Buffsoldier

It's become clear over the last several replies that I'm in no way, shape or form adequately describing what's going on with me. The fault for that is mine and mine alone. For that, I apologize to you all. I'm going to bow out of this thread, and potentially out of the site in general for a while, and work on trying to cope. Thank you.

This I wholeheartedly agree with. There's no set script that EVERYONE has to follow, but if there's not a reasonable enough overlap with the experiences, it's hard to fit in, it's hard (or at least much harder) to engage with my friends, peers and loved ones, and it's much harder to simply relate to them, and for them to relate to me. And this I do not. Yes, the picture for me is different, but the list is SO MUCH SMALLER as to make it incomplete for what should be an adult in the world I've been occupying as an adult. Small enough that it makes the above fitting in/engagement/relating really fucking difficult. The picture I have, now, after the lights have come on, is smaller, and there's holes all over it. I thought it was a nice 8"x10", and it's a wallet size that a toddler went to work on with a hole punch. This may sound like a joke, but I'm actually being serious here. Think of it like this: I for the longest time have been thinking that I've been on the same level as all of you because we're all football fans, and we've all been football fans for the entirety of our adult lives. Now the lights are partially on and I'm finding out that I'm a Colorado football fan while the rest of you are Texas football fans. Do you really think I have the background, the depth of experiences and depth of memories of CU Football to participate on an equal footing with the rest of you? Do you think, legitimately speaking, that the rest of you as a collective, will then treat me the same as you treat each other? Or will you as a collective treat me as that child that brags on something they've done? "I've got a Heisman winner too!" "Oh, that's nice dear. Hey, have you seen the new swingset in the backyard? You should go check it out." That's the world I woke up and realized I'm in now. I'm woefully short on experiences to be participating with my friends, peers and even loved ones now.

The last several posts have really served to highlight my point: "Weed bad" "Kids bad" "No, kids good!" And we all know there's roughly 1.7 MILLION posts on this board alone exhorting just how great weed is. And here I sit, not having any fucking clue how good, how bad it is/would be for me. Motherfucking exactly. Again, this is NOT ABOUT ME MISSING OUT ON GOOD EXPERIENCES. This is about me missing out on ALL experiences that would make me a COMPLETE person. BL, let me ask you: Now that you've done it, do you want to do it again? Did you learn something from it? And if you did, do you think there's any way you can describe the absolute full depth of the experience? Or were there some aspects of it that you'd have to experience personally in order to get the FULL, COMPLETE depth of knowledge?

I feel that the number and type of common experiences that I have in my life is much, much smaller and the list is MUCH more incomplete than the list of experiences held by my friends, peers and loved ones. I want to be clear that what I'm referring to is NOT a list of pleasurable experiences. It's experiences both positive and negative. Experiences that help make a person...well, whole. Complete. Even negative In the concept of Yin and Yang, I've got some Yang, and not a lot of Yin, and even the Yang list is shorter than those in my world. And as a result, I feel much smaller than those around me, and much more incomplete. Misshapen. Full of holes. I feel like I have a child's level of experience in a world of grown ups. In the interest of brevity, I'll list just a few. I've never smoked weed. Not once. And I went to college in Boulder for 5 years, for fucks sake. For that matter, I've never done ANY illegal recreational pharmaceutical, other than alcohol underage. I've never cheated on a woman I've been in a committed relationship with. Looked at other girls? Sure. Talked to/flirted with? Yep. But never touched, kissed or had sex with anyone else if I was in a committed relationship. I've never been arrested. Hell, I've only had 1 speeding ticket my whole damn life. I fully realize that not all of the above are positive, healthy experiences. Some may be positive to some, and negative to others. "So what? That just means you're a good person, and you haven't fucked up like the rest of us." Right? Not necessarily. I know THAT I shouldn't do those negative things. But I don't know the intricacies of WHY. I know a shit ton of good people that have fucked up, LEARNED from it, and used that knowledge and maybe those regrets to make themselves a better person. It's like telling a little kid "don't touch that stove. It's hot, and it'll hurt." He knows that it'll hurt, yep. But once he goes ahead and does it, he's gonna know EVERY LAST DETAIL of WHY it's a bad thing. Right now I feel like that little kid who's never done anything.

46. A good job. A good second job. An amazing daughter, and an equally amazing girlfriend. And I'm completely miserable right now. Of course, that's because of an existential crisis that hit me in the face like a sledgehammer....swung from the Concorde. 3 weeks ago the girlfriend told me something about her past that was like the last puzzle piece needed to figure out what the picture is, when you don't have the box. I've been fed little bits of data over the past 20-30 years and this was the last thing that tied them all together. It became clear that the number of what I'd consider common experiences that a large percentage, if not most, of the population has...... I don't. And the self confidence I had on who I was, how I fit into the universe around me, how big and complete my list of life experiences are is gone. It feels akin to believing, knowing, that you're in a 10x10 room, and then someone turned on some the lights and you find out that you're in a 500,000 SF warehouse. It's jarring and terrifying. I now feel incredibly small, woefully inadequate, and shockingly incomplete as a person. This has been as impactful on my psyche as my Dad's death 21 years ago. I've actually started seeing a therapist for it. She confirmed that it's an existential crisis, and not a run of the mill mid-life one. Somehow that's comforting that it's really as big a deal, to me, as I think it is. She also said that it's gonna be a long process, which I already kinda knew before I even reached out to her. And she said that this is an "opportunity for tremendous personal growth." Right now it sure as hell doesn't feel like it.

So, Bevo's post spurred some thought processes for me. It sounds like this virus has a particularly keen effect on the lungs. Has there been any correlation drawn between the severity of the virus and the notoriously shitty air quality in most major Chinese cities? I mean, if the pulmonary system of literally millions (billions?) of Chinese is already compromised by the place they unfortunately live, is it really surprising that all the deaths have been in China, and nothing other than hospitalization in all the other countries? While, we're at it, two other questions for those better educated than I: 1. What's the average recovery time after symptoms appear? I've seen 1 week, but I've never seen anything official. 2. After recovery, is the victim/patient now immune from further infections? Or is this a virus that has can't have an immunity built up to it?

Answer every question with: "I don't know. Why?" Chart the length in time of each answer to "Why?". Give the average.

Sweet Jesus. Talk about too much unstructured free time....

"Y'all just woke up this morning and took a whole bottle of stupid pills, didn't you?" ETA: (would be "dumbass pills", but little kids and all....)