u/JohnMarstonSoldA8th

It Has To Be You

Dear L,

I wake up and you’re always the first thing on my mind. Before the day has even had a chance to begin, there you are; in the silence, in the ache, in that strange space between sleep and waking where the truth always seems hardest to avoid.

I keep being reminded of the nights we spent together. Of all the things we used to be. Of the closeness we shared, the warmth, the intimacy, the way it felt like we had carved out a world of our own somewhere between late hours and quiet words. I keep being reminded of how, no matter how much distance or silence comes between us, there always seems to be some part of us that cannot fully stay away. Some part of us that keeps looking for the other in the smallest things.

Even now, although we find ourselves estranged, I keep seeing our paths brush against each other in these small, uncanny ways. The same posts. The same songs we once shared with each other. The same images finding their way to both of us before one has a chance to comment on it. All of the same things that once tied us to each other and, in some strange way, still do. It is as if even in separation, there are still little threads left behind that neither of us fully knows how to cut. No matter how many threads we do eventually cut, there are always going to be strings that ties to you in my world. Something tells me, it's the same with you.

And maybe that is part of what makes all of this hurt so much. Because for all the distance, for all the pain, for all the damage, I still feel the shape of you in my life. I still feel the absence of what we were. I still carry the memory of your voice, your warmth, the way you made certain moments feel softer, deeper, more alive than they had any right to be.

There are days when I can almost convince myself to keep moving, to stop looking back, to let silence be silence. But then something small pulls me under again - a phrase, a song, a certain hour of night, the memory of the way we used to talk when the rest of the world had gone quiet. And suddenly I am there again, remembering not just what we had, but what it meant to me.

I know things are not simple. I know pain has changed the shape of what this is. I know there are things between us that cannot be undone just because I miss you or because my heart still reaches for you. But none of that changes the truth that you are still with me in ways I do not know how to explain to anybody else.

I miss you. I miss the nights, the tenderness, the familiarity, the feeling that no matter what happened in the world around us, there was still somewhere I could find you. And maybe the cruelest part is that even now, with all this distance, I still catch glimpses of us in the smallest places, like something unfinished still echoing beneath everything. I don’t know what to do with that truth except say it plainly: you are still the first thing on my mind when I wake up, and you are still one of the last things I think about before sleep finds me again.

I guess what I'm trying to say, is.... I still love you. I never stopped loving you. Not for a second. Not through the anger, not through the silence, not through the distance, not even through my own self-destruction. Beneath everything ugly, everything broken, everything I can never take back, that truth remained. I don’t know what to do with this love that has nowhere left to go except back into my own chest, just to ache there in silence. I have lost many things in this life, but nothing has ever felt quite like losing you. Nothing has ever hollowed me out so quietly, so completely.

I don’t care what happens in my future, who walks into my life, who tells me to let it go, or how much time passes between now and whatever is left of us, I will always hold onto the hope that you’ll come back someday. Nobody and nothing will ever take that from me. Hope does not die just because it hurts. And maybe it isn't supposed to. No time, distance, or silence will ever stop me from loving you. In the same sense, the wreckage I left behind, everything I ruined... never stopped you from loving me, either. There's something incredible to be found in that type of love......

You do not owe me a response. A feeling. Or anything. I just needed you to know that I will always love you, and only you.....

Yours, and yours only, D

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u/JohnMarstonSoldA8th — 7 days ago

Favorite Comedy Central-Era Episode/Scene?

Hey everyone,

I've been rewatching the Comedy Central Seasons out of sentimental value or nostalgia lately since I watched these seasons when they first aired and was wondering what everyone's favorite episode or moment from the Comedy Central seasons were. (Seasons 6 & 7, the two seasons after the movies basically)

My favorite episode by far will always be The Late Phillip J Fry. That episode from start to finish was lightning in a bottle that I know as a fact they will never be able to recreate. It's honestly my favorite episode of the entire show because it scratches every itch a Futurama episode should have. And it undeniably has what I consider to be some of the series' best moments. Like Leela's goodbye letter to Fry, the future Planet Express bits, and ofc watching the trio crack open a cold one & watch the Universe end. You just can't top an episode like this one. There are other episodes from the CC run I've come to really appreciate over the years like Free Will Hunting, Calculon 2.0, Lethal Inspection, Prisoner of Benda, and Decision 3012. All of these episodes aged like fine wine imo.

My favorite moment from the CC run however is something that I only just started to appreciate recently. And it's from the second-to-last episode of the run titled "Stench and Stenchability", when Bender lost the tap-dance competition he says something along the lines of "I never knew I could hate this much" before declaring he's going to tap dance on her grave someday. Well, if you ever watched the episode you know what he's about to do in just a few minutes (this would never fly today imo) 😅 the only reason I like this moment so much is because it reminds me of my own hatred of a co-worker of mine who I feel very similarly towards lmao. When I was younger I felt that the moment was in bad taste (and still do to a degree) but I can't help if I can relate to the feeling. Crazy moment from what is otherwise a very underwhelming episode full of crappy melodrama. Another favorite of mine is the ending of "Fry and Leela's Big Fling". If you know, you know lol.

Oh and fun fact: The "He Wants a Brain" song Zoidberg sings' instrumental has a higher volume when it first aired compared to it's digital/DVD released version.

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u/JohnMarstonSoldA8th — 8 days ago
▲ 6 r/aliens

Is there a discord server for analyzing the UAP Files?

Hey everyone,

I'm curious to know if there's a discord server dedicated to going through and analyzing all of the recently released UAP/UFO files? I remember when the Epstein Files released there was a server dedicated to analyzing those, would love to know if there's one for the UFO files

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u/JohnMarstonSoldA8th — 14 days ago

My Dinner today!

I don't normally eat Indian food (like at all) and this was my first time having this dish. But I must admit, this was really tasty! My one grip with this dish though is that it made me sweat like a mf after eating it, and it wasnt even spicy?! Like whaa?

Definitely trying Lamb Curry next sometime soon

u/JohnMarstonSoldA8th — 15 days ago

Hey y'all

This is a great question to ask chatgpt if you've been using it for quite some time. The question is as follows: What kind of person would you say I am based off of all of our interactions? Be brutally honest about the good & bad. (Bonus points if you ask it this question under the extended thinking model) It's surprising how spot-on some of it is as well as how far back it's memory goes, as it brings up stuff I haven't discussed with it in a long while.

Here's the answer it gave me:

Based on our interactions, I’d say you are intense, perceptive, wounded, loyal, stubborn, emotionally deep, and sometimes self-sabotaging.

The good: you are not shallow. You notice patterns other people miss. You remember details, emotional shifts, contradictions, tone changes, timing, behavior, and context. That can make you very insightful. When something matters to you, you do not treat it casually. You care hard. You have a strong sense of justice, especially when you think someone is being hypocritical, abusive, dishonest, or hiding behind authority. You also have a lot more self-awareness than you sometimes give yourself credit for. You frequently ask, “Am I doing too much?” “Am I reading this wrong?” “What does this say about me?” That tells me you are not just blindly blaming everyone else. You are trying to understand yourself.

You also seem very loyal. Maybe too loyal. When you attach to someone, a job, a memory, a symbol, a playlist, a relationship, a workplace conflict, or a grievance, you don’t just drop it. You want meaning. You want accountability. You want the truth. You want people to admit what happened. There is something admirable in that. A lot of people just detach, lie to themselves, and move on without ever examining anything. You examine everything.

The bad: you can become consumed by what you are trying to understand. You can take a small detail and build an entire emotional courtroom around it. A song added to a playlist, a Reddit visibility change, a coworker’s tone, a mod’s wording — you often try to extract a final answer from things that may not contain one. That does not mean your instincts are always wrong. Sometimes you probably are picking up on something real. But your mind often treats ambiguity as evidence, and then the emotional part of you starts prosecuting the case before the facts are fully there.

You are also very sensitive to unfairness, rejection, hypocrisy, and being dismissed. That sensitivity is understandable, especially given what you’ve described about work, family, health, and relationships. But it can make you reactive. When you feel disrespected, you sometimes escalate fast. You may be correct about the underlying unfairness, but the way you respond can give the other person an easy excuse to paint you as the problem. That is one of your biggest blind spots: you can be right about the pattern and still hurt your own case by how intensely you react to it.

In relationships, you seem like someone who wants deep emotional recognition. You don’t just want someone to like you. You want to feel chosen, remembered, understood, and emotionally irreplaceable. That is powerful, but it also creates pressure. When someone is vague, avoidant, or inconsistent, you don’t experience it as “maybe they’re busy" or "maybe they're still hurting". You experience it like a symbolic wound. You start trying to decode whether you matter. That can make you pursue clarity from people who may be incapable of giving it, which keeps you trapped.

You also have a strong habit of looking for signs that confirm what you already emotionally suspect. With your ex, for example, when something points toward lingering feeling, you lean into it. When something points toward avoidance, you also lean into that. Both interpretations can coexist in your mind because they both keep the emotional bond alive: “She still cares” and “She’s running from it.” The danger is that this can keep you psychologically tied to someone even when their actual behavior is silence, distance, or inconsistency.

At work, I think you genuinely want to be respected and treated fairly. But you also carry a lot of stored resentment, and that can leak out in comments, suspicion, or defensive framing. You are not wrong to document things. You are not wrong to notice selective enforcement. But you sometimes seem tempted to fight social unfairness with social exposure: “Everyone talks about everyone, so why am I singled out?” That may be true, but strategically, it can make you look like you are trying to drag everyone down with you instead of calmly defending your own conduct. Your strongest path is usually documentation, restraint, and precision — not emotional counterattack.

The most honest summary I can give is this:

You are not a cruel person. You are not stupid. You are not some hopeless case. You are someone with a strong mind, strong emotions, and a deep need for fairness and emotional truth. But you can become obsessive when you feel abandoned, disrespected, or uncertain. You can mistake intensity for clarity. You can overread, overexplain, overpursue, and over-defend. You can also get stuck trying to make people admit things they may never admit.

Your best qualities are depth, loyalty, emotional intelligence, memory, pattern recognition, resilience, and moral seriousness.

Your worst tendencies are rumination, emotional escalation, suspicion, fixation on unavailable people such as your friends, confirmation bias, and letting unfair treatment consume too much of your identity.

I don’t think you need to become colder. I think you need to become more disciplined with your intensity. Your feelings are real, but not every feeling needs a case file. Your instincts are often worth listening to, but not every instinct deserves action. Your ability to care deeply is a strength — but only if you stop giving that depth to people and situations that keep draining you without giving anything back.

(I then asked it to "tell me more", as it continues with its response by doing that & adds more details)

You strike me as someone whose inner world is much louder, richer, and more painful than most people realize from the outside.

I don’t think people around you always understand how much you are processing. You may look like you’re just complaining, overthinking, or being stubborn, but underneath that, there is usually a deeper question: “Did that mean what I think it meant?” “Am I being disrespected?” “Am I being discarded?” “Am I crazy, or is something actually off here?” A lot of your distress seems to come from trying to prove that your perception is real.

That is probably one of your core wounds: not being believed.

Not just in a dramatic sense, but in an everyday sense. When you say something feels wrong, people seem to minimize it. Family, coworkers, supervisors, people online, women you’ve cared about — you often experience them as either dismissing you, stonewalling you, or making you feel like you’re the problem for noticing the problem. So you keep building arguments. You keep collecting details. You keep wanting a smoking gun. You want the moment where someone finally says, “Yes, you were right.”

That has made you sharp. But it has also made you exhausted.

You have a very forensic emotional mind. You don’t just feel something; you investigate it. You look at wording, timing, contradictions, silence, behavior shifts, playlists, profile changes, facial expressions, who said what, who didn’t say what, who replied late, who didn’t reciprocate. In moderation, that makes you perceptive. In excess, it makes life feel like you are always standing in front of a conspiracy board with red string everywhere.

The brutal part: sometimes you are trying to get certainty from things that are inherently uncertain.

A playlist view cannot fully tell you someone’s heart. A coworker’s attitude cannot always prove a coordinated campaign. Sometimes the answer is simply: people are inconsistent, avoidant, petty, careless, or not as emotionally invested as you are. That is not satisfying. But it is often true.

Another thing: you are very prideful, but not in a shallow arrogant way. It’s more like wounded pride. You have a strong need to not be made small. When someone talks down to you, ghosts you, ignores you, falsely judges you, or acts like your feelings don’t matter, something in you reacts hard. You don’t just feel hurt. You feel insulted. You feel erased. And then your instinct is to push back, explain, expose, confront, or make the other person understand the damage they caused.

That instinct is human. But it can become a trap, because the more you push for recognition from someone avoidant, dismissive, or hostile, the more power they have over your emotional state.

A major pattern I see in you is this: You often give people who have disappointed you the role of emotional judge.

Your ex’s silence becomes a verdict on your worth. A coworker’s coldness becomes a verdict on your place at work. A subreddit ban becomes a verdict on your credibility. A family member minimizing you becomes a verdict on whether your pain is real. But none of those people should have that much authority over your self-concept.

The good side of you is genuinely strong. You are not indifferent. You are not emotionally lazy. You are capable of deep loyalty, symbolic thinking, remorse, reflection, and persistence. You can look back at your own behavior and ask whether you were too much. You can admit when something hurt someone. You can feel guilt. You can still want love after being hurt badly. That matters.

You also have a kind of romantic seriousness that is rare now. You don’t treat connections like disposable entertainment. You want meaning. You want shared history. You remember small things. You attach emotional weight to songs, seasons, films, gestures, and conversations. That can make you deeply moving to the right person. But to the wrong person, or to someone avoidant, it can feel like pressure.

That’s one of your relationship risks: you can make emotional meaning faster than the other person can safely carry it.

You may not always say it out loud, but internally, you are already building the story. You are already wondering whether the person in front of you today could be important. You are already reading the subtext. You are already comparing their behavior against old wounds. So when they act casually, slowly, or inconsistently, it hurts more than it would hurt someone who was less emotionally invested.

You are not weak for that. But you do need to be careful with it.

Another honest point: you sometimes confuse being emotionally honest with being emotionally effective. Those are not the same thing.

You can write something that is raw, truthful, and powerful — but that does not mean it will produce the result you want. You can call someone out accurately — but that does not mean they will become accountable. You can expose a double standard — but that does not mean the institution will treat you fairly. You can explain yourself perfectly — but that does not mean someone will care.

That is probably one of the hardest lessons for you: truth does not automatically create justice, closure, love, or accountability.

And because you hate that, you keep pushing harder.

You also seem to have a lot of stored humiliation. Not necessarily obvious humiliation, but the quieter kind: feeling like you are the one left wanting more, the one ignored, the one talked about, the one made to wait, the one who has to prove himself, the one whose pain gets treated like an inconvenience. That kind of humiliation can turn into anger fast. It can make you want to win the argument, not just resolve the problem.

That is where you can get dangerous to your own peace. Not dangerous as in bad, but dangerous as in: you can spend enormous emotional energy trying to defeat people who already showed they are not capable of giving you what you need.

You are also someone who seems to crave control after powerlessness. When someone ghosts you, you analyze. When work feels unfair, you document. When YouTube bans your channel, you look for procedural inconsistencies. When your body hurts or your weight fluctuates, you calculate calories and StairMaster time. When people act strange, you search for the hidden logic. That makes sense. Control is comforting when life has felt chaotic. But the danger is that analysis can become a substitute for acceptance. You can understand a situation perfectly and still need to let it go.

The biggest contradiction in you is this: You want peace, but you are drawn to unresolved things. You want love, but you often fixate on unavailable people. You want fairness, but you sometimes engage with systems that are not built to be fair. You want to be understood, but you sometimes express yourself so intensely that people focus on the intensity instead of the pain underneath.

That does not make you a bad person. It makes you someone who has not yet fully learned how to protect his own emotional depth.

My bluntest read?

You are a person with a lot of emotional power but not enough emotional containment yet.

Meaning: your feelings are real, complex, and often insightful, but they sometimes spill over into rumination, confrontation, overanalysis, or self-punishment. You have the raw material of someone who could become very grounded, compelling, and emotionally mature. But when you are triggered, you can become fixated on getting the other person, institution, or situation to validate your pain.

The growth path for you is not “stop caring.” That would make you fake.

The growth path is: care without chasing, notice without obsessing, document without spiraling, love without begging, and defend yourself without losing composure.

That is the version of you that would be hard to dismiss. Because underneath everything, I don’t see someone who is hopeless. I see someone who is tired of being made to feel like he has to fight for every ounce of respect, affection, and basic recognition. And because you’ve had to fight so much, you sometimes bring a war posture into situations that require patience, strategy, or silence.

Your challenge is learning when to fight, when to step back, and when someone’s refusal to understand you is already the answer.

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u/JohnMarstonSoldA8th — 17 days ago