And easier to jump in to. I love all of the systems and possibilities, and the procedurally generated cities are incredible but I am just struggling to survive. I'm looking for something that is as deep but easier to get in to, if such a thing even exists.
I just placed the bombs at the correct location on the ends of the space weed farm, nothing at all happened, and now I am being sent back to Reen on the complete opposite side of the map. This is definitely a bug right? It's going to take me forever to get back there.
(Trigger warning, CSA and CSAM)
Long ass post ahead.
Hi. Long time poster here, using a different account in case this post is identifying as hell. I want to respect everyone else's privacy I have mentioned here except for this one person who is now a matter of public record.
This is unfortunately, all real.
So, several years ago my partner introduced me to one of her long-time friends. Let's call them Steve. They were so cool! They liked everything I liked. We had, I believed at the time similar values. They were legitimately the most intelligent person I had ever met, they held a master's degree in psychology, and they horrifyingly worked in child psychology. Before I knew what I know now, I believed this was a noble thing that they were doing. I really, really looked up to them in that way. I imagined myself as a troubled child and seeing therapists who would never be able to SEE me, and I knew my friend saw these hurt kids for who they truly were and would be able to help them work thru whatever was troubling them.
And beyond this, they were very ethical or so I believed. There was once a time there was a lady at the bar who was trying to get either of us to take her home, and my friend very politely declined because she had been drinking. This is an exceptionally low bar but I've met many men who would not give a fuck in this situation, and this made the rest of the story all the more confusing for me.
Despite my friend being very troubled and having BPD themselves, they were a stellar friend. In many ways in fact, they saved my life. They were truly a friend to me in a way that no one else had ever been. Using their connections in the realm of psychiatry they were able to help me find the help I needed when I was truly struggling several years back. I will forever be grateful to them for that, despite what came later.
We stopped communicating every day for a bit, and then stopped talking altogether for about a month. I thought nothing of this, as this was never uncommon all throughout our friendship. Despite my former friend making strides in their mental health, they would still fall back onto old habits and when this happened, they would usually isolate themselves before they could damage their relationships. This never lasted terribly long however.
Then a mutual friend reached out to let me know that Steve had been picked up on suspection of CSAM. I've read the affidavit, and it is truly disgusting and horrifying, completely fucking unexpected and unbelievable. I once confided in said friend about CSA I experienced and they helped coach me thru it, and now I am wondering was this a source of exhibition for them? Was the child psychology also? Terrible. Awful. Unethical. Vile.
I will admit that I considered suicide for a while after this. My life was falling apart in different ways and now a close friend of mine has been revealed to be a monster who exploits kids. Not only did they betray those kids, they betrayed their friends, they betrayed their clients, and they betrayed themselves and all of the purported ethics that they said to hold dear. There is a lot that I could forgive, even much I could overlook but never a person who abuses CHILDREN. What a truly fucking horrible thing to burden the people who love you with. What a fucking awful system to contribute to which harms kids.
It is still hard for me to reconcile that this person and the person who I called a friend are one and the same. I had to mourn them as if they died. I have to think of them as being dead.
IDK where to go with this from here. I guess I just wanted to say that this was the moment that I stopped giving a fuck about being "stigmatizing." I have often heard "just because you had a bad experience with one person who has BPD doesn't make them all abusive!" Yes, we all know this, but that is besides the point. It has never been "only one person" to me, all relationships I have had with people who have BPD have had some element of abuse to them.
Either they abused me, or there were whispers of them abusing somebody else, or they had sex with my unconscious body while I was passed out, or they abused me all through my childhood, OR they contributed to a system that abuses kids. Take your pick.
Well, in my experience the person who was actually doing the work was the worst abuser. So sometimes I'm just going to need to rant about people who have hurt me and that doesn't mean I literally believe every single person who has BPD is abusive. It means I am hurt and I need to talk about it.