s00ngone
All you can feel is the weather
- Mar 21, 2025
- 12
Hi, everyone. I'm a new member to the site but a recent lurker. For a little background on me: I'm a 22 year old guy living with my parents and younger sister in California. I've struggled with depression, anhedonia, you name it for the better part of my life, which have always made living difficult, but recent events have pushed me over the edge in a very particular way. I'm going to detail my life (mostly) up until now, so get ready for this to be a long one.
I don't remember much about my early life these days - it's all blurred into a past that doesn't even feel like my own experiences. But here goes.
I was born in Mexico. My mom crossed the border with me into the US three times when I was 1. She told me the story recently of having to clamp my mouth shut near some border patrol officers so I wouldn't cry and holding until I turned blue. When the danger passed and I wouldn't come to she thought she'd killed me. We made it into the US, to Phoenix, AZ, where I grew up. She'd married my bio dad in Mexico but eventually decided to divorce him due to his alcohol addiction (he's still drinking to this day). She, my bio dad and I were staying at my bio dad's nephew's when we made it to Phoenix, and over time my mom and my bio dad's nephew started to fall in love. He'd take my mom and me out places while my bio dad was out drinking for days at a time, buy groceries to feed us, buy my diapers, etc. Just generally being more involved and responsible for my mom and me than my father was. Pretty soon after, he kicks my father out and my mom decides to make him my stepdad.
Life in Phoenix is pretty standard, from what I can remember, for a Mexican kid growing up in the states. We're middle class, my stepdad works construction so we can afford a decent house, I get the videogames and books I love, family comes over for holidays, etc. My parents are definitely their own flavor of strict - I remember having to do handwriting practice and study articles out of Spanish magazines - but it was good, good enough, and a few years later my sister is born, making us a family of 4.
I was definitely a handful as a kid, not because I was a troublemaker (quite the opposite) but because I definitely had some undiagnosed auDHD going on and it made any kind of fitting in, at school or at home, difficult. I didn't have proper friends at all in elementary school, a trend that continues through the rest of my life up until now. I What I lacked in charisma I made up for in intelligence, I guess, being the kind of kid who'd look forward to spelling bees every year. My mom had the option to have me skip a couple grades several times but decided not to for my sake. In 5th grade, my teacher recommended me as a candidate for a scholarship program that would award 8 students out of a pool of about 200 with a scholarship opportunity that would cover private schooling costs all the way up to university. That is, it would've been a free ride to college.
I say "would've been" because the next few years would be the most chaotic years of my life - I'd never make it to college.
I actually earned the scholarship after a rigorous vetting process of testing, book reports, an in-person and home interview and other things. I do remember when my mom got the call and I was literally jumping for joy in our living room. It was the happiest moment of my life up until then... quickly dashed by the news that my mom's immigration status had caught up to her and she was being deported.
I'd only finished summer school. The deportation wasn't "get out of the country immediately", closer to "you have 6 months to a year to leave", but my mom and dad decided to leave sooner than later. I was devastated. It became a choice: leave with them and lose the scholarship, or stay behind at the scholarship's residential home. Under normal circumstances, students from the community program could interview and do a house visit a few weeks/months in advance to see if it was a good fit. In my case, it was about a week or two max to decide: was I staying or was I going?
I ended up staying. My mom tells me I was eager to stay even though she told me that I'd be leaving behind my family. The way I remember it, it was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't leave behind such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Regardless, the next two years would be a unique kind of downward spiral.
My parents and sister left me on the porch of the Boys' House with my two houseparents, Susie and Ivan. Susie was in her 30s, from Iowa, a tennis player. Ivan was a tall Croatian guy, also in his 30s, devout Catholic but otherwise a chill guy. They would be my parents for the next 2 years. I was 11. My roommate was 17, on account of my "being mature enough for my age to handle it" (spoiler: I was not) and the next youngest boy was 14.
If fitting in was a challenge before, I was a complete outcast there. That's not to say I wasn't cared for - the houseparents did their best with me, I think, in the middle of an unfortunate situation. Mine wasn't the worst reason for being there, either, by far. One of the other boys was an African refugee with no surviving family and no birth records, so the program and houseparents didn't even know how old he was. Still, I was deeply depressed, and the cycle of poor performance began. My 6th grade school year at a Jesuit Catholic middle school year began with high hopes and high grades, but I couldn't seem to participate. (This will become a theme.) I aced tests most of the time, but assignments and projects were impossible for me to finish because I'd procrastinate and avoid the work until it was a mountain I couldn't dent.
If I could summarize my time at the scholarship in a few words, I'd call it "wasted potential." And I don't even say that disparagingly - it's just what I imagine anybody would say seeing the sad way I sank further and further into depression, anxiety, self-isolation, self-loathing... I remember a long stretch of time when I'd get home from school and immediately go to sleep, just to avoid the world while I could.
Around this time, I was also grappling with my sexuality. I encountered porn pretty early, always preferring same-sex scenarios in my fanfics and videos and Rule 34 searches. My 17-year-old roommate became an object of fixation for me during my time there, somewhere between love, idolization and outright worship. I distinctly remember how much it burned to see how naturally /good/ he seemed at everything, how charismatic and loved he was, while I felt like a piece of shit, frankly. I hated myself because I wasn't him, and because he didn't want me. Being 17, he naturally didn't care much for giving an 11 year old the light of day.
I had therapists over the years. They were pretty great, from what I can remember, at least at the time. One guy, Roberto, pretty much singlehandedly kept me afloat that first year. But I also distinctly remember how impenetrable the awfulness, the sadness, the horrible feelings seemed. Through the community, people could sign up to be "mentors" to us kids in their spare time, and I was lucky enough to get an older woman named Eileen as a mentor. She was an interior designer, infinitely kind, just a beautiful person who believed in me wholeheartedly - but even she wasn't enough to penetrate the darkness. We once went out to see the Goosebumps film, then visited a botanical garden for a light show at night and I remember how /sour/ I felt, and acted, like I needed the world to know I was hurting and nothing could make me feel better.
I don't resent little me for that at all. I was in pain. I just wish it could've been different.
By the end of the first year, it was obvious that I was in danger of being expelled from the scholarship. I knew this, and in my anxiety about being "kicked out", as I'd always phrased it, I asked my roommate how he felt about me potentially leaving. This was after a few weeks of "testing" whether he'd care to start a conversation with me if I didn't say anything after we were both in bed. Unsurprisingly, nothing. So when I broke that silence and the response from someone I idolized so hard was, "It'd be weird not having someone in the room with me, but I wouldn't miss you 'cause you're kind of annoying"...
It broke me. People ask about words that stick with you for your entire life, those are mine. They seem kind of silly in retrospect, but in the moment they were totally devastating. I ended up coming back to the scholarship when Susie vouched for me, but for the entire next year (and for many years after that), I felt entirely unable to be myself. I guess I must've always had an obsessive-compulsive personality, because from then onwards I couldn't go a single second without hyperawarely monitoring myself for whether I was "being annoying" or not. I became my own mental warden. I cared so thoroughly what people thought of me, or would think of me, that I lost what it meant to be "myself" at all.
The second year, though? More of the same. Even worse, actually. My grades start great only to gradually slip out of my fingers, my mental health continues to falter leading up to a "cry for help" where I scratch my wrist with a pin and the houseparents have to lock all the sharps up - it's a mess, for complicated reasons. You might be inclined to think it's only because of what's going on with school and being away from my family, but I remember myself also being influenced by my roommate's own depression after the death of his grandma, so much so that I threatened suicide, was hospitalized and ended up going through a mental health rehab center... which, two weeks later, did not have the intended effect.
I was definitely getting kicked out when the school year was about over and my grades were way below where they needed to be. My roommate graduates from his private high school and my only recourse is to spend all afternoon in the house's rec room clumsily playing Melanie Martinez's "Dead To Me" on guitar. Yeah, it's as cringe as it sounds.
So my stepdad picks me up from the Boys' House to move to Tijuana. I start 8th grade there, living in the house that my parents had built from scratch on their plot of land they bought when they first moved. It's not great. The quality of education and standard of living is much lower, and I'm actively not learning much. Mostly, I'm the weird "American kid", practically the exchange student who people would ask to say things in English all the time. I had a small friend group I spent most of my time with, and one guy I'd even invite over sometimes, but I remember it as a very unremarkable, uneventful year except when I found out we were moving to California when I finished the school year.
I bought these really elaborate, thoughtful gifts for each of my friends, but none of them really cared. From what I can remember, at least. I recall being really crushed that none of them seemed at all grateful for the probably $100 I'd spent between them on gifts I'd spent weeks planning.
We moved to California without a place to live lined up. This meant moving in with an older couple that were family friends and starting high school at the school by their senior community a week or so late. My parents surfed the housing market for 6 months until they found our current house. In that time, we moved from that senior community to living with my stepdad's boss's daughter at the construction company he was working with at the time, who was friends with my mom. That relationship ended up being shallow and short-lived.
My relationship with my only friend in high school, though? I'd never recover.
I met them in our English class freshman year. We happened to pair up for a Shakespeare sonnet activity and they asked for my Instagram. We seemed to hit it off immediately, becoming instant friends, quickly growing inseparable. I hadn't had a great time with the transition to high school, with such bad anxiety that I had to email my counselor to walk me through the lunch line so I wouldn't starve every day. No friends yet, either. So this friendship felt like a real godsend, and in many ways, it was at the time. But the high highs would make for some catastrophic lows over the years.
At some point into our friendship, they revealed to me that they'd been diagnosed with BPD and that I was their favorite person. Being a generally empathetic and loving person, I told them that wasn't a problem - I didn't know what I was agreeing to. Their entire life came to depend on me, on my favor, on my attention and availability, to the extent that when I seemed angry or out of sorts they would often spiral out of control and threaten suicide. They came from a deeply unstable household. Their mother had died a few years prior, and then their grandpa, who was their only remaining source of stability. They lived with their abusive, uncompromisingly awful grandmother and a satellite system of uncles and aunts who were all either malignant drug addicts, leeches, outright terrible people or a combination of the three.
As you can imagine, my grades weren't doing so great at this point, either. Altogether, I barely scraped by in high school, and this friendship didn't help. I spent most of my time that should otherwise have been spent socializing with groups, in clubs, on my assignments, etc. damage controlling for this person and their shitty, fucked-up life. I loved them. I didn't /want/ to abandon them, because they were important to me, but it's not hard to see now that I took on an immense responsibility so much bigger than me, or that I or any one person could handle.
This wasn't the only thing going on in high school. At some point I meet this guy from Honduras on a Discord server and we start "dating" - another short-lived romp that ended in heartbreak when he didn't want to be as exclusive as I thought. I meet some 36 year old dude on Reddit who chats me up talking about "waiting till I'm 18 so we can be together." My best friend tells my high school counselor about this and it doesn't go further than that.
For several months, I end up tangled up in the roleplay scene on Twitter for a video game, Detroit: Become Human, to the detriment of my life and grades. At first, it's innocent enough, something I do in my free time, but it quickly starts taking over my life. I'd spend hours bouncing between accounts and juggling interactions in this fictional world I was sinking into. At this point I'm 16, but I lie about my age to have NSFW chats with people.
The next year, I join mock trial. That's a real high point for me, finally having both a community and something to invest myself in, though it's a lot of additional stress while my grades are tanking, my relationship with my BPD best friend is turbulent as ever, and I'm navigating a "relationship" with a guy I met in my Algebra class. This ends up being more of a drawn-out non-relationship where I'm so depressed and numb that I can't even tell if I feel anything for this guy. Together with the jealousy from my best friend, this is all so insanely stressful I develop a lump in my throat during finals week of first semester.
Come March, COVID hits and we're all sent home for the long stay inside. Now would be a good time to mention that things with my family were not a-okay as soon as I moved back in with them. There was a profound disconnect between me and my mom, and barely a relationship at all between me and my stepdad. We've never been close, I've never felt understood, and over the years I recede further and further into myself, into video games, into escapism.
I'm going to cut this post here because I'm quite fatigued writing it and I honestly don't feel like I'm being as descriptive or concise as I'd like to be. I've always considered myself a good writer, but lately, and ever since my SI really came on strong, I just don't care enough. Next post coming soon. (:
I don't remember much about my early life these days - it's all blurred into a past that doesn't even feel like my own experiences. But here goes.
I was born in Mexico. My mom crossed the border with me into the US three times when I was 1. She told me the story recently of having to clamp my mouth shut near some border patrol officers so I wouldn't cry and holding until I turned blue. When the danger passed and I wouldn't come to she thought she'd killed me. We made it into the US, to Phoenix, AZ, where I grew up. She'd married my bio dad in Mexico but eventually decided to divorce him due to his alcohol addiction (he's still drinking to this day). She, my bio dad and I were staying at my bio dad's nephew's when we made it to Phoenix, and over time my mom and my bio dad's nephew started to fall in love. He'd take my mom and me out places while my bio dad was out drinking for days at a time, buy groceries to feed us, buy my diapers, etc. Just generally being more involved and responsible for my mom and me than my father was. Pretty soon after, he kicks my father out and my mom decides to make him my stepdad.
Life in Phoenix is pretty standard, from what I can remember, for a Mexican kid growing up in the states. We're middle class, my stepdad works construction so we can afford a decent house, I get the videogames and books I love, family comes over for holidays, etc. My parents are definitely their own flavor of strict - I remember having to do handwriting practice and study articles out of Spanish magazines - but it was good, good enough, and a few years later my sister is born, making us a family of 4.
I was definitely a handful as a kid, not because I was a troublemaker (quite the opposite) but because I definitely had some undiagnosed auDHD going on and it made any kind of fitting in, at school or at home, difficult. I didn't have proper friends at all in elementary school, a trend that continues through the rest of my life up until now. I What I lacked in charisma I made up for in intelligence, I guess, being the kind of kid who'd look forward to spelling bees every year. My mom had the option to have me skip a couple grades several times but decided not to for my sake. In 5th grade, my teacher recommended me as a candidate for a scholarship program that would award 8 students out of a pool of about 200 with a scholarship opportunity that would cover private schooling costs all the way up to university. That is, it would've been a free ride to college.
I say "would've been" because the next few years would be the most chaotic years of my life - I'd never make it to college.
I actually earned the scholarship after a rigorous vetting process of testing, book reports, an in-person and home interview and other things. I do remember when my mom got the call and I was literally jumping for joy in our living room. It was the happiest moment of my life up until then... quickly dashed by the news that my mom's immigration status had caught up to her and she was being deported.
I'd only finished summer school. The deportation wasn't "get out of the country immediately", closer to "you have 6 months to a year to leave", but my mom and dad decided to leave sooner than later. I was devastated. It became a choice: leave with them and lose the scholarship, or stay behind at the scholarship's residential home. Under normal circumstances, students from the community program could interview and do a house visit a few weeks/months in advance to see if it was a good fit. In my case, it was about a week or two max to decide: was I staying or was I going?
I ended up staying. My mom tells me I was eager to stay even though she told me that I'd be leaving behind my family. The way I remember it, it was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't leave behind such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Regardless, the next two years would be a unique kind of downward spiral.
My parents and sister left me on the porch of the Boys' House with my two houseparents, Susie and Ivan. Susie was in her 30s, from Iowa, a tennis player. Ivan was a tall Croatian guy, also in his 30s, devout Catholic but otherwise a chill guy. They would be my parents for the next 2 years. I was 11. My roommate was 17, on account of my "being mature enough for my age to handle it" (spoiler: I was not) and the next youngest boy was 14.
If fitting in was a challenge before, I was a complete outcast there. That's not to say I wasn't cared for - the houseparents did their best with me, I think, in the middle of an unfortunate situation. Mine wasn't the worst reason for being there, either, by far. One of the other boys was an African refugee with no surviving family and no birth records, so the program and houseparents didn't even know how old he was. Still, I was deeply depressed, and the cycle of poor performance began. My 6th grade school year at a Jesuit Catholic middle school year began with high hopes and high grades, but I couldn't seem to participate. (This will become a theme.) I aced tests most of the time, but assignments and projects were impossible for me to finish because I'd procrastinate and avoid the work until it was a mountain I couldn't dent.
If I could summarize my time at the scholarship in a few words, I'd call it "wasted potential." And I don't even say that disparagingly - it's just what I imagine anybody would say seeing the sad way I sank further and further into depression, anxiety, self-isolation, self-loathing... I remember a long stretch of time when I'd get home from school and immediately go to sleep, just to avoid the world while I could.
Around this time, I was also grappling with my sexuality. I encountered porn pretty early, always preferring same-sex scenarios in my fanfics and videos and Rule 34 searches. My 17-year-old roommate became an object of fixation for me during my time there, somewhere between love, idolization and outright worship. I distinctly remember how much it burned to see how naturally /good/ he seemed at everything, how charismatic and loved he was, while I felt like a piece of shit, frankly. I hated myself because I wasn't him, and because he didn't want me. Being 17, he naturally didn't care much for giving an 11 year old the light of day.
I had therapists over the years. They were pretty great, from what I can remember, at least at the time. One guy, Roberto, pretty much singlehandedly kept me afloat that first year. But I also distinctly remember how impenetrable the awfulness, the sadness, the horrible feelings seemed. Through the community, people could sign up to be "mentors" to us kids in their spare time, and I was lucky enough to get an older woman named Eileen as a mentor. She was an interior designer, infinitely kind, just a beautiful person who believed in me wholeheartedly - but even she wasn't enough to penetrate the darkness. We once went out to see the Goosebumps film, then visited a botanical garden for a light show at night and I remember how /sour/ I felt, and acted, like I needed the world to know I was hurting and nothing could make me feel better.
I don't resent little me for that at all. I was in pain. I just wish it could've been different.
By the end of the first year, it was obvious that I was in danger of being expelled from the scholarship. I knew this, and in my anxiety about being "kicked out", as I'd always phrased it, I asked my roommate how he felt about me potentially leaving. This was after a few weeks of "testing" whether he'd care to start a conversation with me if I didn't say anything after we were both in bed. Unsurprisingly, nothing. So when I broke that silence and the response from someone I idolized so hard was, "It'd be weird not having someone in the room with me, but I wouldn't miss you 'cause you're kind of annoying"...
It broke me. People ask about words that stick with you for your entire life, those are mine. They seem kind of silly in retrospect, but in the moment they were totally devastating. I ended up coming back to the scholarship when Susie vouched for me, but for the entire next year (and for many years after that), I felt entirely unable to be myself. I guess I must've always had an obsessive-compulsive personality, because from then onwards I couldn't go a single second without hyperawarely monitoring myself for whether I was "being annoying" or not. I became my own mental warden. I cared so thoroughly what people thought of me, or would think of me, that I lost what it meant to be "myself" at all.
The second year, though? More of the same. Even worse, actually. My grades start great only to gradually slip out of my fingers, my mental health continues to falter leading up to a "cry for help" where I scratch my wrist with a pin and the houseparents have to lock all the sharps up - it's a mess, for complicated reasons. You might be inclined to think it's only because of what's going on with school and being away from my family, but I remember myself also being influenced by my roommate's own depression after the death of his grandma, so much so that I threatened suicide, was hospitalized and ended up going through a mental health rehab center... which, two weeks later, did not have the intended effect.
I was definitely getting kicked out when the school year was about over and my grades were way below where they needed to be. My roommate graduates from his private high school and my only recourse is to spend all afternoon in the house's rec room clumsily playing Melanie Martinez's "Dead To Me" on guitar. Yeah, it's as cringe as it sounds.
So my stepdad picks me up from the Boys' House to move to Tijuana. I start 8th grade there, living in the house that my parents had built from scratch on their plot of land they bought when they first moved. It's not great. The quality of education and standard of living is much lower, and I'm actively not learning much. Mostly, I'm the weird "American kid", practically the exchange student who people would ask to say things in English all the time. I had a small friend group I spent most of my time with, and one guy I'd even invite over sometimes, but I remember it as a very unremarkable, uneventful year except when I found out we were moving to California when I finished the school year.
I bought these really elaborate, thoughtful gifts for each of my friends, but none of them really cared. From what I can remember, at least. I recall being really crushed that none of them seemed at all grateful for the probably $100 I'd spent between them on gifts I'd spent weeks planning.
We moved to California without a place to live lined up. This meant moving in with an older couple that were family friends and starting high school at the school by their senior community a week or so late. My parents surfed the housing market for 6 months until they found our current house. In that time, we moved from that senior community to living with my stepdad's boss's daughter at the construction company he was working with at the time, who was friends with my mom. That relationship ended up being shallow and short-lived.
My relationship with my only friend in high school, though? I'd never recover.
I met them in our English class freshman year. We happened to pair up for a Shakespeare sonnet activity and they asked for my Instagram. We seemed to hit it off immediately, becoming instant friends, quickly growing inseparable. I hadn't had a great time with the transition to high school, with such bad anxiety that I had to email my counselor to walk me through the lunch line so I wouldn't starve every day. No friends yet, either. So this friendship felt like a real godsend, and in many ways, it was at the time. But the high highs would make for some catastrophic lows over the years.
At some point into our friendship, they revealed to me that they'd been diagnosed with BPD and that I was their favorite person. Being a generally empathetic and loving person, I told them that wasn't a problem - I didn't know what I was agreeing to. Their entire life came to depend on me, on my favor, on my attention and availability, to the extent that when I seemed angry or out of sorts they would often spiral out of control and threaten suicide. They came from a deeply unstable household. Their mother had died a few years prior, and then their grandpa, who was their only remaining source of stability. They lived with their abusive, uncompromisingly awful grandmother and a satellite system of uncles and aunts who were all either malignant drug addicts, leeches, outright terrible people or a combination of the three.
As you can imagine, my grades weren't doing so great at this point, either. Altogether, I barely scraped by in high school, and this friendship didn't help. I spent most of my time that should otherwise have been spent socializing with groups, in clubs, on my assignments, etc. damage controlling for this person and their shitty, fucked-up life. I loved them. I didn't /want/ to abandon them, because they were important to me, but it's not hard to see now that I took on an immense responsibility so much bigger than me, or that I or any one person could handle.
This wasn't the only thing going on in high school. At some point I meet this guy from Honduras on a Discord server and we start "dating" - another short-lived romp that ended in heartbreak when he didn't want to be as exclusive as I thought. I meet some 36 year old dude on Reddit who chats me up talking about "waiting till I'm 18 so we can be together." My best friend tells my high school counselor about this and it doesn't go further than that.
For several months, I end up tangled up in the roleplay scene on Twitter for a video game, Detroit: Become Human, to the detriment of my life and grades. At first, it's innocent enough, something I do in my free time, but it quickly starts taking over my life. I'd spend hours bouncing between accounts and juggling interactions in this fictional world I was sinking into. At this point I'm 16, but I lie about my age to have NSFW chats with people.
The next year, I join mock trial. That's a real high point for me, finally having both a community and something to invest myself in, though it's a lot of additional stress while my grades are tanking, my relationship with my BPD best friend is turbulent as ever, and I'm navigating a "relationship" with a guy I met in my Algebra class. This ends up being more of a drawn-out non-relationship where I'm so depressed and numb that I can't even tell if I feel anything for this guy. Together with the jealousy from my best friend, this is all so insanely stressful I develop a lump in my throat during finals week of first semester.
Come March, COVID hits and we're all sent home for the long stay inside. Now would be a good time to mention that things with my family were not a-okay as soon as I moved back in with them. There was a profound disconnect between me and my mom, and barely a relationship at all between me and my stepdad. We've never been close, I've never felt understood, and over the years I recede further and further into myself, into video games, into escapism.
I'm going to cut this post here because I'm quite fatigued writing it and I honestly don't feel like I'm being as descriptive or concise as I'd like to be. I've always considered myself a good writer, but lately, and ever since my SI really came on strong, I just don't care enough. Next post coming soon. (:
I hope this can be a place for you to vent, for what it's worth, this is probably the only place I can speak without holding myself back... SASU is a place I think most will end up being in during a transitional period, either to recovery or to ctb. I'm sorry you've been through a lot friend, I hope for only but the best looking forward for you <3. Sasu can be a void, so be careful... I hope you can say your goodbyes to this site someday, because you find yourself in a better spot
