I was in a locker room three months ago minding my own business when this oddly looking guy next to me struck up a conversation. He looked old and incredibly skinny, but you could tell his face was younger. Maybe it’s a skin condition like Ehlers-Danlos, I thought.

Well, the guy was in his early thirties and said the reason for his condition was that he had been recently freed by a cartel. He had been kidnapped for years, kept without food or proper hygiene, basically working as a slave. And then he showed me a picture of himself from three years ago on his phone. He has the incredible phisique of a Greek god, beautiful face, with a six pack and well developed muscles. And there he was, skinny, thin as a pencil and with loose, aged skin.

He recounted how he had used his smarts to survive. He had been forced to kidnap others, forged friendships with his captors and even made important suggestions to the leaders to create alliances with other cartels. He was damn good at the job making people fall into the trap, schmoosing the right people and getting out of situations. He said he was honestly one of the best they had, according to him.

He went on about how he had been tortured, kept in a cellar, worked tirelessly from dawn til dusk, and then released one day. And then he told me he he still had friends in the cartel to this day.

That’s when I found a break 20 minutes in of this guy trauma dumping on me and I noped the fuck out of there with some bullshit excuse. Never in my life have I ever been so scared, sad, sorry and flabbergasted of someone recounting their life story.

When I used to be spiritual I had a very small cult following of 12 people whose extreme believe in my lies actually showed me how frigthening Religion is.

I used to be Mormon

By coincidence, I inherited the RAM and CPU from the work computer of a guy who later shot up my workplace. Luckily he was the only one killed in the shooting. I still use the kit from the shooter to run my home server.

The guy who first showed me D&D when I was a kid went on to rape and murder a 90 year old woman who lived down the street during a botched robbery.

I’ve been sick at home for a few days. I blew my nose into some toilet paper, checked, then tossed it in the toilet. Saw myself in the bathroom mirror and had snot all over my mustache.

Then it hit me. This isn’t the first time I’ve blown my nose with a mustache — it’s just the first time I’ve immediately looked in a mirror afterward.

Oh my god

The most fun I’ve ever had in my life was when I was young lighting off fireworks and a nearby patch of grass started on fire. My father and I ran over and meticulously stomped out every bit of fire as it spread, and managed to beat it handily. It was exciting.

I am a patron to several ancient and eldritch nature deities.

I had half of my face ripped off by a dog when I was a kid. Skin and flesh was just hanging off of my face and I almost lost my right eye.

Doctors did a great job patching me up and you can’t even tell that anything happened unless you know where the super subtle scars are.

After taking a car door to the head during heavy winds, I experienced immediate and recurring night terrors/sleep paralysis for two years. They started out pretty extreme, with me waking up on my stomach with some kind of creature pinning me to the bed. I’d struggle enough to lift my head a few inches, only to find my pillow was filled with distorted, open-mouthed faces stretching out at me from the material.

As time went in the hallucinations gradually waned in extremity, though never becoming anything comfortable. I would open my eyes to see a phosphorescent grid encompassing my walls, or millions of flies on my bedroom ceiling. Once my cat was staring up at them too, and I believed what was happening was real, only to wake up a moment later facing a different direction, and my cat fast asleep at my feet.

Eventually it’s as though my soul became heavy or something. I slept on the top floor of a two-story home, with a very old colonial-era basement below it. I would constantly find myself one or two floors directly beneath my bed, all but glued to the ground and trying with all my might to crawl out of the damp, dark cellar towers the stairs, but too sluggish and/or paralyzed to do it. I felt terrified down there in the darkness. Eventually the adrenaline would wake me up safely in my bed.

Throughout the entire ordeal I would somewhat frequently open my eyes to see some sort of ghostly or transparent entity looming over my bed, leaning over or staring down at me. The last night I ever experienced an episode, I woke up to see that very entity, but I realized suddenly that the entity was me. It was me standing there, looking down at myself. I became angry. I felt like these episodes had ruined my life, and made sleeping something I no longer looked forward to. The rage came to a head. I activated every nerve in my body to try to break free of the paralysis. I gritted my teeth as I succeeded, groaning the words “FFFFRUUUUCKK YYRRROOOOUU!!!” as I bolted up from my bed and lunged through my own ghost. Then I never saw it again. In fact, I never had another night terror since. It’s been years now. A decade at least.

Sometimes I depersonalize and can barely taste, smell, or feel pain

Lost one of my testicles when I accidentally got hit during bandy practice. Scrotum turned into the size of a handball before it got better. No surgery or drainage, was told to let it be and it would fix itself.

Had a cup and everything so just got unlucky.

I (aurally) witnessed a kindergartener get run over by her school bus. I was on a different bus and our bus drivers were talking over the radio, then there was this ungodly wailing from the other bus. The other bus driver just kept screaming “I killed her, I killed her”.

Turns out the little girl barely missed the bus, ran alongside it to catch up, tripped, and fell under the wheels of the bus.

Once we got to high school, students on the killing bus were offered counseling. I, not being on the killing bus, didn’t talk to anyone about it until I went to therapy decades later.

Yellow school buses freak me out still, for that and abuse reasons.

Probably not as interesting, but I was woken up as a kid (teen?) by my mom screaming and running into my room/in my bed. Woke up to see my dad standing in the doorway with a steak knife. She had asked him to go to rehab. That was it. We’re good though 🤙🏾

My joints slip out like that’s what they were meant to do. My hips will dislocate during sex, it’s a not at all fun-for-me party trick