I won’t be a father and possibly not even an uncle.

It’s been 9 years, I’m married again (happily), and my ex-wife is never coming back.

It’s difficult to go from best friends who tell eachother everything, to strangers.

It took a lot of therapy for me to realize that we both played a part in our marriage ending, and it wasn’t all my fault. But, I also learned in the process that my childhood really screwed me up, and I needed to deal with it, and reconcile with the fact that I didn’t have a loving childhood. The abuse, both verbal, physical, and sexual has had a lasting effect on me as an adult.

But, most importantly, I learned that I can heal from all of it, and grow as a person.

I think she’s happy now, and so am I. So even though I still miss her once im a while, I know things worked out for the best.

1. People die unexpectedly. Tell anyone and everyone that you love verbally that you love them (even if it’s man to man). Don’t leave anyone guessing as to how you felt about them.

2. Not everyone is a friend for life, even if you’ve been friends for 5/10/20/40/80 years.

3. People change and you can’t control that.

4. Recording the people you love speaking; preferably while you ask them about their lives. See #1

I’ll probably die a virgin. They won’t be able to come up with a movie about that. Lame.

Realizing that I’ll never be able to achieve any of my previous hopes or “dreams”, it’s too late, and that life is fundamentally uneven and unfair.
Similarly, realizing there’s no sense of “karma” or balance in real life, it’s just a crutch that people can use to justify or rationalize things.

Where will be a last time we do something in our lives for everything

They never loved me and I’ll be ok without them

That ultimately, no matter how many people I surround myself with, I will always feel alone.

That i wasnt born the opposite gender and that i was born in a transphobic country

Knowing the people who I ideally want to date or would have a better chance of dating, will forever be out of my reach because of missed opportunities in the past. For example, there’s a couple of friends I know I would’ve loved to date. One of them I could’ve had but nobody said anything to eachother and it had been 14 years ago when that chance came and went. We just mesh well together and can go the distance when it comes to conversing and getting along. But, I’m forever friend-zoned because nobody said anything when emotions were high back then.

And another thing is accepting the fact that you aren’t as compatible with some of your friends when you thought you were. The painful part is realizing this after so long. I had a massive friend exodus last year. I’ve lost friends whom I’ve been with for 15 years, 10 years, 5 years and 3 years in that order. And it was simply because at somepoint, we just ignored the part where we weren’t as heavily compatible as we once were. And it showed the more times we were at odds with eachother. Hell, I lost another friend this year who I had hit it off well for 3 going 4 years and it’s the same example.

That a bunch of barbarians from north and western Europe whose primary values were ownership, sequestration, exploitation, and domination set the political, economic, social, and psychological agenda for an entire planet. True, this may have been the mode of survival from Rome to the Renaissance, but why are we still locked into it now?

The next part of this comment includes crude generalizations of 1st to 18th century for every continent. Historians, feel free to clarify. Ahistorical boobs, at least be willing to ask questions before you attack.

Turtle Island sustainability and oral history, Asian cosmic coexistence, Middle Eastern knowledge preservation, African social development, East Asian detente, Australo-Pacific deep time and vast exploration, and/or panhumanistic duty to family — no. Every other culture and value system expressed by non-Europeans was summarily suppressed, violently undercut, and disregarded as backward, non-Christian drivel. This continues into today.

Gangsters, germ warfare, rapid industrialization — yes. Every means of short-term gain, power concentration, expansionism, and advantage-taking is normal. Inter- and sometimes intra-familial feuding, marriage pacts, and warmongering is normal.

Sometimes, it seems that almost ANY other system than the one we have now — centered on wealth and weapons — would be an improvement. However, ever other system can not contend with the threats of wealth and weapons.

I’ll never be the same again after my brain injury.

In some ways thats a good thing but Im not 100# sure I’ll get all the walking stuff back exactly

That I was being complacent to support animal cruelty just because I liked egg salad and cream cheese.

I was vegetarian for 7 years. I thought that only obvious things like meat and leather involved animal cruelty.

I was very wrong. And when people showed me I was wrong, I took a good while to process it. “But the cow needs to be alive for milk. But the chicken needs to be alive for eggs. Surely it’s not THAT bad”.

It’s a lot worse than that bad. Once it fully got through my skull just what kind of cruel practices were involved, not by choice l, but by industry NECESSITY, with the animal products that felt safe, I broke down crying while I was trying to reconcile the fact that I was letting my taste buds drive me to support terrible things.

I did finally quit. These days I don’t really miss much, food wise. And life lesson wise, it helps enable me to be a less unethical consumer. A store/product is involved with something morally terrible, like donating a lot of money to fascism? Welp, bye! No more money for you from me!

Loss of friendships can be the result of very minor events that triggered someone or were not communicated well. This does not mean that anyone is necessarily “bad” or lacks care for the world. That can be true but it is not always true. The hardest thing to come to terms with is that despite the above in many cases there is no way back to friendship with that person

That an unfortunately large portion of my family are stupid MAGA’ts. I always knew they weren’t exactly tip top in the faculties department but they usually had the right directions. That’s shits completely gone now. Sort of in relation to that. Just how dumb the average level is. The lack of troubleshooting capabilities, the disregard of knowledge, the irrational hate for the ‘other’ the just complete contempt for anyone who doesn’t directly effect you day to day. The schdenfraude from the faceless trump voters is a nice trickle but it’s becoming maddening how much of it there is. I’m finally beginning to understand the need for so much history in school. Unfortunately there is an uncomfortably large portion of the population that simply can’t learn from words and can only understand experience. It almost feels like a hidden great filter.