My best friend in high school was a real hell raiser and skirt chaser. He had a heart attack at 19. When he recovered he quit drinking, married a 15 yr old girl and became a fundamentalist preacher. He is 57 now, still married and still preaching.
I recently ran into a guy I knew in high school. We hadn’t really been close, but hung our with the same circle of friends. I would have been better friends with him if he’d ever talked. He walked with his head down, hair in his eyes, and if you really pressed him, you might get him to mumble a “hello.” It was sort of like hanging out by a fencepost.
Last summer, I saw him while I was visiting my parents. He walked up to me, gave me a hug and said, “Hi Mild! How are you! It’s been a long time!” He’d cut his hair, gotten married, bought a house, started his own business . . . when I left I had to ask my dad who he was. I recognized his face, but with such a different personality, I couldn’t place him.
We’ve talked to her about it several times, as has my father (they’re divorced, but still on fairly friendly terms). We’ve tried to do it in as non-threatening a manner as possible, and I know she’s talked to a counselor a couple of times, but so far, she hasn’t been consistent about it. My grandmother passed away from cirrhosis in 2000, in part because of her alcohol consumption; we’re very concerned that mom may be going down that path, too. My sister and I talk to her about it every time we’re in town and it seems to help for a short time…sometimes. Thanks for your concern - we’re going to keep talking to her about it. What would be ideal is if her friends would also address it with her, but many of them appear to be more enablling than anything else.
I have this good friend., L. She married this guy, H. Now, she was my friend, he wasn’t, but I’d met him several times before they got married and he seemed like an ace guy. Really nice, smart, had lots of ideas and ideals. I liked him a lot.
Soon after their marriage, he sunk into a depression and everything about him changed. It got so that I dreaded their visits; he would say cruel things to L. in front of me, belittle her, and then put me in really uncomfortable positions. He once told me - when L. wasn’t around - that he wanted to commit suicide. You know what I’m not? A freaking counselor. I had no idea what to say to that and it made me really, really, really unhappy. He stopped being a vegetarian because George Bush was ruining the world anyway, so there was no point in trying to do anything. He stopped going to synagogue because god hated him. He got fired repeatedly for not going to work.
It was a really dramatic change in personality. Unsurprisingly, L. was pretty miserable. She spent about three more years in the marriage, trying to help him overcome his depression, but he refused to take his medication and he didn’t want help and eventually she got over her fears and guilt and divorced him. It was really sad, but he was destroying not only his life, but hers as well.
Well, in the last 7 years I went from having depression and anxiety disorders, pretty crippling shyness, hated myself and the way I looked, and being in general dysfunctional (unable to perform at school or work, chronic oversleeper, hardly ate) - to a normal member of society, supporting myself, with no depression or anxiety, who works comfortably in customer service and takes good care of my body. I went from sleeping 10-16 hours per day to 6-8, and I feel so much better!
Catalysts were: talk therapy, escaping from my toxic family, getting jobs that forced me to interact with strangers, and beginning a relationship with a wonderful man. Also reading a lot of self-help books and being determined to change the things in my life I didn’t like.
Other than these things, I haven’t changed too much when it comes to the essentials of my personality. But people I’ve know for some time do say I seem much more cheerful, confident, and talkative, now.
An acquaintance of mine failed to recognize me, we’ve chatted and have a mutual friend and have had dinner several times as a group. The mutual friend complained that the acquaintance is not such a great friend anymore, she’s become selfish and distant. I said I thought she was having some sort of medical or mental issues, her husband dropped dead of a heart attack in the street some months before and it seemed to me she’d lost the plot a little. When I say “failed to recognize” it was more like looked through me, as if through a fog. She actually bought around 10,000 dollars worth of kit off me at the time so we talked several times, it was odd that she had no recognition of me. Not knowing her well I didn’t take it personally like her friend and just thought she might be in a state of shock of some sort.
Recently she came into the shop: “Hey Boo, blah blah blah” all back to normal. She’d had some thyroid condition that was now sorted out she was saying. I don’t know if it was that or the death of the husband or a combo, but what was odd was how the friend had been “all hands on hips” and “who does she think she is” but didn’t pick up on the personality change as being a concern rather than an offense if you will. I don’t know if they remained friends, but it stuck out like a sore thumb that she wasn’t herself.
When I was a young woman, I knew a man who was as kind and good and gentlemanly as anyone I’ve ever known. Another friend and I agreed that he seemed to be the most Christ-like person we had ever known. He was also a football player and handsome. It was easy to develop a great big crush on him.
In college he was well-regarded by both students and faculty. During his senior year, he was honored with the highest honor that the faculty can give.
He became a high school teacher and I lost track of him for a while.
The last thing that I heard was about five or ten years after that. He had been fired for his inability to control his temper. He just couldn’t stop cursing the students.
I cannot imagine.
I can assure you my cousins consider the fact that their mother isn’t drinking any more as a positive. The being a delusional pain in the ass is common to her, my mother and their mother and unlikely to change until we bury them.
Just curious about any new examples, so bumping my own topic.
All my life, my sister was fairly moderate. She was vaguely racist in that new things scared her and she was uncomfortable around any people of color who weren’t aggressively suburban and pretty much exactly like her. But she was well read and loved art. She married a guy who likes John Wayne movies and the Andy Griffith show and that’s about the extent of his intellectual curiosity.
Now, she’s a full on Joe Biden is a pedophile Hunter Biden’s laptop loon. She also converted to Catholicism, but didn’t like the most recent pope (which is weird, isn’t a big part of being a catholic is being cool with the pope?). She’s not exactly MAGA, in fact, I don’t think she’s ever voted for him, but her husband sure is. Their both kind of isolated and weird and just all around kind of nutty.
I’ve mentioned before how my SO had a friend who, after sustaining head trauma while crossing Kapiolani Boulevard, became a Waikiki prostitute, giving freebies to Mayor Frank Fasi under his desk and Tom Sellek in his trailer.
One of my roommates in Milani had been a soldier who also suffered a brain injury, off-duty. After a medical discharge she became an enthusiastic lesbian, counter to her previous activity. Then, embracing both charismatic Christianity and a like-minded male sailor from Pearl Harbor, she submitted to both running her life for her.
I met a friend of a friend about 30 years ago when she was volunteering for a disabled charity. Quite left wing and caring. Bumped into her a few years later when we were both working in Europe and she was a big supporter of the EU and FoM.
Then I don’t know what happened as the next I heard of her she’d been elected to parliament as a Conservative. She was suddenly very enthusiastic about Brexit and reducing benefits to disabled people and other nasty and cruel policies.
She lost her seat at the last election and I’m hoping that she will learn something from that and maybe go back to her previous, more empathic, beliefs. (Mainly because I feel ashamed that I slept with a Tory MP, even if it was decades before she was elected.)
Two friends. Both psychotic episodes, at different times. Both triggered (or, more probably unveiled) by drug use, super-strong cannabis on the one, he did not regularly smoke. He just went straight crazy one day after smoking some very strong weed. Full blown madness, it lasted several days before he was institutionalised. I did get to read his manifesto, though. It was incoherent as expected, but with some religious fervour.
The other, a gentle, then ever steepening decline. I’d taken LSD with this guy, and he was fine then. He had the standard symptoms and onset for young males, and his uncle had schizophrenia… so not sure if we can blame the drugs.
One recovered, the other is schizophrenic and cannot function in society.
One friend of mine was widely praised for being exceptionally mature beyond his years when he was 16-19 years old or so. Then suddenly he turned super immature and was criticized for behaving like a preteen or teen when he was 25 or older. I have no idea what caused that flip.
I wouldn’t call it altogether drastic, but I had a good friend who I played with in a band in London back in the day. We were a bunch of fairly irreverent lads who poked fun at people who took things too seriously.
Couple of decades later, he is now apparently some sort of ‘life coach’ in something that looks to me very much like a cult. No longer responds to email, though he has a presence on Facebook.
I guess he is just no longer the person I knew.