When did it all go wrong...

for you, personally?

when i met your mother :(

27 Sept 2020

September 1970

I don't feel like I'm as a big a loser now as I was in my 20s, but I know I did not 'win' jack shit. I think I am more in a Sysyphus situation at this point.

around autumn 2002

September of 2013, for me only

Fall semester of freshman year of high school, 1982.

For my country I think sometime in the early months of 1973.

June 2013

literally was like flipping an off switch.

basically it went, August of 2013, I was probably the best I'd been in my life, and seemed to be starting a relationship that was going to go somewhere.

Sept 2013 - get dumped abruptly and gaslit by my ex, and then simultaneously deal with a level of professional pressure/stress/abuse at work that would last through March 2014. OCD symptoms, heart palpitations and panic attacks that had been gone for years seized the opportunity to come back, forcing me back to therapy.

Started recovering and feeling myself again until around late summer of 2014, only for the second half of the work project that caused me so much anguish to hit a level of nastiness about thrice as bad as the first time, and I was basically slaving away and doing nothing but working and sleeping for several months until March of 2015. got so wrecked that I asked to go back to my old role.

couldn't even take a breath from that when dad abruptly tells me that he and mom can't live in North Carolina anymore and are coming back to live in FL, and dad says he needs to live on our couch (I lived with my brother then) to work and save up money, while mom stays a few extra months alone in NC. he shows up and his car dies ON THE DRIVE DOWN for good, so I had to co-sign a car loan with him a few days later (and he hadn't had a car note in years, so it wasn't expected in his budget). lived with us for five months until about September of 2015, and he and mom moved down before they were ready, and within two months of moving, already told me they couldn't pay their rent and had to borrow from friends and my brother and I. they began borrowing from us at a rate that was very hard to sustain.

Therapist, who was incredibly effective for me, then tells me she won't take my insurance anymore and I can keep seeing her for $125 a session, ending that.

2016, I think we all remember, was an ugly shitshow from the jump, but as we got into October, I'd finally started to feel better, and figured a lot of the stress I'd felt would go away when the election was over. Need I say more.

2017 became Hell again at work, with projects forcing me to travel and give up the theatre festival I was supposed to do, spent probably a third of the year away from home working out of hotel rooms. was on two projects where I received a level of professional harassment and abuse from clients that killed what was left of my self-esteem and forced me to outright leave my department and become a trainer. fortunately that ended the professional abuse. it was so bad I took a $6k paycut.

since then it was mostly Trump, COVID, dad hospitalized, me having to be a caretaker, insurrection, more COVID.

my brain basically just never got a break from anxiety after 2015. most of my traveling the globe and going to 50+ concerts a year was to help numb the negativity that pored through me every day.

a normal person could endure most of that, but I was always starting with a short deck

Whenever US elections became always instead of every four years

the internet

by which I mean, whenever it was that the internet became omnipresent in everyone's lives. Or maybe when everyone got smartphones.

About 13.8 billion years ago (Big Bang).

More focussed answer...

2018 was a year from Hell, with severe workplace bullying and harassment, that I am amazed I got through and never thought I would. It was consuming my thoughts during all waking hours at one point.

I did get through it . So things went spectacularly wrong, but are (relatively) ok now.

Couple 100 thousand years ago, when ape-things started to think about things.

It was consuming my thoughts during all waking hours at one point.

Ugh, same

When I left home for college. Fortunately I was able to turn it around eventually.

i think i have a few answers. but then i'll end on a hopeful note.

- things initially started going downhill when everyone around me hit puberty except for me, and i had to keep going for several more years before i halfway caught up. before all that, i was a bright comedian and played all the sports (and usually did well in them). as soon as it started, i was the shortest and skinniest kid in school (including 2 grades below me) and my comedy turned into self-deprecation as i learned to make the funniest jokes about myself in response to getting bullied, or to pre-empt it. i had a crush on so many girls, and watched all my friends date everyone i liked for many years. my dad was clearly disappointed that i turned out to be a weak man, and his only advice was always that to say that he was once small like me, and then he became a big strong man. so, maybe that would happen for me too.

- going to graduate school / getting a real job. it wasn't exactly "all right" before this. but i was 23. i had just moved to chicago. i worked part time in a cool record store, i played drums (incredibly obnoxiously) in some sort of druggy improv group of 8-12 people, i had lots of friends and got invited to parties. then i decided that peak oil was the biggest problem of all time, probably, and i had to do something about it. what should i do? who or what can fix it? i don't know, probably something about the government? public policy degree. i moved with my former partner to the middle of nowhere and studied my ass off for two years, mastering skills that have absolutely nothing to do with working in the government, like Net Present Value, microeconomics, and negotiation. in my experience, i could have walked into my EPA job straight out of high school and done just as well. probably better because i would have more youthful vigor, and also EPA would have loved having what appeared to be 13-year-old boy as their pet mascot and also program manager of something created by a long-forgotten statute from the 70s that is nevertheless still mandated to technically be done every year. however they did pay me money, that was nice. but the 9-to-5 drudgery compared with a years-long slow die-off of my relationship and having moved away from every good friend i had ever had, twice, led to things going wrong. i was also very depressed during this time and wasn't on anti-depressants yet

- summer 2016. i got married just before this, and everything was going right. i had moved from brooklyn back to Chicago (first time in 10 years!), and i decided to quit my fed job even though i could have transferred to Chicago in a new role. i didn't quit because i knew trump would win. i thought clinton would definitely win and rolled my everyone who was worried about it. i decided to try to be an artist, attempt 1. a digital artist. or a gif specialist. or a videomaker. or a video light sculpturist? all in my living room. i wouldn't get a job because i doing art full time now. but the problem was, i couldn't complete anything. i had at least a dozen half-baked ideas in various stages of progression. ideas from all over the place, all loosely connected by the fact that it was me making them. but most of them just in the form of long paragraphs like this one. i got really depressed, worse than before. than trump won. my parents came to visit on the day after the election. i don't remember if it was planned or if they just decided it would be a fun time to visit me. i ended up screaming at them for the very first time in my life. maybe i had a few outbursts when i was younger, but none were that serious, and none so sustained. they sat and listened to me scream at them about the world for 4 hours. my dad listened calmly and occasionally mentioned something about the bible. he made big shows of nodding his head with me when i said something he might generally agree with, like if i said something that suggested that you couldn't count on people to do the right thing. i took them to task for the trump support and made it clear how plainly evil and corrupt he was. why did they support him? well, abortion, some other things. abortion though. i defended/screamed everything that i knew about why it was wrong to be so concretely against access for abortion, let alone so passionate about it that you would vote for a clearly corrupt evil buffoon just because he could have the right answer on abortion. i asked my dad if he was a single issue voter, and he proudly answered yes, abortion. i yelled some more about other things. my dad said that gay people have a disease and i threw an ottoman as hard as i could at the open front closet. the closet was packed to the brim with thick heavy coats, which softly absorbed my superhuman feat of pcp-like strength of my throw. then i started crying and took my dog for a walk, and after i got back my parents left. it got worse after that, then my dad died of his own ignorance a few months ago, about 20 years ahead of schedule. my mom is currently trying to figure out how she can die without it technically a suicide so that she can join him in a literally-conceived eternal world of bliss and no pain and everlasting love, with perhaps the only stain on her legacy being that she was not able to save me, and in fact i seem to take a certain delight in telling her that i would never want to live in any eternal place, let alone any eternal place where she would be, and that i would be down in burning hell with my friends who were actually here for my while i still lived.

the good news is that i can write about that last "going wrong" in the past tense now, and for a long time i thought i would never be able to say that. i can write about it like that and then give it a good old-fashioned death ending, the one probably every creative writing prof dreads because they know everyone's going to do it. someone has to die. well, someone died. and now i've found that i'm much, much happier - not because he died, but because i have finally been able to truly think and act independently of his influence. yes, i still think about him a lot and write about him, like here, and talk about him sometimes. but i do it openly, and with the knowledge that his story has ended, and that mine is still going and is getting good again.

whenever my ilx-sensors pick up an epic neanderthal post, i am compelled to reply in kind. great thread!

Failing my first six weeks period of a class (fourth grade English - I wanted to read everything I could find from Mark Twain instead of the class reading, whatever that was) and realizing there were no real consequences, my parents were mad for a while but that passed - and then finding the level of bare minimum effort to please parents/school staff by staying in honors classes and not getting yelled at, so never learning to study or work hard. Turns out that 'doing things you don't want to do' is a hard skill to pick up on the fly when you're 20.

I don’t really want to put my birthday on the internet

jks jks, I’ll say generally I think freshmen year of college made me crash land into some realizations that I’m still working through

(nothing to do specifically w college as an institution or living away from home.

I didn’t mind that)

well, someone died. and now i've found that i'm much, much happier - not because he died, but because i have finally been able to truly think and act independently of his influence. yes, i still think about him a lot and write about him, like here, and talk about him sometimes. but i do it openly, and with the knowledge that his story has ended, and that mine is still going and is getting good again.

― Z_TBD (Karl Malone)

Massive learning, one of my personal "when did things start going right for you" moments tbh

This can happen even if the influence of the deceased was mostly positive.

It never went wrong for me, hardships are par the course.

Maybe you just haven't met the right hardships as yet.

What a thing to say xpost

The Albigensian Crusade, when an independent Occitanian culture and polity were crushed.

i read van horn street's post as "it never turned a different direction, it has been hardships all along"

but i don't know. i'm also slippery with language sometimes. it could very well be "life sucks, didn't stop me". i think of that as related to living through the 1930s/40s and always made sense to me in that way as a coping mechanism, because you have to

The latter yeah, I don’t know anyone whose path has been painless. I just assume everyone’s life is hella tough and as long as you keep going, nothing has turned ~wrong.

can't identify the point where it went wrong for me, but I ended up alone which I'm discovering is a great disadvantage

"as long as you keep going nothing has turned ~wrong" is bullshit

idk seems to me theres numerous ways to interpret it and its also presumptuous to insist everyone has an "its all gone wrong" philosophy

the internet

― Lily Dale, Friday, July 16, 2021 3:01 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Whenever US elections became always instead of every four years

So then, around 1994.

08

Although id like a new answer

Internet on phones + twitter

internet is a weird one for me. i could see that being right, but that was also the time of puberty/high school woes. it's hard to figure out what exactly went wrong

Sorry youve to literally pick a day its the rules iirc

Just put a random one in rhonda never checks

RHONDAAAAAAAAAAaa

goddammit it, Rhonda. Goddamn it. every day. Every day is like this, it seems, these days. Every goddamn day. Goddammit Rhonda.

#onethread #paymentforposts

everyone laughs now. but later, you'll get payment for posts. and someone will do a "first mentions" search and think "oh that's right, i guess karl really was trying to get us all payment for posts, something that we all take for granted now in the distant year of 2084. i'm glad the mods did a good job of keeping things stable while we all worked out the payment plan, and then we all got healthcare through #paymentforposts by 2040, just a couple years before uncle charlie here was born. uncle charlie would have died without those payments. think you ilx, from the future. don't make the mistake the alternate pasts did - there's a reason we're the prime now, here in 2084. it's because you made the right decision with regards to #paymentforposts in 2021, reading this now. paymentforposts.xyz - you're gonna check and see. and be disappointed either way. #paymentforposts"

Rhonda where are we on this hot new hashtag

Everywhere i do be nobody does be talking about it

#paymentforposts

what if we just got a cent per post. what if we all posted thousands of times per day. think about the traffic.

think about all the traffic and the ad revenue, and the #paymentforposts gained along the way. and not only that, but also the money.

not to mention the cookies

:P

Honestly that was kind of a flippant response of mine. I do think the internet has had a bad effect on me, my attention span, moods, capacity for accomplishing things, but it's been so gradual that it's hard to pinpoint a moment when Things Went Wrong. And there are some aspects of the internet that I'm grateful for, ilx being one of them.

This is a complicated question for me to answer because I feel a lot of regrets over my lack of professional accomplishments, and in some ways I wish I had made better choices, but also I was very backward at a lot of social stuff when I was younger, and I've been very gradually getting better at it. So a lot of my social milestones, such as they are, feel like they were just barely achieved and might not have been achieved if things had been even slightly different. It's easy to imagine a different version of my life in which - for instance - I became a professor or a journalist but never dated at all.

But if I had to pick a specific moment in my life that made a definite difference for the worse, it would be getting officially diagnosed with migraines when I was 21. I'd had headaches for years, mostly on the weekends, and I dealt with them by taking Aleve and lying down. Then I got a diagnosis, and that meant migraine meds, and the meds caused rebound headaches, until I was getting full-blown migraines two or three or four times a week. It took 14 years to get that figured out and get off those particular meds. I wonder what my twenties and early thirties would have been like if I'd never been on them to start with.

February 2013

Been reading Johanna Hurwitz books to my niece. Even in the recent ones, all her characters seem to be growing up in a pre-internet world. She acknowledges the internet, but barely ( "we can look up facts about kangaroos!"). It's more like a dot on the periphipery than an augmented reality filter in the Johanna Hurwitz universe. The kids are drawn to investigate things in a way that's very hands-on and their experiences are location-based. I remember when my life was like that too, kinda. But there's all this other stuff from my pre-internet childhood that hardly encroaches on the Johanna Hurwitz universe: designer toys, brand name junk food, blockbuster movies, the advertisements for these things, the places where they're bought and sold. Being seduced by all these things, lusting after them constantly, was a major driving force in my life before the internet and if I'm honest, it amounted to nothing less than the erasure of myself.

The thing is, my niece is def going through that too now. I don't think she experiences the world through a digital filter yet, though. Perhaps because she can't read or write enough to navigate the internet. Like, as much as I experience the internet increasingly as a barrage of images, it's still a text-based structure in some sense.

I'm not saying "entertainment franchises" or w/e ruined my life, to be clear. I would say it contributed to a kind of tunnel vision.

"as long as you keep going nothing has turned ~wrong" is bullshit

― Dan S, Saturday, July 17, 2021 11:35 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

worked for me!

series only get serious when the home team loses

"after it all going wrong, the team that is currently losing goes on to lose the whole thing over 85% of the time - this next year is critical"

Hasn’t happened yet

Hoping I don’t realise till I’m dead

To bring some sunshine here though.
Last year it finally went all right.

Married (happily)
Bought a our first home
Reduced work to to four days a week

The sunshines gotta rub off at some point tho I guess?

I'm not saying "entertainment franchises" or w/e ruined my life, to be clear. I would say it contributed to a kind of tunnel vision.

I don't know if I'd say the franchises erased my self, it was more like they partly constituted it (as in those horrifying Transformers commercials where the child's eyes start glowing; indeed, I professed a desire to be a Transformer). My dad had me join him in a lot of gardening, and he struggled to get me to remember the names of the things we planted — I simply was not interested. I had a very powerful preference for the synthetic world. In a way, even though I now live in a city and seek out more "natural" spaces, this hasn't changed — I still can't summon the will to learn horticultural vocabulary.

As for the thread question, I basically floundered in grad school and stuck around for an absurd amount of time (wish I wasn't stuck with "Neue Jesse Schule" here — that was meant to be a display name but somehow it ended up becoming the default). A lot of things particularly "went wrong" in the fall of 2016 (problematic roommate situation, a suddenly ailing hip, a professionally inappropriate flirtation, the election).... But I think I've really been shielded from the worst and suspect things will start going wronger for me in the next decade, and that I won't be ready for it.

It never went wrong for me, hardships are par the course.

― Van Horn Street, Saturday, 17 July 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Maybe you could go and live in Gaza, find out more about hardships and reconsider the nonsense you post.

you really are a tremendous ass

my life is pretty good and things eventually went right for me but I had two big fucked up moments in my life

1) 7th grade, I got busted for "shoplifting". I put that in quotes because I hadn't actually stolen anything, but the school cop says I was "caught", shows me a video of "something" going up my jacket sleeve, but won't say what, also says I stole something a second day even though I knew I wasn't even there. My parents come, my friend's parents come, I burst into tears saying I'm innocent, and the cop tells me if I say I'm guilty I can get away with a $45 "Second Chance" program instead of the $360 worth of citations. I decide not to risk it and just "admit guilt". In retrospect not a big deal but I felt like I lot the trust of my parents. It was a lot like that one Simpsons episode!

Anyway, two weeks after that, I get suspended from school. Here's what happened. I was bullied a lot by these 2 particular kids and one day I say something like "you guys better stop it!!" and one of them is like, "or what? You'll put me on your hit list?" I said "yeah" and made a "hit list" with their names on it. They think it's hilarious and start telling me other names to put on it. which I do, because deep down I wanted the bullies to like me. One caveat: I did not know what a hit list was. I thought it was a list of people you wanted to punch? Christ, I was 12. I throw out the list. A few weeks later, Columbine happens. Turns out one of the bullies saved the list and gave it to a teacher. A week after I was suspended for "threatening to shoot up the school". Needless to say my social status was not very good after that. I was whispered about all the time. Nobody wanted to hang around me. Both these things happening at the same time really hurt...I felt like I lost the trust of everyone. Even years later, I was at a party and chatting with some dude and he says "aren't you the guy who wanted to shoot up the school?" Like this is a small town, EVERYONE knew about it. It tanked my social life for years.

2) About seven years ago. By now I finally have a nice group of friends hanging out fairly regularly, people who I consider my brothers in a sense, including the few people who actually were my friends during high school. Some of them get into drugs but it's not clear who's doing what and how much. I hear them talk about morphine and sometimes when I see them they're in a state which in retrospect had to be heavy withdrawal just disconnected, grouchy, texting people all the time (one thing I kept asking..."who do you keep texting, everyone you know is here!"). Anyway, one of them, the guy who basically held the group together, overdoses on something I've never heard of: fentanyl. His family really liked me, even picking me to deliver the eulogy on behalf of his friend group. A week later, they find the person who sold him the drugs: my older brother. I had no idea. Suddenly his family won't talk to me, which is understandable, and everything with my friends is kinda weird. They don't blame me at all, it's just a fucked up thing. Nobody knows what to say. It culminates in us at the sentencing, with my family on one end and his family on the other, along with a bunch of my friends (who they'd asked to be there for moral support). His mom, someone who I'd always considered a second mother, got on the stand and asked for life in prison for my older brother. Such an immensely fucked situation. To make matters even more intense, I'm there with my wife who was 8.5 months pregnant. It was such a miserable time. I'd just get home and stare at the wall for an hour, not knowing what to say, how to feel, anything. But things were never the same with my group of friends after that...not because of me or my brother, it's just that was the guy who planned everything. The other dudes who were into drugs quit everything cold turkey and a few of them went kinda nuts after. Two of them are basically unrecognizable now and another one nearly committed suicide because the cops kept badgering him (offering him immunity in exchange for a recorded phone call with me, which was fine because I didn't know anything!) Fuck! That was crazy!!

fess up frogs, what did ya steal

they wouldn't tell me! like that's the worst part, I asked "what do you think I took?" and the cop said "I don't know, but they checked the inventory and it was off by one so clearly you took it"

I heard rumors later that the cop had a quota of arrests he had to meet each month, idk if that's true or not but needless to say this did kick off a lifelong distrust of cops

and that cop's name....

was....

Karl

Malone

we are the law!!

In light of the above, I guess someone should lock the "who would you put on your ILX hit list" thread.

i will arrest anyone and sue anyone who deserves it, but also i am willing to represent the "profitable majority" for a class action suit against anyone who is wronged. and i think there's a lot of wrong here.

i ask everyone to stand up if they have NOT been wronged.

your honor, i see that you remain sitting

you really are a tremendous ass

― it is to laugh, like so, ha! (Aimless), Monday, 19 July 2021 bookmarkflaglink

I think my ass is quite good. But if you want to call it tremendous I will let you

tbh posting “hardships are par for the course” does come across a bit like Prince Gautama Buddha still in the aristocratic family palace, and protected by family and servants from seeing as yet that life is subject to old age, and death.

(And sickness).

otm and much more eloquently put than the stfu you insufferable clown post I deleted!

A lot of assumptions are being made about someone you know next to nothing about… like everyone I’ve had my fair share of suffering, I just don’t think it’s a sign it’s ‘all gone wrong’, more so than it what it is and I chose to be happy and positive regardless.

Calzino it seems it’s in your best interest to ignore me or something.

it’s just a really tactless thing to post after people kind poured their hearts out in two long personal posts

I hope this thread was helpful and cathartic to people and not painful. I made it after a few beers, frustrated with the circularity of my recent psychoanalysis appointments. It was kind of a wry joke. Didn’t expect people to post seriously on it.

it was helpful for me at least.

helpful for me too. it's not for everyone, but i think it's a good to talk about what went wrong, and to see what (some) others deal with. seeing so many people here deal with illness and tragedy in their own lives, for years here, helps prepare me for the inevitable crap that i will deal with. i remember telling my therapist about that a few years ago, actually, that i felt like i was depressed and falling apart even _before_ something really awful happened like a death or illness. back then, my goal was to get to a stable state and try to avoid thinking about and dreading the inevitable terrible things that will happen.

don't know where i'm going with that. it's good to talk about problems, i think.

I've almost posted itt about a half dozen times before but I keep coming back around to the thing where I've thought it all went wrong at least a half dozen times in my life and then things kinda turned around (even if not quite a full return to the pre-'all went wrong' state). I'm not sure if we get to know when and if it all goes wrong. Maybe sometimes, like if I opened my eyes one morning and I was just a head floating in a vat or something. That seems like something you don't come back from. Otherwise who really knows when you're on an inexorable downward slide.

That said, I definitely tend to live like I'm awaiting an endless number of other shoes to drop, forever bracing for the next clobbering from life. Maybe I should stop that. Maybe if I just say 'maybe I should stop that' enough times I'll just stop that. I think that's how it works.

It can be awful to anticipate terrible events, sometimes one gets relief by causing those terrible events.

To bring some sunshine here though.
Last year it finally went all right.

Married (happily)
Bought a our first home
Reduced work to to four days a week

The sunshines gotta rub off at some point tho I guess?

― hrep (H.P), Monday, 19 July 2021 04:35 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

someone's new here!!!

it's good to talk about problems, i think.

The US Army, being what it is, decided back in the late 1990s when new mental health therapies were proliferating like mushrooms after rain, that it needed to commission a study to determine which kinds of mental health and wellness therapies were most successful and which were either ineffective or less effective, so it could figure out where to spend its bags full of money. After several years it issued a report that concluded that almost every kind of therapy seemed to be moderately successful, with none of them standing out as the statistically 'correct' approach, and the real benefit seemed to be derived from the patient feeling like they were getting good attention and sympathetic help in dealing with their problems.

Their definition of 'moderately successful' may have been somewhat skewed...

Therapies that makes people want to get back in the battlefield with the motivation to kill people - clearly successful
Therapies that enable people to revaluate their lives and that tend to lead to them dropping out of the military - clearly a failure!

I don't think the study was confined to active duty soldiers, but included the multitudes of discharged veterans.

After several years it issued a report that concluded that almost every kind of therapy seemed to be moderately successful, with none of them standing out as the statistically 'correct' approach, and the real benefit seemed to be derived from the patient feeling like they were getting good attention and sympathetic help in dealing with their problems.

Maybe sometimes, like if I opened my eyes one morning and I was just a head floating in a vat or something. That seems like something you don't come back from.

That could just as easily be something to aspire to, though. I mean, as long as my head had wi-fi — and Amazon Prime, so I could get hats delivered.

Yes but is the delivery drone equipped to place a hat atop my tank?

I reiterate my contention that theres nothing at all wrong with what VHS said and ppl are projecting onto it

ok

It all went wrong that time I said something on ilx that I thought was straightforward and fairly innocuous, but that some other ilxors strongly objected to.

it went wrong for me when the Eastern front fell. Up until then, I was confident that I could win a two-front war. but afterward, clearly at least one of those fronts had fallen, and I had lost the confidence of my troops

(x post)

Was it this one - Is there life on other planets? ?

Martin's not able to respond ow, so let's pass that one by.

Having just returned from a weeklong multi-generational family gathering in a big remote farmhouse, I am equipped with multiple possible answers to this question: It all went wrong when my mother felt compelled by social pressures and her own lack of confidence to marry my father (they're still married, 55 years on, but my mom makes relentlessly clear that it wasn't her idea); or maybe when my dad's parents were remote and judgmental toward their children; or possibly when my grandfather's father abandoned the family when my grandfather was very young, leading to him growing up with a bunch of resentment and hurt that he passed onto his own kids.

Were earlier generations still around to make their case, I'm sure we could push the original sins back much farther. (And to be clear, I love my family, I mostly have good relationships with them, and I think they all mean well, most of the time.) But it made me aware all over again that learning to let go of past pain and injuries is often the only way to deal with them, because you can't solve or fix them after the fact even if everyone involved is still alive. And also of course that "letting go" is tremendously difficult work, and something you generally have to do over and over and over.

otmfm

Yeah, that's otm for me too.

And made me think of Larkin's Winter Palace:

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints.

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

possibly when I had teh racist couple next door move in.

Possibly when I had started cutting things at the start of the year but only finished 2 shirts and got halfway through a 3rd.

POssibly when I never got into a cleaning routine and now its too hot to start one.

Probably never getting into an exercise routine.

Probably sitting in the sun over the weekend without thinking of sunscreen.