Worst act of Self-Destruction.

In My Humble Opinion
1

What was the worst act of self-destruction that you either witnessed or committed.

Witnessed- A friend of mine in High School. It was our Junior year of High School and finals were one week away. For some reason he decide not to go to school for the last two weeks, missing all his finals. He was a 90 average student at that point and ended up failing half his classes. He was actually doing well enough in the other half to pass without taking the final.

I know High School sucked for the both of us, but I never understood why he did this. I did not even realize he was doing this until I asked how his finals went and he told me he did not take *any *of them. He spent his last two weeks of his Junior year hanging out in the school library.

Committed - Every once in a while I try to ignore all my responsibilities for as long as humanly possible. I usually snap out of self-destruct mode when it becomes impossible to put off something very important. This happens about every semester. I stop doing all work around after midterms and then start up again a week before all my research papers are due. I usually time it right, but the few times I don’t I end up getting something lower than an A for the class.

2

One of the employees of the Armored company I worked for got busted for public intoxication in another state while carrying his concealed weapon. Got fired for that one.

Another guy at the same company had to renew his Class B driver’s license. Knew all about it, scheduled in advance for Monday morning. Includes a drug test. Over the weekend he went deer hunting with his brother and smoked some weed. Failed the drug test, fired immediately.
My (net quite yet ex-) wife went through her phone book in alphabetical order telling everyone that I was physically and emotionally abusing her. She got to my sister. My sister asked for examples. Soon to be ex couldn’t provide any, except a vague claim that I’d “shoved” her two years earlier, with no details because she “couldn’t remember”.

Given that wifey was regularly slapping and kneeing me in the groin, shoving me into things and ripping things out of my hands, my sister immediately contacted me. The next day I filed for an Order For Protection and had wifey removed from the house a few days later.

Her response was to file false charges and for Divorce. But she told everyone that I had abandoned her, filed for divorce and was attempting to defraud her of thousands of dollars of non-existent money.

Her parents nearly disowned her when they found out about all the lies.

3

My friend and former roommate is currently committing suicide by obesity. It is really painful to see the state he has reduced himself to. he’s about 400 pounds and fulfills almost all of the negative fat-guy stereotypes: eating massive quantities of food, almost all his diet is fast food or other very poor quality meals, is incredibly stationary when not absolutely required to move, etc… Self-denial and rationalizations for his gluttony and sloth are the mental means he uses to avoid addressing the obvious fact that he is in extremely bad health. Cheerful fatalism is the manner by which he avoids acknowledging that he could change if he put forth effort.

He will be dead in less than 10 years, before he’s 50.

4

My BIL was diagnosed with high blood pressure. He didn’t care to take the medications. This got him renal failure. My wife and my SIL offered their kidneys. BIL had to lose 50 pounds. He has gained 150 since. As a dialysis patient, he got a blood infection whose serious symptoms he ignored. Infection got a hold of his heart valves and hip bones. He ignored those symptoms too. He had his pelvis removed and is now wheel-chair bound. He still refuses to do anything about his heart.

I don’t mind the slow-mo suicide, except that it is taking a real toll on my FIL.
That I have done, I have always had trouble with my toe nails. As a teenager I would fix them with house tools. A couple of “fixings” later, it would be messy enough to need surgery. Lather, rinse, repeat. One is now doing fine. The other was fubared.

5

My long ago on-again off-again girlfriend, who I’ll call Kate. Which, actually, was her name, but it isn’t anymore because she changed it.

Kate was about as gifted a person as I’ve ever met. She was amazingly intelligent, especially with language; she was about as gifted a writer as I have ever met in my entire life. There are good writers on this board and I’m telling you she was better than any of them. Her IQ was unquestionably in the genius range. She was charismatic, charming, a brilliant actress, had a great sense of humour. She was also strikingly beautiful - I say that not just because I dated her, but I mean, you could actually see guy’s heads turn whenever she walked by. Tall, beautiful, the curves, you name it. She kind of looked like a cross between Kate Winslet and Rachel Weisz, only with better legs than either. EVERY guy wanted her. She was strong, coordinated, graceful and a tremendous swimmer. She could have been a famous lawyer or could have played one on TV. I have never met a person in my life who was more blessed with a greater range of physical and mental attributes.

Between the ages of 17 and 24 she managed to screw up her own life so badly it was like she was trying to. I suppose in retrospect she ws a non-violent sociopath; purely through being a pathologically mendacious jerk, cheating and using and stealing and lying, she alienated everyone she knew and burned every bridge available to her. Every single member of her family - her parents, her siblings, her grandparents - was driven away, despite their best efforts. Every friend she ever had gave up on her and many hated her guts. I mean, add up ALL the people you know -every member of your family, every friend and classmate and co-worker and supervisor you ever had, every member of every youth group, sports team, club, association and church you were ever a member of, everyone who knew you in any way, and imagine that by the time you were 23 or so you had managed to piss every single one of those people off. She dropped out of high school and went on welfare. At one point she was living at the YWCA. She never held a job for longer than two months. She ended up getting into a short marriage with some guy in another country which apparently ended in a messy divorce. The last I heard of her - second hand, because frankly I came to find her kind of scary, in a she’ll-screw-your-head-up way - she ended up as a sort-of DJ in the goth scene of a small town trying to make money selling her stuff on ebay. Apparently she got a lot of tattoos.

I mentioned she changed her name. That move might have come out of bitterness towards her family (who loved her and were decent people from what I could tell) but I think it’s likely she did it because so many people despised her.

What was amazing about this was that there were no drugs or alcohol involved of any kind. Hell, she didn’t even smoke, and wasn’t particularly fond of any sort of alcohol. No pills, no blow, no smack, no acid. Clean as a whistle. She screwed up her life solely because she had no foresight and no conscience. It was quite amazing; I would not have thought it possible.

I quite honestly hope she turned her life around because I don’t wish anyone the aimless, poor and sad life she was on her way to, but I just cannot envision how she could do it.

6

Well, the worst act was my buddy from college who lay down on a train line. They identified him by his wristwatch.

Me, when I was an actor I was being hounded by a theatre company to attend an audition for a certain production. No idea why, but I just didn’t want to do it. I kept ignoring it, but they kept pursuing, so eventually I sighed and agreed a time. I travelled up to London, and got as far as the audition room, then said to myself, “I’m not an actor any more” and walked out of the building, never having announced my presence. I’m not an actor any more.

7

I’ve known someone for over 20 years who is a diabetic smoking crackhead. After suffering a stroke, she’s still a diabetic smoking crackhead. After being on the kidney doner list and dialysis for five years before getting a kidney, she’s still a diabetic smoking crackhead. After having her donated kidney fail and getting back on dialysis, she is stiill a diabetic smoking crackhead.

8

Close relative who was a Cigarette Smoker from 13

Collapsed Lung at 29 – still a smoker
1 Lobe of lung removed at 37 – still a smoker
1 Lobe of lung removed at 45 – still a smoker
2 more collapsed Lungs 29- 56 — still a smoker
Heart attack at 56 – still a smoker (underweight, great cholesterol, walked ~mile a day)
COPD Diagnosed 59 - still a smoker
62- COPD with an Oxygen tank. Takes it off a lot because he is still a smoker

Can’t walk across the street w/o losing breath – literally. This is just the HUGE stuff.
Turned himself from a big walker – 2 miles a day sometimes -an athletic guy if not an “athlete” --from that into a 65 yo yellow-ish waxy looking guy - because he can’t leave his apartment - who takes the elder bus with 90 year old widows to the store because he can’t carry a bag of apples 2 blocks. The COPD, really is what made the horror of what his self destructive addiction did to him clear.

9

My mother. She’s a schizophrenic and bipolar, so to a certain extent it isn’t her fault, but she made her problems a hundred times worse by not taking care of herself.

She is a diabetic, but made no attempts to control it for years - indeed, she would go for days on end eating nothing but Rita’s Mango Water Ice. Since she’s gotten her blood sugar under something like control in the last year, it’s gotten her closer to normal thinking than even being committed and medicated did.

Unfortunately, she continues to smoke, even though she has developed more blod clots in her legs. (She is on Social Security Disablity because of them.) :frowning:

10

My mother smoked and smoked. She started smoking with a circle of her girlfriends after mass as a teenager. One by one, everyone of them died by cancer. She still smoked. She’d get bladder tumors and have to have them surgically removed. The Dr told her to quit. They’d cut out the tumor, she’d still smoke, and they’d come back. She finally stopped smoking after the 4th tumor removeal…and magically, the tumors never grew back.

She had burnt out her lungs by then though, although it wasn’t until a number of years later that the gradual lack of oxygen to her brain killed enough cells for her to need to be put into assisted living. She did have some Alzheimers and exhibited signs of dementia, but she had killed off so much of her brain by lack of oygen that had shrunk to less half its normal size. She had a massive, massive stroke the week before she died. It didn’t kill her because the space bectween her brain and her skull had widened so much that it took all the blood that leaked. There was so much room that it couldn’t kill her.

I often think about what it must have been like … to have all your memories, education, lovers, life experiances, and ultimately all your rational thought processes stripped away from you. It had to be Hell on earth for her before she finally died. I always remind my son of this, followed by the ‘cigarrette talk’.

11

The head of the cancer research department of some big name hospital caught by Dateline trying to boink a pre-teen.

12

In a similar vein…

“Follow me around. I don’t care. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.”

Gary Hart, late 1980’s.

13

I briefly dated a crazy girl. She was a couple of years younger than me and had gone to college at Rice University like I did. Now, Rice has a strict honor code. The students all sign honor pledges and in return a huge amount of trust is placed in them. For example, professors are **required ** to leave the room during tests. Many profs give self-timed take home exams. When I was there students took the code very seriously, and even though it was really easy to cheat, most people didn’t. During my four years there I never personally knew anyone that cheated.

According to crazy girl she cheated all the way through – copying other people’s work, taking notes into tests, abusing the system in any way she could. All the way up to the last semester of her senior year, when she had a crisis of conscience. So she turned herself in and told the honor court everything.

Normally if the honor court discovers that you’ve cheated you fail the class and continue with your academic career, sadder but wiser. But she’d cheated in almost every class over the course of four years. So … they thanked her for her honesty and kicked her out of school a couple of months before graduation … .

14

My wife once turned herself in for voter fraud.

In her defense, she was 7-8 months pregnant and very hormonal. :wink:

15

My grandmother. Diabetic, chainsmoker, long-time heavy drinker, obese. A meal for her would normally be a piece of angelfood cake or cream pie. She would spend her days lying on the couch (in a pool of piss) watching TV. To compound this, Dr. Quack, M.D., put her on so many meds that she was doped up by the end of the day. The poor woman died.

At the age of 88.

16

I worked for the Division of Blind Services as a tutor. One of my students was a guy in his 30’s who had developed diabetes as an adult. I think he had diabetes less than 5 years when I knew him. He managed it so poorly he was legally blind. During the time I tutored him, he had 2 attacks.

He had 3 children. His wife had to drive him everywhere. I would bet he is completely blind by now, probably multiple amuteed if not dead.

It was frightening to me to see someone who could be normal. But because he refused to monitor his insulin levels got himself in that situation.

17

A very good friend of mine began having problems 4 years ago. He couldn’t sleep because of constant fear that people were “out to get him”. His physician set up a referral for a psych evaluation. He didn’t live long enough to be diagnosed. While his wife was at her regularly scheduled bingo, he hung himself.

When his wife got home, she called me. Before calling the ambulance.

18

A friend of mine had a 25 year old son with hanged himself on the day of the OJ criminal trial verdict. He owed ten of thousands of dollars to four women in child support for his seven children. She later found out two more women had three children by him.

Guy couldn’t keep it zipped.

19

I’m young and dont usually associate with crazy people, so I cant say I know anyone that has ruined their life in any fashion of note. I know a few kids my age that are probably alcoholics (let’s just say I know this from experience), and they dont seem to give a damn how drinking is affecting them. So far their lives are fine though, but it’s only a matter of time.

For myself, I guess two things. When I was 15 I tried to kill myself by drinking some rubbing alcohol. I didn’t drink any though, but I gave it some thought. The funny thing though is that I only was planning on drinking one cap worth, as in the cap that comes with the bottle. IANAD but I dont think that’s a lethal dose, haha. That’s probably only funny to me but meh w/e.

Second thing was a friendship I had with an uber-Christian nutcase. He wasn’t fullblown nuts and not hateful and he was a good member of my Assemblies of God youthgroup in college so I trusted him. It wasn’t him training me to speak in tongues that drove a wedge through our relationship, but this whole period of time of demonology.

This is going to make me sound crazy, but over the years I’ve noticed that spiritually I have a strong mystical side to me. During college, I noticed that sometimes when I meet people I can visualize images that act as metaphors for what’s going on with that person. My rational side tells me that it’s probably my hyper-intuitive brain working overdrive on noticing small details and then fueling that thought process into my religious lobe, but whatever the case these details when freely given to the person tend to be helpful.

Ok, but this demon thing went way beyond that. He was trying to “coach me” and use my gift to exorcise people, including each other. I went along with it at first in a kind of adorable youthful zealousness, but when he started encouraging me to go up to random people on campus and start talking to them about Jesus and how demons are affecting your life… that was the beginning of the end.

I had a long-distance girlfriend at the time and my phone sex and cyber sex with her was also causing God to “punish me.” My depression at that time was obviously a result of my sins.

So, in a nutshell, I’d say that relationship was pretty destructive. Thank God I was able to drop him like a bad habit eventually.

20

I was visiting a friend who was a motorcycle mechanic, and we went out to a played-out gravel pit to watch the moto-crazies. My friend pointed out another mechanic making an assault on the steepest, near-vertical hill in the place. Twice, he got two-thirds of the way up and spectacularly fell back down. He tinkered with his bike some more and tried it again. He just made the brink. Then, still mad at his bike, he held the throttle open all the way until the engine blew up. Then he kicked it off the hill and cussed it as it tumbled to the bottom.

My own worst act of self-destruction pales next to what I have read so far. I won’t bore you with my puny tragedy.