I know this might not be the place for it, but fuck if I know a better one at this point. This board is the last remaining remnant of humanity and companionship this site has to offer. I don't know how many of you were around for it, but back in the day, this wasn't a site for everyone and their 6 year old nephew. All of it, but specifically /b/, was a sanctuary for those of us who had nowhere else to go. Who were alone, and hated it, and could do nothing about it. We found purpose and meaning in the bonds we had with each other. Because here, despite how we acted, how absurdly we may have shown it, we knew that this was the only place that everyone else understood our pain. And so we would have baww threads, brief respites from pretending to be completely inconsiderate asshats where we would finally be able to cry. We had built a culture all our own, that nobody else could possibly comprehend or even want. We made a sanctuary for the broken, the outcast, the socially inept. For the horrifically abused, the unnamed orphans, and those that were empty inside and wished that just for a little while, they could feel. For those who had experienced incredible loss, and those who were about to become that loss to others. When the world rejected you, and life fucked you raw, that's when you earned your place in our community.
Over the years it's lost that touch, and baww threads have become something that the new /b/ doesn't even remember. They don't participate because they don't understand. They're all just rich fat white kids who grew up misunderstanding our inside jokes, and want to be edgy and racist in a place they won't get reported for it.
But earlier today, I found an image that brought back a flood of memories. Now, I was never one to cry, though I wanted to. Every time I would close my eyes and savor the sadness, but I could never bring myself to actually fully feel it. I knew that keeping everything bottled was terrible for me,
Cont.
and it was only going to get worse, but I just couldn't fucking do it. But I found an image, and it led me to another, and another, and eventually an entire archive of stories. Stories about deaths, and regrets, and the guy who runs the animal gas chamber. Stories about how this once beautifully flawed place brought anons back from the brink of suicide, and stories that could only be told in one of those rare threads. I've been reading for the better part of 2 hours, and I cried. I cried like a little bitch. And god damn it, I've never felt more like a human being.
My story is a long one, and hella depressing. Frankly I shouldn't be alive right now for more reasons than I can even count. I've been tortured, drowned, tricked into a crack addiction, and more. But I'm still here, and the only reason I've made it this far is because of you, anon. If you remember what it was like, back then, when all we had was each other, then you are and will always be my brother, or my sister. My best friend. Hell, even if you don't remember. As long as you fit the description, you're one of us. We may not have a home anymore, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let that stop me. You will always have a friend in me anon. When your best friend dies, when your mom gets cancer, when an earthquake destroys your school. When you feel so entirely alone in the world that you feel like nothingness would be a reasonable alternative, when all you want is for the pain to stop, I'll be here, waiting. You will always have someone to talk to, just like I did. You will never know my name, and I'll never know yours, but I love you anon. I love you more than you could possibly understand, because I know how much you need it.
It'll get easier someday. I promise.
http://4ca.org/show.php?dir=baw1&page=0
Final bump.
Thanks anon.You are not alone.
>>17208761
>tricked into a crack addiction
lmfao exactly how does that happen?
There are support groups and forums specially designated for whining. This is not what this site is.
>fondly remembering an old circle of anonymous internet "friends"; a community of faceless nobodies as a substitute for human interaction
Dude...
>>17208898
:)
>>17208902
It's a long story, but essentially I was moving up the corporate ladder of weed dealers and was introduced to this guy who "could flip pounds in a day". His house was really close to mine, so I'd go over all the time (this was during the summer, didn't have school) and we'd smoke together. It was a more intense experience, and I coughed a lot more than usual, but he always insisted on packing my bowls for me so I figured he just put in a lot more tobacco than usual. By the time I was ready to buy off him for my own supply, I started to notice little white specks in the weed, but I was so far gone that I didn't even care. The addiction was actually amazing, it was the cold turkey withdrawal that nearly killed me.
>>17208905
Shut the fuck up.
>>17208924
Which is exactly what I mean by "a culture nobody else could possibly comprehend or even want". We all knew how fucking sad it was. But it was a hell of a lot better than staring at a wall and marinating in self-pity.
And for the record I'll be saging my replies from here on out, I have a feeling I might be posting a lot.
Or maybe not. Well either way, thank you for taking the time. It means more to me than you know that someone else actually read this.
>>17208960
Keep going if you want to. I left /b/ a few years ago(3 or 4 I can't remember) for this exact reason and have surprisingly found /a/ to have the best type of community, really similar to the old /b/, which is a bit exclusive and seemingly harsh but actually kind. It's kinda going to shit too though.
I remember examples like >>17208818, though I was never really depressed though, I just like that people around here show their real selves much more, their good and bad, and that's what keeps me here.
>>17208757
>>17208761
People don't understand what it means to enioy the present. This place isn't what it used to be and we all have to deal with it or move on. The biggest boards have been infected and become worse off because of it regardless of who you blame (reddit, underage, etc.).
As shitty as this site can be, I have some faith in it. It's why I'm here trying to help the people with real problems.
We're all just trying to get through life.
>>17209078
I miss the old days but boy oh boy do I hate that comic.
>>17209118
It won't fix itself. It will only become worse.
>>17209143
To address your early point, being anonymous makes it easy to be personal. I think that brings out some of the most human things about us, for better and for worse.
I personally think /adv/ is the best board (minus tfw no gf threads) simply because you can be more mature here without being a faggot.
Give it another 5 years when all the kids experience life and then they'll open up more. For now, just let em /b/
>>17209078
Went to get Chinese food, honestly thought the thread died. I get what you mean though, even now there's a certain level of loyalty to the values of the site and specific boards, even if those values happen to be completely fucked up.
>>17209118
>>17209163
I completely agree, that's why I chose to make this thread here. It's the most mature, and it seems like the most likely to have people that remember what I was talking about.
>>17209163
The early post wasn't me. This is my first post.
>>17209163
Also I've had a couple whiskey gingers so I forgot to actually address your post (this is saged), 4chan will never be what it used to be because it never used to be a tourist attraction. Talking about it in public used to be more or less forbidden, because we were trying to avoid what inevitably happened. The problem is that now, everything that used to make it special got sick of putting up with the annoying fucks from 9gag and at this point it's a ghost town populated by extremely young drifters. Then they'll move on, and make room for the next batch of entitled little shits, and so on until the end of time. I'm just glad boards like this and /wg/ still exist.
>>17209307
>>17209307
Which isn't to say that everyone who visits the site, or majority of the boards, is one of the children I'm describing. It's just that the current culture is a perversion of what we invented, which was designed to seem harsh until you understood the language. It's morphed into just pure intolerance of everything, which makes it impossible for anyone who would otherwise have found a haven to actually enjoy it or find any sort of solace or companionship.
You know what? While we're all here, I think I'll take this opportunity to talk a little more about my life. For the sake of convenience I'll leave out everything but the important details, considering going in-depth about how it feels to go completely insane from the age of 4 isn't exactly a timely matter.
Basically I've always been different. Now I'm not sure what caused it, could be that I briefly died while I was being born, could be that my mother never really liked me, as far as I can remember. Maybe a mixture of both. But what I lacked in certain areas (social aptitude, certain critical thinking skills), I more than made up for in others (I learned to read much quicker than the other children, I figured out how a lightbulb worked by the age of 3, around 4 I invented this complex multi-tier game using Yu-Gi-Oh cards and toy cars, kind of a cross between chess and Hearthstone). Basically I could have been a prodigy, if I wasn't kept in my room for weeks at a time. I was allowed out once my dad got home, but since my mother took an extended maternity leave, he was working most of the time, even on weekends. And so I would sit in my empty room, read the same books over and over, stare at the ceiling, etc. I had one of those popcorn ceilings, and I found that if I stared at it long enough without blinking, I could see shapes in the ridges. I would make up stories for them, and when that got boring, I would give voices to my stuffed animals. I would give them all names, and personalities, and after a while I forgot that they weren't actually talking to me. And it didn't really help that my mother would stand outside my door and wait for me to get out of bed, so that she could burst in and scream at me for a solid half hour for not sleeping, considering her excuse for keeping me in complete isolation was that I should have been "napping". She was a very confused woman.
This continued until grade school, when I couldn't conceivably be kept out of sight (out of mind) any longer. Even then though, she seemed to go out of her way to find something to be irrationally, terrifyingly angry about. There was never any physical violence, that's how she got away with it. She would make me stand there, not moving a muscle, as she lamented how worthless I was, how many people I was hurting with my actions, no matter what it was. She would ask my teachers, always in a pleasant, infinitely kind demeanor, to write in my agenda either a smiley or frowny face depending on my daily behavior, and they would comply, not knowing that a frowny face earned me an extra 45 minutes of her breaking the sound barrier with everything wrong with me, and how much of a disappointment I was, etc.
Now this might not sound THAT bad, but combine the constant demoralization with the isolation, which on it's own had driven me quite mad (to this day I can't help but talk to myself whenever I'm alone, like I have full on conversations with my alternate personalities, also I have alternate personalities), and I was barely a human being. On top of that, I didn't really sleep until about halfway through high school. I'd get maybe 3 hours a night if I was lucky, 1.5 to 2 on average. My memories are understandably fuzzy for most of my childhood, other than the times I would get to spend on the internet, where people actually sympathized with what I was going through. Sociopathy, depersonalization syndrome, the inability to relate to anyone, and obviously being the proverbial and literal punching bag for pretty much everyone I came in contact with. You don't know the meaning of the word alone until you're willing to settle for "friends" that treat you like absolute dogshit, just because they talk to you when everyone else either ignores you or uses you as a universal scapegoat. And thus was my childhood, in a nutshell.
So it should come as no surprise that I fell into drugs from a fairly young age, and fell in love with poppers (a special bong piece in which you attach a chunk of a cigarette on top of your feed, hits much harder and it's expected that you puke your first time). I smoked more weed in a year than any of you will in your lifetimes. I also chugged boxed wine and Baileys, whatever alcohol I could get my hands on without it being obvious that I was taking it. About halfway through high school I decided to lose weight, and my life turned around pretty quick. I learned the unique ability from a young age to change my personality at the drop of a hat, but it took many years of careful observation to perfect. Anyway, I infiltrated literally every social group there was, and became that guy that everyone knows and gets along with. Still didn't enjoy it much, but I reveled in the idea that I was now at the top of the food chain that for so long was the bane of my existence.
I skipped more school than I went to, and if not for my Geography teacher, I would probably be in some back alley or drug den, begging for cash for my next hit. Or dead. He made sure that I did enough to pass, and took every possible step to ensure that I got my Diploma. The man's a genius, and he took me in as his apprentice, of sorts. He reminded me what it was like to have your life mean something, reminded me of how much I enjoyed writing. Challenged me like nobody ever had, treated me with the intelligence I had forgotten I possessed. Without him, I would have probably killed myself a long time ago.
That's enough for now, my roommates are blasting their shitty pop music so loud I can hear it through the music in my headphones and I can't hear myself think.
>>17209480
What drugs did you use? Did you do acid/shrooms/MDMA? Or just crack(and weed)?
>>17209504
Well poppers are like another drug entirely, the nicotine and THC actually perform a chemical reaction under the water so that the smoke that comes back up is really a benzodiazapene (like Valium). But yes, only crack, weed, and poppers. And alcohol. Other stuff was too hard to come by/expensive at the time, plus there was the constant illusion of "I'm only smoking weed, I couldn't possibly be addicted". A shitty excuse, but a potent one in the mind of the addict.
>>17209547
In my experience "only weed" is pretty non addictive, though I do it once every 2 or 3 months. Crack is something I'd never try though.
Alcohol seems actually more dangerous than weed/occasional ecstasy pill, as it really easily creeps into my daily schedule.
>>17209591
It's not necessarily the weed that's addictive, it's the nicotine. And there's a pretty big difference between smoking every few months and smoking a gram a day, every day.
>>17209626
Yeah I know, I happen to know many people that went down that path.
For many weed was only a gateway, but 2-3 guys legit lost their minds to it. I can't remember last time I've seen them not high, or the last day they didn't smoke.
Stuff like that is what keeps me away I think.
>>17209626
>>17209646
Anyway, I didn't know what to talk about so I latched onto an easy topic. It's 3am here and I'm off, have a good night.
>>17209650
I I had the same kinds of friends, and I didn't mean to be dismissive. I appreciate you taking the time to talk, sleep well.
I just want to say that I appreciate this thread. I only started posting on this site less than a year ago. Found that /adv helped me with my need to vent and be helpful to others. Also, I'm 32, so pretty much the opposite of underage. Thanks for your story, OP. My problems aren't nearly as fiendishly rooted as yours, but I can relate to the alienation aspect of it, only mine crept up on me more slowly and much later.
I'll come back later, it's 3am up in my neck of the woods as well. Thank god /adv is a slow board.
>>17209078
I understand the sentimentality and the feels the artist was trying to achieve as well as the Cowboy Bebop reference, but damn, that is one fucking autistic comic.
>>17209646
I know that feeling man. My best friend turned into a total pothead. He smokes before work, during work, after work, always. He's a productive stoner and works hard but still.
Weed gives me pretty bad anxiety and since I'm going through a pretty rough period in my life I'm trying to stay away from it, so him and I hang out less. Which kinda sucks, but whatever.
>>17208757
Learn how to greentext.
Also, learn how to tl;dr
>>17209700
You're welcome, and thanks for saying that. It actually means a lot. If you want to elaborate, it's completely up to you, but it seems like this would be as good a place as any.
>>17209861
If it's giving you anxiety, then it's probably just amplifying feelings that already exist but aren't necessarily at the front of your mind. I'm not saying to go smoke till you develop schizophrenia, but maybe try to figure out what specifically you get anxious about, and deal with that a little bit at a time.
>>17209876
I've been greentexting since before your parents were born, I just didn't feel like it. Something this personal requires a touch of authenticity.
>>17210706
Not sure what to elaborate on, but I guess I could shine some light on what's causing alienation the way I experience it. I don't think our life stories need to be that similar in order for us to find common denominators. I had a good enough upbringing, so no comparison to what you told me about your mother. My father was emotionally and intellectually distant, but he was always in close proximity, working a business from our house. He came to the country in the early seventies, and speaks the language less than perfect. I think language barriers can be as huge a cause for alienation as anything, and although I'm not speaking about social interaction, I am somewhat referring to the quality of communication, as such. I had friends growing up, and I was seen as a resourceful class mate, and active in sports and outdoors activities, as well as an eager video game companion to some - but there was always something holding me back from raising to the top of the curve, when it came time to start looking at girls and taking the position I wanted to have, and felt I deserved, in any constellation of social groups.
To put it clearly: In groups with strong individuals, I naturally took on a "beta" role, but in groups where I would naturally be seen as a leader, I automatically downplayed my role. Say, if I was playing basketball with a weaker friend, I would make an effort to not be outscoring him. If I was with someone socially awkward, I would play equally clumsy, because I always feel bad when people aren't as talented as I am. And I chose to become friends with "losers" rather than to try and make my way up the social ladder. It has made me sort of a free radical, where I can jump from one set of group to the next, without forming any strong bonds, save from a few close friends who are basically 30yo virgins, with low social status.
Cont.
>>17211235
Cont.
My biggest issue is that I have always been seen as a very gifted artist, and I did in fact take a degree in fine arts, and the same story goes, I was seen as a resource in my class, with top marks for my studio practice. But I never felt comfortable with being the best, and as a result I've stopped trying. I've wasted many years not doing much work, because I know I'm good enough to get the attention I need for my work to get out in the market, but instead of going to any galleries with my paintings, I've just been selling directly to private persons straight from the studio, and not nearly enough to get by. I was even asked to come on board a high street gallery in London, while I was still studying, but never took on the offer, because I don't want to be seen.
I feel like I'm rambling here, but the bottom line is that how we work on our ability to form bonds with people, is not only about the bonds themselves, but perhaps to a larger degree, how we work internally on our ability to be open to opportunity, and to other people. When we close ourselves off to any real interactions, we can't expect to find meaningful relationships.
I've missed out on an early career, and several romantic relationships, and I'm in great economic dept, due to not wanting to be the best that I can be - even when the obstacles are merely psychological.
And I believe most are.
I got diagnosed with AvPD a year ago, to no surprise, but I'm confident that change is still possible, and it's easier to see it in myself, when I have the opportunity to put it to words anonymously.
>>17208813
Can you trace this thread in any archives?
Would like to see the responses to it.
Bumpin
>>17211237
I wish I could help you, but I feel like any advice I try to give you would come across as disingenuous, considering you obviously can't simply turn off whatever's making you the way you are. However, I can sympathize with your situation. There are days when I I'm literally incapable of leaving my room for anything other than food or bathroom breaks. Last week I lived off of nothing but rice for about 3 days because I couldn't work up the nerve to go shopping.
I think it stems mainly from a subconscious low self esteem, you believe in the deepest corners of your mind that you are insignificant, and that anything you may do or say is pointless. From there, you begin to believe that everyone else sees you this way, and effort is meaningless because you will ultimately fail in your endeavors.
All I can say is, life is too fucking short for that. Someday much later on in your life you're going to look back on everything you've done, and realize that you took the time you have on Earth for granted. When you have this much, you begin to feel like it will last forever, and it's easier to just watch it all pass you by. But you might as well just end it all now if that's your mentality, and save yourself the trouble. You have been given an incredible gift, and regardless of specifically why, because in all likelihood we'll never really know, you have the freedom to put that gift to use in whatever myriad of ways you see fit. And I'm not talking about your artistic talents.
Life is what we as a people make it. It wasn't always this absurdly difficult to make a living, there was a time when we all shared everything regardless of who did what. When we all gave a shit about each other. My point being, you write the rules for your own existence. If you don't want to be a part of massive art shows, then don't. If you want to shut yourself away from the world and wither into a lifeless husk of a human being until it's too late, then by all means go for it. Cont.
>>17212608
But ultimately, you need to ask yourself if that's really going to make you happy, and if that's the best way to use the gift of existence that for whatever reason has been given to you. You are free to be as miserable or as happy as you want. Everyone is free to do, whatever they want to do. Serial killers are free to kill for fun, and detectives are free to stop them. Governments are free to enslave their people, or create a true democracy, or whatever else they see fit. Regardless of morals, the only real limits in this world are the ones we place on ourselves.
You need to decide what will make you happy, and then you need to decide whether or not it's worth doing.
