mad offcourse. It was life altering for me. The betrayal I felt.. The depression I slipped into. It was real. But I was his age and had no issues with expressing myself. We were 20 so I never thought anything of it.)
He likes to hide behind the computer. Has issues expressing himself can't deal with emotions well. He's been abused by his ex (in his own words: karma) and he still has to deal with her cause they have a son together. It is rather cruel and she is not well mentally so I do feel for him somewhat. But indeed: karma. It's no excuse at all and I'm not trying to downplay anything but I can finally look at it from a distance now and see where his issues lye.
And even though no one advice me to let him back into my life again. I'm glad I did.
On the phone I talked about what the ghosting has done to me in my formative years and what an impact it had. He listened carefully. And told me he could not have handled things worse than he did. He came clean on the emotionally cheating part (he had no choice cause he didn't know I talked to his friends back then and they told me he was lying) and he said he wished he made different choices. It was all very distant. The tone of voice, the way he spoke.. I just got it. We weren't seeing eye to eye. He had no intonation when he speaks, the way he handles things in life, he doesn't notice other ppls emotions and feelings. Even tho he is a kind person.
But I just came to the realisation that having a friendship with him is nearly impossible. Not because of the ghosting. Cause I am willing to forgive him now he's showed me some remorse. No one seems to understood that but a few. I can't hold grudges anymore, it costs energy. I can see he's actually not a bad person, even tho ghosting says everything about him. Even 21 years later it feels he's stuck in a teens way of emotional thinking. And that has helped me to realise that I can't have this friendship with. I was hoping to see him at some point. Me and my partner go to the UK a lot and It would've been possible for me to grab a coffee with him. But i don't think hell be able to handle small talk. It's just so weird that he has these issues and I never noticed back in the day.
Ghosting is never ok. Cause he was able to maintain relationship with his ex straight after he ghosted me. So he was able to have some sort of emotional interaction with ppl. But I don't gel with him now because of his issues and that's helped me to realise that having the ghoster back in your life isn't going to change anything.
I didn't get answers other than that he was immature, a few lame apologies.. But he listened. And I noticed something is up with him. And that has changed my entire perspective. It's no excuse. But I kinda feel sorry for him now. And notice how much I've grown after that. I sought guidance and counseling cause I was depressed. He never addressed any of his trauma. He hides away and freezes when emotions need to be dealt with. He is kind and caring. But it's a very superficial and robot like even.
He is emotionally too immature to have a proper friendship with, in my opinion. So idk if I'll ever see him. Which I hoped for but I now know it's not possible. It'll be an online contact from now on. So I don't feel satisfied at all. I don't have closure or answers. But I do see the bigger picture now. I've never been able to think about him in all these 21 years. It hurt me too much so I blocked things out. It traumatised me very much. The fact that we've shared some fond memories that he certainly hasn't forgotten over all these years was nice. And it has to be enough. I've forgiven him but have now told him I can't do this superficial friendship. And stick to a unpersonal whatsapp contact. Cause I feel that's all he feels comfortable with. With him being autistic and traumatised.
It feels very unsatisfactory, but it is what it is. He can't give me the same level of emotional maturity. Its helped me to move on tho. And we're being civil. How could I have fallen for this emotionally very unstable guy??
Just wanted to share my story.