Hey guys, it's been a really emotional day for me, so bare with me. I'll try to get to the point.
Her(32) and I(37) were together for nearly two years. Neither of us had been married, neither of us had kids and we didn't want them either.
She makes nearly three times my income (75K USD) and early on in the relationship, she started pushing me to get look for a different career and get a higher paying job. I'm an interpreter, worked in warzones but I've been domestic since Feb 2020. Always thought coding was sooo cool, had a couple app ideas that I wanted to develop myself and so I signed up for a course.
About a year into our relationship and four months into my course, she asked me if I'd move in with her. She had a string of bad roommates who were either coming up short on rent or were overstepping boundaries in the house. I was hesitant because I had a bad experience moving in with a SO before but I was much younger then.
After some discussion on the matter, I agreed on mutually acceptable terms: First, I would pay what her tenants paid($900). Second, we would revisit the situation after a year; if I got a better paying job and could contribute more, I would. She bought her townhouse in summer of 2022 and her mortgage is nearly $4000. No way I was gonna be able to cover half of that on my income. I was paying what I could and everything else was 50/50. We would trade off expenses on recreational activities. I'm saying all this to emphasize I was not a freeloader.
Around February of this year, she asked me on the status of my course, when I think I will finish and when I think I'll be able to start applying to jobs. I really enjoy coding, it's so gratifying when you figure things out and you're able to put some stuff together - but it's hard. It takes a lot of practice and a 50hr course honestly takes much more than 50hrs.
I told her it's a bit more difficult than I anticipated and I needed more polishing before I can start applying for jobs. Even if somebody hired me, I'd be afraid of getting let go because my skills weren't strong enough and then not having my other job, which is reliable, pretty convenient and pays relatively well compared to the national average. She started applying more pressure, talking about how she needs me to contribute more. I understand where she's coming from and I want to contribute more. Thing is, she then laid on me that if I'm not making more by July, I might have to move out and it could possibly be the end of the relationship. That wasn't in the fine print when we agreed to the terms above. It definitely hurt to hear but I tried to use it as motivation to try to work harder and find a good developer job.
Fast forward to this morning, like 10 minutes after I woke up, she told me in a very nonchalant way she thinks we should take a break, which would mean me leaving the house. It was kind of hurtful how casual she was about it but what hurt me the most was the following line "And if you meet someone you like, just tell me before you do anything with her". I really don't know if I'm just sensitive but that line was the most hurtful thing I've been told my an SO. It just felt like she didn't care. I couldn't imagine telling her that in a million years. I spent the rest of the day shocked, hurt and numb at the same time. I honestly couldn't look at her the same after that. It really broke me mentally.
She checked up on me a couple times throughout the day but I just had no words. Everything in my body was telling me to leave. When she came home later, I tried holding it together to explain how I felt but I started sobbing pretty hard, almost to the point where it hurt. As much as I loved her, she broke me earlier that morning and I had never felt so - I don't even know how to describe how I felt. I feel like I'm an unwanted dog that keeps getting returned to the shelter.
I told her I can't do it anymore, packed most of my things and left. She tried walking back her statement but I just didn't believe her. She has some tears in her eyes but she didn't respond much to be honest.
I'm pretty depressed. I think I did the right thing for the long run but it still hurts a lot. This was the closest I had come to finding the one I want to marry and I feel like I wasted the last two years of my life.
What would you have done? Do you think I reacted too harshly?
TL;DR: My girlfriend asked for a break, said something that was really hurt me and I broke up with her later that day.

The world has gone mad.
Global pandemic. Civil protests. Riots. Inept leadership. Corruption. Propaganda. World powers shifting uneasily as tensions rise. World War III feels like it’s just one wrong move away.
And I’m trapped here in my crappy little apartment because of quarantine.
Well, not trapped exactly. I could go out and participate in socially distant activities, or join the protests downtown, but I’m too damn depressed to get off the sofa. With everything shut down, I’m currently laid-off temporarily and living on the last of my savings, which consists mostly of ramen and canned veggies. My current hobbies include selling everything I own for rent money, lying on a sofa that was abused by a fraternity back in the 80s, and distracting myself with a crappy smartphone that was outdated when I bought it three years ago. I’ve sold everything else. Television, game console, tablet, computer, and all my games. Material things don’t matter when you don’t have a place to store them.
“I’m not a loser,” I whisper to myself. “I’m not stupid. I’m a hard worker. I’m just stressed and depressed as fuck.”
A century ago I could have just headed out into the wilderness and been a prospector, panning for gold and silver in the hills. I could have hired out as a cowboy, riding the open range and herding the cattle for one of the big ranches. Or been a hired gun. Or a bounty hunter. Considering how desperate I am right now, I would probably fall into a gang of outlaws robbing stage coaches and banks, vanishing across the border to drink and gamble until the money was gone.
Good thing I’m not much of a drinker, I guess.
\Ding**
A text interrupts my idle contemplation of shadows on the ceiling. Lifting my crappy smartphone off my chest, I thumb open the message app. It’s a group text from my boss at iBox Co.
“Hey guys. I know this is a horrible way to deliver the news, but I gotta close the business. Thanks for all the hard work and good luck in the future.”
I drop the phone back onto my chest and it pulses faintly with the beating of my heart.
\Ding**
I check the new text. It’s from my mobile service provider.
“Your automatic bill pay has failed. Please update your account or call the service department.”
Well, duh. No job, no money. No money, no life. Rent due at the end of the week. Supposedly they can’t evict you during quarantine, but they said nothing about the land lord disconnecting the water and power. John down in apartment 2B has been living like a caveman for the last 3 weeks, stubbornly refusing to move out. I wonder if that’s how I’ll end up? Alone in the dark, cooking ramen over a candle.
\Ding**
\Ding**
\Ding**
A quiet rage builds in my gut. Bad news, bad news, bad news. Nothing but bad news and more bad news. Estranged from my divorced parents because I refused to pick sides. Kicked out of college for poor academic performance. Scholarship gone. Girlfriend gone. Job gone. Money gone.
Frustrated at my helplessness, I clench my fist around the phone and fling it behind me.
\Smash**
“Ah shit,” I grumble aloud, instantly regretting my impulsive action and rolling over to survey the damage.
The remains of a fancy framed mirror I had bought for a few bucks at an estate sale hung on the wall, smashed into pieces with my smartphone sticking through it like a ninja star. “How the heck did that happen?” I asked myself, staring in disbelief. I liked that mirror. It was one of the first non-essential purchases I had made after I moved in and I thought it gave the otherwise bare wall some needed character. Now it was shattered into pieces just like everything else in my life.
Crawling off the ratty sofa, I walked over to examine the damage. Pieces of thick glass hung from the frame like jagged teeth, reflecting my too-skinny body in a dozen slivers of reality. My cheap smartphone was embedded in the middle of the mirror and apparently halfway into the wall behind it. Prying away a few shards of glass to survey the damage, a strange pattern was revealed on the wood panel underneath the glass. Wriggling a larger piece loose cost me a nasty slice on my finger and I sucked on it while picking away the remainder of the glass. When everything was clear, my phone was revealed to be smashed through a silvery spiderweb of lines and symbols, apparently merged with the wall like a piece of modern art.
I tried to pull it loose with my good hand, but it was wedged in there tight. Gripping with both hands I tugged and twisted until it was slick with blood from my finger. “What the actual hell?” I said, peering at point where the phone merged with the wood backing of the mirror and the wall. I ran my fingers around the edge of the phone, trying to find where it was stuck and smearing the entire area with bloody fingerprints until it looked like a crime scene.
I gripped it again with both hands and began tugging.
\Ringtone**
My phone began to buzz and vibrate in my hand while the melody of a popular AOP song played. The strange silvery pattern my phone was embedded in lit up like a Christmas tree, glowing with thousands of colours that began chasing each other in time with the music. I instinctively jerked away, but my hands were stuck to the phone.
I couldn’t let go. My fingers were welded to the device! Panicked, I flopped around like a fish on a hook as the bluish light crawled over the phone and up my arms. Some force yanked me into the wall up to my elbows and I started screaming like a little girl with a wasp in her hair.
Then it pulled me completely into the wall.
I disintegrated into a cloud of artificial confetti, falling through synthetic colours and genetically modified sounds. Nothing made sense. The world was a boiling pot of salty madness and I was a shattered jar of elbow macaroni. Eternity passed in a cloud of steam.
“Ah, poor lost thing. What are you doing here?”
A soothing voice laid a foundation for my consciousness and I grabbed at it.
plehhhellephelpeeemeehelpmme
“You are near dissolution. I’ll do my best.”
Invisible fingers pushed and tugged and squeezed and formed the clay of my existence back into me. The last few months of my life flipped by, an embarrassing montage of manga, anime, Red Dead Redemption, and masturbation. Lots of masturbation.
“I’ve done everything I could. I’ll send you through your destination, or close to it. Your kind is not meant to be here without a guardian, remember that.”
Glass shattered into a million fragments as I emerged from that dark realm and tumbled across the ground.
I sucked in a deep breath, choking on soot and the distinct aroma of bird shit.
When the world stopped whirling around me, I opened my eyes. Above me were burnt rafters covered in bird shit and the remains of a roof. Sunlight painted one soot-covered stone wall in the golden hues of a summer afternoon. After a moment, I realised that I felt pretty good. Really good. Like I could run a marathon. Climbing to my feet, I wiped my grimy hands on my shirt. The back was probably a ruin of shit and soot already, so keeping the front clean didn’t make sense.
The room was a ruin. A fire had obviously raged through here some time ago. A wood chair was collapsed in a corner near a fireplace, along with what appeared to be the remains of a table. Shattered bits of glass were scattered all around a large ornate standing mirror frame, the one that I had apparently exited from. A large mound of mushrooms and ferns grew in another corner on what was possibly a bed at one time. Behind me a fire ravaged door hung on blackened timbers.
*System Restart\*
I blinked at the text hanging in the air.

Hi Reddit.
I need outsiders’ perspectives regarding my current situation. I think I’m being singled out by my shift supervisor. So for context, I (34M) am working as a part-time crew in a fast-food chain where most of the staff are closely related to each other (either as close friends or relatives). My shift supervisor (M in his early 40s let’s call him Adam) tends to call me out whenever I do some kind of violation while letting others slip doing similar offense but with far greater magnitude. Here are a few examples:
1. There are certain drinks that we as staff are allowed to take for free, such as sodas and coffee. For teas and shakes, we are expected to pay for half the price. Most of the front staffs (cashiers) are taking an average of 1 shake during their shifts. There’s even one staff (F who’s probably in her late 20s let’s call her Amanda) who regularly takes at least 2 shakes during her shifts. While I tend to avoid coffee (due to caffeine messing up my sleep schedule) and sodas (because sugar), I usually just drink water but there were times that I took teas. for the 8 months I have been working there, I only took 4 glasses of tea. During that 4^th time, I got called out by Adam, saying that we should be paying. I immediately paid after being called out. The next day, he also called out Amanda, but said that since it was just the first time, he would be paying for her drink. He also has his best buddy working there (M in his mid-40s let’s call him Brad) who regularly takes food items that are not free for staff, Adam just trash-talks him and don’t really ask him to pay. There were times that Brad was taking more food to give to his family which Adam is close to as well. TBF to Adam, he is really paying for his shit.
2. Amanda recently went through a rough patch in her relationship, and she was a mess, to say the least (but she’s okay now). She will be coming in late (there were a couple of times that she was late for about 2 hours), and then just go to the pantry to cry, and then the other front staff will be with her to console her, leaving the counter without a crew for a good 10 minutes. Then after, she will be asking Adam that she will leave early. Adam did not say anything during this time. Now, I received a text from the coordinator from our church that he needs to call me for about 2 minutes. I told Brad who’s working with me in the kitchen that I’ll be gone for a few minutes to answer a call. The call lasted 3 minutes and 47 seconds (yeah, I checked). Around 2 minutes into the phone call, Adam approached me asking what am I doing. I told him I’ll be back shortly. Then he snapped, saying no need, just go home already. After I came back, he asked me what am I still doing there. I told him I just answered a call, and it was just a short period I was gone. He retorted that if you’re on a shift, you can’t just disappear to go somewhere. That I should have told him (he was not there during that time, he was cleaning the tables, and I told Brad). He then asked me “Are you a boss? Only bosses do that.” (he does that) I looked at Brad during this time, the f*cker can’t even look at me.
3. For those who have not worked in a burger joint, there are three workstations in the kitchen; the grill, the fryer, and the assembly (or point). One crew per station. The person assigned to the grill will assist the one working at the point. Since I am on a slower side (talk more about this later), I usually work with the fryer. I noticed that whenever I am working at the assembly in which I will also be simultaneously working with the grill, I won't be receiving any assistance from Adam or Brad, to the point that there will be a lot of pending orders. Only then, I’ll be told by Adam to move back to the fryer. But if it’s another crew, they will immediately jump in to help. I think in this case, he was just training me to do shit faster.
4. Adam, Brad, and Chad (another front crew) recently had a guys’ night in, where they hang out and drank beers. When they were planning it, I was with them. The thing is.. I know that I am not close with Adam, but I initially thought, I was close enough with Brad and Chad to get invited too. But nope.
5. Adam doesn’t really talk to me, aside from “you can take a break”. He’s even iffy about answering my work-related questions. There was one time, I was not able to get to work and I didn’t know anyone’s contact number aside from the manageboss, so I ended up texting the boss. And when I asked Adam if I can get his contact number so I don’t end up contacting our boss again, he flatly declined (other crews know it).

I actually respect and look up to Adam, since he’s really good at what he does, and is dedicated to his work. And he knows how to handle rude customers and homeless people who like to visit our workplace (which I don’t think I have the patience to deal with). Btw, Adam, similar to me, is single and is really into video games. And I even expressed to one of my friends that I don’t mind being like Adam when I grow a bit older. So, I don’t have a definitive idea of why I was being subjected to this treatment. But here might be some reasons:
1. As I mentioned before, compared to the other crews, I am considered the slowest. I think this is due to my undiagnosed ADHD, (you know when you’re working in a place where there’s constant beeping, I get overwhelmed pretty quickly). And they were just really fast, they’ve been doing it for years.
2. I got close to the other supervisor (F in mid 20s let’s call her Sarah). She’s currently doing her internship so she’s not working with us for 4 months. We easily bonded over the common struggles of being a student. I’d like to think that Adam was just being protective of Sarah (since they have known each other for quite some time and they are family friends, I think). There was one time when I came to work that Sarah was excited to see me to share some stories/struggles related to her school projects. That made Adam noticeably upset. It happened a couple more times before I started noticing that Adam tried to make sure that Sarah and I will not end up working in the same area for long periods. Sarah is single but I don’t think Sarah is interested in me since I heard her once talking to her best friend (who was also working with us before) no (with conviction) if I was her type. They didn’t know that I heard them. I did consider pursuing her when I realized I enjoyed being around her. Added to the fact that I’d heard their discussion, we have a decade of gap in age which is frowned upon in our culture, and I am currently not financially stable. I decided not to.
3. This is probably a stretch (the most, compared to the previously stated since I don’t have solid proof) I am bi, but I don’t openly talk about it. There’s definitely a stigma towards gay people in my workplace like the other crews like to interrogate you about your relationship status, and then insinuate (a few times they outrightly asked) that I am gay for being single for my age. They probably think I am a closeted gay who might take advantage of them or something. But I have my friggin preferences.
So there you have it. Or I might be reading between the lines (as someone with ADHD usually do) I need advice on how to navigate this.
Before you advised me to just quit and find another job, I have been trying for months now. And aside from these issues, working there isn’t so bad, and I can’t really afford to be unemployed. I am not in my home country, but we are all from the same country. I don't really want to raise the issue to the boss, since i am considered the outsider there and they are all really good at their work.

Hayao Miyazaki's View of the Japanese People

Maki Watanabe: Let’s talk about Director Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke." This work was a representative blockbuster film of that year. It was not only the first Ghibli work to exceed 10 billion yen at the box office, but it even reached 19.3 billion yen!
Mamoru Oshii: That number is indeed impressive. Unlike the previous work, "Porco Rosso," which was whimsical and lacked a theme, this time he returned with a grand theme. This time the theme was "Hayao Miyazaki's view of the Japanese people."
Maki Watanabe: So the characters like the “People of the Mountains” appeared.
Mamoru Oshii: It can be said that it brings together an all-star lineup of images representing Japan in the old man's mind. From the Emishi to the people of Irontown, to the lepers, to the Forest Spirit, and so on, the theme of the “People of the Mountains” is the ethnic minorities and small groups of Japan.
Maki Watanabe: Mr. Miyazaki has done a lot of research in these areas.
Mamoru Oshii: The old man is indeed a hardworking and studious person. He reads history books very seriously and wants to leave behind the fruits of his studies. Mr. Takahata also has this side, and so do I. In other words, this is a common desire shared by all creators. In this regard, the old man's research interest fell on another kind of Japanese who are not well known, that is, the “People of the Mountains.”
Maki Watanabe: What about Ashitaka, one of the protagonists?
Mamoru Oshii: Although he is Emishi, he is also one of the People of the Mountains. He has a unique religious view and view of nature, which are consistent with the old man's orientation. The old man has absolutely no interest in agricultural peoples, and the people of the mountains are both hunters and makers of things.
Maki Watanabe: Ah, the “making things” setting that the old man likes.
Mamoru Oshii: That's right. So this is the world where he can best transfer his feelings to these people.
Maki Watanabe: So, unlike Mr. Takahata, Mr. Miyazaki is not interested in farmers?
Mamoru Oshii: Not interested. It never appeared in his (original) works, right? Mr. Takahata is good at rural themes, but the old man is not at all.
Maki Watanabe: What is Mr. Oshii's impression of "Princess Mononoke"?
Mamoru Oshii: This work is too stiff. The theme is too grand to be concluded. It's like spreading out a whole piece of wrapping cloth and then not knowing how to put it back together, and in the end, you can only make a mess of it. In the end, the flowers bloom muddleheadedly, and then the music plays as usual, and it ends without anything being resolved. Did they ever think about how to end it? Filmmakers generally like to make a grand opening, but very few can put it back together perfectly. But this is where the director's skill is shown.
Maki Watanabe: Christopher Nolan once said that when making a film, you have to think about the ending from the beginning, and once you decide on it, you don't change it. The endings of his films are indeed impressive.
Mamoru Oshii: Actually, that's the usual way to do it. I also think about the ending from the beginning. Structure is the life of a film, it's a matter of course. On the contrary, the old man, who doesn't write scripts properly, starts from scratch and doesn't want to think about the ending at all. I have said it many times, it is precisely because of this that he is not suitable to be a director.
Maki Watanabe: However, the more you say that about him, the more I find the old man cute. After all, he has always been true to himself, that's great, isn't it?
Mamoru Oshii: What's so cute about it? In a sense, he's someone who makes movies solely on his own talent. Indeed, he is a genius in a way, he doesn't consider anything before or after his death. It is Toshio Suzuki's job to assist him from the sidelines. Speaking of which, Miss Maki, do you remember the last scene of "Princess Mononoke?"
Maki Watanabe: I remember. In the end, everyone went back to where they belonged and it ended. I didn't understand why Ashitaka stayed in Irontown instead of going back to his hometown, so I complained: "Hey, go home." But I didn't quite understand it when it was released. To be honest, there are a lot of things in the story that are hard to keep up with. At that time, many magazines made special features on "Princess Mononoke," and they all sold well. It should be that everyone didn't understand the story, so they wanted to hear what was going on.
Mamoru Oshii: How many people can remember the ending of Ghibli movies, especially the old man's movies? The theme song or the main melody composed by Joe Hisaishi plays, and then it's "the end," forcibly ending. This is Suzuki's strategy.
Maki Watanabe: "Princess Mononoke" uses a song by Yoshikazu Mera at the end.
Mamoru Oshii: The song was also used repeatedly in the promotion, making people so familiar with the theme song that it lingered in their ears. So why use this song over and over again? Because the people in charge of publicity didn't understand the story either. What is the story of "Princess Mononoke" about? It should be the story of Ashitaka and San, but what happened to them in the end? Miss Maki, can you explain it clearly?
Maki Watanabe: The theme is the opposition between civilization and nature. San represents nature, Ashitaka is the middle ground, Lady Eboshi is civilization, and then the story is about the collision of these values. I just rewatched it, so I can probably explain it to this extent, but the part about Ashitaka and San feels very weak.
Mamoru Oshii: That's right, Ashitaka and San should have become like Pazu and Sheeta in "Castle in the Sky," but they didn't. Surprisingly, San is not charming in the slightest. The most surprising thing I saw at the screening was this. The old man, who has always drawn beautiful girls, could it be that he didn't put his heart into San? At least it seems so. The appreciation of the characters is significantly less than before. It's almost impossible not to ask, "What's wrong with the old man?"

The Magic of Hayao Miyazaki's Manga Films

Maki Watanabe: Indeed, although she is the heroine, her impression is very weak. She didn't even leave as deep an impression as Ashitaka.
Mamoru Oshii: That's right, it must be Ashitaka who left a deeper impression. Followed by Lady Eboshi, she is the old man's favorite type. The most interesting thing about the old man is that he doesn't just stop at simply praising nature and denying civilization. I've said it countless times, the old man himself has another side to him that loves fighter jets and mechanical civilization. He is a very contradictory person.
Maki Watanabe: Lady Eboshi is the character who speaks for the old man, right?
Mamoru Oshii: The process of civilization is an inevitability of human development. Human beings cannot survive without destroying nature. This is human beings. Lady Eboshi of Irontown is probably the representative of this kind of human being, just like Nausicaä in "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind."
Maki Watanabe: Lady Eboshi loses an arm at the end, and Nausicaä also has a prosthetic arm.
Mamoru Oshii: So, that's the price. In the old man's way of thinking, they must pay a certain price, and it is easy to see from the picture that it is manifested as the loss of an arm. The old man has a unique sense of balance, and he will definitely look for that balance point. Take the villain character, Colonel Muska, in "Castle in the Sky" as an example. As he is escaping, he throws his underwear out of his open suitcase. From this scene, you can also see that the old man did not completely portray him as a bad guy. Adding a bit of cuteness to the villains is what the old man does. Lady Eboshi is a character with very clear values, and for the old man, it is necessary to make her pay the price of losing her arm. In this sense, he is a genius in terms of balance. Although having said that, the old man would not do such a thing as adding a scar to a cute girl. The same goes for children. Girls and children are the old man's sacred realm, and he never lets these characters pay any price or suffer any trauma.
Maki Watanabe: But there's nothing entangled in Lady Eboshi, is there? For example, Ashitaka reported that the women in Irontown were in danger, but she said, "Women can take care of themselves", and then devoted herself to destroying the Forest Spirit. Generally speaking, wouldn't there be some hesitation and struggle? So I don't feel the charm from her strength.
Mamoru Oshii: That's the nature of the old man. Putting viewpoints side by side, putting out all kinds of values without omission, for the old man, there is no contradiction in liking characters who are not troubled and do not hesitate. Because the old man hates indecisive characters the most. He would never affirm those who are hesitant, hesitant, and prone to distress. In short, he doesn't like entanglement.
Maki Watanabe: This value is very interesting.
Mamoru Oshii: Of course, he likes nature the most. However, if the Forest Spirit is affirmed, human beings have to be denied, so there must be an existence that speaks for the human position, and that is Lady Eboshi. The old man is not such a simple person. He has studied why human beings have embarked on the road of industrialization, and he knows very well that this is an inevitable choice. But it wouldn't ease his mind if he simply affirmed it. But if he recognizes the Forest Spirit, he can only come to the conclusion that "human beings should be destroyed", so he has to add San, a character born in nature. Ashitaka is in a position between San and Lady Eboshi.
Maki Watanabe: But Ashitaka should go back to his village, right? Everyone is waiting for him. Why stay in Irontown? If you make such a choice, you have to go through some struggle, right?
Mamoru Oshii: That's why I said, the old man just hates struggling and tangling. The story itself is difficult to justify, so it can only end in such a forceful way. There is basically no drama in this work, because there is no struggle of values at all. As a film, there are often confusions like "Which direction is this story going?" The reason why it turned out like this is because the problem has been concluded in some aspects. That is to say, civilization will never go backwards, and it is precisely because of the creation of civilization that human beings have become human beings. Those who can really live in nature don't even know that it is nature. If one had never stepped out of the Garden of Eden, one would not even know that one was human. Industrial society is a necessity for human beings, and human beings can only survive by conquering nature. But humans don't want to deny the part of themselves that resonates with nature.
Maki Watanabe: I see.
Mamoru Oshii: The old man made "Princess Mononoke" on the basis of understanding all this, but even if he understands this rationally, he cannot let it go, so he will be divided. So how do you put an end to this split in a movie? He didn't think about it carefully, so "Princess Mononoke" became a film with an incomprehensible ending. Speaking of which, because the world in the movie is not a world of good and evil, children should not understand it. The old man clearly said that he made animation for children, and said that no matter what the real world is like, at least in the work, the black and white of good and evil should be clearly distinguished. This is one of the main tasks of being a director. However, his own work lacks such consistency. Although the theme is grand, it cannot be concluded properly. Of course, it's not just the old man, there are many movies like this.
Maki Watanabe: But the picture is very powerful. This time I re-watched it and felt very emotional.
Mamoru Oshii: Like this, in short, showing you some powerful things and making you accept it in a confused way is the unique magic of the old man's manga films. Although the director and the critics can see through the flaws at a glance and will not be deceived, the animators will be amazed and exclaimed, "Amazing!" after watching it. Of course, he is really good. Whether it is the demon or the Forest Spirit, he has made very, very grand scenes. The movements of all the characters are very neat and beautiful, and the background is also very magnificent. But as for the animals, because I'm a bit of an authority when it comes to the representation of "dogs", the image of Moro doesn't look good at all. The film is full of places like this that (the old man) made with his eyes closed.
Maki Watanabe: That's how it is. I was so shocked that I didn't pay much attention.
Mamoru Oshii: This work is extremely difficult to draw, and it's also very long, isn't it? It's impossible to be perfect. Apart from Moro, there are also some problems with the setting of Irontown. The animator who was in charge of drawing Moro also participated in the production of the movie "Jin-Roh." His performance in "Jin-Roh" was obviously better. Not to mention anything else, the running posture of beasts is a difficult problem for animators, more difficult than birds and horses. For example, the posture of a dog lowering its center of gravity and speeding up will make the animator cry.
Maki Watanabe: The Forest Spirit also looks very unique!
Mamoru Oshii: That's the old man's forte. The little mushroom-like spirits are also his forte. Not only are they rich in movement, but children also especially like them.
Maki Watanabe: Very cute, and adults love it too! (laughs) Later, the scene where the Forest Spirit stepped on the ground and the flowers and plants suddenly grew made people couldn't help but exclaim "Wow," it was really beautiful.
Mamoru Oshii: That part is very sensual, as if you can smell it. It's really sensual, very enchanting. I only admire the part with the Forest Spirit, just like the scene in Totoro where the trees suddenly grow. That's the essence of the animation world. Even if it's done with CG, it can't make that kind of feeling. That is the old man's unique sense of movement, a sense of sensuality, a kind of eroticism unique to plants. The old man is really good at drawing plants. He's definitely better at plants than animals. From this point of view, there are indeed many remarkable scenes in "Princess Mononoke", maybe the character that the old man put more effort into is not San, but the Forest Spirit, which is why everyone is glued to their eyes.
Maki Watanabe: The scene of the Forest Spirit walking on the water, being hit and sinking into the water for a while, and then floating up again… That scene is very touching.
Mamoru Oshii: The old man is also very good at water, he is simply a genius. So, I'm not always picking on him, I'll praise him where it's due. I'm making a fair assessment. There will never be another animator like the old man. It's just that, although I may have said it too many times, he's really not cut out to be a director (laughs).
Maki Watanabe: I re-watched it after a long time. Although there are many problems such as the ending not being closed and the story having loopholes, I am still shocked by the picture.
Mamoru Oshii: If you look at it again after a while, those grand themes will be put aside by everyone, and many parts can be enjoyed separately. Sure enough, the unique sexy charm of this film is irresistible.
Maki Watanabe: But the places made with digital technology are really not good, or because the hand-painted parts are so good, the digital production looks not so good.
Mamoru Oshii: This film used digital technology for the first time, which caused a lot of buzz when it was released. The scene of Ashitaka riding a deer was made using texture mapping, but that doesn't suit the old man. The old man's unique sense of movement and pleasure in the flowing scenery cannot be expressed by texture mapping. I am very sure of this. In fact, this place should be the same as the sea of clouds in "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" and the flowing scenery in "Castle in the Sky," all done by hand. But if we did, the work might not be completed.
Maki Watanabe: Another major feature of this film is the voice actors. This time the dubbing lineup is very luxurious.
Mamoru Oshii: Needless to say, this is Suzuki's strategy. Toshiro Mifune, Akira Emoto, Masahiko Nishimura, Yuko Tanaka, and even Mitsuko Mori were invited. Ghibli has also invited many actors to be voice actors before, but this is the first time that there have been so many. Almost all the main characters are well-known stars. Every Japanese can conjure up the faces of these stars in their minds.
Maki Watanabe: San is voiced by actress Yuriko Ishida, and Ashitaka is voiced by Yoji Matsuda. Mr. Matsuda voiced Asbel in "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind."
Mamoru Oshii: Speaking of San just now, speaking of the lack of presence of this character, she doesn't look like the beautiful girl depicted by the old man at all. One of the reasons is that her voice didn't move people's hearts. Also, why Akira Emoto? Do you have this question?
Maki Watanabe: But didn't Mr. Oshii's "Sky Crawlers" also use actress Rinko Kikuchi? And Ryo Kase.
Mamoru Oshii: But not many Japanese knew Rinko Kikuchi at the time, right? As for why Ryo Kase was used, it's a long story... But the reason why I used Rinko was because I thought no one in Japan knew her, so it didn't matter.
Maki Watanabe: How come, I know her. After all, she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for "Babel" and has attracted a lot of attention.
Mamoru Oshii: That's because Miss Maki, you are in the film industry, but ordinary Japanese people don't know. And it was also because I liked her very much after meeting her once. Looking back on it now, she was wearing a black dress very similar to the one worn by the young Motoko at the end of "Ghost in the Shell."
Maki Watanabe: Was that intentional?
Mamoru Oshii: It's very possible. She seemed very positive and motivated at the time, which is what an actor should be. It is very important to have the momentum of "must win this role." Mélanie St-Pierre in "Garzey's Wing" is also like this, with a kappa hairstyle and a gun in the audition video.
Maki Watanabe: I didn't expect it to be so easy to capture Mr. Oshii's heart. A kappa hairstyle with a gun is all it takes (laughs).
Mamoru Oshii: What are you talking about! It's important whether it fits or not. That's the key. Let's not mention this for the time being, why don't I like this voice actor lineup very much? Because I watched the whole film at the luxurious premiere, and they stood on the stage in a row. These faces were very powerful, and the number of people was extraordinary.
Maki Watanabe: I've always had a question about letting actors be voice actors. Does letting Yuriko Ishida dub really attract audiences? It won't be the driving force to make people want to watch a movie, right?
Mamoru Oshii: Suzuki's strategy is "to do everything that can be done." Having celebrities lined up can get media attention, and Toshiro Mifune was more famous than Hayao Miyazaki back then, wasn't he? He didn't want to attract audiences with Yuriko Ishida, it was just a strategy to get media attention. Before the release, it was Suzuki's job to raise awareness of the film. First of all, "Princess Mononoke" is a very important work in every sense, and it must sell well, otherwise its investment scale will bankrupt Ghibli.
Maki Watanabe: It's a work that has put all its efforts into it.
Mamoru Oshii: Yes. The old man also made agrand structure in his mind, putting all his heart into it. Toshio Suzuki's efforts made this work a success in distribution. As I said just now, there are various sensitive issues in this work born from the old man's whims and fantasies, so Suzuki is responsible for the aftermath. You may have forgotten that there has never been a scene in a previous animation where a head or an arm is chopped off like in this work. When it was first released, every animation studio was talking about "Princess Mononoke," saying, "That old Miyazaki actually drew so many scenes of beheadings and severed limbs!" What does this mean? It can only be said that the old man has become unstoppable. What Suzuki said didn't work, it was completely out of control. In my opinion, this sign appeared in the "Porco Rosso" period. At that time, I let him do what he liked. On the other hand, Toshio Suzuki had to work harder to get the word out.
Maki Watanabe: Having said that, it has created a big-selling record in film history, which is very remarkable.
Mamoru Oshii: Judging from the results, it was a big hit at the box office, so it became more and more unstoppable.
In this way, the two consecutive films were created as they pleased, but the two works are completely different. The arbitrariness of "Porco Rosso" is a personal thing. But "Princess Mononoke" talks about Japan, nature, human beings, and even the theory of civilization. The old man put all the things he was interested in and studied into it, proposed a grand theme, and created it as an "author." That is to say, he officially debuted as an author.
Maki Watanabe: So, "Princess Mononoke" is a masterpiece of director Hayao Miyazaki, right?
Mamoru Oshii: Masterpiece? He hasn't even "mastered" it yet. Just put together interests and knowledge. No editing, no structure, just a list of content.
Maki Watanabe: Then how should it be evaluated?
Mamoru Oshii: Clearing inventory. No, it's more accurate to say picking up and shipping. Because he moved all the stock out.
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The content is from a Japanese book 誰も語らなかったジブリを語ろう (Let's talk about Ghibli that no one has talked about).

Hey all, my name is Mo. Our kind moderators gave me the green light to post this about 45 days ago, but I have been mulling over it, so please bear with me.
As some of you know, living in a heavily populated city like NYC has loads of benefits, but it also comes with a few annoying setbacks, such as the difficulty of making long-term or interesting friends who share similar interests or backgrounds as you get older. Not being from here can make it even more challenging.
With books like Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom coupled up with these 2 articles: Want to Make a New Friend? How Much Money Have You Got? & The Loneliness of the American Worker that I recently read from the Wall Street Journal. I got super fired up about posting this. Things are getting worse out there, & as someone who’s into sports, it’s a little challenging to find people who are able & willing to watch or go to games, let alone be friends with them.
So, I am a 29-year-old black male lurker here. With the aim of stepping out of my comfort zone & meeting new people to develop long-term friendships with, I purchased 3 full-season memberships for the NY Liberty, NY/NJ GothamFC, & NYCFC. I’m looking for female & male friends around my age (25–35ish). I don’t think I have a number as to how many friends I am looking for, but let’s just go ahead & say maybe 10 females & 10 males to even things out. Please keep in mind that this is not an R4R post & is very NYC-based sports team-related. I noticed that on Reddit, women’s posts about friendship tend to get more engagements & answers, so hopefully this gets some traction & I get to e-meet new people that I can physically meet in real life on a biweekly or even monthly basis. If you read this and feel like it's not for you, then that’s fine, but if you know a friend who’s looking for friends, then please kindly share this with them and/or introduce us. I’m looking for people around the same age, as I don’t have lots of NYC-based friends in general. I currently work as a social worker. My simple pleasures are trivia, sushi, museums, karaoke, bowling, scenic drives, working out, my curated playlists, the New York Times’ games, a comedy & theater show, & coconut cake & ice cream. I love cats. I am a Libra with an ENTJ personality type. I am Caribbean. I love food. I love anything coconut-flavored. I studied and love theater, so I like to enjoy good plays, musicals, and movies. I love going to the movies. My Regal Theater is about 12 minutes from me. This year I’ve seen 106 movies so far (a few of my favorites: The Holdovers, Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives, Yodha, Dogman, Seagrass, & Cabrini. Sorry Challengers didn’t make the cut, haha). I love museums (a few of my favorites: the Brooklyn Museum, the Met Cloisters, & AMNH). I also love good comedy: sitcoms, stand-ups, and improv. Although I am more of a fast-paced person, I do love classical music. I’m straight. I’m spiritual but not religious. I am an extrovert. No allergies. I am very proactive. I am impatient sometimes. Little fun fact about me: almost everything I own or wear is grey/gray but my favorite color is red. I live alone. I don’t drink alcohol, & I don’t smoke/vape. No substance use at all, but I’m open to being friends with people who do these things as long as they aren't around me when doing so. I don’t play video games; I don’t stream. I have them, but I don’t necessarily use mainstream social media. Loneliness is a b-word & I can be a homebody & a bit reserved sometimes. I consider myself to be a sapiosexual, so evidently I am an avid audiobookworm—I have listened to 75 books so far this year through my Libby & Audible apps (a few of my favorites would be: Ikigai, Feminism is for Everybody, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, I am Not Sydney Poitier, The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao & Heartburn). I try to listen to a book a month. I closely follow and like to talk about international and national politics. I think I get bored easily, so I like to talk & have meaningful conversations. It doesn’t have to be “deep conversation,” but something that can stimulate and challenge my brain & point of view. My apology language is planned change, & my love language is quality time (doing something) so I am looking for platonic female & male friends that I can go to games with & spend quality time with doing other things that we have in common as well. The Copa America and the Euro are starting soon. Let’s not forget the World Cup. I live in Canarsie, Brooklyn, & I drive, so maybe we can tag along to games sometimes, etc. I have an ACE score of 1. One social cause that I am passionate about is homelessness. I have a fear of heights. I'm very big on respecting people's personal space & boundaries, so I don't like people who are always late. My motto is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Around the right person, I am stupidly funny but can be too blunt sometimes; therefore, one thing that I started doing is checking in & asking to see if I have said anything unkind, mean, rude, or condescending to whoever I’m talking to, and if so, I ask what they are so I can be cognizant of them, & I also ask the person if they feel heard, understood, & respected after apologizing & talking about what I said or did that bothered them. I looooove football (soccer). My favorite teams are Argentina, Barcelona, Manchester City, Inter Milan, PSG, Borussia Dortmund, NYCFC, & NY/NJ GothamFC, as mentioned above. Obviously, the Libs are the best WNBA team out there. I like to think of myself as someone who’s securely-anxious in friendship. My spirit animal is a bull. I am open-minded, so I am willing to learn & compromise. I am not diagnosed with any mental or physical illnesses. I'm all about the simple pleasures in life. I have tried making friends in real life—in person through un/paid events, etc.—but people are madly flaky & aren’t committed to a friendship…Anyway, enough said—I am looking forward to making meaningful connections with you here, & if there's something specific that you'd like to know about me, then please do not hesitate to ask, or you can organically find out when we start getting to know each other in person!
Please feel free to reach out to me either through DM or comment under this post. Because you made it this far through my post, I am giving a free ticket for the May 31st game to the first person who reaches out to me and is willing to be friends. Oh, & in case you're wondering, I sit in Section 8, Row 18. As a season ticket holder, I definitely won’t be able to attend all the games, so I will be giving other free tickets to people who reach out to me & want to be friends as well.
Lastly, I want to give a huge shoutout to the moderators for allowing me the opportunity to do this. I appreciate it but I appreciate y’all even more.

The purpose of this post is to show what being selective in your talents and having a large supporting staff can do compared to how niji is running things. maybe someone in niji sees this and they make changes, maybe not. i like numbers so i'm doing numbers.
oh man where do i begin. so with the announcement of 3D of advent i had to do some checking on sub numbers and where they are at because i dont really watch holo, but i do see clips of them occasionally and they got that talent. what a shock that was!
Hololive advent EN right now:

• Fuwamoco: 840k subs
• Nerissa Ravencroft: 692k subs
• Koseki Bijou: 598k subs
• Shiori Novella: 511k subs

I know they debuted slightly before TTT, but just as a reference point, lets get them visible here too. TTT sub counts:

• Claude Clawmark: 109k subs
• Victoria Brightshield: 104k subs
• Kunai Nakasato: 75k subs

i'm not here to number shame, we all know TTT was effected quite tremendously by things earlier this year but i think they could have rode it out if they had more support staff to assist them with higher quality streams, better resources, bigger collabs with JP senpai's or whoever. point is, all of niji's management was busy putting out a fire and their latest wave suffered SIGNIFICANTLY because of it.
What i found VERY interesting about this though is that right now, Fuwamoco and Nerissa are lined up to hit 1 mil subs right around the time holo EN gen 2 will. Fuwamoco will actually beat kronii and bae to it (this is just natural predicted growth, not accounting for any events... like a 3D Debut). this leads me to believe this latest gen of holo had a lot more support for making sure things ran smooth compared to gen 2 (expected honestly, more experience in western audience.)
Right now if fuwamoco kept doing their thing and had no crazy events, they'd hit 1 mil in 4 months. kronii is looking at 6 months, bae at 8, and fauna a bit further down. Nerissa is looking to hit 1 mil in 7 months. i really want to stress that THIS IS ASSUMING NO SPECIAL EVENTS LIKE A 3D DEBUT, CONCERTS, ANNIVERSARIES, BIRTHDAYS, ETC.
I did a comparison with the niji talents, um. i could go into the specifics, but i'll be quick cause it was a little depressing. victoria is looking to hit 350k subs in 5 years (thats as far as social blade goes), kunai is looking at 200k in 5 years, and almost as if nepo works, claude is looking at 425k in 5 years. if we compare that to current subs of niji talents, EVEN WHEN THEY'VE LOST A YEAR OF PROGRESS, we can see that there is 0 support structure or plan to grow these talents. the rate of growth is worse than some indie talents i've seen for growing subs. In my opinion, as time goes on the management at nijisanji grows worse which leads me to believe they do not hire new management for each wave, they just spread their employees even thinner.
the entire point of joining a company is for the viewership boost, the assistance in management, and to help bring in sponsors. Nijisanji EN at this point does not provide a CONSISTENT viewership boost, theres not enough management to help new talents, and as of this year the sponsors are leaving.
I could go into the merits of how holo is going super strong right now, but i dont even need to, you're probably already aware and its not the point of this post. We need a significant change in the management structure at nijisanji for any chance at these talents growing. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
My sources for the numbers: each talent's youtube page for their current subs, and their socialblade.com page for the projected sub growth rate.

I am not the OOP. The OOP is u/ElectronicMoon1676 posting in AskALawyer
Likely Concluded as per OOP
2 updates - Medium
Original - 13th May 2024
Update1 - 15th May 2024
Update2 - 23rd May 2024
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Mother wants to legally force me to live with her even though I am 39.
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So my mother (60) has always had a flair for dramatics and will convince herself of things that are just not true, and of course her brothers (my uncles) think it’s hilarious and will get her worked up even more, while making fun of her for being so gullible behind her back. I cut her out of my life 4 years ago. We are in Michigan. Someone I trust in the family came to me with concerns that my mother may lie to try to get conservatorship over me.
Here is what I know. Her current belief is that I am an unemployed alcoholic living in my car and being taken advantage of by evil men from the political party that she hates. This is not true. I have a place, pay my bills and had a full-time job last time we spoke. I did leave that job but I also returned to school full time on GI Bill, which includes a stipend for living expenses, and found a sweet part-time job, in an air conditioned office, on campus. As far as I know she has no idea I am back in school and I haven’t told anyone in my family, even the ones I trust, what is going on in my life.
Problem is that she lost her job of over 20 years during a mass lay off sometime since we last spoke. These new coworkers haven’t known her long enough to recognize how she doesn’t keep her stories straight or how she flip-flops things around. Basically she has led everyone she works with to believe I am only in my early-mid 20’s and haven’t quite finished my “teenage rebellion phase”, and she is a good mommy who just wants to save her baby from the evil political party.
They have all been “helping her with “research””, and believe because I have a disability rating from the VA, it means I am mentally incompetent. It does not at all mean that. Now I am positive that none of them actually understand how a VA disability rating actually works, my mother likely lied to them about it. Her new friends believe she can have me declared incompetent, force me to live with her for monitoring, and finally take control of my finances thus getting control of my disability payments. I have an 80 rating which is currently just under $2000 a month.
My concern isn’t that my mother could prove I am incompetent but it’s that she could use court proceedings to get a hold of my address, school, or work place. I guess my question is about rules of discovery when it comes to conservatorship cases. Can my mother or any lawyer willing to take her case on actually get ahold of my personal info I don’t want her to have?
If I provide courts with documents proving my competence and ability to care for myself, do I have the right to ask the court to seal or redact any information or documents with info I don’t want her getting? She sabotaged me going to college around 20 years ago and I don’t want to go through that again. I am assuming that the first person I would ever have to deal with would be a social worker, and I want to know if I have any legal recourse to prevent the social worker from sharing my info with my mother?
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Comments
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530_Oldschoolgeek
See if your college has some kind of free legal aid service they can direct you to, and explain this to them. They might be able to point you in the direction to get low cost or free legal services so an attorney can send your mother a cease and desist letter along with filing for a restraining order in such a manner as to not disclose your current whereabouts.
They might also have other ideas that will curtail any attempt by her to try to put a conservatorship in place.

OOP: I just checked and they don’t. But, silly me forgot, the VA clinic in my city has a social worker on site. I used her once for a medical power of attorney. But I bet she could either help me herself or get me to the right resource.

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Stunning-Interest15
Not a lawyer, but they pay me a shit ton of money to handle stuff like this as a private investigator. Here's my take.
Yes. Her lawyer will hire an investigator to find all of your information. They will pay online databrokers for your file and they will get WAY more than your address. (Everything. They will get everything. If you fucked up and said that thought you didn't want people knowing about, they will find that out.)
Any of that information that can then be found on Google is a public record since it's already on the public Internet. Your address is almost certainly among that data.
No court can sanction public information. Even if they could, the internet is forever and it's already out there.
So, bad news there. The good news is that you're a grown ass woman and the courts are not going to give her a conservatorship just because you have PTSD. You are in no danger of anything other than your mom showing up on your doorstep unannounced.

OOP: How likely are lawyers and private investigators to take on someone without the ability to pay. Do they have the ability to check credit scores. My mother is terrible with money. My brother confessed to me that she “sold the house” she bought with her third husband a little while after their divorce. By brother insinuated that she was in a bad way with money. I know that when I was 20 and she was 40, I had a better credit score than her. I went to buy a used car and she said she would have to co-sign cuz I was too young to have a good credit score. Turned out I got a better rate without her co-signing. Makes me wonder how bad someone’s credit has to be that you are detrimental to a loan as a co-signer.

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Update - 2 days later
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I tried to update the original post and couldn’t, and the update comment I left got buried at the bottom.
Backstory: Mother wanted me declared incompetent to gain control of me and my veteran disability payments.
So I talked with another family member who confirmed what the first said. Everyone is angry because I wasn’t suppose to find out what happened because “they were handling it”. I refused to tell who told me, which is causing more anger but whatever. So this situation had resolved itself last week. My mother was talking a big game about how she was calling lawyers and Adult Protective Services. After a few days she started trashing on all lawyers and saying that APS was wasting taxpayer dollars.
Apparently she has forgotten all about this whole mess. Her job got a new summer internet and my mother is obsessed. Every conversation anyone has with her is about this guy. My poor grandma has to have no less than a one hour conversation with my mother everyday about this guy. The guy comes from a lot of money, which in the end was what I think she wanted with me. This guy just turned 20 and my mother is 60.
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Comments
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homer_lives
That sounds like a win for now. Most likely, APS "laughed" her out of the room. I would avoid contact since she sounds Manic, going from one scheme or idea to another.
shhh_its_me
Sounds like Mom needs a guardian
DredgenCyka
If I had a nickel for everytime I heard of someone's mom trying to force their 100% VA disabled veteran son or daughter to live with them by declaring them incompetent for self care, I'd have about 25 to 30 cents. It's just weird that it's happened that many times, and it's sad. Stay away from her, and thank you for your service!
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Update - 8 days later
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TLDR of my previous post was that my mother wanted to have me declared incompetent so she could get control of my veteran disability payments and force me to come live with her. I went no contact like 4 years ago. Her plan was to make up wild stories about me and it didn’t go her way. Now she is obsessed with this new intern at her job that comes from money, and seems to have forgotten all about her plan.
I was able to squeeze in meeting with the social worker who works at my VA clinic. I gave her the run down and even showed her my two previous posts. She thought it was kinda funny. She informed me that if a state SW were to be informed of a veteran in a need they would reach out to the VA and she would likely be a first point of contact.
She said that no one from the county or state has contacted her about me yet, but she would make a note. Apparently, the whole Britney Spears conservatorship has made a lot of people think it’s super easy to get conservatorships. She said some people think they will get paid a lot of money to do it. Her best guess is that if my mother did call, it was explained to her how complex the process is and that I would be guided to the VA to receive treatment first, before declaring me incompetent. She did agree with many of the comments that said my mother could find me pretty easily if she really wanted to.
The SW use to work at the state office and while she didn’t work at adult protective services but she had friends and coworkers who did. Money seemed to her to be a really big factor in how hard people fought to get conservatorship. She was surprisingly compassionate towards my mother and said sometimes parents just get worried and worry makes people do stupid things. She said some parents have a hard time adjusting to their children becoming adults and moving out.
Sometimes it’s because they are losing child support, or they’re losing the person who did all the chores, or because they just don’t want to face reality that their baby grew up. And these parents will lash out at the world instead of accepting the truth. She told me about a case a friend of hers had where the parents of an adult woman who had moved out couldn’t face reality. Her parents had been relying on her to do all the housework and raise her brothers. With her gone, everything fell apart at home.
These parents blamed their daughter who had moved out instead of taking responsibility for their own lives Her friend was so stressed by the case because she got yelled at by the parents almost daily about how the state needed to force their daughter to move back in with them. They never got their wish and almost lost their other kids. A grandparent found out what was happening and stepped up to set the parents straight.
Someone had messaged me saying my post was blowing up on social media and I went looking for it and couldn’t find it. They pointed out my family could see it, but I’ve decided I don’t care if they do.
So basically, if my mother really wants to find me she can, but the conservatorship isn’t that easy to get, and I know my mother well enough to know she doesn’t have the patience, or money needed to pursue this anymore. Also there seems to be a lot of rules surrounding conservatorship that I don’t think my mother would have liked following. So I should be good for a while.
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Comments
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OOP in response to a deleted comment (presumably about the intern)

A far as I know he still works there and she is still obsessed.

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DredgenCyka
You should still remain in No Contact with your mom. This will still make it difficult to gain conservatorship over you. I also don't think the VA hospital will pronounce you incompetent at all unless you lost limbs or went into a vegetative state from a concussive blast, in addition 100% Disabled ≠ Incompetent to manage youre own life. Hopefully, the VA will become an advocacy group for you, im also pretty sure the VA offers lawyers to their veterans. You can ask about that if your mom steps out of line.
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I am not the OOP. Please do not harass the OOP.
Please remember the No Brigading Rule and to be civil in the comments

I 20m and my girlfriend 10f got together cuz we were family friends our relationship is public and known to like everybody from her side shes very loyal to me she doesn't even talk with any other dude not only guys she dont even talk to girls for me I don't know if she's a kind of girl who seeks attention yesterday we were playing game and she said if I win you'll do as I say I said fine and eventually she won and she told me to unfollow every girl on Instagram except relatives and sisters now only females in my following list are my mom and my 3 sisters then I asked her to unfollow useless dudes in her following she started to say no it's not right I told to do now you don't tell me to and stuff then she started saying I won't do it cuz I won then after some arguments she agreed she unfollowed around 11-12 guys who never even texted or interecaed but then there were 4 guys left which alerted me cuz they one of them was has a massive crush on her and cried in front of her to be in relationship with him one of them was flirting with her and said her to leave him (me) and be with me(him) one of them hit in her twice texting but she left him in seen and one guys is a guy I know who's does have I'll intentions she dosent know any of them personally and never met any one of them when I asked her to unfollow then she started arguing with me i won't stuff what's your problem I won so so stuff then she said Im tired of your behaviour and i don't wanna be in this relationship anymore I said you sure she said I want some time and then she came back she said I wants a breakup I said sure then she started saying in tired of your behaviour you say anything to me i won't tolerate it and I said you want to leave me for some guys you never met who just want you physically and you disrespecting me for them she said enough you you do whatever you want I'm not going to unfollow then that's it I said fine live with them best of luck then I left she called me in morning and started taking like nothing even happened and started asking me questions what are you doing when you woke up I said idk she said why idk in sweet time i said I don't feel like taking to you she sent me a reel and i haven't responded to it she logged in my account a 6-7 times checked some stuff but didn't texted me
What should I do shoud I leave her ? Or should I have a conversation if yes then what should I say to her ??

Hey yall, I’m a prospective Econ PhD applicant - graduated with a BS in pure math and CS and a MS in Math ~3 years ago and have been working in ML research at a small quant firm with a penchant for niche applied research areas. A lot of my work revolves around using tools from other fields, mainly statistical physics/mechanics to solve problems in financial econometrics and package them as ML solutions, so I suppose “econophysics” might be a good descriptor for a chunk of this research. A lot of the external learning about economic theory I’ve been doing on the side as well has almost fully convinced me to apply to PhD programs within the next ~2 years.
I’m in the opposite boat as most of those asking about prereqs, since my math background is decent (measure theory, functional analysis, spectral theory/hilbert space/self-adjoint operator courses, measure-theoretic probability, convex and nonlinear optimization, stochastic processes, stochastic DE/PDE sequence, algebraic/differential topology and geometry, complex geometry, and ~7-8 various PhD courses in complex and topological dynamics and ergodic theory, etc.)
On the other hand, my formal econ background is just intermediate micro/macro and an econometrics class. I keep hearing that more math is usually the better route to go, but right now the few options that I haven’t taken yet at my local university are very niche:
Continuum theory, few very application-specific numerical methods for PDEs courses, Nonlinear analysis/bifurcations, PhD course on lie algebras, combinatorial commutative algebra, topological laminations, bunch of mathematical physics courses, and a few others but the general trend is that my remaining options don’t intuitively seem very intertwined with most areas of econ theory.
My local university doesn’t have an econ PhD program, but one 30 min away does. Would it be a better option to give more math a rest and go for some grad-level econ courses instead? I was planning on taking a PhD Micro theory course in the fall, but aside from that I’m not sure what my best choices might be. I’m guessing I’ll be able to squeeze in 3-4 courses in the timeframe before I start applying, so if anyone has insight on what kind of PhD-level econ courses are typically the most valuable for admissions, that would be super helpful. For context, my area of interest leans towards econometric theory, but that might change as I get more exposure to formal econ courses.
Thanks in advance for any advice on coursework choices!

Oh, very long post. Sorry.
Hello, everyone! I know it’s been a while. Being completely honest with you, I am not okay… well, I’m feeling better now. I’ve been feeling horrible, hella anxious, and, yeah, depressed. I don’t even know how to start this post or how to explain what has happened. Maybe it’s really nothing, but it took a toll on my mental health.
Thank you for all your comments and messages. For real, thank you for your concern. It wasn’t my intention to worry you all, but yeah, I wasn’t having a great time. I’m still fighting against my own demons, but it’s all better now. So, thank you, really. I appreciate it so much. I wish we all could go out for a coffee in real life or something.
I’ll let you know what has happened.
A lot of things happened around Mother’s Day, and it brought up old feelings and bad impulses against myself that I had left long in the past. There was a day when I simply didn’t want to exist anymore, to say it kindly. I know my hormones are not being helpful, and the only feeling I can trust right now is my love for hubby and baby and our upcoming little girls. I honestly don’t know what I would do without them. They are my entire world and universe. They simply save me. And I need to be strong for these babies, they are not doing so well. Maybe that’s also part of what made me feel so down like this.
I was already feeling down a few days before Mother’s Day and didn’t feel like celebrating. I know my mom had betrayed me and done unforgivable things up to that point, but I couldn’t help but feel sad because… well, I no longer have a mom. I asked the aunties and grauntie not to acknowledge the day for me, and they understood. Grauntie did call me early in the morning, and it made me sob hard, we talked for about an hour, so go figure. Hubby and I got her a big gift to show our appreciation and gratitude because he says she has also stood as a mother figure for him during these chaotic months. Oh, yea, grauntie is a great woman, and she laughed so much about her nickname, btw, she loves it. Baby calls her that now, well “grantie.” Aunties started saying happy mother’s day the next day lol.
Anyway, hubby didn’t let the day pass for me. He brought me breakfast in bed, he cooked all day, and since we decided to stay home, he brought healthy junk food (approved by my doctors, he made sure about that) for us to stay in bed, or on the couch, watching movies, Bluey, and a marathon of my shitty show that he doesn’t like (but he enjoys in secret lol). He gave me some presents and flowers that baby picked herself. I don’t know when this man took the time to also help baby make a craft for me without me noticing. It was very cute. We decided to stay home, turn the lights off, and stay upstairs pretending we weren’t really there. We both couldn’t help but be concerned and a bit anxious about ILs showing up. We stayed locked upstairs just resting, snuggling, and cuddling.
I will try to summarize what happened when they showed up.
Baby was taking a nap in her room, and we were into our own stuff when they interrupted. We tried to ignore them, but MIL kept insisting, saying she knew we were home. She kept ringing the bell and then knocking on the door. They claimed they were visiting us because we couldn’t attend her reunion. It was only MIL and SIL (not beast SIL), and they were carrying bowls with food. Later I noticed it was only food they know I am allergic to or that I don’t like. After some minutes, we decided to just get rid of them. Hubby changed and went downstairs to warn them he was calling the police (he did that for proof that he asked them to leave, knowing they were not going to go away). MIL was very calm and kept saying shit, but hubby didn’t engage in her conversation. Important information: she asked a lot about me and baby, about our safety. I stayed upstairs, and peeking through the window, I noticed their car was parked on the other side of the street, out of the range of our door cam. Fucking creepy BIL was inside, I guess waiting for them.
I picked up my phone to take a picture of him and I had some unread texts from good SIL warning us ILs were coming and saying things like “be careful,” blah blah. She also said good BIL was heading over here so he could help take them out of our place, I guess. I gotta give points in favor of BIL because he stood up for hubby and even called their mother a liar.
So, we called the police on them, but they also called the police on us, on hubby. Fucking idiots. Fucking MIL. They called the police on hubby saying they believed there was a case of domestic violence happening in our house. They said we didn’t open the door and they were scared because they suspected I’ve been in danger and they hadn’t heard my voice or baby inside. To this point, we are not sure who made the call, but I believe it was creeypy BIL. Hubby had to open the door to talk to the officers, I also had to go out because they wanted to speak to me. Mind you, I was so stressed and just wanted to help hubby with the bullshit that I didn’t realize I was only wearing a top and leggings because, mind you again, I was comfy in my house before they decided to arrive. So, yea, they saw my belly and they officially know that I am pregnant. I, somehow, feel so violated by them knowing. Ugh, fucking idiot creepy BIL’s face and smirk and his eyes all over me still give me the chills. Good BIL had arrived at this point too, so he also saw me but his reaction was the most normal of all. I guess he just got sad. I know he wanted to get close to me but he didn’t dare. Good, I guess.
A female officer separated me from the drama and asked me a bunch of questions in private. I brought her inside the house because baby was still sleeping upstairs. She kept glaring around, like looking for something suspicious, I suppose. The other officer talked with hubby and with a neighbor and he very soon concluded the accusations were all bullshit. They just asked to check on baby because MIL kept insisting. We had to explain that baby was actually her grandkid because she kept asking about her daughter, I just wanted to punch her in the face. I went to pick baby up, she was still asleep, and the cop I was talking with was nice enough to keep both of us inside the house. Baby ended up waking up and crying with all the trouble from outside, anyway. MIL heard her crying and she lost her calm, started to raise her voice. I couldn’t control myself and I poked my head out and told MIL that of course, baby was crying and it was all her fault, and I called her a bitch 🙄 This led to a verbal fight, just imagine everyone involved… and the cops. SIL was crying. I stayed inside but close enough to the door because I was worried about hubby. I overheard him asking if it was done and if he could go inside with us. They were leaving, officers were making them go away but MIL couldn’t just leave without causing more distress and told hubby she wished I bleed out and die while giving birth and that she hopes my baby is not his (because they changed the game, now I am the cheater). I instinctively opened the door to stop hubby from reacting but he was just there standing and staring at her. Ok, background: I had preeclampsia when baby was born, then after being sent home I got very ill and had to be rushed to the hospital because I got an infection. Hubby and everyone got super worried when I had to go back to the hospital. It was bad. Hubby thought the worst and he obviously talked with MIL about it, back at the time so yeah, she knew where to hurt him. Hubby said to good BIL something like “yes, this is the family you keep choosing.” He was like in shock. Hubby and I just went back inside and we hugged. Good BIL tried to talk to us but we ignored him, I know he was upset. He recently sent me a text I haven’t answered back. I have seen hubby sad and vulnerable, but the only time I’ve seen him actually cry was when his father passed away. This time he cried too and couldn’t let us go an inch away from him. I held back my tears. We were very jumpy and uncomfortable so we took some blankets and went to sleep in the other house. There’s no furniture, no lights, and no water yet in my dad’s house but it was better to know we were nowhere to be found. It was like camping for baby, she even asked for vampire stories that we invented for her right there. Then, hubby and I just hugged and cried our eyes out to sleep. I was simply angry and sad and upset that they took away our peace. I cried because this bitch keeps hurting my family, because they are making us run away from our own house, from wverything we have built and for what!? I am thankful we have my dad’s house to escape but it brings me bad memories and I also got a bit triggered that night, I guess. We talked a lot that night and we came to the same conclusion: the only thing that matters is that we have each other and we will never let them win.
No, it wasn’t enough for a RO. Police didn’t want to try for charges because all they saw was a family drama, which it was if you see it as an isolated incident. No, they didn’t go against the beats RO. We told and showed and give everythign to our lawyer.
Then my mom happened. I had a few voicemails from her, and I was weak, so I listened to them. This happened the next day. I waited for hubby so I wouldn’t have to listen to them alone. This was the biggest mistake of my life. We planned to have a nice dinner at home to save Mother’s Day and as an excuse to have a date but I ruined it all. I don’t know why I listened to all of them. She started all calm, victimizing herself but calm. She said happy Mother's Day to me, started to talk about baby, about me, and about my brother. She said she is very sad to be a mother without her kids. She said it would be easier if we were dead (yes, she said that), she would cope better with that truth. It escalated with each voicemail, to the point where she blamed me for what happened with her POS boyfriend and me. I had never heard her say something like this to me while growing up. Never. She claims she’s now all lonely because of me. She said she should have aborted me when she had the chance, as my dad suggested. This… I made me go numb. She accused me of seducing this man and that’s why he fell for me. Only thing I can think is that this POS has been manipulating her, idk but it hurt like hell. She told me that I should have stopped him. She blamed me too because, after that incident, she had lost all opportunities to recover her relationship with my dad. She then basically said our dad never really loved me and my brother, and that’s why he left and never came back. I started to spiral and, well, I barely remember my dad since they divorced. He came back when everything exploded, but before that… I don’t really have memories. I don’t know, she made me question a lot of things. Her tone was calm and sweet, which made it worse. She didn’t use the words or phrasing I am using right now either, her discourse made sense, this is basically what she meant. Of course, she also called me a bad mom too, and I couldn’t help but think about all the things good SIL said about baby and how I didn’t notice it. I started to blame myself for the condition of my baby twins. I am not a bad mom, I know that, but it got me right there. I thought about baby being bullied by her cousins, about MIL throwing up the food I packed for her right in front of her, about our little baby eating food from the floor and trembling because she was frightened. I can’t take out of my mind the image of baby trembling. And I cried as I hadn’t cried in a while. And then I started to remember a lot of other things about my life. I questioned myself again if my mom ever really loved us because growing up, it felt like she did, and I was so grateful I had my mom with me because she was by my side all the time after the POS happened. She was there when I started to struggle in my teens, when I wanted to die, when I started to hurt myself. My dad was there too, and I have beautiful memories with him, he stood for us, I became really close to him, he helped us a lot during that time, but there are a lot of blank spaces where he’s not around. He got another girlfriend, and that time he stayed close to us in the same city but he stopped visiting. Until we went to college, he got together with his current wife, and flew away. He was there if we ever needed money, he paid for our education, but I never reached out to him asking for any other type of help. We barely talked, I tell you he didn’t even knew hubby or baby. To be fair, he was comming over for our wedding but we had to cancel it because of covid. I kept spiraling about it. I got tangled in my mom’s words. I remembered the POS boyfriends I had and how I let them mistreat me, do whatever they wanted to do with me. I let that happen, but I now realize my mom was comfortable with it. I got over that and stopped letting it happen because of the aunties and therapy. Not my proudest moment, but I broke my phone after listening to all her audios.
My train of thought ended up the same: I am so, so thankful I met hubby, and the only thing that matters is that we have each other. Hubby and baby and the twins are the only things that kept me alive these days. They are my world. Still, I was/am? dealing with urges to hurt myself. It’s alright when I am with baby, it’s alright when I am with hubby, but night time and the moment I open my eyes in the morning… it has been tough. My mom put me in a very bad place. I let her put me in a very bad place again, but it will be the last time. She won’t take the good from me. No way. Hubby says she’s trying to isolate me and he might be right but she won’t get it.
Hubby says I should talk with my dad. I’ve been very distant with him lately, and I know he can feel it. I want to talk with him too about this, but I don’t even know what to say. I miss the aunties, I’ve been distant with them too. Last weekend, hubby and I went out to eat with one of them (the auntie that wrote the text when I told them I’m pregnant) and her husband. It was nice, we had fun. I’m telling them it is two girls this week. I didn’t want to tell them before because I am really scared about my babies. They are a bit smaller than they should be, and even if they are just supposed to be small babies, it worries me as this is not so good for twins. Also, they suspect baby B has a heart condition :( I told this to the auntie, she’s the only one of the group that knows about all the difficulties of my pregnancy, and it helps a lot that she knows. I can’t help to be worried, but I can be positive and happy and excited for them. I have to be positive and happy and excited for them. I know the love aunties will give them even in my womb is much needed now. And hubby and I are doing and will do whatever it takes to keep them safe.
So, I said fuckyoumom and changed my mood, Hubby was worried because we really don’t have ANYTHING for the twins, and we are also in the process of moving. He had tried to convinced me to start looking for stuff to clear my mind but I wasn’t in the mood. Well, we finally started to look for cribs (very difficult task tbh) and we bought their first onesies :) I’m letting the aunties shop for them too now (they’ve been insisting a lot lol) and it is very funny when they start sending pictures of plushies or toys or clothes and asking if they should buy everything x2 (I love them because they keep thinking about the big sister). They are still trying to win points to be the godmothers lmao. I called grauntie last week and apologized for not being so communicative lately, and she started to come over again during the mornings, she’s been helping me with house shores and with my feelings. This has also helped hubby a lot because he was so worried when I was home alone. I cried so much with grauntie about my mom, and she showed me some of her Facebook posts. I just wish she would stop posting baby’s pictures. Grauntie also encouraged me to talk to my dad and yea, I will. And we went out to look for baby stuff together. She also knows about my pregnancy problems, but she’s confident we all will be alright.
The most important thing of all: we told baby she’s going to be a big sister :) She believed my belly was growing because I ate a watermelon seed lol If you want to know her reaction, I’ll make another post about it because I don’t want to mix it with all the shit above.
We ended up having a late Mother’s Day (also a pretext to be close to each other) the next Sunday after the actual day. It was nice and it cheered me up. It was a surprise from hubby.
My car is all fixed now and bills were sent to the beast family but they haven’t paid. We have the RO but the idea of them still scares me a bit from time to time. We’ve been calm these days at home but we have been going to visit the other house from time to time to get used to it. We’ve been planning where to place our furniture and how to decorate just to clear our minds. Hubby said maybe we will be able to start moving in a week and a half or two complete weeks. Yup, we’re moving even if we only have our bed there. I have mixed feelings about it but I know it’s for the best.
What his family and my mom don’t realize is that their bullshit only makes hubby and me stronger as a couple. He relies on me and I rely on him, we don’t fall. We always come to the same conclusion that we are simply meant to be together and for our kids. I can feel how our love and respect to each other grows stronger. And I am holding tight to this. As I said before, the only feeling I can really trust right now is my love for my little (and growing) family. The love they give me is something I have never doubt, not even in my darkest moments. I still have urges from time to time, I feel anxious and sometimes I can’t sleep, as right now, but all this love keeps me sane within my not so sane moments. I’m alright, I’m getting better (also yes, I’m going to therapy and having more sessions than usual).
I know I always say this but I can’t be thankful enough for hubby… You know? Hubby always says that I saved him, but I believe it is the opposite.
We’re going to be alright. I have always known that.
And I’m back hehe

(Disclaimer: this is essentially my life story, so I understand if you don't want to sit and read a full novel of some depressing fuck's cry for help, but I couldn't find a way to condense it, sorry.)
Life is shit right now. It's taken a long time for me to admit it, but there's just no more beating around the bush anymore. I'm trapped in a profound sadness that refuses to loosen it's hold on me, and I don't know what to do. I don't want to end it all, I never have, but I've just been through so much that it's hard to believe things could ever get better.
I'm 24(M), and 4 years ago I lost both of my parents, 10 months ago my girlfriend of 6 and a half years broke up with me, and just a few weeks ago the company I had been planning to work for over half my life shut its doors for good. Now I'm sat with no clear path forward and a brother trying to take what little I have left, and I just don't know how to move on.
I lost my dad on February 29th, 2020. He had been in and out of the hospital for the past couple months for constipation, didn't think much of it, he was 68 after all. One night I come in to visit him in the hospital and I walk in on a surgeon explaining something to him and my mother. It turns out that results from the latest test had come in and a polyp had burst in his large intestine, he was quickly developing sepsis and if they didn't operate soon he wouldn't see the sunrise. A few minutes to sort his thoughts and make some calls to my aunts for advice and he decided that the surgeon who talked to us was more than welcome to operate since he offered, it just so happened he was one of the highest rated gastro-intestinal surgeons in Texas (don't know if I got the name of the surgeon right, my bad). So they prep him for surgery and as they wheal him off to put him under he grabs onto my hand, with tears in his eyes, and says "Take care of your mother." He had a look in his eyes, he didn't think he'd get to open them again. But sure enough a few anxiety-inducing hours later the surgeon comes back out and lets us know that everything went off without a hitch, they managed to remove the blockage and clean everything up without issue. Dad spent the next week in recovery at that hospital, but I only managed to visit him there once. I hate hospitals, but I love my dad, so when I saw him in there, all strapped up with hoses poking in and out of him, I put a smile on and rubbed his feet like I always did (he broke both his legs and shattered an ankle years ago, the man was lucky to walk to begin with, so you'd better believe I'd help in any way I could). That's the last picture ever taken of me and my dad, with him strapped to a hospital bed and me giving him a foot massage. The next time I saw him he had been discharged without me knowing, so I headed back home to our rural town late one night when he said I could visit. I'd had a lot to think about then, I'd always thought I had so much more time with Dad, that I'd only have to say goodbye when I was good and ready and he had seen us through our biggest moments. By then I wasn't so sure, so I sat with him on that Friday night and just talked, for as long as I could. I told him the little things I'd been hanging on to for far too long, the kinds of things that didn't matter in the slightest but you'd never tell your parents because you're too embarrassed. I told him about how I bumped into someone at a stoplight right after high school, but I convinced the other guy not to get insurance involved because I didn't want him to know and end up costing him more money, so I just used all of my savings and my graduation gift to pay the guy off after he replaced his rear bumper. All dad had to say about that was "you should have gotten insurance involved, that's what it's for." We laughed, and he thanked me for telling him, said it proved that I was the man he always wanted me to be. We talked about a lot, I tried to hug him tight, but since the surgery was on his gut they couldn't just stitch him up. He was so bloated before the surgery that he looked pregnant, so the skin around his gut was delicate and they had to bandage him up and put this weird circulator on him to keep it clean. Either way, I hugged him as best I could, told him I loved him, that he should take it easy, and that I'd talk to him soon. I remember looking through the door as I walked away, he was just laid up in bed watching TV. I gave him a peace sign as I walk off, he always did the same, whether we were looking or not. That was 9:30 PM. At 6 the next morning I woke to my mom calling me in tears, she said dad was gone. They had spoken after I left, talked about what we discussed, and he said he couldn't get comfortable in bed so he'd moved over to the recliner in the living room. He didn't wake up. Later on when we finally got the reports back they said he had passed peacefully in his sleep due to a heart attack. Dad had heart problems before, he had a quadruple bypass when I was about 8 and a stint placed in later on due to a murmur in his heart, and ever since he'd been taking meds. There were so many little details that stuck with me from that day. He was wearing a pair of socks I gave him when I came back on the 29th. The night before he said he didn't think he'd wake back up after the surgery, but he did, which meant God wasn't done with him yet. I still remember the sound of my mom's sobs from behind the wall of my bed, my brother and I stayed with her for the first week afterwards.
I was always aware that I had a great life, but I had never lost anything so major, never had something so horrid and life-changing happen to me. One moment I was getting used to my new classes for the semester in college, and the next thing I knew my life had flipped ass over teakettle and the world was imploding. The combination of the pandemic hitting right as I experienced the worse loss of my life, in the middle of my second year of college, certainly didn't help either. To be honest, it's still a blur. I don't remember much of those months, only that the days blurred together as I barely perceived time passing. The semester ended, and one day when my brother are checking on Mom, she suddenly rushed out the door with a sack of vodka bottles in tow, got in her car, and drove off to work. We had worried she may have fallen off again, but had been hoping against hope she wouldn't. Mom had been alcohol my entire life, I won't get into it, but when we went to her work and my brother drove her home, we had to carry her upstairs ourselves after she fell into a potted plant with vomit on her shirt. Not too long after we staged an intervention and had her checked back into rehab. At the end of her first month she would decide if she'd stay for a second and third, and despite the pleas of my brother and I, she wouldn't listen. We said we were done with her. We had given her all the love and support we could, but if that wasn't going to work then we'd resort to our only other option and cut her out. When she checked out of rehab I drove her home. I thought I could try one last time to talk some sense into her, that maybe she'd listen to reason. In the end she just ignored me, so I said everything I could think to say. If it was going to be the last time I got to talk to her, then I'd make use of that ride home and tell her everything I could think of. Just like Dad. I dropped her off at the family home, gave her a hug, told her I loved her, and watched as she got smaller in the mirror as I drove away. About a week later on July 9th, I got a call from my brother and my Aunt, her little sister. She was gone. They found her in a CVS parking lot in her car, upside down. She had been there for hours. We don't know exactly what happened. She may have had a seizure. All we know is that the reports came back with "complications due to alcohol abuse and fatty liver."
After that, the estate fell to my brother and I as the sole inheritors. I'm thankful for everyone that came out of the woodworks to help us. Our aunts helped with the will and all of the proceedings that came after. A lot had to be done, and a 20 year old still in college (me) and a 24 year old fresh out of college (my brother), were not the ones capable to taking care of it all. It took months to sort it all out. Hell, some of it never got resolved because we just never knew what to do. What matters is that we had the time and space to grieve, and so I did.
It turns out I've always had depressive tendencies, but at this point I had fully developed an Anxiety and Depressive disorder. It came to a head one Summer day when I just couldn't take it anymore. I'd always wrestled with the concept of Death, that after everything that happens in your life it all just ends, nothing, just an end to all, void, nothingness. I hated it. It stills sends me into panic attacks to this day, and has since I was a child. That Summer day I hit rock bottom, and I couldn't think of anything else, because what else could matter if it was all going to end anyway? Why should I care? I'm not going to care when I'm gone, so why care now? It's not like I'll be around to regret leaving if I chose to end it all. These were the thoughts that flooded my mind, and they wouldn't go away. I took a walk. I went through my neighborhood, cut through the trees at the cul-de-sac near the bottom of the hill, and came to a path that led to a nearly dry creak. the water was barely flowing, but I was sweaty and I wanted to sit. So there I sat and contemplated it all. The absolute inconsequentiality of life and all its meaninglessness. I looked down and saw a rock, picked it up, and thought to myself just how long it would take to bash my brains out and end it all right there. Sure it would hurt, but only for so long, then it would be gone, and I'd stop hurting. I don't know how long I really sat there looking at that rock, but eventually a family of four came walking down the path and I had to get up to get out of their way since I was sitting in the middle of the path. I dropped the rock, let them pass, and walked back home. after that I called my friends, got the name and number for their doctor, and booked an appointment later that week. Ever since then I've been medicated and I'm better for it. I don't believe in those thoughts anymore, but it scares me that I got to a point that I nearly listened to them. I've back to that creek bed since, and it's actually very pretty right after a storm, when all the trees are still dripping with rainwater.
Fast-forward a few years and it's May 2023, I struggled and I stumbled, but I felt like I had made progress. I felt far from past it, but I was moving on. I graduated with a Bachelor's in Science for Art and Entertainment Technologies. I didn't know exactly what I'd do with it, but I felt like I could figure it out with the city I was in. I went up to celebrate my girlfriend's graduation a few weeks later up in Missouri, we had been together for six and a half years. We met in high school in the same friend group, stuck through college in a long-distance relationship, and I thought we would go all the way. Over that summer after we both graduated she had to take one last internship to finish up her degree. I visited when I had the chance, but over the course of the summer I worked to make sure the house lived in would be ready for her, ready for two people to live in together once we finally started our lives together. She spent another two and a half months in Missouri, and the day she got back on July 29th she broke up with me. She had her dad drive her down the night before, and she spent that night with me after the long trip. The next morning after waking up and having breakfast, she sat me down and said she didn't think we should be together anymore. It was something she decided on over the Summer, she said she'd been thinking about it for a bit and finally had a gut feeling that we should split up. There wasn't anyone else, she actually explained that it was the opposite. She had lived her entire life with barely any privacy. As the middle child of 6 children she rarely, if ever, got a moment to herself. She only ever had one room to herself, but even then it was in a smaller house with 4 other people, and no locks on her door. When she left for college she had to share a dorm with her roommate, and when she came back for the Winter and Summer breaks she stayed with me (I also have a housemate, so even then the privacy wasn't perfect). Over the course of that last Summer she finally had a room all to herself, a single dorm for 2 and a half months. During her internship it was the exact same, she worked in an archive, which are quiet on a bad day and silent as the grave every other day. Couple that with the fact that she only ever work with one other person (her supervisor), and that's if they worked with anyone else there at all, for 40 hours a week. She told me that summer gave her the alone time she never had the chance to take before, and spent a lot of it thinking, spending all the time she never got before to be alone with her thoughts. A couple weeks before she came back she had come to the conclusion that she didn't want to be in a relationship anymore. She gave me a lot of reasons for want to split up, that being one of them. The biggest reason, one she said she couldn't ignore, was that she thought we were becoming two very different people. She said she didn't think we would work if we stayed together, that the way she saw us going, it just wasn't going to work out. She told me she still loved me, but when I asked if it was in the same way as before, she could only shake her head. I still regret asking that. She left with her sister later that day, and came back with her family the next to pack up all her things and leave. When she was busy inside, I took a moment to talk to them and ask if I did anything wrong, they all said no. They said she was just the most independent person they all knew, and that I had nothing to be sorry for. It didn't help. When they were done she gave me one last moment with her, one last tear-stained kiss goodbye, but when she turned in the driveway to hand me back the extra key to the house, I broke down. I stood by the door just long enough to watch their car fade from view as they drove away, then I went back inside and collapsed into a void of sorrow and self-pity.
That was 10 months ago. I'd like to say I've made progress, but some days it's hard to believe that. In the time since I've spent a lot of time on myself, learning who I was and what I wanted to be. The main sticking point I had with her reasoning was that she was so certain we were going to end up two completely different people, but I didn't even know who I wanted to be. If I didn't know who I was, let alone who I was going to be, how could she be so definitively certain? A lot of time and self-reflection brought up a plethora of questions I'd never thought to ask myself. With a rural backwoods public Texas education, it turns out that a lot of mental health issues can fall between the cracks. I found out that I'm on the Autism Spectrum (I get my full Psych Eval later this week, so that's nice), I learned that I'm demisexual, and also that I get extremely, soul-crushingly lonely when I'm single. All my best friends had to move out of state last February (it's a long story but I can explain if necessary), so when we split up I had next to no one to fall back on nearby. I had acquaintances and others I could call, but the people I loved the most were a 13 hour drive away. I made the trip when I could, but it just wasn't the same. It's ironic though, I found a therapy service through a podcast she introduced me to. I've been seeing a reliable and caring therapist for 9 and a half of the past 10 months, so I'm grateful for that. I've come to learn that even if the crushing loneliness hurts the most, finding a new relationship isn't the right step forward. I spent long enough trying to make that happen, now I know it can't fix anything, nor should it.
For a while I was starting to feel things turning around. Not so much getting better, but it was a start. Then It got to February, and along with it another tide of problems. My brother has always been the one to party, since he was in high school and all throughout college he was the one that got the drinks and people together. When we became independent he was the one that got on my ass about not wasting our inheritance and only using it when absolutely necessary. It's ironic then, that he was the one to call me in late Feb telling me he'd blown through it all and gone bankrupt. For this next part I need to provide some context, so I'm sorry if it drags on. I never planned on moving out of the family home, but mom and dad had waited long enough and wanted me out, so mom agreed to find a place for me to stay and provide housing until I graduated college. She was a realtor for a big real estate company for over 25 years, and it just so happened that the last neighborhood she sold from had a model home the company wanted to get rid of. She pulled some strings and in the end she got it for a steal, like half the market price for a house in the area, with a monthly payment similar to most apartments in the same city. I'm well aware of how privileged I was and still am to this day, I don't want people to think I don't recognize the luck I've been given. However, when our parents passed the entirety of the estate was split 50/50 between my brother and I. Meaning that the house that I lived in at the time, and still have for the past 4 and a half years, is only half mine. This never really sat well with me, so when I eventually brought it up with my brother and asked about becoming the sole owner of my house, he agreed that it was the right call. The problem, is that he told me that he hand over his half for half of what the house would be sold for at maximum market price. He didn't want what we'd paid for, he didn't want half of what it was bought at, nor did he want any reasonable price, he wanted the most amount of money he could get for a home that wasn't his, nor was ever meant to be his (I want y'all to know that I already feel like the most privileged asshole ever having typed all this out, sorry for sounding like a shithead). Somewhere along the way, he got it in his head that I had already agreed to pay what he wanted me to for his half, and when he called me late Feb and asked for money, he got upset with me when I told him that I didn't want to. He got angry and started talking about how I owed him for my house, how I already agreed to pay him and that he'd count whatever I gave him as the start to my payment for the property I've lived on for nearly 5 fucking years. I panicked, and though I regret it, I caved and gave him far too much money (more than I'm willing to admit), in hopes he'd leave me alone. Unfortunately over the past 4 months he's only gotten worse.
Before this time we (my brother and our Aunts) came to the conclusion that the family home we had turned into an Airbnb was no longer sustainable. While it had been profitable for a good few months in 2022, by late 2023 it had turned into a money sink. There was more and more wear and deferred maintenance popping up with each passing month that by the time 2024 rolled around we were forced to choose between selling it off or emptying the rest of our inheritance in an attempt to fix it back up with no promise that it would be worth it. It sucked to do it, I spend the first 20 years of my life in that house, but in the end we gave the go ahead and my Aunt helped us put it on the market when Feb rolled around. The housing market where it's built is extremely competitive, it's on the outskirts of a rural tourist town with a view to die for, so we didn't think it would be too much waiting around before we got an offer. That was 4 months ago, and we haven't heard a word since, even though the first estimate was 6 weeks to 6 months. The agent helping us with the house let us know that there were over 60 homes being sold in the surrounding area, with half of them at a very similar price point. I don't feel comfortable revealing exactly what the house is priced at, but to give an idea, the money I'd make off of selling it, even after being split in half and reduced by taxes, would be enough to completely pay off the mortgage on my house and then some. The kicker to all of this, is that the house isn't in perfect condition. Even considering all the detracting factors, I'd say the price we have the house listed at is more than fair for the area, but nobody wants to buy a fixer-upper at that price point, even if it is worth it. To make all these matter worse, I found out recently that my brother has STILL been holding house parties there, even though he has a perfectly good party place where he currently lives! I found out when my Aunt told me about a showing we were going to have, but my brother tried to call and tell her to postpone it because he was going to be having a party the day before the showing was scheduled. In the middle of all this, he texts me out of the blue, trying to get me to talk to him and discuss something. I'm having none of it and tell him that if he needs to get something off his chest, he can text me or leave me alone, I don't want to talk. So he ends up sending me full fucking paragraphs, going on about how he's hit rock bottom, how we have to close the joint account we've been using to pay all the shared bills and expenses, and how he's so sorry for being a shitty older brother. Near the end of it he throws in how he recently lost his girlfriend to a drunk driver and that he's in mourning. I went digging and it turns out the girl he mentioned, who did tragically pass in an accident and was heavily mourned in the community, was not in a relationship with him for the past year and a half. I didn't know this until a month later though, so this all came out of the blue in a time where I just wanted to be done with him, so now I had no clue what to think. The way he spoke and said all the right things to make me feel for him hurt, it made me want to drive over to his house and throw my arms around him and tell him that he'd be okay and he wasn't alone. Then we found out about the party, and he never stopped using the joint account for all the bullshit personal spending he'd been using for before at liquor stores and bars, so I got to see first-hand what all he was spending both of our shared funds on (this is only one account I put money into when we need to pay bills, the majority of my money is in my own personal savings account that he doesn't have any access to). In short: he made it real obvious that everything he said to us was a complete and total lie, after pleading with me and making me take on the task of cancelling half the bills we had tied to the joint account just to save him the time and effort. He manipulated me, and it was plain as day to see it.
Now I'm at a point where I just have to wait for something to happen. I can't do a damn thing to change my shitty situation with my brother and my home. I want to cut him off, become fully independent, and leave all the trauma I have with him, but I literally can't. I have to wait until the family house is sold or he tries to come after me and my livelihood. I tried my best to research my options, but there's nothing I can do with my house unless he signs over his portion to me, and he won't do that unless he gets what he wants. The only thing I've been able to think of is that I could possibly take him to court and argue that his actions caused the selling price of our family home to go down, but I don't even know if that's possible or what it would do for me. I don't want to sue my brother, I just want to be done with him. I want to scream and yell and make him understand the stress he's put me through, make him feel the pain he's caused me my entire life just for wanting him to like me. I want to make him know just how much it hurts to have put so much effort into someone that was never going to care in the first place, but more than anything, I just want to be done with him.
I did the math, and unfortunately I now know that I have a time limit for the family home to be sold. Meaning that if the home isn't sold by the new year and we have to pay the property taxes again, I'll be the one taking the full brunt of that responsibility. If that happens I will either not have enough money in my savings to cover that cost, or I'll have just enough to pay for it and have nothing left. Either way, with how much the maintenance of everything has been draining our finances, I'd have to sell my current home to pay for the costs after property taxes are dealt with. It would solve so many issues if I just sold off my house, but it would hurt so God damn much. I've put so much effort into this house to try and make it feel like a home, make it feel like my home. When the world was falling apart and I lost everything else, this one house and the memories I made here were what kept me going. There are days where it feels like it's all I've got left. The last thing I want is to lose this house. I know I'd end up fine. I'd have funds left over to take care of me after it's sold, and the family home would sell eventually, but none of that would matter. I can see how long I might have left in this house in the pages left on the calendar hanging from my wall, and all I can do is wait for the other shoe to drop to see if I'm losing this too. All I can do is sit and fester in this shitty void of depression and anguish while I wait to find out what happens. I hate it.
When I didn't think anything could get worse, just a handful of weeks ago I idly checked Facebook and saw that my ex, the love of my life, had found herself a new boyfriend. Soul-crushing couldn't begin to describe what I felt. I thought I'd made progress, thought I'd said goodbye to my desire to rekindle what we once had. I thought I'd finally started to move on, but I suppose I didn't know how wrong I could be. She had changed her profile picture to one with her and him standing together, arm in arm. She looked so God damn gorgeous. I couldn't get over the fact that she had never done that when we were together, I guess I still haven't. I'm not even mad at her, or him, or anyone, I'm just in pain. I want her to be happy, she deserves to be happy, but all I can focus on is just how much I miss her. I saw her post about how they went to the zoo and it broke me. I've checked her Facebook so many times and I know I shouldn't, I keep telling myself that it's only going to hurt, but I still do it and it always breaks me down even more. For a short time she changed her picture to a different one and removed her relationship status, so I thought they had broken up. I feel guilty for even admitting it but it made me feel hope, like we still had a chance. I didn't want to give in to that feeling and set myself up for disappointment, but I couldn't help but feel like maybe she thought of what we had and there was a chance that the knowledge of who we were now would be enough to start something new. But I was wrong. She changed it to a new picture of the two of them a few days later, and it broke me all over again. It's strange, every time I start to feel like something is working, like I'm making some kind of progress, another bombshell comes hurtling around and blindsides me. I keep trying to get back on my own two feet, and I keep getting knocked back down. I feel myself becoming more and more jaded throughout all of this, and I'm trying so hard not to let myself become that. I feel the desire to just give up building more and more as the hurdles keep tripping me up, and I hate how appealing it's started to become. I'm just trying to find out who I am GOD DAMNIT, why can't anything just go fucking right.
I haven't had the motivation to do anything, it's always been an issue in my life that I've constantly fought against. From applying to college to finishing finals, I've only ever done the work that was most important when I had no other choice and at the last possible moment. Motivation and passion; these are the two things I've struggled with the most for the past year. I always knew that if I was going to find fulfilment in life, those would have to be my two guiding lights, or I'd end up sad and disappointed no matter where I found myself. Nothing seems to help, I can have fun when I make the conscious effort, but it doesn't feel the same. Now more than ever I've been putting in so much effort just to find out where I'm meant to be and what I'm meant to do. I've done and tried so many different things just to gain a better understanding of who that guy in the mirror staring back at me really is. I know I've made progress, logically it cannot be ignored that the steps I've made to get to the point that I have in life have done something, but it's gotten just so damn hard to see, and even more so to believe. There are days where I go through all the motions, I wake up, I eat, I do the things that I used to enjoy, but all I can think about is her and the amazing times we had. I think about all the plans we had together, the plan I had to ask her to marry me, the life we planned on building together. It just doesn't stop, but I'm doing so much to try and move forward. I just don't know if it's doing anything, if I'm just spinning my wheels in place while waste away on the inside. I schedule weekends where I can get away from it all and take a trip somewhere a few hours away, because even if I could be doing something else while I'm here, even I can recognize that a change in scenery and something new could always help. Sometimes it does help, other times it just feels like a distraction, and other times it just brings me back to the trips I used to take with her and the only thing I can think about is how much fun we'd be having if we were there together.
I used to think I knew what career I wanted in life. From a very young age I only ever wanted to work for the same company that produced the shows I grew up watching online. The things they made got me through so many darker times, and made the bright ones all the better to remember. I picked up new hobbies and learned new skills just to try and have an edge when I finally worked up the courage to apply for a job. I even picked up 3D modeling in high school just to get a head start from the inspiration their shows gave me. Then everything went to shit in my life, I lost nearly all direction, and I ended up too little too late. Two weeks ago the company that I'd been following for over half my entire life shut its doors for good, and I got to see one of my life-long dreams turn ash. At least I got to be there to say goodbye. They gave a lot to me, so I'm happy I at least got the chance to let them know that before they were gone.
I want to move on, I really do. Amidst the maelstrom of everything that's happened to me, and the deluge that still is happening to me, it just feels impossible that I ever could move on. I only just made my first resume last week for the first job I've every applied to, and it's at a retail store with nothing to do with what I studied in college. I want to make progress in life. I want to live. But I feel like I haven't had a life to live for so long now, and I just don't know what to do.
I'm sorry for the novel-length text dump of exposition and self-pity, I just didn't know what else to turn to.

This is gonna be really long, I’m so sorry! This is my first time posting, and I'm on mobile. I've never been so upset in my life, and I feel like I'm losing my mind. I just need to know that I’m not crazy and that my feelings are reasonable.
TLDR: Roommate let me think that we shared ownership of our cats. For the last 3 years I have done 99% of the work taking care of them, including cleaning their litter box EVERY SINGLE DAY, buying their cat carriers and flea collars, and taking them for months at a time with no contact from her. Now that it's time to move out, they are suddenly only “her” cats, and she says I don't have any claim over them. She admitted to not thinking about them or prioritizing them and relying on me to take care of them.
For context, me and my roommate have been living together for 4 years. We started off as roommates in a dorm, then in a 6 person apartment with our friends, and then we moved into a small 2 bedroom house together for our last 2 years of college. The first 2 years I was in college, I went home every weekend, and often missed important group things. My family lives about an hour and a half away, and wifi at home was not good enough for me to just do online school during covid. When we were in the 6 person apartment, my roommate’s friends asked us to babysit their 2 kittens during a long weekend, and then decided that they didn’t want them back. When I came back, I got to meet them, and all 6 of us agreed that they would be our cats and we would take care of them.
After the first week, it became apparent that me and my roommate were the only two taking care of them. We all chipped in to get them fixed, and they lived in our apartment for a year. I took them home over all school breaks. Me and my roommate lined up our house before the semester ended. That summer she studied abroad in France for 3 months. I took the cats home with me. During this time, she never reached out to me a single time. She never checked on the cats, or asked if I needed anything. The first time she mentioned the cats was when I brought them to our shared home that I deep cleaned before she moved in. After that, school started again, and we were both busy. They were OUR cats, so I cleaned their litter box every day, I bought their food and litter every week, and played with them every day. I bought them a water fountain because they didn’t like still water, I bought their flea collars and had a schedule to change them in my phone calendar, I gave them deworming medicine, and I bought both of their cat carriers, leashes, and harnesses. I also brought a cabinet that my grandpa made for the cats to put their litter box in so it was hidden in our small house.
For the next two years that we were in the house, anytime we were both gone for more than a week, I took the cats home with me. I cleaned the litter box every single day. I bought almost all of their food and litter. I know what foods they do and don’t like, and which ones hurt their tummies. Anytime I rearranged my room, I did it with the cats in mind. I make sure to maximize their window room, and anything that could hurt them/they can’t have, I put on shelves they can’t reach. The cats are not allowed in my roommates room. Sometimes if she is in her room they can go with her, but my room door is never shut. The cats slept with me almost every night, and I have hundreds of pictures on my phone with them on my face or curled up under the blankets with me. I leave my door cracked when I sleep so they can come and go as they please.
When I am gone for long weekends I check with my roommate to make sure that she will be home to take care of the cats, but when I come back, the litterbox is always full. We have two cats and one litter box, that’s why I clean it every day. The handful of times she bought them food or litter, it was the cheapest bulk item from Sams, and they don’t like that food. Sometimes the food would give them stomach issues and I would have to buy their regular food and replace it. The cats do not like fish, and they typically respond the best to sensitive stomach food.
Now, at the beginning of our last semester, she began making comments in front of me to the cats. She would say things like “Oh, you guys are gonna love (city that she is moving to after graduation)!”. I didn’t have the energy or emotional capacity to say anything when they first started, but I would wake up at night crying because I was so anxious and worried about losing the cats. In the past whenever other people asked us what was happening with the cats, she would look at me and say “We’ll figure it out closer to time.” I always thought this meant we would have a conversation about it, but I guess I’m just naive. Two weeks before the semester started, I lost one of my grandfathers. We were really close, and it hit me really hard. I was also taking 18 credit hours so I could graduate on time. This may not seem like a lot, but I am a STEM major at a rigorous school, and most people I know don’t take more than 14 credit hours at a time. I was also doing unpaid work to try and finish my thesis before graduation. On top of that, both of my childhood dogs died a few days apart in the first month of the semester. I have a necklace with their faces on them and wore them religiously. I am a pet lover, and I always have been.
After the semester ended, and we graduated, we still had our lease for 2-3 more months. I am very non confrontational, and we have never had a single argument or disagreement. This made me even more anxious about talking to her about the cats, so I wrote down a paragraph to read to her. I also made a spreadsheet documenting the receipts I had for the money I’ve spent on the cats. This only goes back about a year and a half due to accounts that I made and when the records start. This does not include the 3 months she was away or the year and a half before the receipts. It also doesn’t include places where I don’t have accounts. This number is only a fraction of what I have spent on the cats since we’ve had them. One night I sat her down, and asked her to hear me out. Here is the paragraph I read her:
“It hurts my feelings that you let me put so much time, energy, and money into the cats without saying something if you didn't consider me to be an owner too. You didn't even think I deserved a conversation about what's happening to the cats when we graduate, even though in the past you said we would figure it out when people asked. I feel like I at least deserve a conversation. I thought they were OUR cats, so I've been treating them that way. This has been keeping me awake at night and really stressing me out. I made a spreadsheet with receipts I have saved from the past 1-2 years from Kroger, Target, and amazon (limited by how far back the websites save my purchases/ when I started an account), not to mention the purchases that weren’t saved from places like publix, dollar general, and pet stores. I’ve spent over a thousand dollars of my money on the cats. I have a spreadsheet if you want the proof and to see where I spent the money. I also bought both of their cat carriers, all of their flea collars, and their deworming medicine. I keep track of when their flea collars need to be changed and when to buy new ones. I cleaned their litter box every single day until after me and (boyfriend) started dating, and even now I clean it every other day at least. I’ve watched the cats for months at a time on my own, and the longest I’ve ever been away from the cats is 9 days when I was in (location) for lab work. I feel like the cats know that I love them and do a lot to make sure they’re taken care of. If I knew that I wasn’t even considered one of their owners, then I wouldn’t have taken so much responsibility for them. It’s breaking my heart to think that I may not ever see them again, and if I knew that from the beginning, I never would have let myself get so attached or do the majority of the work to take care of them. I feel like I’ve been taken for granted, and I really don’t think it’s fair to me to not even discuss who should get the cats.”
When she responded, she gaslit me and tried to take credit for things she didn’t do. She said that if I thought they were shared, I should’ve asked her for help or reminded her to do things. She said she cleans their litterbox every other day, and I told her I know that's not true because I DO clean it every single day and I would notice if it were cleaner than normal. Also, the litterbox is full when I come home from 2 day trips. I told her that if she is an owner, she shouldn’t need reminders and she should know their needs and take care of them on her own. She then said that I just was more on top of it than her, and I told her that there were plenty of opportunities for her to step up and take care of them, but she never did. I gave her examples of when I did and did not tell her I wouldn’t be able to do something, and when I came home they were not done.
She said that if it's about money, she’d pay me half of the amount on the spreadsheet. I told her I don’t care about the money and that I would pay her 3 times what we’ve combined spent on the cats if it means I get to keep them. She has a much better paying job than me, but I love the cats and they are priceless to me.
She said that I didn’t have to do everything that I did, and I told her that if I didn’t the cats would’ve gone without. I told her that if I knew that I wasn’t at least partially their owner I would’ve set boundaries and I never would’ve taken on so much responsibility. I know how to prepare myself to not get attached, but she never gave me that chance. She said that I called them “my roommate's cats” and I told her that was not true. You can ask anyone that’s ever been to our house, not just my friends, but hers too, and no one has ever heard me say that. I ALWAYS call them “my cats, our cats, or mine and my roommate's cats.”
She then admitted that it wasn’t fai to me, and she shouldn’t have let me do so much work, but that they are still her cats and she is taking them. I felt like she was blaming me for being a good caretaker??? I asked her why she let me do so much work if they weren’t also my cats? She said that she had more responsibilities outside of the house than I do. I told her that’s irrelevant. I have things to do too, BUT I prioritize the cats. It doesn’t matter what is going on in our lives because the cats still need to be taken care of. They need immediate care and attention and you can’t just put off their care like you can other chores. I literally would leave campus in the afternoon to clean their litter box, give them clean water, and play with them for at least 30 minutes before going back to campus and working until 3 in the morning. If I went to stay the night with my boyfriend, I would tell him I couldn’t come over until I cleaned their litter box and played with them and fed and watered them. Friends of mine can vouch that I have left in the middle of things or came late or left early to make sure the cats were taken care of. She then admitted that she didn’t always pay attention to their needs because she knew that I would take care of them.
Then she said that she did more chores around the house and I know that’s not true. Everytime I clean the litter box I sweep AND vacuum the WHOLE house. Until the last semester, I was mopping once a week after vacuuming. Until the last semester, I did dishes more often and cleaned the bathroom more often. I took the trash cans to the curb every week because she had the day wrong that the garbage truck came. I may have been slacking on my dishes the last semester but its because I would rather take care of the cats than the dishes if I don’t have time for either. I didn’t have time, but I made time because I am responsible for the cats.
She said that she didn’t think one of us cared more about the cats than the other did. I was gifted a sweater with their faces on it, and I bought us matching shirts with their pictures on them. I asked her if she had any specific pictures she wanted on the shirts and she said “no, you definitely have more pictures of them than I do anyway.” She then brought up my dead dogs and how much I cared about them. She said my personality was just animal lover. I told her that even if that’s true, I know how to not get attached if I know the animal isn’t mine, and that I never would have done so much for them.
I then asked her what would happen when I’m gone, she can’t just not prioritize them. She said she bought a litter robot because she knows I won’t be there to clean the litter box every day. When I mentioned her study abroad trip and how she never once checked on them or even just when she would go on short trips, never worrying about them, she said she was just grateful to have someone taking such good care of them while she was gone. I told her that she never once told me thank you before now. I told her that if I knew they weren’t also mine, I would never have agreed to watch them over breaks because I would be too attached.
I asked her about their flea collars and other medicine and their food preferences, or when they have upset stomachs. She thought you just put a flea collar on once and leave it forever. She didn’t know they had worms. She knew the food she got them was one they didn’t like and hurt their stomachs. In the past, I went to 3 different stores to get their food that they like, but couldn’t find it and was complaining to her I had to get a kind that doesn’t hurt their tummies but that they’ll tolerate eating. She said “they’re cats, they won’t starve, it doesn’t really matter.” I’ve also been the only one to buy and give them wet food weekly. She said that it’s unfair to me and she should’ve communicated better, but that they are her cats and she’s still taking them. I told her I felt like she took advantage of me and she said “I don’t think I’ve taken advantage of you, I think I took you for granted.” By this point I was crying, and she started to cry, and told me I was her best friend and she loved me and didn’t want this to be an argument.
I am devastated. I thought we were friends, but friends don’t do this to each other. I have always been there for her, and I would drop everything to help her. Now I can’t even look at her. I sent her a text message after staying at my boyfriends for a few days:
“I don't want your money, I want the cats. I was willing to pay 3 times what we've both spent on the cats to keep them, and you offered less than half of what I've spent by myself on only essentials for the cats in the last year and a half. The money isn't what matters to me. I want the cats. I don't think you understand how much this hurts me. You've taken advantage of me for 3 years and we both know this isn't fair to me. Every day for the last 3 years you made the choice to let me take care of the cats. You let me clean their litter box every single day, buy their food and litter every week, and more.
When I went away for long weekends, I told you in advance to make sure you would be home to take care of the cats and every time I came home to a full litter box that was disgusting. The longest I've ever gone without seeing them is 9 days and I was worrying about them the whole time. When you were in France you never once checked on the cats or offered to buy their food and litter while I had them. The first time you've ever said thank you was when I sat you down and talked to you about why I feel like I should take the cats. That was really shitty on your part and I never would've taken on so much responsibility for them if I knew they were only “your” cats.
You said I call them “my roommate’s cats,” but we both know that's not true and I've never once referred to them as yours. I have always called them ours. I've prioritized the cats' health and happiness and sacrificed a lot of my time, money, and opportunities to take care of them.
Our responsibilities outside of the house are irrelevant, you should have been paying attention to their needs if they were “your” cats. Even when I didn't have time to come home, I made the time to check on them. I would come home in between assignments to play with them and clean their litter box then go back to campus until 3 in the morning to finish my work. I cared about them, so I made the time to take care of them. If you are really their owner you shouldn't need me to remind you to take care of “your” cats. You wouldn't need me to clean their litter box every day. You would know what their favorite foods are and which foods hurt their tummies. You should know and be able to anticipate the needs of “your” cats if you are their owner. You would know that they had worms and needed deworming medicine. You would know that flea collars need to be changed regularly, and when to buy new ones to replace them.
We both know that if the cats needed something, it wouldn't get done unless I did it. The cats aren't like other chores and they need immediate care and attention. You can’t just put it off. If the last 3 years are a reflection of how you take care of “your” cats, then my heart is breaking for them. If you take them, we are no longer friends and I will never forgive you. I hope you start actually taking care of them and treating them the way they deserve. Don't ever talk to me again unless you're giving me the cats. If they turn out to be too much I'll always be happy to take them back.”
She responded with this:
“I know there is nothing I can say to apologize for the way you feel because of me, but I am truly sorry. I can see that whether you or I have the cats, we are no longer friends. This hurts me to my core since you have been my only best friend for the last 4 years. This doesn’t excuse my actions and it honestly makes them worse.
Since we can’t be friends I want you to at least know that the cats are being taken care of. I have committed to being a better owner (far too late unfortunately for us).
As far as the money goes I don’t care that you don’t want it back. I will be paying you the full price on the spreadsheet regardless of how it gets to you because it’s fucked up for me to abuse you like that.
I will be moving out on May 29. I’ll be in contact with (landlord) and my half of rent will continue to be paid. I’m so sorry that this is the end of our friendship. Never in a million years would I think to be losing a friend like you, but I guess I should’ve realized what I had before I lost it. I understand that you never want to speak to me again, but if you ever need anything you can always reach me.
Please know I really do love you and I’m sorry again. I don’t expect you to forgive me but I don’t want you to worry about the cats. I’ll do everything I can for them to live their absolute best life as you would have them.”
I think that what she did was intentional. If she knew she was going to take the cats all along, why did she never tell me or stop me from taking care of them? I really feel like she knew she could just use me. She said during our conversation that she didn’t expect to talk about this, and she looked shocked that I brought it up at all. In the past she’s admitted that she’s good at manipulating people but she chooses not to. I know her really well, considering we’ve lived together for 4 years now. Her apologies didn’t seem sincere to me, it felt like she was just trying to brush everything under the rug and make me stop crying because she was uncomfortable.
I can’t go home, every time I’ve tried, I start spiraling. I can’t stop crying. I don’t even want to go into the house when she’s gone. This is the longest I’ve ever been away from them. I feel so awful. I really wish I recorded our conversation because now I’ve been considering taking her to civil court for custody. Am I overreacting? I know I’m being dramatic, but I feel like I’m losing my mind. They’re my babies, and I feel like I’m abandoning them. Typically I’m a doormat but this is where I draw the line. What do I do now?

What do you think makes you "special" or "unique"? Is it your love nature? Is it your philosophy or ideas? Is it perhaps the way you think? What makes you special?
Nothing does, because you aren't special. There are 8 billion people on this planet at this time, and you mean to tell me you are different then every one of them? That there isn't a single person like you? Well, obviously not, if you do think that you need to get your ego in check, but I'm sure most of you know there are others like you.
What I seem to notice is how people view themselves as unique, and then gravitate towards people like them, who they too believe are unique and special. We focus on personality so much, we add labels and names to ourselves, yet none of it matters. There will always be many people who agree with your philosophy's, have the same hobbies, and enjoy the same things you do.
So tell me, what makes you special? If your personality isn't, what you enjoy isn't, your philosophy isn't, if everything about you isn't special, then what is? What is one thing that no one else has that you do?
The answer is quite simple actually, it's your experience of life. No one has your same exact memories, not a single person who has ever lived and is alive has experienced life the same way you have. It's impossible, yet here you are reading this now, and here I am typing this. You read what I type, and I type in hopes you read. It's kind of strange, isn't it? How we both could be so alike, yet experience this one post differently?
You are special, just not in the way you once thought you were. There is nothing about you that I could find in someone else except one thing, your story. For yes, there are many like you, but not one who has lived like you.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to gather some opinions in case I am overthinking and panicking for no good reason.
I have submitted a kit for myself, my mother, and my maternal grandfather. My maternal grandmother is deceased. My mother is an only child, so she has no siblings to test.
I have no interest in turning on the matches feature, neither does my mother or grandfather. I submitted these kits with the intention of looking at the ethnicity results alone. Unfortunately, my kit is still processing.
I tested my maternal grandfather a few months back. His results came back with: - 64% German - 15% English & Northwestern Europe - 11% Sweden and Denmark - 5% French - 5% Norwegian.
My mother’s results came in today: - 35% English and Northwestern Europe - 29% Ireland - 24% Scotland - 10% Wales - 2% Sweden and Demark
My grandmother definitely had an Irish and British background. No Paper trail for any Scottish, Swedish, or Welsh on her side. (So far.) Considering this, and the fact my mother has no German results, I have gotten nervous. 2/8 of my mother’s great grandparents were born in Germany, and another 2/8 were born in German settled villages in Austria.
So, why I believe I am overthinking: - German ‘DNA’ can be labeled as English. - It’s possible to not inherit all your parent’s ethnicity. - English ‘DNA’ can be labeled as Scottish. - It’s possible some ancestors who can be traced to Ireland had Scottish backgrounds. - Ethnicity results are not 100% accurate. -German ‘DNA’ can be labelled as Swedish.
Why I am concerned: - Ancestry suggests both Scottish and Irish DNA were inherited from both parents. (My grandfather had no Scottish or Irish results.) - Both my grandparents would/could have British DNA in their results. Ancestry suggests one parent has 0% British. - Ancestry suggests both parents are linked to the Western & Central Ontario Settlers community. My grandfather is not.
I realize I could just confirm that my grandfather is my grandfather by turning on matches for both their accounts. But I would like to respect their wishes and avoid this.
If I download the data from both kits is there a way to compare the DNA without being matched to other people?
Ultimately, looking at these results, would you consider turning on matches/ordering a paternity test to confirm a relationship? Or is there another explanation for these results, outside of an NPE, that I am missing?
Before this, we had no reason to suspect an NPE and I fear turning on matches to check.
Apologies if this was a silly post. I realize I probably sound paranoid. Just curious what others would do in this situation!

[Let me know if a chapter a week is okay; I'm thinking it might be a bit too often. Run Zero: https://redd.it/1csb71x Run One: https://redd.it/1cwxbsg]
The mining foreman refused to go to sleep, and watched intently as Tightniks finally reached over and set it home with one hand. Its last nervous little sigh was the only thing he remembered-
The ship is without power, and Tightniks can't run the radar much without draining the batteries...
32s: First trap.
He built it big this time, and there are six trimps in there. They look familiar somehow, the light one with dark hair and an unusually short and broad tail compared to the rest, a big-eared green one, a grey one, a yellow one, and a red one with big paws and "XIII" on its rump, and a brown one with pink ears that takes the lead and cheers, "Kakka!" Once he lets them out, they all follow him intently around like just-hatched birds do their mother. He shows them the busted off cockpit and forward cabin of the ship he just crashed and they get inside and start da- ...nope, sticking with "dancing". He busies himself looking for the survival pad.
Until he hears the squeak of a baby trimp. They're feeding it- ...rocks. Carefully selected, aluminate rocks. What the heck are they doing? Whatever, I've got to get some conventional food for- What's that? He's got the survival pad already, but this was outside the ship, it must have materialized when he descended through that glowing grey mist getting out. He gets it flipped over and turned on.
"Manual portal activation 2 successful:" it displays, "rare shield equipped 54%Stg 14%Atk MT 0 Nu loaded / 399 He loaded / Metal challenge active / Total portal activation 956"
Metal challenge? The human selects it.
"You have the Metal challenge active. Tweak the portal to bring you to an alternate reality, where the concept of Miners does not exist, to force yourself to become frugal with equipment crafting strategies. If you complete The Dimension Of Anger without disabling the challenge, miners will re-unlock."
He's so confused, What the Loy is a Dimension of Anger? I think I have a headache from this high gravity. Sits down for a moment.
Notices that one of the trimps is sleeping in a small deep hole just at the edge of the garden, apparently to have a nap in standing upright.
I don't believe you, "portal". I'm training that one first chance I get!
56s: Pop full.
There are ten of them already?? I'm still working this derpy little potato patch to get enough food to bulk up just ONE of the- He looks at the portal pad and blurts out loud, "Fifty-six SECONDS??" He postulates that he's in a time-dilated environment, and that the portal is measuring time somewhere "out there", this "map frame" environment. It's like those Star Trek episodes he can't remember "Wink of an Eye" and "Blink of an Eye" that he can't quite remember. [One of them is Star Trek TOS, and one of them is Star Trek: Voyager and I forget which one came from where.]
1m57s: Arable in Z1c13.
The human walks along and one of the trimps viciously fights the various hostiles that try to come at him, staying ahead. Just behind, he finds that hole-digger busted into a cave big enough for 9 of them, and they start raising babies to fill it up.
3m37s: Miners in Z1c30.
It's broken! he notices of the data card he just picked up. It's one of the ones that flew out of the ship when he undogged the ship's side hatch, but it didn't survive. What was on it? He's got a vague memory of a big tanuki-tailed trimp, much bigger than the- Wait! This memory is of hole-digger all grown up. So this is- he looks at the smashed data card in his hand, ...this is the Miners card. At least there's some lying about so we're not totally deprived of metal.
That's odd. I'm sure I spent longer training this little guy than "one second map frame." The human looks at the black trimp with the grey head fur and silvery eyes, "So, can you say something yet?"
"Shijou." [Takane and Takanya are not black, it is their favorite clothing color.]
"Okay, can you say something else?"
9m12s: Zone 1, 40 pop, 3.5s RC with Z0/1, 13m19s turkimp. 12m55s: First scientist.
"Tai," his first scientist waves at him.
"Hmm," the human tries to think of a better test, "What color is the sky?"
"Shijou." The exasperated human is about to sigh in despair when he notices a card in its hands, with one word on it, "Blue."
"What?" he takes it, "You can't speak but you can write, huh?"
"Shijou," it twirls its paw off the end of the card in his hand. The human turns it over, and in small writing, it has "Technically, the sky isn't blue, it's a foible of Rayleigh scattering in an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. And you have 'TIGHTNIKS' embroidered on the left side of your uniform."
A look of astonishment sweeps over the human. I never taught it about Rayleigh scattering. Apparently, the scientist training has unlocked its brain to access the collected knowledge of a previous life! Then he looks at his uniform and groans, spanking his eyebrows in realization. The trimp had apparently noticed him wandering around the camp wracking his brain and talking to himself trying to remember his own name, and it's right there the whole time! He spanks his eyebrows again.
The very well fed grey-headed trimp starts doing experiments, leaving him to take the turkimp back to his farmers. Too bad it's only a quarter as fast at it as he is.
32m25s: Zone 3, 79 pop, 4.5s RC with Z1/2; c16, 79 pop, 6.8s RC with Z2/3.
"Nano! Nano, nano, nano." The D&B (that's dodge and block) foreman has an impressive yellow mane, light face, green body, and brown hind limbs, and moves like a blur when it decides to. When asleep, it's as unarousable as an exhumed fossil, except with the food article Yellow the scientist calls an "owny geary". [Puchim@s Afuu]
Helping it out is a brown-maned white trenching expert Tightniks finds oddly familiar. It has no problem mining, but couldn't start a fire if its life depended on it, so smelting is out of the question.
I guess that's how the Metal challenge really works. Too bad I suck at it. Tightniks is spending all his smelting time smacking out nails and joist hangers for the houses, and has nothing left for fighting gear.
1h53m25s: Zone 9, 306 pop, 7.9s RC with Z8/15, no turkimp.
The white trimp with the brown head fur- ...whichever one it is because it, or one that looks just like it, sometimes (apparently) burns itself up or blows itself up trying to build a metallurgical furnace. This one is digging a hole right now, into the concrete of some ruined building's foundation. It hits some strapping and rebar, makes a happy sound, follows it along and gets it sorta clear of the concrete bonded to it, and rips it out of the ground to throw on the metal pile. It now seems content to do that instead of trying to smelt ores.
"Red?" Tightniks glances at one of his scientists, "Do you think we could take it to- What's that place you said you visited five hundred years after some misty fight or-"
"Cloudy strife," it says, "Yeah, Midgimp is like that, we could probably map a route through there. Lots of metal. Especially the part that had an avalanche happen and fell down. Broke all that stuff out of the ground already." [Final Fantasy VII and Advent Children cinematic and Sector 7 collapse.]
"Okay," Tightniks says, "Let's do that."
5h32m02s: Zone 21, 2042 pop, 14.9s RC with Z20/232, no turkimp.
"Ooooookay," Tightniks growls, "There is something off about this thing."
"Shijou?" the grey one looks at the yellow one with concern about their human starship pilot friend.
The human stoops, picks up the little green gem on the ridge between Zone 20 and 21, looks at it, huffs, and asks, "Any idea where this comes from?"
"Err..." the red one seems hesitant to say, "I think you made it."
"Really?" the human huffs, "How could that be?" Then he tosses it at Red, "See if anything reacts to it. It might be radioactive, so we should take turns to minimize exposure."
"Really?" Red's holding it now, "What makes you say that?"
"Because I'm pissed off for no reason I can figure out," the human says, "I think it's coming from-" he gasps, "Waitamint!" He starts searching for the portal pad.
"Frags," the red one says quickly, "I think it's arranging a route. You're good with maps," it tosses the gem to the grey scientist.
The human has his portal pad up and reads aloud, "You have the Metal challenge active. Tweak the portal to- yada yada yada. Tiss tiss t- complete The Dimension Of Anger without disabling- miners will re-unlock."
\BOOM\** They turn to see (another of) the white brown-haired trimp'/s' attempts at a metallurgical furnace explode, and it seems both very frustrated and has really hurt its toe.
He snaps his fingers, "That's gotta be it. Although, does it mean 'miners' or 'furnaces'?" He re-reads the portal pad while the scientists shrug.
"Shijou," the grey one has just finished tracing the route map the gem was showing.
"Are we going any faster than on previous cycles, you think?" he asks Red.
"What's a cycle?" Red asks.
"We're stuck in time loop, you realize?" the human says.
"Well," the yellow one jumps off a little rock spire it was using to see farther ahead, directly into a seated position on the ground with an impressive thump the human can both hear with his ears and feel through the ground of the more-than-Earth gravity planet, "that explains a few things." The little scientist trimp seems quite morose at the news.
"This thing says the fastest we've ever got this 'anger' map done is ten hours, thirty-five, but the clock right now is at five hours, thirty-four." Tightniks tilts his head, frowns one eyebrow, and taps, "Getting it done faster increases attack damage somehow, and oh-"
"What now?" the yellow one asks, still seated beside the spire.
"It says we already got a 2.5%-er for having a million traps," the human says, "I don't remember doing that. Maybe..." he sighs, "Maybe that's a good thing, 'cus I'd probably go insane building them all. Still though, it says we're going faster, but it doesn't feel like it."
"How'd you know how it feels," Red asks, "if you don't remember it?"
"'Day jaw voo' I think is the term," the human says, "or something. The sense that all this has happened before, but I'm not quite remembering and there's no physical evidence of it."
"Shijooooooooooo..." the grey one moans, waving a card at him. On it:
"In order, but we don't know if that means chronological order or frequency/proportion of memories:
"- The ship crashes (pretty sure that happens every time) "- The human builds huts "- The human teaches some trimps to speak and do science "- The human builds houses "- The human makes maps "- The human builds mansions "- The human blows up and gets himself killed somewhere around Z17 to Z21, often on a dragimp "- The human only recently/occasionally builds hotels "- The human only recently/rarely tamed a dragimp "- The human only recently/rarely mapped the Dimension of Anger"
Tightniks sits down and offers it back.
"Tai," it flatly refuses to take it back, paws up and eyes closed.
"It's kind of a relief," Tightniks rubs his temples, then looks at it again, "knowing it ain't just me."
6h17m43s: Portal PB, 1% AP for sub-8h, 45 He, 7.149 He/hr, 2209 pop, 13.6s RC.
The last head of the map's boss monster goes limp as one of the fighting trimps' dagger points goes into it, and the huge thing settles on its tail, resting on the package that seems to be the prize of this map. And there's a popping sound, and then something mechanical.
Is that a scroll compressor? Tightniks looks at the package. The deflating monster's lifting envelope material drapes over everything underneath it. "Yellow, Shijou!" he snaps and points, "roll up that side of it. Keep this part from sucking down on the extractor nozzle!"
All ten of the scientists jump in, literally, pushing the gas in the bag towards the compressor. Tightniks as well, rolling up the front.
Until he kicks, and nearly trips over, a smaller package that might be the explanation for the reason why the center of the monster's defense seemed to be a little away from the big package he could see. It's in the right place, he realizes. He gets it uncovered and reads stenciled-and-sprayed block letters on it:
"DT TIME PORTAL / THIS SIDE DOWN"
Perhaps the Dimension of Anger is so named because of the rage suddenly rising up in Tightniks' throat. It isn't so much as the free-floating aggression suddenly has an answer, there is definitely a fresh batch of rage and anger as he grips the nearest Dagger V, Mark 2 with both hands-
Refocusing on surviving the next few seconds, the pilot turns on the radar for the final approach and takes a last look around, then straight ahead at his forward camera and primary flight display...
He crouches, sets the dagger down gently, then starts clearing the debris from the box's grab iron. He tries to lift it- Damn, this is heavy! As he gets it turned over, gravity finishes the job, and it shakes the ground with an impressive thud as it falls right side up.
"DT TIME PORTAL / THIS SIDE UP" There's a square cutout in the middle of one side of it, with a sliding cover at the bottom of it.
"Get the pad!" he screams, seeing that his scientists are almost done rolling up the megablimp.
The grey one already has the survival data pad and offers it to him.
"The big one," Tightniks clarifies, "The big one." he picks up wide flat rainbow cable and its edge socket in one hand, "It goes here," he points at it with the other. "It must have come with me-" He had taken the small survival data pad and notices something, "Oh?" He starts looking around, "Hey!"
The white trimp with the brown hair is napping in a hole next to the smouldering remains of its latest attempt at a smelting furnace.
"Hey, mining buddy!" he whistles at it, "Mining buddy!"
It wakes with a start and rushes over, but doesn't seem to be in a good mood. But as soon as Tightnik shows it the survival pad, with all of the mining data installed just as if all those broken data cards and scorched scrolls were intact when he found them, fireworks goes off in the little trimp's eyes and it rushes off with the pad. Within minutes, the first furnace that works is chugging away at some ore and it returns to give the survival data pad back to Tightniks.
7h24m49s: Fresh turkimp; 7h25m30s: Labor reallocated.
The big-eared green lumber foreman's mood fell much further than the mining foreman's mood was before Tightniks packed up the turkimp roaster and moved just about everyone over to the smeltery.
The brown-haired, big-tailed white mining foreman was surprised at the change, and very happy. It had climbed up onto the helium compressor cart to check something on the pad a couple cells into the zone.
"Are you upset with me?" the red one asks the human.
"No, not at all," Tightniks says, "Are you getting the feeling that we had an upset at this point last cycle?"
"How would you know it was only the last?" Yellow asks, "Your memory's no better than ours."
"Right," the human sews another patch into his uniform, "However, I've only actually hit the switch on the portal twice, the first one on a challenge called Discipline, and the second on a challenge called Metal, which we just finished. It's easy to sort out from the statistics. I'm nervous it'll get harder to sort out when we're up to, oh," done fixing his uniform, he pops a bit of turkimp into his mouth and chews a couple times, "a few dozen or hundred manual cycles."
"Friggin' solve this faster than that, please," Red grumbles, "I know the emergency counter got to nearly a thousand, but..." he kinda trails off. Finally, he says, "I think we're remembering more cycle to cycle as we get more helium into it. I mean, I'm glad that isn't the only mechanic."
"Can't miss the supernova if it is," the human ponders.
"What?" Yellow chuckles.
"I'm remembering something from before all this, I think it was called a video game, where you'd go forward real-world in the simulation of a time loop, and your real-life head remembering what you did on previous cycles was the only mechanic," the human takes another bite, then dons his uniform shirt while chewing it. After his head pops out of the not-so-crisp-and-fresh uniform neck hole, buttons still done up, he finishes, "one of them had a supernova." [That would be Outer Wilds among the bunch of games with this mechanic, er, Minnit (I know it's spelled differently than "minute"), 12 Minutes, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and- ...I'm sure there are more.]
11h19m28s: Starting void 1 (L30).
With the thermal gloves on, Tightniks gets the void map into the portal device slot. It dematerializes and his fingers close where it used to be in his hands, then he yelps, stands up and starts dancing, "Oh crap, it's cold!" He quickly starts looking for stuff to bundle up. Once not too uncomfortable, he notices something, "You're having trouble, too?"
"No," Yellow and Red look at each other, "Well, not with the cold; this route has a poisonous atmosphere, slows down our young assimilating aluminum at the proper rate."
"Manning the traps will work at full speed, right?" Tightniks says.
"Should if your fingers can handle it," Red confirms.
11h33m57s: Void 1c100.
"You are one ugly muthaf[garble]!" he says when he sees the void boss, "Stay here, I'll be back." Runs some traps, grabs a couple helmets for the fresh volunteers, "Put these on."
"Shijou?" the grey one looks at the red one, really rather perplexed.
"I agree, that's not his usual accent," Red tilts his head, "Tightniks, what has gotten in to you?"
"Stop cheering me up," the human grumbles, "You think this is the real Quaid?"
"I think the cold is affecting him more than he realizes," Yellow offers.
"Phased plasma rifle in the forty watt range," but what the dizzy pilot actually throws at the zone boss is a Mace V-4, "and then I was thinking of breaking your neck."
[Felt like some- "Arnie? Well, the union is pulling out all the big guns today, huh?" (Tom Hanks as Sully) ...no, brain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, not Arnie Gentile (it was really funny to background Sully and listen to that line instead of "That's definitely you" in Terminator 2 while he's posing with the Minigun.) Arnie lines from Predator, Terminator 2, True Lies, Total Recall and The Terminator.]
"Tweak the portal," reads Tightniks from the portal controller aloud, but quietly, "to bring you to an alternate reality, where Trimps are bigger and stronger, to force yourself to figure out a way to build larger housing. Your Trimps will gather 50% more resources, but your housing will fit 50% fewer Trimps. If you complete The Dimension of Anger without disabling the challenge, your stats will return to normal."
"You will also open a new memory coolant unit," Yellow reads, "You think that'll cause a housing bonus?"
"Shijou," the grey one hands him a card saying "We have enough for another gateway."
"Oh, good," Tightniks hands it back after signing it, "Yes, build it."
"We're doing that next?" Yellow asks.
Tightniks sees the little fellow sitting on top of a mound that the human thought was a bowel movement pile from Draglimp, but it must be something more geological if trimps can climb it, let alone want to. "Yeah, I guess," the human answers, "It kinda scares me, I mean I'm going back, but what happens to you guys?"
"We have too much day javo or whatever you called it," Red says. He's usually on all fours, shakes his left hind leg as though something got stuck to his foot, "This isn't incrementing, I'm sure. 13 is less than 956."
"According to this, you'll be twice as big," Tightniks sets down the portal controller pad and stands up from the cart, "It's hard to imagine, especially for Shijou and Diggy. We'll clear thirty-six, that's it."
14h04m37s: Z33c95, IC.
"Are you sure we can make Zone 37 start?" the red one asks.
The yellow one is standing on Red's shoulders.
"It said we did last time," Tightniks taps on the crude leather bag strapped to his back, the portal pad inside it, "though maybe..." he tilts his head, rolls whatever he was sucking on in his mouth for a moment, "it just happened while I was building those traps. No, I'm sticking with that plan."
"If it's going to take that long," Red grinds its jaws sideways for a moment and lets its eyelids get lazy, frustration clear in its tone, "why do it again?"
"Because I've got a bad feeling about this 'Size' thing," Tightniks says, "it drops our resourcing by 75% assuming we build the same amount of housing as before, which we won't because of the reduced resourcing. We needed 65 capacity in the cabin and huts before we could do run the gypsum/paper wall machine we found. I have a funny feeling that never changes."
"We don't need 65 trimps to run it," Yellow says, "just three."
"Yeah," Tightniks says, "but a particular three that know what they're doing, and my day javoo is telling me the last of those is always the sixty-fifth."
"Shijou," the grey one moans from the other side of Tightniks. Didn't have a note this time, just kicking a little rock along as it walks.
"It thinks you're right," the red one growls forlornly, "Hating to say it, but I do too."
14h16m06s: Skel in c1, 50 bones purchased whipimp.
There's a thump at the cart, and then some commotion around it that's noticable enough for Tightniks to come over and take a look. The bone box is empty, all forty-nine titanium bones in it are gone. Tightiks brings his right hand up in front of him, and it's just a balled fist, the bone he was holding a moment ago is gone. As he starts looking for where he must have dropped it, he realizes maybe it's all related. Looking in the bottom of the empty bone box, he finds a note.
"I got you the whipimp. This new Bad Guy will begin spawning in your next zone at an average of 3 spawns per 100 enemies. I hope it helps, but I can't tell yet."
The note is in Tightniks' own handwriting, although lazy but with more consistent kerning. Is this from an older version of myself? Friggin' time travel.
14h18m48s: This L34 moun 160/27/79 calls itself "Magical Mountain" - I can't remember whether the Disney trademark is that or "Magic Mountain" ...I've seen a "Black Mesa" before, that's a Half-Life thing, and somebody on Reddit made pretend that "Dank Hill" was a King of the Hill thing (which is actually *Hank Hill, I think - it's hard to remember, it wasn't very good and I haven't watched it since the 1990s.)
19h32m00s: Doom/AT, 12816 pop, 80N, 37.7s RC with Z34/5298.
"Okay, we got that friggin' thing chocked," Yellow wipes its brow and almost bonks itself with the Mace VI-2 that it's holding, puts it down and makes sure the wedges are secure.
Grey, Red, and Green are packing more stuff around the huge boulder that chased them down a tunnel to make sure it doesn't do that again.
"Getting any day javoo?" Tightniks pants, hands on his knees, but apparently uninjured, or nearly so.
"Not at all," Yellow vehemently responds, slashing the air with its paw, "You?"
"Oh," Tightniks gets his breathing under control, "I think it was a human movie."
"Like a video on that pad?" it gestures at the human's pocket with the small one.
"No, a bigger screen," the human says.
"Fifty-five inches?" the trimp scientist chuckles.
"More like fifty-five feet," the human rubs the sweat out of his eyes, "Lots of people watching. It was called a sin."
"Ah," the trimp ponders, "Like a crime, vice, psychopathy or bad habit?"
"Er..." the human taps his forehead trying to remember, "Sorry, a cinema."
[The whole thing is obviously an homage to something I remember only slightly better than Tightniks, I think it was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. As I'm posting this, I sadly realize that Nick Rekieta's arrest was between when I wrote this and now.]
19h58m55s: Zone 37, 473 He, 23.67 He/hr, 13088 pop, 81N, 32.1s RC with Z34/5298, 2806 pop short, no turkimp.
The ship is without power, and Tightniks can't run the radar much without draining the batteries...

Seemingly out of the blue my fiancé (dating for 4.5 years) dumped me on a voice note lasting 2 minutes saying we cannot be together. No explanation was given, and he said he does not want to talk about it. My fiancé lives 2 hours away. I’m absolutely devastated and didn’t see this coming. He said on the note he did it this way because he just chicken and can’t face me. I am devastated and it’s been a week and I haven’t responded. I feel like I the way he ended things is the biggest disrespect ever and it truly shatters my heart to pieces. No explanation or anything. I have the wedding dress tailored to me.
A background of behaviour leading up: A month ago he kept talking about the wedding how he wanted to get married this summer and what kind of venue and all. Then I discovered that last year he took a trip out of town for business reasons and he never told me. (Lied by omission I guess) when I confronted him about this he shut down and proceeded to ghost me and give me silent treatment. Then he came back after I messed him and apologized, bought me flowers, told me he was sorry and that he loved me. Days before the dump: we went for dinner in my city had a good time but I brought up I wanted him to not ghost me like that again because it was super hard for me (I lost a bunch of weight, couldn’t eat). Anyways we didn’t really get into it. The next day he leaves to his city and he is telling me he wishes I was there and he will buy me a ticket to come. Then the day after: under 2 minute voice note that he loves me, he can’t face me, we can’t be together and he doesn’t want to talk.
I am still in shock and I don’t even know how to reach out. I could text? Feels so insane to me to text someone so important about something that was so so significant in my life. I am absolutely devastated. I think if I called he wouldn’t pick up to be honest. I want to talk, I want to return my ring too but I’m so scared of reaching out and having this person twists new knifes into my heart. I will not beg him to reconsider but I still feel so insanely hurt by the way he ended things after so much, looking at venues, buying a dress. This is truly a nightmare for me, I’m so broken. Please advice.

The Bulk of Creatures is listed within Player Core: "You might need to know the Bulk of a creature, especially if you need to carry someone." We'll suppose your friend is of Medium Size, which is listed as Bulk 6. Unfortunately, "Carry" is not a listed action anywhere in the rules, despite this. We'll assume it takes 1 Interact action and that you will be Encumbered as a result. Interact does not specifically list creature, but there doesn't seem to be an alternative; it does have "Pick up an item from the ground" on the Carrying Items page (there's also a note on Tiny PCs riding larger PCs but no further clarification).
Let's assume you have a speed of 40 feet (Fleet + Quicksilver, if you must have an example). Since you're encumbered, this is now 30.

• 1a) Can you Stride, and then drop your friend on the ground with the Release action? Would it hurt? Do you have to use Interact to lower them gently?

Rules for Dragging exist, explicitly calling out creature (and as an option instead of carrying them). When doing so, their bulk is halved, it requires 2 hands, and you get a measly (explicit) 5 feet per round, which is confusing, since this ignores bulk limits and character speed. We'll also note that Reposition exists. It requires 1 hand and an Athletics check, and can move 5 to 10 feet per action. There appears to be no RAW way of modifying this for willing or unconscious creatures. Ignoring the confusing rules for Dragging, Reposition seems at least reasonably designed such that you can try to use Athletics to move someone a shorter distance with fewer actions or penalties.

• 1b) Can you perform any task with the move trait?

Can you Climb with your friend slung over your shoulder with the Combat Climber feat? Can you crawl with their body on top of you? Can you carry them while flying or swimming with the appropriate move speed? Can you Tumble Through? Can you Leap 15 feet horizontally? Sneak? Balance?

• 2a) You are carrying your friend. You can speak and have 1 hand available. You perform an action with the teleport trait. What happens?

Some spells, like Translocate, forbid you from bringing another creature. Many teleport spells however do not say this! If you are a Monk can you use Abundant Step and bring your friend with you? If you are a Magus can you use Dimensional Assault to do the same? Can you hold on real tight and Flicker together?

• 2b) What if the action does not teleport you traditionally but instead moves you through another plane?

You are carrying your friend. You cast Dive and Breach. Do the both of you enter the Plane of Water and come out the other side?

• 2c) What if your friend is in your inventory, or inside of you?

Suppose you first put your friend in a Spacious Pouch. Suppose you Swallow or Engulf your friend first (Perhaps using a rank 4 Enlarge or an Ooze Form to justify this). Does it change the answer?
"But you don't have enough hands!" Fine, give yourself an extra one. Or make yourself Large to justify 1-arming a person. Or assume you are a Master in Athletics. There are clearly ways to mechanically justify the capability.
Is being able to stride while carrying a party member too powerful? What kinds of actions would you allow or expect?

I wanted to post here for feedback. I've posted before on other subs but I wanted to see what people's perspectives on this sub are.
I have been with my partner for 15 years and we have 2 children together. We were each others first everything. Our relationship has been very volatile at times and more than our share of ups and downs. I think we became attached and "fell in love" too quickly in the beginning, but over the years we've probably fallen out of love and if we're being honest our children are our main reason we're trying to stay together. We've recently been trying to work on our relationship more and it's helped a bit.
So 2 months ago I contacted a female my partner worked with 14 years ago while he was a manager at a retail store. I had always been uneasy about their working relationship but pushed my intuition aside for many years. She messaged me back and was very candid and open that they had been sleeping together nearly the entire year they worked together. She did not know he had a girlfriend(me) at that time. She said they would have sex every few weeks either in the office after closing alone together, in the car after work, or at her place. For a year. She said he told her he didn't have texting on his phone(he lied) so they only arranged things at work or over the phone. They never went on dates or anything but flirted and made out at work frequently and hooked up every few weeks. She figures they had sex a minimum of a dozen times from February until NovembeDecember when he quit suddenly and essentially ghosted her.
I confronted my partner about this and he at first denied it, saying she was crazy and making it up, that she was bitter, etc. I called him on this obvious BS, and eventually he admitted he vaguely remembers sleeping with her ~4 times during that year, but says the only times he actually remembers were during a time we had been broken up for 3 months later that year. She says it was the entire year. He also denies remembering pursuing her at work when he first started there, as she said he did. He doesn't remember giving her his number in the beginning either. He doesn't remember ever having sex with her in the car or at work or making out with her at work. She says it was pretty frequent making out and they definitely had sex in those places, but he only remembers it happening at her place. He essentially doesn't remember any kind of cheating on me, but says his gut tells him he did.
He described the times he remembers sleeping with her as "not good sex", that he wasn't really interested in her, wasn't really attracted to her, was just using her for the ego boost of feeling desired. Yet she describes the sex very differently, that he was definitely enjoying himself, that they would cuddle afterwards and he was affectionate to her. Not to mention the excitement factor from sex in the office or car. His account and her account couldn't be more different but I absolutely believe her because she was very apologetic and didn't initially want to give me the details, she never knew she was the other woman. She was hurt when he quit suddenly and ghosted her.
My partner came clean about another incident 11 years ago when I was pregnant with our second baby. He had gone out to a bar with coworkers and got drunk and went back to one woman's place where she gave him oral before he lost his erection and she drove him back. However I contacted her after his confession and she said that he gave her oral as well, but there was in fact no penetration but he did sleep over.
He swears up and down he can't remember the cheating from 14 years ago, that it's all hazy. He's been a chronic weed smoker and steroid user since I met him, if that has anything to do with it. I find it impossible to believe he doesn't remember actually cheating on me. It's convenient he only remembers the sex that happened while we were broken up.
Is this something I should be able to move on from? Given the fact we've been together for so long and he hasn't done anything shady(that I know of) in the last 10 years and we have children together and just bought a house. My heart is broken into a million pieces and I'm utterly destroyed but I don't want to break up my kids lives if there's any other way.
I'm upset that he was never going to tell me any of this, always denied any time I brought up feeling uneasy or suspicious. My intuition always told me there was something there. Hes always had an excessive porn habit and used to have a habit of checking out other women in front of me, sometimes to "get back" at me for thinking I did the same thing(I've never been that type, never cheated or looked at other men), or even telling me how many attractive women he worked with who would "line up" to be with him. Throughout our relationship he used to constantly accuse me of cheating on him, now I understand it was projection and I think I knew it even then but was too cowardly to face it.
Sorry this is so long. Do you think time has changed him? He cheated when he was 23 years old and then again later the ONS when he was 26. I don't ever want to go through this again, I don't know if I believe he won't cheat again and I don't 100% believe he doesn't remember the first time he cheated on me. And if he does remember but just doesn't want to admit it then that means he's dodging accountability.

I've commented a few times in a few posts about my family's experience going through the F-1 to H-1B to GC route to migrate to the US and I've received a lot of questions over the DM, many of which I thought were pretty basic. I thought it might be helpful to put this primer together so folks know the right questions to ask and approach their planning more strategically.
This post is going to be very candid. I've noticed that the questions I've received come from misconceptions about higher education, F-1 visa, and what comes after graduation. I want to give folks the right information, but also temper expectations and give a realistic portrait of what it means and takes to use the student pathway to legally and permanently reside in the US. It is not a stroll in the park, and I don't want to give anyone the wrong idea.

BACKGROUND

Two of my siblings plus myself are all here in the US via the student visa route. I received my green card in 2021 after being in the US for nearly 4 years. After receiving my Masters at a prestigious university, I was hired immediately by an organization willing to sponsor my H-1B, which they did so after two years of employment under STEM-OPT work authorization. My employer started putting together my I-140 (Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker, which is the start of the process for an employment-based green card) shortly after receiving approval of my H-1B. As the paperwork was being put together, my partner and I decided to get married and I switched from employment-based green card to marriage-based green card. The employment-based green card would have added around a 3 year wait if we went through with it, while my marriage-based green card was approved in less than a year.
Both my siblings are currently in the same pathway. One received their Bachelors last year, was hired before graduation and has recently received approval for her H-1B. Their employer has committed to sponsoring their employment-based green card next year. My other sibling received their MFA last year and is now in the process of getting their O-1, which is a different kind of work visa. Like me, they both came to the US with a student visa. We were all very strategic about the programs we chose and how we approached networking within our industries.
We also prepared for years. I knew I wanted to get my Masters and permanently reside in the US even before I finished college in Manila. My siblings also knew that early on. So as a family we planned for years, including preparing financially because we knew that we had a very slim chance of getting free rides for our planned degrees. Our early planning also helped with our professional decision-making, because we became very strategic about what kinds of jobs we took after graduation in Manila (except our youngest sibling, who did her Bachelors in the US, so her planning revolved around her academic career in high school). I would say from start (initial planning) to finish (with the last sibling also now on the way to permanent residency), it took about a decade.

GETTING STARTED

Is the student pathway the right pathway for you?
The first question you should ask yourself: can you afford the student pathway to permanent residency in the US? Higher education in the US is not cheap. Universities very rarely offer full scholarships to Masters programs, and those that do are incredibly competitive. So you cannot depend on scholarships to help you pay for your degree--doing so will likely end in disappointment.
(PhDs are usually free and includes a living stipend, but the application process for PhDs are on a whole other level. I will not cover it here but I can answer any questions related to applying for PhDs.)
Most Masters programs in the US are two-year programs, and the average cost of a Masters degree is around $60,000 per year (source). That's $120,000--almost Php7,000,000--in two years. That is a lot of money. That does not include your cost of living, which depending on the location can vary. I personally spent around $1000 on living expenses every month (housing was through the school, so the cost of that was included in my tuition statement)--and that is living frugally in a very high cost of living city. That's an additional $12,000 per year. Of course, you can lower than number by living with family if that option is available to you.
So on average, you would need around Php4,200,000 per year for your Masters degree. Again, a lot of money. It goes without saying that the student pathway is a very expensive pathway to permanent residency in the US. Can it also be a quicker pathway than, say, being sponsored by a sibling? It can be, but that depends on how long it will take for you to save up for tuition.
What if you can make those numbers work? What else should you know?
I need to put this upfront: the F-1 student visa is a non-immigrant visa. Meaning that it is a visa meant for people who will enter the US on a temporary basis. This is why the student visa has no direct pathway or benefit to permanent residency in the US. You need to change status inside the US to one with immigrant intent or double intent to be able to be on that pathway or receive that benefit. That's where visas like the H-1B visa comes in.
You also cannot work outside of your school on an F-1 visa. During the school year, you are allowed to work part-time on campus, and during the summer you are allowed to work full-time on campus. Work outside of the school is only allowed if it's part of your curriculum (i.e. your program has a class for "onsite internship") and you are allowed to be paid while that opportunity is going on. You can do this part-time, but most legitimate universities will have limited opportunities for this (i.e. under your program you're only allowed to take credit for onsite internships one or two semesters). However, your eligibility to work full-time after getting your degree will be affected if you do this full-time for one year. If you want to jump from F-1 to H-1B, this is not something you want to do.
Your ability to bring dependents to the US on a student visa is also limited. You can only bring your spouse and unmarried children under 21. Dependents of F-1 visa holders are not allowed to work in the US (although children under 21 can go to school full-time). This means your spouse cannot work while in the United States, and that includes working remotely for a company in the Philippines.

APPLYING TO PROGRAMS

The student visa still seems like my best option. What's next?
The next step starts with you. I've received a good number of DMs asking me "Is Master of ABC the right course for me?" or "Will a Master of DEF get me a green card?" These are not the right questions to ask because they're not going to get you any good answers. Yes, we know the ultimate goal for taking your Masters in the US to get permanent residency. But the true purpose of getting a Masters in the US is to make you highly marketable and competitive to US employers that will be willing to sponsor your work visa and petition you for your permanent residency.
So you need to view this degree as a way to level yourself up professionally. I absolutely do not suggest getting a Masters degree in something "you already know"--the objective is not to coast while spending Php4,200,000 a year--but to be so much better at what you're already doing. Here's an example.

Maria Clara graduated from Accounting at a good university in Manila and now has around 2 years of experience as a CPA at the finance and accounting department at a multinational corporation based in Makati. She wants to get her permanent residency to the US via the student pathway and has done a significant amount of research on possible Masters programs and career paths in accounting in the US. She started reading into forensic accounting and realized how interested she is in various aspects of this career path. After looking through universities and programs, she has put SUNY Albany's MS in Forensic Science at the top of her list for a variety of reasons. One, it meets the education requirements for certified public accountant licensure in the state of New York. Two, even without a scholarship of financial aid, the costs for international students is not exorbitant at $23,000/Php1,320,000 for the year-long program--with some frugal living and help from relatives in the US, she can save that amount in 3-4 years. Three, New York is the center of global commerce--all the biggest companies and their accounting firms are either headquartered or have large offices in New York City, so she has a wide swath of employment options. Now she just has to get her ducks in a row and make sure her Bachelors meets the requirements for application, as well as put together a shortlist of other programs she should apply and create a timeline for herself and the milestones that need to be hit to make this dream a reality.

Bottomline is, your starting point in this entire process is reflection and research. You need to reflect on your own professional experience and skills, as well as your interests. You need to figure out which pathway will give you that professional and technical boost and do your research on available programs at reputable universities, what the job market looks like for your target profession, which companies are known to hire in this space.
Of course, you should also take into consideration your limitations. For example, you can only go to school in San Diego because you can stay with relatives while you're studying. That means your research is location-limited to however far you think you can commute.
When this is properly done, it should lead you to a place where you have a shortlist of programs to apply to. Each program will have their own application and testing requirements, as well as their own deadlines, so make sure to keep track of that.
PRO TIP: while grades during college are an important part of your application, many graduate programs put a lot of weight on your personal statement and professional recommendation letters. This is why the first step on reflection is critical--it gives you a good direction from which to build your story, which you will need to convince admissions committees to accept you into their programs.

ACCEPTANCE

I got into one of my top programs and I have my finances in order! What happens now?
Now it's time to apply for your F-1 visa. Your university will provide you with the documentation you need from them (this is mainly the I-20 and your acceptance letter), but the bulk of the documentation you need to present to the visa officer will mostly come from you. Namely, because the F-1 is a non-immigrant visa, you need to show strong ties to the Philippines. This can take a variety of forms, and oftentimes your mileage may vary especially depending on the school you will be attending (i.e. there will be less scrutiny if you're going to Harvard as compared to a university that's not that known).
If you did not receive a scholarship with your acceptance, you also need to show that you are able to afford the first year of matriculation. So bank statements containing the total amount of tuition, as well as room and board, will be important (usually the I-20 that the university will issue you will include this amount).
At the interview, be polite and only answer the questions asked. Do not offer up information not asked by the visa officer. I suggest you have a ready answer if the visa officer asks you why this particular school and program, but you should have this answer already if you followed my advice about reflecting and researching before applying to programs :)
Visa is approved and on hand! What do I do while I wait to leave for the US?
Networking starts the moment you receive your passport with your F-1 visa. You absolutely cannot and should not waste a single minute of your active student visa, so this is the time you start telling people that you're going to be studying in the US. You need to work your current network and find peers and mentors who will be willing to connect you with colleagues they know who work in the US or have ties to the US in your professional field. Let's go back to Maria Clara as an example.

Finally, after years of hard work, Maria Clara has her desired acceptance into SUNY's MS in Forensic Accounting program, and her F-1 visa was approved by the embassy without any issues. After celebrating with her family, she lets her boss know about her visa approval, who has been one of her most ardent cheerleaders during this entire process. Her boss has also offered to introduce her to their counterparts in the US once she got her visa approved, which is really important to Maria Clara--she knows she needs to get ahead of networking professionally since her time in the US is limited. She has also reached out to other people she knows in the company that engage frequently with teams in the US. She's messaged her college professors as well, as she knows that a number of alumni from her college have migrated to the US. Her plan is to get connected with as many professionals in her field as possible, connect with them in person once she's in the US, and build a rapport with as many connections as possible so she can be guided accordingly and stand out when the time to apply for jobs comes.

Remember that unlike US citizens (USC) and legal permanent residents (LPR), your time in the US is limited and bound by the rules set by your visa. So you have to be creative and get ahead in some way. You need to be more prepared and more strategic than USCs and LPRs because you simply do not have the time to dilly dally. Yes, enjoy and savor in the moment of seeing the fruits of your labor, but the hard part begins now. You simply do not have time to waste.

DURING THE PROGRAM

I'm in the US now and working harder than ever! Is there anything more I can do to set myself apart from others?
Other than to make sure you have high grades and you're setting aside time to build professional relationships, it's time to think outside the box. Remember that you are limited by the rules of the F-1 visa, so experiences such as an off-campus summer internship is off limits to you. You will need to find ways to strengthen your resumé that doesn't include working off campus, and that could take many forms. One of the most effective recommendations I've received on this is to do an independent research during the summer--you could do it via a professor whose class you really liked, or if you've made inroads with some of the connections you've been building since getting your visa, have a professor oversee a research project you could do with those connections. (This is still academic work, and many programs will give credit for this, so it is not considered off-campus work under the eyes of USCIS.) You can use your research to really elevate your skills and experiences when applying for jobs.
It's also time to seriously start looking at potential employers. You can use the connections you've built to get a sense of what the professional landscape is for your field, learn about peoples' experiences at various companies and organizations, and get a feel for hiring processes. Remember, you don't have a lot of time to apply for jobs once you near the end of your program, so you have to be armed with the right information to guide your job hunting strategy. You will need to put yourself out there and be the best version of your professional self if you want employers to disregard that they will need to spend more money to hire you rather than a USC or LPR who doesn't need sponsorship.

LAST SEMESTER AND GRADUATION

I'm in my last semester of my program! Any tips?
The last semester is usually job hunting season, so make sure that resumé is polished and your network is activated. By now, if you've done the leg work, you will have a shortlist of potential employers and you will have made connections in most, if not all, of them. Time to check-in and ensure that they know you're interested in joining their company and you'd like their support and guidance in doing so. This is one of the harder parts of this journey, and you have to be relentless. Use all the resources at your disposal to ensure your resumé is seen by as many eyes as possible, and that includes speaking to your professors, especially your favorite ones, so they can also lend a hand.
More importantly: submit your work permit application (more commonly known as OPT) as early as possible to avoid delays and getting stuck in the USCIS backlog. You need this permit to be able to work after graduation for a limited time (one year for graduates of non-STEM programs, with an additional two years for graduates of STEM programs) without needing to immediately require H-1B sponsorship.
Getting employed by a company willing to sponsor you is not the end of the line. All for-profit companies are subject to the H-1B lottery, which means you will be competing with other internationals for the limited number of H-1B visas allotted every year. So even with an employer willing to sponsor, the H-1B visa is still not guaranteed. You can work around this by joining what is a called a cap-exempt organization instead, and USCIS classifies those as institutions of higher education, nonprofit entities related to or affiliated with an institution of higher education, nonprofit research organizations, and governmental research organizations. That means more research, and more targeted strategic networking, given that your employer pool now is limited.

EPILOGUE

The student visa is not an easy or cheap pathway to permanent residency in the US. It is getting harder and harder to beat out USCs and LPRs for great jobs in companies that have the experience and resources to sponsor H-1Bs and GCs. You need to do your research every step of the way and prepare to do some really grueling work in order to be the better investment for these companies. Plus, there is the luck element of the H-1B lottery. But it's not impossible. It can and does happen--my family is a great example of it (we're 3 for 3 in this pathway now). Your preparation and willingness to go the extra mile is critical, and you have to be ready to grind for a while. Rest often only comes when the green card is approved.
For those still considering the student visa pathway to migrate to the US after reading this very long post--good luck, and may the force be with you.

Hello everybody, I hope all of you are well.
I am writing this post to ask for some advice maybe, or feedback on how to successfully overcome, integrate, and process a mother complex that I think I am slowly starting to come out of, but am still very much entrenched in. I will provide only as much information as necessary to avoid overburdening everybody. To those of you who read, and reply, I thank you.
When I was young I had a tough upbringing as I was/am quite eccentric and this led to ostracization in school. In my life, the sole person who really was emotionally available in a way was my mother. Now, my father is not a bad person by any means, but I was 100% divested of a paternal father figure, as he always preferred to work. He had a problem with the kind of emotional availability that having children would entail (as I see it) and therefore unconsciously sought ways to preoccupy himself.
As a result of my upbringing I had very few friends, and developed a fear of what one could call 'normal socialization'. This is very Puer Aeternus type stuff. I actively pushed away sexual thoughts and matter, repressing any thoughts that would refer to my sexuality in any way possible. These ideas/thoughts would be diverted in other ways such as by an overemphasis on the pleasure of eating good and high quality food, as well as through fetishization. In a psychological sense, I was totally and completely dependent on my mother for a sense of security for most of my life.
Fast forward to today. I am in my 30s and actually took some major steps to freeing myself from that lifestyle. I moved out from my country of origin and as a result was naturally subjected to a wide variety of stimuli, friendships, and the need to adapt in ways I never have. It hasn't been easy, but slowly but surely I have been doing so. However, every day I continue to call my mother on the phone. I seem to depict it to myself as a kind of sympathy, because my mother is divorced and alone aside from having pets, and I out of all of my siblings feels a very deep sense of compassion and sympathy for her. I really do not feel like I have separated myself from her psychologically as a result, while moving definitely has made me develop quite a bit. That being said, I seek approval and validation for my mother all the time on account of this dependence, and I think this is something that is holding me back from "striking out" in the way Jung describes in Symbols of Transformation and perhaps elsewhere.
I have some background in Jung (and philosophy more generally) and am sympathetic to his therapeutic approach. This has been playing on my mind for a long time. I am just wondering, to make a long story short, if there is anything I should consider doing in order to, as Jung puts it, make the archetypes conscious and develop a healthy relationship to that mother archetype/complex. I'm not sure if it's as simple as not calling my mother every day, or something like that. Or does it have to do with making other sorts of archetypal content conscious?
I can list some things that I believe are related to this complex. I am ultimately optimistic, but some of the issues in connection to this have definitely filled me with anxiety.
Thank you in advance to anybody who provides advice or guidance on this matter.