u/PortableClock84

So my main language is English, and I'm 15, and I want to learn my native languages (which are Urdu/Punjabi), but I would like some advice or apps that I could use to study. For both of my school electives, l'm also doing Spanish (which I'm comfortable with) but they don't offer Urdu so I chose German instead for fun because I enjoy it.
As for Urdu/Punjabi, l've been around people who speak those languages ever since I was a kid, so if someone speaks in either language, I can understand them, as well as the grammar and sentence structure. But l've always just listened so l've never spoken in either language, so in order to speak I usually have to "search" for the words even though I can easily recall them once someone says them. I would like help with continuing my Urdu/Punjabi, as well as Spanish and German, if anything you offer has those alongside them. Tips are appreciated too! My main question is how to turn passive understanding into active speaking, especially when you already understand a language but struggle to recall words while speaking (TL)

When I was 12, I used to do the “choking game” quite often. It wasn’t because of the challenge or social media, because I didn’t have and still don’t have any social media except for reddit and youtube.

I did it because I liked the feeling it gave me. When I would hyperventilate with my head toward the ground, touching my toes or while sitting down, I would quickly stand up and put my thumb in my mouth and blow as hard as I could without letting any air out. This would give me a “high” And my head would feel cold and lightheaded, I would see visual snow and my legs would become unable to hold me up causing me to fall down.

It felt like I was under anesthesia in a hospital because my hands and feet would become numb, and I couldn’t feel them. The sensations would last for around 10-15 seconds before the tingling stopped and I could get back up.

I used to do this to make myself stop crying because it felt like it would completely “reset” my brain, almost like coming out of anesthesia and I’m 14 now and I stopped doing it when I was 13 because I didn’t want something bad to happen to me (Would like to clarify I do do not do this anymore)

I’m so sick of seeing some youtube videos and all the comments talking like this: “ts is too mch for m i need js a lil break rn yall ain gon do shi for me js go 💔🥀✌️🫩😔👩🏿‍🦲🛩️” I understand it’s slang, but it’s so incredibly repetitive and repulsive to the point where I’ve stopped reading the comments. I’ve never really had social media other than YouTube, Reddit, and Roblox, but this slang is everywhere, and I thought it was only on Instagram or twitter It’s genuinely so infuriating cause every comment section feels like the exact same five people copied and pasted the exact same sentence, removed half the letters, added six completely unrelated emojis, and somehow convinced themselves they created a new dialect. Nobody says anything about the actual video anymore. It’s always “bro is NOT making it out,” “ts got me crying,” “we got (blank) before GTA 6” or some dramatic fake depressed thing and before anyone says I’m just old or “don’t understand the humor” I’m 14 and I understand it perfectly. That’s the problem. There is nothing left to understand because it is the same joke repeated thousands of times with slightly different wording. A phrase will be funny for two days, and then everyone runs it into the ground for the next six months until it becomes unbearable. Then they immediately move on to the next phrase and do the exact same thing again. It feels like people are terrified of typing like normal human beings because apparently using complete words and expressing an original thought is embarrassing now. Every comment has to sound detached, ironic, miserable, and vaguely nonsensical. You could post a video of someone making toast and the comments would be like “ts changed me as a person bro 💔🥀” or “those who know 🥀✌️🫩” What are you even talking about? What am I supposed to know? I don’t expect YouTube comments to contain groundbreaking analysis, but I would at least like to see one genuine reaction that wasn’t like stupid tik tok and repeated by ten thousand teenagers. At this point, reading the comments feels less like hearing different people’s opinions and more like watching one gigantic repulsive mess talk to itself.

The scale could not read my weight anymore.
The little screen blinked twice before displaying one cold word:
ERROR.
I stared down at it while gripping the metal rail beside me. My knees trembled beneath the weight of my body. Two nurses stood nearby, pretending not to look worried.
They had brought in a special hospital scale the kind normally used for patients who could no longer stand but even that one had failed.
After several phone calls, measurements, and calculations, the doctor finally sat beside my bed.
“Daniel,” he said quietly, “we estimate that you weigh approximately 873 pounds.”
I expected to feel shocked.
Instead, I felt tired.
I had known for years that I was killing myself. Hearing the number only told me how close I had come to finishing the job.
It Started With Silence
I was not always this size.
When I was eight years old, I was a quiet, skinny child who hated going home after school. My father drank, and when he drank, the entire house changed. Doors slammed. Glass shattered. My mother cried behind the bathroom door.
I learned to stay invisible.
The kitchen became the only room where I felt safe. Late at night, after everyone had gone to sleep, I would sit on the floor in front of the refrigerator and eat.
Cold pizza. Peanut-butter sandwiches. Cereal straight from the box. Anything I could find.
Food did not yell at me.
Food did not leave.
Food did not tell me I was weak.
For a few minutes, while I chewed, the fear inside my chest became quieter.
My mother noticed that groceries disappeared quickly, but she never punished me. I think she understood. Sometimes she even brought home extra snacks and placed them beside my bed.
“Something to make you feel better,” she would say.
Neither of us realized that every bag of chips was teaching me a dangerous lesson:
Whenever life hurts, eat until you cannot feel it.
Hunger Was Never the Problem
By thirteen, I weighed more than 250 pounds.
At school, people called me names. They made animal noises when I walked through the cafeteria. One boy secretly recorded me eating lunch and posted the video online.
It received thousands of views.
I stayed home for a week, telling my mother that I was sick. During that week, I ate constantly. Not because I was hungry, but because eating was the only way I knew how to escape the humiliation.
I would promise myself that each meal was the last one.
Then the anxiety would return.
My heart would race. My hands would shake. My mind would begin replaying every insult I had ever heard.
So I would eat again.
By the time I graduated from high school, I weighed 410 pounds.
I did not attend the ceremony. The gown did not fit, and I was terrified that the folding chairs would collapse beneath me.
My classmates walked across the stage while I sat at home eating fried chicken and watching television with the curtains closed.
I told myself I did not care.
But I cried between bites.
My Whole Life Became a Delivery Order
At twenty-four, I stopped leaving the house.
Walking hurt too much. Every step sent pain through my knees and lower back. I began working customer-service jobs from my bedroom, answering calls while surrounded by empty containers.
Delivery apps made everything easier.
Breakfast might be pancakes, eggs, sausage, hash browns, biscuits, and a milkshake.
Two hours later, I would order pizza.
Then burgers.
Then Chinese food.
Then dessert.
I spent almost every dollar I earned on food. When I ran out of money, I used credit cards. When the cards reached their limits, I borrowed from my mother.
I became skilled at lying.
I told delivery drivers I was ordering for a family.
I told my mother I needed money for medication.
I told doctors I only ate once or twice a day.
Most of all, I lied to myself.
I would say, “Tomorrow, I’ll change.”
Tomorrow became Monday.
Monday became next month.
Next month became another year.
At 500 pounds, I could still shower while standing.
At 600, I needed a chair.
At 700, I stopped fitting through the bathroom doorway.
My world slowly shrank to one reinforced bed in my mother’s living room.
My Mother Became My Caregiver
My mother was sixty two when she began washing me.
She would heat water, soak towels, and clean the parts of my body I could no longer reach. She changed the sheets beneath me and applied medicine to the sores forming in the folds of my skin.
I hated myself every time she struggled to lift one of my legs.
Sometimes I apologized.
She always said the same thing.
“You’re my son.”
But I could see what caring for me was doing to her.
Her hands shook. Her back bent. Her hair turned gray. She stopped visiting friends because she was afraid to leave me alone.
One afternoon, I heard her crying in the kitchen.
I called out, asking what was wrong.
She wiped her face before coming into the room.
“Nothing,” she said.
There was a bag of fast food in her hand.
Even then even after hearing her cry I asked her to bring it closer.
The Addiction Controlled Everything
People think food addiction is simply loving food too much.
It was not love.
It was panic.
When food was not available, I felt trapped inside my own body. My thoughts became violent and desperate. I would yell at my mother, accuse her of starving me, and threaten to call someone if she refused to order more.
Once, she brought me grilled chicken and vegetables instead of the fried meal I requested.
I threw the plate across the room.
It shattered against the wall.
My mother stood silently as pieces of food slid down the paint.
The moment my anger passed, shame took its place.
She cleaned the mess without speaking.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry, but instead I opened my phone and ordered another meal.
The delivery arrived thirty minutes later.
I ate while she swept broken glass from the floor.
That memory hurts more than any physical pain I have ever felt.
The Last Time She Brought Me Food
One winter morning, my mother said she felt dizzy.
I begged her to stay home, but not because I was worried about her.
I wanted her to order breakfast first.
She placed the order, then drove to the pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions.
She never came home.
A police officer arrived that afternoon. My mother had suffered a heart attack while sitting in her car.
She died before the ambulance reached the hospital.
My first thought should have been about the woman who had spent her entire life protecting me.
Instead, through the shock and grief, another thought appeared:
Who is going to bring me food?
That was the moment I understood how sick I had become.
My mother was dead, and the addiction was still demanding to be fed.
I screamed until my throat burned.
The neighbors called emergency services because I could not get out of bed. Firefighters removed the front door and part of the wall to reach me. Eight people helped move my body onto a reinforced stretcher.
As they carried me outside, I saw sunlight for the first time in almost two years.
People gathered across the street.
Some recorded me.
I closed my eyes and wished I could disappear.
873 Pounds
At the hospital, the doctors found blood clots in my legs, severe sleep apnea, uncontrolled diabetes, heart failure, infected wounds, and fluid around my lungs.
They told me that I might not survive another year.
Maybe not another month.
A psychiatrist came to speak with me. For the first time in my life, someone asked what I felt before I ate.
Not what I ate.
Not how much I ate.
What I felt.
I told her about my father.
I told her about school.
I told her about the video.
I told her about every night I had spent trying to swallow loneliness.
Then I told her about my mother cleaning the broken plate from the floor.
I cried so hard that the oxygen mask slipped from my face.
“I killed her,” I said.
The psychiatrist shook her head.
“Your mother died from a heart attack. But you are allowed to regret how your illness affected her.”
Illness.
I had always thought addiction meant weakness. Hearing someone describe it as an illness did not remove my responsibility, but it gave me something I had not felt in years.
A reason to believe treatment might be possible.
Learning to Feel Hungry
Recovery was not beautiful.
It did not begin with inspiring music or a sudden burst of determination.
It began with rage.
The hospital controlled my meals. I shouted at nurses. I begged for extra portions. I tried to manipulate staff members into bringing me snacks. At night, I dreamed about food so vividly that I woke up chewing the inside of my cheek.
My body was receiving enough nutrition, but my mind kept screaming that I was starving.
Therapy forced me to sit with emotions I had spent decades burying.
Fear.
Humiliation.
Anger.
Grief.
Every feeling arrived without food to silence it.
Some days, I wanted to quit.
Then I would remember my mother holding a washcloth in her tired hands.
I began talking to her when I felt overwhelmed.
“I’m sorry,” I would whisper into the dark.
“I’m trying now.”
The Empty Chair
Six months after entering the hospital, I had lost 112 pounds.
I still weighed more than 700.
I still could not walk.
I still needed help with almost everything.
People congratulated me, but the number did not feel like a victory. There was no finish line waiting nearby. There were years of treatment ahead of me, assuming my heart survived long enough.
On my thirty-eighth birthday, the nurses placed a small candle in a cup of sugar-free gelatin.
They sang to me.
Beside my bed was an empty chair.
For one foolish second, I imagined my mother sitting there, smiling and telling me that she was proud.
Then the vision disappeared.
I blew out the candle and began to cry.
I had spent my entire life eating because I was afraid of pain.
In the end, the food did not protect me from pain.
It only delayed it, multiplied it, and took away the person who had loved me most.
What I Know Now
My name is Daniel.
I weigh 761 pounds as I tell this story.
I do not know whether I will live long enough to leave this hospital. My heart is damaged, my body is exhausted, and some consequences cannot be reversed.
I am not sharing this because I want strangers to pity me.
I am sharing it because addiction does not always come inside a bottle, a needle, or a pill.
Sometimes it arrives in a paper bag.
Sometimes it smells warm and familiar.
Sometimes your family hands it to you because they do not know how else to help.
And sometimes, one comforting bite becomes another, then another, until the thing you used to survive becomes the thing that is killing you.
Tonight, I am hungry.
Not physically hungry.
I am hungry for my mother’s voice. For one more ordinary morning. For the chance to take back the plate I threw, the lies I told, and the years I spent looking at her without truly seeing her.
There is no meal large enough to fill that emptiness.
So I let myself feel it.
I close my eyes.
I hold the pain without swallowing it.
And for the first time in my life, I allow myself to grieve.

I just want to make sure I won’t get banned, I can make custom items and I want to make my whole plot this theme so I can have fun by trolling people. Genuine question by the way 🤔 I want to know the things I can’t and can do If I create this