I would bring up my battle with PTSD, but that was really a three year journey of a lot of darkness, so no one moment stands out as a “bottom”.
Instead, I’ll go with sitting in a bank manager’s office, with my four month old baby, begging him to reconsider the giant mortgage penalty he was going to hit us with for selling early. We had both been out of work, and the bills just kept mounting. As a last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy, we decided to sell the house and move into something smaller/cheaper. The sale would have been enough to cover the penalty and most of our outstanding bills, except the sale completed the day after the penalty calculation expired. The new one was twice was the original had been - therefore not paying anything off.
We didn’t have that much debt, but there was just no way out of it after that and I pleaded with him to reconsider - charge us the lesser - the three months interest instead of the differential. The worst part? They were our biggest creditor. I said “You’ll actually come out of this better in the long run since we won’t have to default on anything and you’ll get more money.”
He refused.
I left the bank, got into our POS car that was falling apart, knowing that we didn’t have any other options than bankruptcy left, and to add salt, that I would have to re-home my awesome Black Lab.
It was a horrible feeling.
Now we are doing so much better and I will NEVER deal with another ScotiaBank. Ever.
I’m old enough to have several low points. Probably my lowest was sitting in Baghdad counting the days. The only thing keeping me going was the thought of returning home. Then I found out I had nothing to come home to.
I’m assuming it was an anonymous cowardly act. I would think if it was not anonymous someone would get banned. I hope.
It started with Woman A who was my entire world, but not very good for me. She broke me down until I turned to Woman B, while still clinging to the hope that A would change. I couldn’t make myself believe that A was what she was, and B was my support to deal with it. Not my finest hour. It was a shit thing to do to both of them. I was just so hurt, sad, confused and ANGRY that I lost my way. I didn’t handle things as well as I should have. Man, did I fuck that up. It took a long time after that for me to not feel broken.
It’s a tie between having to bring a note to school excusing me from P.E. because I had “fallen” and bruised the backs of my legs(it didn’t help when the teacher read the note out loud to the class), and having to get a note from the teacher saying that I was supposed to bring my books home for homework. The need for the note was because I was put on “restriction” for some minor infraction, and “restriction” consisted of sitting at the table in my pajamas looking straight ahead, from the time I got home from school until bedtime-no talking, no looking around, and no unauthorized reading.
The day I came home from work to find my husband sitting in the darkened living room, waiting for me, so he could tell me he was leaving me. Turns out, he had spent the past few weeks planning an exit strategy with his girlfriend. His truck was packed with all his stuff, and he handed me a receipt for the money he had withdrawn from our joint account. I was totally blindsided and got the spend the weekend in shock.
Sleeping on the floor of my brother’s apartment because I had lost my job, had no savings, and my temp job laid me off. I lucked out in that my own lease was up, so I didn’t have to break it, but my electricity was turned off three days before I moved out because I was so break, and I ended up losing my deposit and owing the complex money because my boyfriend had left so much crap behind and done minor damage.
The boyfriend? I had kicked him out a month previously after I went to the ER with abdominal pain only to be told that I had pelvic inflammatory disease from a trichomoniasis infection he’d given me. The doctor assumed I’d been the one sleeping around and refused to spell it out for me. The boyfriend bitched about having to take the necessary medication and watched me write a check for the meds that I knew my account wouldn’t cover. I learned he’d had plenty of money for that and the electric bill when he spent $300 on frozen meat (fell off the back of a truck?). I broke up with him but let him stay, so he brought over the woman he’d been cheating on me with and had sex with her in the living room after he thought I’d gone to bed. I kicked him out the next day.
When I called my mom to cry on her shoulder, she told me “oh, phouka, we raised you better than that.” Only time I’ve ever hung up on my mom.
It got better. I found a job, paid off my debts. Friends spent time with me. I took over my best friend’s apartment when she moved. But there was that day when I was sitting on a futon mattress on the floor, crying my eyes out, while my cat tried to get past my hands to sniff my face, feeling like a complete failure, unwanted, unloved, and totally alone.
It was. There are many cases where you hope that the person doing something stupid gets cosmic justice, but I really hope that whoever did that simply realizes at some point in their life that there are better ways of handling things.
Fall of 2013. DH had been laid off, neither of us was getting anywhere finding a job, his unemployment was running out, and we were pretty much out of options that we knew of. I was very seriously debating suicide methods, trying to figure out if I should rehome our pets or whether I could count on DH to be able to take care of them without me, and composing a “to do” list to wrap up my life with as little unfinished as possible for DH to have to handle.
Roughly a month before the end of the line, options started opening up that put us in a survivable financial position (read: having income), with both of us now in training for better job options.
Honestly, my father’s suicide the day after my mother found out what he’d been up to with me for three years and then spending my adolescence with a violent alcoholic mother wasn’t as bad as those months last year.
I was a squatter in an apartment with a couple other low-lifes, went for a walk and was standing outside a fast-food joint offering 35¢ hamburgers, and realized I not only didn’t have the 35¢, but had no real prospects for coming up with it other than my girlfriend working a shift as a stripper that night.
I can hardly even recognize myself in that story, but it was the point where I stood up and said “I gotta turn this ship around”.
Day before my birthday. I suddenly lost all hearing in 1 ear. Very odd, and an inconvenience, but livable. 16 hours later I lost my balance system. Very common with sudden hearing loss. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. I was in bed for weeks and off work for a year.
The constable coming to my history class in college and taking me out in handcuffs over a bounced check (for $13) to a grocery store. I have never told anyone that that happened.
There definitely are some wonderful and supportive people here that will offer a shoulder to cry on. But there are also some sadistic bitches here that will mock you, make fun of you, poke at you with sticks, and apparently send you pictures of dead babies. I don’t post about personal problems here anymore, which is kind of a shame, since there can be so much emotional support found, but I learned my lesson.
Relatively trivial compared to some of the things I’ve read here, but an incident from the early '80s may have been mine. I’ll explain:
I had been working on a drilling rig, about fifty miles from Wamsutter, Wyoming, when I came down with a strep throat. On about the third day, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like I couldn’t get any air. I managed to get someone to haul me the two-hour drive to the nearest hospital (Rawlins), where the doctor on duty basically yelled at me for being a big baby but said I should take some antibiotics and go back home to rest. In the morning my employer arranged a Greyhound bus ticket and made the eight-hour trip back to Denver, where I was living at the time, a) without a penny in my pocket as I had accidently left my wallet out at the rig; b) wearing my muddy rig clothes and carrying a cardboard box containing a humidifier issued by the hospital as my only luggage; c) croaking like Aqualung every time I tried to speak, due to the throat condition; d) dazed and miserable due to fever and 48 hours without sleep. The other passengers gave me a pretty wide berth, although I can’t really blame them.
More recently, earlier this year I had a horrible episode with kidney stones that involved two hospital visits and an unpleasantly invasive procedure that left me incontinent and leaking blood from places I’d rather it didn’t leak from, for a couple of weeks. That’s definitely the runner-up.
End of October 2007, I was sitting at home Sat morning after going to the dr. a few times for some bladder issues. Received a call from the hospital with the Dr saying they had reviewed the notes and I should come check myself in immediately. by the next day I was on dialisis and stayed in the hospital for 3 weeks and another 4 on dialsis when i got out. Along with a lot of other procedures. I got better…mostly. everything works at about 35-50% depending on the day. Every day since then has been a bonus.
