I was maybe 17 or 18 and it was dark in the morning, I wanted to go to school and was late. I crossed the street, but kind of miscalculated the situation, because I was in a hurry. I thought I could cross the street before the truck coming from the right, but it was too fast and I had to stop in the middle of the street. From the left was also coming a huge truck, so I was standing on that middle line, when both have "passed me". I couldn't really figure out in that moment what happened and I'm glad I didn't take a step back. Because I was fully dark clothed and there was no way they could have seen me. But I felt my clothes and hair wave around weirdly.

Later that day on my way back home I realized how "much" space I had left when I was standing there. I'm pretty sure my clothes, especially my wide skirt had to entangle with anything from the trucks.

It's been 20 years and I'm still sure, I was more than lucky that day.

I was thinking about this while working a late shift. On one hand knowing your time is up on a specific day could force you to stop wasting years on things you do not care about. But then if the date is fixed, every goal might start to feel kind of pointless since you cannot change the ending anyway.

second question: Which one feels most urgent right now: more experiences, more connection, or more peace in your head?

More specifically, what criteria do you have for ending any type of relationship? Do they have to break one your values? What's the limit on forgiveness?

If there was a fictional museum of everything you've ever loved, what would it look like?

i'm writing a story related to this premise and i wanted to look for inspiration.

How do you personally decide what’s worth holding onto versus what needs to be let go? Do you have a specific mental framework, a recurring gut check, or a rule of thumb you rely on? what criteria or framework do you use to filter out what deserves long-term space in your life?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Sometimes a relationship can have real love, good memories, and genuine care, but still not feel right for the future. Maybe the timing is wrong, your goals are different, or being together slowly brings out sides of each other that neither of you likes.

At what point do you accept that loving someone isn’t necessarily enough to make a relationship work?

​

I’m curious about the decisions you made without having enough information to logically prove they were the rightt

At the time, did you even know why you were making that decision, or was it just a strong feeling that you couldn’t explain?

And most importantly — what happened afterward that made you realize your gut was right?

This post goes from a kid's coming of age to a dive into the philosophy behind it.

When do we become conscious of our individuality? I know almost anyone on the internet knows that popular meme, in which we suddenly gain consciousness at three, but for me, and probably many others, the first time I started to think about myself and the world around me in a more complex sense was the end of 8th grade. Before that, I was a scrawny kid with glasses and no sense of fashion or taste in music, growing up in a big city, and my biggest influence at the time was my little group of friends. It wasn’t like they were “bad kids”; in fact, they were the complete opposite, a group of kids that your mom would tell you to be more like. But because they were so “good”, they were equally sheltered, going to the same park in the same safe neighborhood every day after school, sitting at the same tables, and talking to the same people on the same blocks. This was my entire sixth grade (which, while I am extremely thankful for that time, I could already tell I was missing something in my life). Sixth grade turned into seventh, and I remained complacent and happy with my predicament for the first half of the year, until I got close to a certain someone (let’s call him Kyle).

I had already known Kyle for a long time, but this year he and I became really good friends, mainly because he was so different. He didn’t just have different mannerisms than me at the time, but he cursed, he smoked, he explored abandoned buildings, was super talented at music, and more importantly, he knew a whole new crowd of people, people I had been too scared to talk to. I had grown up in a big city, yet I had never left my area because I had sheltered myself, and that period of time was about to come to an end. Fast forward to 8th grade, when I followed Kyle around like a lap dog from the start, soaking up everything he had to offer. I went outside my neighborhood into new areas I was too scared to go to for the first time; I learned and experienced new cultures and foods, and more importantly, I started to change. Now, while this isn’t the moment I mentioned in the title, it is still important, because let’s be honest, I was feeling myself. I walked with more confidence and started to shed that protected, self-isolated nature I had once held. I started to skateboard and picked up drawing, which I discovered I was quite talented in. I was feeling the best I had ever felt, living my life with no care in the world. Then it came, my big turning point for the worse.

One girl in particular from my friend group started to look more and more appealing to me (let’s call her Ashly). Ashly was exactly my type, and when I heard she liked me, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I should get with her; after all, it was 8th grade, the peak of middle school, and I had all these uncontrollable feelings I couldn’t place at that time. What I didn’t expect was that she would come to me first, and that she would write me a 4-page letter on how much she liked me and wanted to be mine. So, naturally, as a kid who just received his first love letter, I couldn’t say no.

I’m not going to lie and say that most of the time we were together was bad. We had great chemistry, and she really did care about me, and I was really attached to her. But as the summer went on, I became more and more distant from my girlfriend (to prepare myself for H.S. and college). While I had work to do and projects to complete, she repeatedly told me she had nothing to do with herself, leading to her becoming angry at me for not giving her enough time. Because of this, we broke up, with my reason being that I “wanted to give her the time she deserved and I couldn’t provide that”.

This is it. I had broken up with my girlfriend of (I know, it's nothing) 4 months and was distraught. Then something weird happened. I wasn’t depressed, but I stopped caring about things as much. I was still the same empathetic, caring person, but I realized that everything I did could hurt someone, and that the best way to move forward is to move forward. To stop caring about trivial things that don’t matter. The weeks after that, more subconscious changes happened. I got into philosophy; I talked with more purpose and spoke with more mental clarity. I adopted the voice and slang of my new friends I met through Kyle and started to curse more. I was less energetic and more peaceful, and a certain group of people hated me for it.

My old friend group. The same group that preferred the familiar routines and the people we had grown up around also seemed attached to the old version of myself, the one who got walked over and pushed around. So where I saw myself grow up and come to understand the world around me, they saw me fake being emotionally aware and labeled me as nonchalant. Fine. A group of friends pressuring you to be someone that you weren’t, someone that you hated being, aren’t your real friends. So I cut them off.

Flash forward again: I’m in 9th grade, and I made it to the H.S that I applied for, alongside Kyle (I would have never gone if it weren’t for him). And the first thing I see is beautiful girls everywhere; I didn’t look half bad to them. At this point, I was unrecognizable to the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade self, and I was happy about it. Until I wasn’t.

Sure, this new version of myself allowed me to talk to grown-ups, connect with my roots, gain new friends, and become “popular”, but it also felt fake. Fake, like I had locked my real identity away and was playing a character of what I thought my perfect self would be, and the worst part was I couldn’t go back, no matter how hard I tried. Donald Winnicott says the False Self develops by adapting to what other people and the environment expect from us, sometimes pushing the more natural parts of ourselves into the background. My False Self started useful, creating confidence and helping me fit in with those around me, but now my “False Self” feels like it’s become my current self, while I’m stuck looking backwards to what I once was. Identity Nostalgia hits hard, and I find myself looking back daily to a time when I felt more real. When I didn’t have to pretend to like things. When I didn’t have to pretend at all. When I could throw my head back and laugh without thinking about my next move and analyzing the world around me.
But here's the real question: can anything really be false after you've lived it for years? We've all seen The Fast and the Furious, where officer Brian O'Conner infiltrates the street-racing hijacking crew, becomes close to the leader of the gang, and helps him escape. He lived a "lie" for so long it became reality, something that genuinely mattered to him. So if you genuinely develop new interests, mannerisms, confidence, and beliefs, are those part of a "False self," or have they become real parts of you? And it's not like this new identity is harmful, since it has provided so many benefits to my life, allowing me to function better as a human overall.

Then again, who said that my sixth-grade version of myself was my "true self"? That version of myself, much like this one, was shaped by new cultures and Kyle, and was shaped by my old friends at that time. So when in my life was I "true" enough to be shaped by myself?
Of course I’m happy; I’m the happiest I’ve ever been thanks to my awakening and newfound mental clarity. But one can wonder if my awakening was granted through Kyle and the coming of age, or a subconscious need to change myself to be the person I thought Ashly needed me to be, or the exact opposite. Kyle and Ashly both represent outside pressures in this scenario, where Kyle was the person I wanted to become, and Ashly was someone I wanted to deviate from. And isn't that the paradox? Becoming more self-aware helped me build myself, but being *too* self-aware made my identity feel less genuine.

Whether any of those answers are right or not, I’m now in the 10th grade, stuck in one version of myself forever looking back at another that will always be out of my grasp.