When I was very young, we moved from our home village to the capital city. Pretty long distance, moved a lot.

CW: suicide and depression

Two years ago, I was suffering from the worst depression I’ve ever had. It’s chronic. I am often suicidal. But the feelings still range in grey, almost never the far extremes. I’m like a battery constantly bouncing between 10% and 50% charged.

But some time in the summer, it was at 1-5%. I was barely hanging on. Some days I nearly broke and I actively started looking for ways to off myself.

Thankfully, I’d worked on building an action plan for the different stages of severity in my depression. One of the actions I was obligated (to myself) to do was ask for help. But even in my 30s, I never really learned how. I’d almost rather chew my arm off than ask someone to help me, with anything. And even if I really needed help I never know how to ask for it, or know what I need.

After some meditation, I realized I just wanted comforting words from people who cared. So I sent a message to my friend group, told them what I was going through, and asked them to send me kind words in private, but like obviously how they truly feel, not just to stroke my ego. Be honest, be funny, if you care send me anything.

Crying just typing this out. The messages I received in reply… were everything. I got way more than I expected. Friends celebrated having me in their life. They called me funny names, like female goth Garfield. Some surprised me; one of my friends expressed that she thought I was so cool from the day she met me. My best friend’s was one of the best, it was just one line.

He said, “Happy you decided to let others be the kind of friend you would and have been for them.”

Our friends weren’t always curmudgeonly or stoic or anything, but in the aftermath of my request, people changed. Everyone started being much nicer to one another. We patched up old wounds. I’d say what happened was my friends started caring more for each other. It’s disgustingly cute. It melts my heart. My friends are the greatest people in the world. I’m furious that some people exist without friends like these. You deserve it as much as I do.

I am a father by choice, but I truly struggled as a parent for the first year or so of my first child’s life. I loved my son, in the way that I was absolutely certain that I would run into a burning building to save him, would gladly give my life to protect him, but I didn’t have that bond with him… if I’m being honest I think I didn’t truly like him during this time. It was more like a responsibility that I took very seriously than the kind of warm love that may be the ideal that people have in mind for how father’s feel about their children.

Once he had outgrown his crib, I decided to renovate a bedroom in our home for him. I painted, decorated, built furniture, and generally turned this room into a toddler’s paradise. It came time to let my son see it and my wife brought him to the room.

This child’s reaction was the most genuinely beautiful thing I had ever seen. He could barely form words at this age, but the sound of him shouting “Meees Happys!! Meeees Happppys!!!” over and over and screaming in pure joy as he explored this space was indescribable and will be forever etched into my heart until my dying day.

It absolutely took over my soul in a way that I can’t describe. From that point on I got it.

I tell this story to new dads in my life all the time because I wish I had known that I would get it eventually instead of feeling broken for the first 18 months of my son’s life.

I changed that day from a man doing his duty for his family to a dad and I never looked back.

My wife was in labor for 39 hours after months of a difficult pregnancy. I love my wife more than any other human on this planet, she is my partner, my best friend, and my ezer. After watching her struggle through labor for so long, she finally gave birth to our daughter. The nurses took my daughter to the corner of the room and I felt so proud of my wife. I was also exhausted, emotionally and physically, and I was so worried about her that I just wanted to be by her side and tell her that I loved her and I was so proud of her. She looked at me and put her hand on my arm and said “I’m ok, go see our daughter.” It hadn’t even been a thought because I was just so relieved my wife was ok.

I walked across the room with the firm belief that my heart was absolutely full of love for my wife and I didn’t understand at the time how I could ever love anyone as much as I did her. I walked to the warming table and saw my little one laying on a small pad surrounded by nurses. I put my hand on the clear plastic side of the contraption she was in and she reached out with her tiny hand and grabbed the end of my index finger. Something happened. I didn’t love my wife any less, but suddenly it was like a big double door in my heart was thrown open and there was this new giant space to love more than I ever imagined possible.

The time passed, the doctors left, and the nurses left. Mom fed her and then as she passed out for a well deserved sleep, I sat in the corner with my little one in my arms. I stared at her and she looked back up for just a minute before falling asleep. I sat and held her quietly as she slept and stared out the window with a feeling that nothing would ever be the same in my life from that moment on.

My mom died 5 months ago from MBC at 62. I was fortunate enough to be with her for the last few days. My husband and I drove overnight to get there, my brother and his partner did the same. My father and my aunt and us all took turns sitting with her, caring for her, doing everything we could to surround her with comfort and love.

The night she passed, we were all in the living room, she was in a hospital bed at this point, and we were all seated around her, watching a movie. She had been unconscious for days at that point but, for some reason, I had this feeling that she was looking at me. Logically, I know she wasn’t and that she was unconscious etc. But it still felt that way and I looked over at her and no one else was looking, they were all glued to the screen, I’m struggling to explain this but it felt like for a moment, everything stopped and her and I were alone in the room.

I blew her a kiss and waved goodbye, it was such a tender moment and somehow felt so intimate despite everyone being there. No one else noticed, it was just her and I for that brief moment. We were close and loved each other a lot, imperfectly at times, but a lot. I’m so grateful for that memory.

She took her last breath about 30 minutes later. We surrounded her bedside, held her hands and feet, I stroked her face and whispered to her as she slipped away. Yet, it was that brief, time-frozen moment when it felt like we said goodbye to each other that really wrecks me and comforts me at the same time. I miss her a lot. Fuck cancer.

Was forced out of my rental at short notice (barely within the confines of law) because the landlord’s son got out of jail and she wanted to move him in. No advance notice, of course.

This forced me into a situation where I had roommates from hell. For approximately two weeks. Then said roommate called the electrician for something minor and one thing led to another and the house was condemned.

So I had to move twice in two weeks. That really sucked

EDIT: oh shit I read that as WORST moving experience, not most lol. I’ll leave this here for posterity I guess

That’s the sort of thing I only talk about with people who have earned my trust.

One experience that I’m happy to share, however, is the best morning of my life. I met a girl who was way out if my league - I’m an androgynous looking lesbian who is far from pretty, and she was tall, feminine, and beautiful enough that she did occasional modeling work.

When we met I was living in a caravan in a friend’s back garden, it was squalid - mouldy and cold. She still lived with her parents, who were very loving, and their house always felt calming and warm, but there was no space.

Through a friend I found out about an abandoned house they’d spotted that looked in good condition, and on further inspection it was ideal - it still had water and power, but had been empty for a few years.

Me and her moved in there with basically nothing. She got a second hand bed for cheap, we cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, and I fixed the shower, all in one day.

I will never forget the feeling of waking up with her in my arms in our own bed, and knowing right through to my bones that I loved her completely. And she loved me back.

We ate cornflakes with room temperature milk in bed, and talked about how we could do the house up and live happily ever after. We talked about adopting kids, and how I’d get a steady job. We made love. We ate cornflakes for lunch too, because that was all we had.

It was magical.

Just over a year later we moved out of that house, going in the different directions that our lives were taking us.

I still love her with all my heart.

I moved to the NL from a poor country when 18 and my first job then was cleaning hotel rooms in Amsterdam. I had to take the train every day, for context I made about 550 euros a month (yes it’s way below minimal wage, it was a scammy company where the hours you worked were calculated based on how many rooms you cleaned and how much time they count for each, we were on 0 hours contracts).

The train for the entire month would have cost me something like 90 Euros if I recall correctly. I had discovered that since the trains were double deckers I could get on at 1 end of the train and watch which floor the conductor is coming on, then walk through the other floor to the other end of the train, repeat until I got off - so I could skim without a ticket.

It was often the same conductor on the same track and I assumed he was completely unaware of me, but one day I was so exhausted from work I missed him and he got to me and asked for my ticket - as you can imagine I couldn’t really afford the fine. I don’t know what he saw, but when I obviously couldn’t produce a ticket he said he just had to check something and basically dicked around for 2-3 mins occasionally asking me chit-chat questions until we got to the next station, then told me he has to deal with the station and he’d be back in a few mins for my ticket and winked at me. Obviously I got off and waited for the next train. I was very thankful and paid more attention going forward to avoid the situation again. Luckily my situation got better shortly after and I didn’t need to skim anymore, nor take that train.

About 2 years later I was doing well in life and was going back to the town I used to live in to meet a friend, and by luck the same conductor was there - I didn’t realise until he asked for my ticket. I repeated the situation to him to see if he recognised me and he said while he didn’t recognise me, but he remembered me. He said he saw me most days when I hid from him, but he also saw me looking beaten down, sometimes in my house cleaner uniform. He obviously couldn’t just give me a permanent free ride but he also didn’t have to run after me, so since I gave him the opportunity to turn a blind eye and it seemed like I needed it he did what he could so he wouldn’t have to fine me.

I thanked him (I was incredibly touched to learn how much he was doing for me, it wasn’t 1 time he was good to me, it was every time) and offered to treat him to dinner or drinks or something I could repay him with, but he just said he was glad to see I was doing better and to try and pay it forward if I can, said his goodbye and went on to work.

10/10 person.

This isn’t moving in a happy way at all, I’m gonna gloss over a lot of the details, but still, trigger warning

I’m a 911 dispatcher. This was pretty early on in my career, but I’d already handled a lot of crazy calls, and I was sort of nearing the point where I felt like I’d heard a little bit of everything, and this was the call that took me back down a peg to realize that there is always something new waiting around the corner for you to figure out how to deal with.

It’s not a story I tell very often, not that I’m particularly traumatized by it and don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that for as much as it affected me, and it certainly affected my caller, there’s not actually that much of a story to tell. But it is one that has stuck with me in a way few other calls I’ve taken have.

I got a call from an absolutely hysterical young woman, screaming and crying in a way I’d never heard before, and I’d heard plenty of screaming in this job by that point. It took me a minute to get her calmed down enough to get any clue about what was going on.

She had come home and found that her partner had killed himself. It was obviously far too late to do anything to attempt to save him. Like I said, there was nothing much for me to do, basically I just had to get her address, enter a few short lines of notes, send police & EMS, tell her to wait outside, and wait on the phone with her if she wanted me to.

And honestly, even if there had been more for me to do, I doubt I could have gotten her to listen to it. Basically every sentence from her was punctuated with that screaming.

Screaming is really the wrong word for it, so is crying, wailing is probably the best word we have, but I’m not quite sure it does it justice. In that sound you can find just about the full spectrum of human emotion- there is grief and sadness of course, there is also anger, there’s confusion, and fear, it’s a cry for help, it’s a warning to others, and just as much as anything else, there is love in that sound.

It’s a truly terrible sound, and in its own macabre way, it’s kind of beautiful. When you hear it, it cuts right through to some really primal part of your brain. From the moment I heard it when I answered the call, I knew this was something different from anything I’d heard before even if I didn’t quite know what it was yet.

It is the sound of someone learning about the unexpected death of someone they truly loved.

And when the pieces connected, my whole understanding of the world shifted a bit in a way that’s really hard to explain.

It’s a really weird way to think of it, but I sometimes compare it to learning that Santa isn’t real, you can’t un-learn it, and once you have, it’s sad because there’s a bit less magic in the world than you thought there was before, but there’s also something strangely fulfilling about knowing a bit more about how the world actually works and if you look at it the right way, you get a glimpse behind the curtain to see all of the love that made it seem like the magic really was real.

It was the first time I heard it, it wasn’t the last, and I’m sure I’ll hear it again. I’ve heard it from women, I’ve heard it from men, I’ve heard it from lovers, parents, children, siblings, the young and the old. It doesn’t always sound exactly the same, but when you hear it you immediately recognize it for what it is.

It doesn’t come with every call I’ve had where a loved one has died, and I won’t claim that those people were loved any less, there are countless different circumstances and everyone grieves in their own ways.

My grandparents both lived with us for most of my life. Over the summers when I was a kid, my brother and I would stay up late playing video games and my grandparents would sit in the same room watching TV. My grandfather would make fun of whatever my brother and I were doing. My grandmother would tell him to leave us alone. It was gentle fun ribbing all around.

My freshmen year of college, my grandmother died suddenly while she was visiting my aunt in California. I didn’t even know she was sick. It was such a shock.

My grandfather was devastated. He used to tell my dad “I had no idea how much I needed her”. He was diagnosed with lung cancer a month after she died. My parents and my aunts and uncles all took turns taking him to chemotherapy. We all tried to keep him going, but the dude had given up. He seemed like he didn’t think there was any point in going on without her. We all tried to raise his spirits so he could keep fighting, but he just didn’t have it in him anymore.

My sophomore of college, my mom would call me periodically and tell me “I think Dada is going to die today.” It happened so much, eventually it just became background noise to me. I was home on spring break, I went to see him at the rehab center and he was telling me he could see grandmother. Being 19, I figured he was just delirious from all the drugs. I went home and went to bed. Next morning, my mom called me and said “Dada got sent to the ER, I think today is the day”. He had been sent to the ER so many times at that point, I was kinda numb to it and I just went back to sleep. I woke up an hour later and got my brother “hey we gotta go to the hospital and check on dada”. No rush, very routine at this point.

We get there and the doctor wants to talk to my dad like asap. So I called him and told him the doctor needs to talk to you. My dad rushed over. Doc tells us my grandfather had a GI bleed but he was too frail to survive the procedure to fix it. So there was nothing they could do.

My cousin came after that. So we sat there in the ER for hours. Looking at the heart monitor. Watching it slowly count down from 100. It took hours. The four of us silently sitting there. None of us knew what to say.

As soon as the heart rate monitor dropped to 0, we were all in tears. Nobody could speak.

A friend of mine and her husband were expecting twins, but the viability of the pregnancy was uncertain. They were warned there might be complications, but they hoped and prayed through to delivery.

The twins were born (two girls), but one of them immediately had some complications. She was moved to the NICU and the doctors weren’t sure if she’d pull through. She showed signs of improvement and fought her little heart out for those rough first few weeks.

After a month, things were looking more positive. But then she suddenly took a turn for the worse, and within a few days she passed.

A funeral for an infant is one of the most heart-wrenching experiences I have ever known, especially for a child who has been alive long enough for the parents to develop a stronger bond. This baby had bonded particularly strong with her dad (her sister seemed to favor her mom). So when the dad was invited to share words if he wanted, he walked up to the tiny casket and sang a lullaby while he wept.

And every person in the room wept with him. The guests, the minister, the funeral director. I’ve never experienced sadness like it.

I moved 560 miles a few years ago.

cw

I lived in Orlando when the Pulse nightclub shooting happened. I also used to work in the arts and was transitioning into a different industry when it happened. In the days following the shooting, every arts organization in the area contacted each other about putting together some kind of tribute. They asked me to stage manage it. There was next to no rehearsal time, so many opportunities for people to get self-conscious and let their ego take over (and there’s no shortage of that in the arts), and everything just… came together. My boss volunteered to be my assistant for the day, because titles didn’t matter and everything was about making this beautiful offering to the community to help process what had happened. Anytime someone would ask, “would you consider trying this crazy thing?” the answer was always, “Absolutely. We can do that.” Local companies donated supplies. World-renowned artists shared the stage with virtual-nobodies, and everyone was so earnest and genuine in the offering they wanted to make to their community that there just wasn’t room for anything except the very best of every person. No one knew how it was going to turn out, and the fact that it ended up being perfect was a testament to everyone’s trust, talent, and courage. It was the most stunning display of collective selflessness I’ve ever witnessed.

There was this guy who started college when I was chairman of the study association for IT. He was a bit of a geek even by IT standards, but all in all okay guy who brought a lot of enthusiasm.

He was never really understood by his surroundings, had a tough childhood with some trauma. Went into special needs schools and working his way up to study IT at a good school. He was like 26 when he started, the more usual age being 18 or even 17.

He was of course always welcome at our study association and everyone accepted him for who he was. He ended up also doing board work for the study association.

Couple years later, I’d already graduated, we met at a general meeting for the association and afterwards he took me apart to say that he’d graduated. He said that it was because of me giving a speech to all first-years that he’d felt more or less at home, felt confident enough to join the association, found friends and that that helped him get his diploma. He said it was because of me he got where he was.

I told him it was not because of me. He got to college before even meeting me. I was just there along the way to nudge him, unknowingly, towards a group of positive people who were always happy to help.

He’d had tears in his eyes and I have him a quick hug. I then told him this study association did a lot of good for me too. Sometimes all you need to do is step into something to generate great change in your life.

The Wisconsin Act 10 protests in 2011. That was when newly-elected governor Scott Walker sprung a surprise bill to gut public sector unions. There were many moving moments: Protests of nearly 100,000 people at the State Capitol; the day that farmers brought their tractors for a “Pulling Together” protest; watching people on their hands and knees wiping down the stone floors of the occupied Capitol to protect them from winter grit people tracked in; seeing the board at Ian’s Pizza recording the geographic origins of donations to feed the protesters as it grew to include all 50 states, and then the world, even Egypt and Tunisia (the Arab Spring was going on, too).

But weirdly, the most moving to me was the day that the firefighters joined in. I was at the Capitol early in the protests, when it felt tentative, driven by the graduate student union, uncertain of wider support. Then word spread through the crowd: The firefighters were coming. This was exciting, because the Act spared public safety unions, so it didn’t directly affect them.

But, they didn’t just join the crowd. No, the firefighters came marching in the doors in formation, led by bagpipers making a glorious din, in full regalia, and carrying union banners. They stood at attention in the rotunda while the pipers played, and made goddamn sure that everybody knew that they were in this fight, including the governor and legislators who would hear it from their offices, and let it be known that they had the backs of the other unions. Solidarity!