Where I started
Where I ended up
Image descriptions
1st image: - A heavy set person who appears to be a man, in baggy jeans and a t-shirt, leaning against a wooden handrail, holding a laser skirmish gun
2nd image: A curly haired woman in makeup, wearing a teal coloured dress
I feel like I need to do more than just post a picture. In this case, the picture really does tell the story in a lot of ways, but still, there was a lot of pain and trauma that led me to this point.
I started off depressed and angry, lost in life, knowing what I needed to do, but feeling like it wasn’t something I could do. And when I finally accepted that I could do it, years went in to it. A quick photo makes it look like a magical transformation, but there was close to 10 years between those photos, and a lot of self discovery, self exploration and pain. As well as joy, and surprises.
Ohh I love this one! Perfectly summed it up with the pics for me ;)
Hey, I just want to say thanks for posting this. I’m just a random internet stranger, but I’m happy for you. I think Fred Rogers sums it up best, he is the epitome of kindness to me.
It’s you I like,
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair
But it’s you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys
They’re just beside you.
But it’s you I like
Every part of you.
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like,
It’s you yourself
It’s you.
It’s you I like.
Thank you for sharing this. I’m glad you were able to find your joy.
Congratz!
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Silence, troll.
I started drinking at 13. Blacking out weekly by 15. Full blown alcoholic in 20s. The problem was, I was fairly successful so it was hard for me to admit I was truly fucked up. I managed a good career, family, friends, house, etc. I drank until blackout daily. In late 30s is when the true around the clock drinking started. Morning, noon, night and throughout the night. DT’s. Started taking Xanax to fight off the anxiety caused by around the clock drinking. That was it. That’s when I lost control. I had a moment of clarity after days of straight blackout during the first month of Covid quarantine. I asked a friend who had been sober for 15 years for help. Went to rehab. Took it seriously. Spend 2.5 months away from my family. Came back determined to live a life of sobriety and focus on family and career. I’ve got numerous promotions, my family is great and I’m 3.5 years sober and work daily to stay that way.
Tldr; lifelong drunk. Got sober at 40. Best decision I’ve ever made.
Huge desicion to make, I’m proud and I’m sure your family is also.
I was born into an impoverished extremist right wing family. I enlisted in the military back when DADT was a thing. I was disowned as an LGBT teenager, and medboarded out of the military after being committed to inpatient facilities multiple times. After that, i was homeless for a couple years, living out of a car and then a backpack.
I finally ended up in this little town in Georgia, got a job at a little retail store, and moved into a trailer with one of my coworkers. Her friends kind of adopted me and i felt accepted for the first time in my life. We were all broke kids, but i told them i was going to be a millionaire by age 30. I was still pretty emotionally unstable and eventually moved on from that friend group, but it gave me the hope i needed to rebuild my life.
I slowly built a career for myself after that, working 70-80 hours a week for a couple years, until i had my foot in the door. It got a lot easier after that. I didn’t quite hit my goal by age 30, but I’m close. I founded my first company at age 28, and raised a 10 million series A. My company is now worth 60 million on paper, but of course that’s meaningless until we IPO. But it’s profitable, and in the meantime, I’ve adopted a little family of people like me, and built a comfortable life for us. Life is good, and I’m content.
Now that you’re pretty wealthy has your family decided to become your best buddy now?
No, they refuse to speak to me to this day. My gf’s family called her to wish her a happy birthday last week, and i cried quietly wishing mine did that too.
(Very?) Belated happy birthday! Your family are the people you’ve chosen to accompany you at this stage in your life, the other one, the one you simply happened to be born into, don’t deserve you. Lots of hugs!
Happy belated birthday girltwink! 🎊 🎉
The older I get and the more people I meet and lives I understand, the more I understand that true family are the ones you choose. You can’t help who you are born to. It’s nice to get their love and approval, but in the end, if they don’t accept your choices or even you, that’s not on you. That’s on them. If you’ve done your best to be a good person, then they should have no reason to turn you out but for their own selfish reasons. It may never stop hurting, but over time, I hope you can find that comfort from your chosen family that chose you back. I won’t soapbox too much about it though. I hope you had a great birthday. :) Big hugs from an internet stranger!
As a side note, talking to a therapist can really help you accept things if you ever want to give it a try.
Aww, thank you for your kind words JighlySackles 😝 I’m doing ok, all things considered. It still hurts a little, but yes therapy has helped.
I’m glad you’re feeling mostly alright. That’s a good place to be. Sometimes that’s the best we get to be for a very long time too.
I think some things will always hurt. But it gets less. And it’s not so crushing. It just takes time.
A great analogy I heard once is to imagine you have a box which represents a past source of grief, and in that box is a button and a ball. As we go about life, the box gets jostled and bumped by things that remind us of our grief. This moves the ball around and every time the ball hits the button it brings on the feelings of grief and sadness. The size of the ball shrinks with time though. When we first go through something traumatic our ball is very large, taking up most of the space in the box, so very small events bump the button, and it’s going to hit that grief button a lot at first. But over time as the ball shrinks. As it gets smaller, the jostling and bumping doesn’t make the ball hit the grief button so much. It might even graze it without pushing it. We may always have that box, and that’s ok. And that button may get to the point it gets hit once after 20 years. But that’s OK too. The grief gets less with time. 🙂
Accidental reinvention story.
I was an independent IT Management Consultant and in my free time I started a side project making a dark ride in virtual reality for the Meta Quest headset. Then Covid happened and my career paused suddenly giving my lots of free time so I focused on the title. It ended up being the 5th highest rated app on the Meta Quest App Lab store out of many thousands for the past year and a bit. I have not gone back to my old career, as well, this is my new career now. The insane part is that I always wanted to be an Imagineer since I was 6 years old, but my life really did not provide those sorts of opportunities. Then one day, when my title was released and the reviews started to come in, I realized suddenlythat I am now an Imagineer. Been 3 years and I still cannot believe it. Love what I do way more than my old career and with AI assistants, I am imagineering faster and faster which is nice as the only complaint I get is where is the rest of the theme park. Currently I am just about to update the single dark ride and add to it an open world theme park around (small today), the first bit of the second dark ride, and the ability to ride with loved ones and friends which is surprisingly magical. Like looking over at someone you know sitting with you on the omnimover and going through a highly detailed dark ride together is so much fun, especially for non gamers who want to try VR.
I am 50 years young.
36yo, I’m in the middle of tunnel currently.
I’m a spoiled, privileged shit. I have a very nice family, good friends, money to live comfortably in a big city. But my life is miserable still: after a succession of failures, I hate my job and suffer painful lonelyness, and I’m too shy to do what most normal human beings do.
I’m almost out of depression but I’ve yet to go through the reinvent yourself part. I feel like I’m going backwards.
I feel like that’s the opposite of what the question asks. Ask me to delete if needed.
Sounds like you’re doing your best. Hope you come out the other side of the tunnel better for it.
Try to go on walks in nature, maybe get out of the city sometimes. You don’t want to go with anyone but maybe have some music to listen to. Hugs and good luck, you’re doing your best.
Sometimes it helps to just get out of your comfort zone, it’s hard, it’s painful, and sometimes you end up just looking like an ass. You just grab a crazy thought and run with it. You don’t necessarily have to fly off to Uruguay and drop off the face of the Earth, but just go out to a part of town you haven’t been to, connect with an old friend, or go to some event you’ve never been to before. Take a pottery class, act in a play, go get food from a questionable, broken-down food truck in a shady part of town, write a shitty novel during NaNoWriMo, whatever. I find myself getting into ruts on occasion, where I’m almost too comfortable with life and it gets depressing somehow, it’s hard getting out of it sometimes, but just getting into a novel situation can jumpstart something inside sometimes, just don’t always go with the expectation of “finding someone”. Loneliness is tough, but in a way it’s freedom from constraints and responsibility.
What does bring you joy?
Often times we focus on what doesn’t bring us happiness instead of what does.
I became physically disabled at 42, I’m 49 now. I was the main / usually sole provider for my family. I was pretty suicidal for a while and had a really really tough time adjusting. Midway through I was diagnosed with bipolar and medicated appropriately. I’m doing fairly well now and actually looking forward to the rest of my life.
Happy for you!
I had the most abstract corporate software job you can imagine and had to dress up every day for it. One day coming back from lunch I saw my entire future laid out in front of me. Fat piece of corporate garbage without talent and around people I hated.
I applied for a job with an industrial machine designer. Never looked back.
I didn’t reinvent myself so much as I started being honest about my identity.
When I was younger, I was very talkative and social, and I was punished for it in elementary school because it was disruptive. This is probably because I was surrounded by family and felt comfortable talking to anyone about anything. Over time, I started to become reclusive and have a severe fear of authority. Eventually, my friend group started shrinking in high school until I had what felt like nothing. I stopped attending school and slept for six months during my senior year. Eventually, I started returning from my shell and interacting with people online.
Since I was still in my depressive state, I thought it was all too good to be true, and I faked my death online because I thought no one would care and it would be an easy transition into something else. I was very, very wrong. People I had met online started creating memorials and trying to contact people I knew IRL to give them condolences. It was the first time that I realized people liked the person I was unfiltered.
After that, I got my GED and moved to a new town where no one knew me to go to college. While there, I decided to be the person I was and not the person I had been trying to be because I thought that was what people wanted. Even then, I was introverted until COVID happened, and I fell back into depression due to a lack of human connections.
I’m glad to have learned this all now, but I wish I had known it 20 years ago.
Nothing too extreme, but I’m in my mid-30s and this year has been one of the most productive of my life. I started a new job in late December. The pay is similar to the job I left. The stress is much lower. Immediately I felt like I had a better work life balance. I have so much extra energy every day.
I started dieting and taking long walks. I lost 35 pounds in 6 months. I listened to a bunch of audiobooks while walking and I’ve also read some ebooks. Together I’ve read 25 books and counting this year whereas most years I’ll read 2 or 3. Once I was nearing my goal weight I increased my calories and started exercising more intensely, with a goal of gaining muscle and losing fat while maintaining weight. I picked up indoor rowing. I’m on week 11 of a 24 week training program. I row hard (working up an intense sweat) 5 days a week Monday- Friday in the mornings. In addition to this I’ve started weightlifting 2 days a week and will gradually increase to 4 days a week while keeping up my rowing routine.
Financially, I started budgeting with YNAB and it has transformed my personal finances. My savings rate has increased significantly and wasteful spending decreased. I moved my savings into a HYSA. I left a financial advisor who was charging excessive fees and moved my investment and retirement accounts to Fidelity where I now manage my portfolio myself. Some of my reading was investing books which gave me confidence I could do this. I’ve tripled the amount I’m contributing to my 401k.
Although I’m new to my job I’ve received constant praise from multiple people in the time I’ve been there. I feel like I have room for growth to move up positions. At the rate I’m going I think I could realistically expect to move up in another 6 months or so.
I started with weight loss.
Lost 140 pounds, which led to me accomplishing a few other things, like performing in Newsies and becoming a roller derby skater.
I also lost weight, mostly out of stubbornness. We were sitting at the dinner table and people were making fun of my “mathleticism”, I responded by jokingly saying that I could be super athletic if I chose to, and my sister then said she’d give me $1000 if I ever became “athletic”. She still hasn’t paid me. They still make fun of me, except now for going “from mathlete to athlete”. So really I didn’t accomplish much.
Yeah, I started to notice warning signs, like I’d walk a single city block and my feet would be sore, or I’d get up from my chair at the office and I’d need 2-3 seconds for my hips to “get right” before I could walk.
All of those added up to me committing to get into better health. Achieving some lifelong dreams along the way was just a side benefit.
I was a factory worker, warehouse worker, and machinist for most of my adult life. I learned a lot of really cool things in those industries, but I never made much money.
So I took some classes, taught myself Autocad, and somehow talked myself into a CAD position at a precast concrete company. And the difference between then and now is amazing from both a financial standpoint and a quality of life standpoint. Of course there are valid arguments that having enough money is a quality of life issue.
Even when things went wrong and the precast company started to spiral the drain, I went to find another job… and in two days I had to turn down four job offers.
Little over a quarter life crisis. My job was slowly killing me. It was destroying my mental health, I knew I needed to do something about it. I was always on the mindset of “I’m to old to go back to school”. Having gone to post secondary in my late teens and early 20s but promptly dropping out. Decided I needed to go back to school. Went back for engineering. Passed with honors and now I have a child. Life is far better than it was, it has its new up and downs but I’m much happier!
Kind of minor and I don’t know that it counts as “reinventing myself”, but I graduated from college at 30 years old. Prior to that, I had done mostly “lowly” fast food and warehouse jobs and didn’t really have much going for me. My fallback was to maybe join the military and try to get something going through that, but otherwise had no real plans or ideas of what I wanted for my future. It’s more than a decade later and in retrospect it still seems like one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. I’m now in a career that I’m more or less happy with doing relatively important work and I have an actual chance at having some sort of retirement savings if/when I get a chance to retire (assuming we avoid the whole global climate meltdown Mad Max ending that it seems we’re heading towards).
was a stupid piece of shit with hate toward most of the world and myself
now i still kind of hate myself but turns out im just trans so i was driving my selfhate toward other people bc i didnt understand where it was coming from
34 yo here. 2009 - Left school, joined Czech Radio as IT and Broadcast Technician. 2011 until 2022 was IT career only. I thought that’s what I wanna do, but nope, and burned out in the end, which started another crisis like in 2009. 2022 - visited my friend at Czech Radio who still works there. The memories and such moved me so much I was determined to get back into Czech Radio or similar. I ended up in Czech Television in sound department. Couldn’t be happier.
It doesn’t happen often for me, but when crisis like these come around, I am determined to pursue whatever comes to my mind.
