u/evenmore08

ISBN-13: 978-0357986769

ISBN-10: 0357986768

Authors: William Duiker, Jackson J Spielvogel 

Publisher: Cengage Learning 

Edition: 10

Thank you!

I’m 18, and I was recently harassed by a man in the city and while I was safely able to get away, this is not the first time something like this has happened. Based on my research, it’s difficult to get pepper spray legally partially due to the laws and my age. Same with alternatives and self defense weapons. I’m not sure if my understanding of these laws are correct. Please correct me if I’m wrong, I’ve not been living here for a long time.

How can I go about acquiring self defense objects? I’d like to be prepared for the future, in case anything like this happens again.

I’m an 18 year old art student in the city. I was carrying a huge bag of art supplies back home and stopped for some coffee at one of those streetside newspaper stands since I was in a hurry and wanted something cold. A 40-something year old man was talking to the owner, who is South Asian, like me. He stopped and looked at me and said I look really pretty. I ignored him and handed my coffee to the owner to pay. He said he was really smart since he was going to study psychology at NYU. He said I’m a “really pretty 16 year old.” I didn’t say anything about my age but I just said firmly that I’m not interested.

This predator kept pressing me and then turned to the owner and asked if I was his daughter, who shook his head no and told him to stop (thank god for this) but that didn’t stop him. As I turned to leave he tried to palm my fucking boobs and said they were really pretty (because of the size of the newsstand he was standing right next to me the whole time.) I got really freaked out and walked away as fast as I could, but not as fast as I would have liked since I was carrying all my art supplies. He started walking at a normal pace after me saying “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to start anything,” until I lost him by entering the subway. I didn’t see him after that.

So yeah, a racist predator man who can’t take a hint tried to touch me and follow me afterwards. This is the worst thing that’s happened to me by a man in my life so far so I am very lucky to be honest. I hate being a woman.

I’m an Indian-American student at a small college in the US, and I’m helping restart our Desi club with 2 Indian international students who are seniors. Since we started working together, I’ve noticed that when I suggest things related to Indian culture, they often respond in ways that make me feel out of touch, like “that’s not really common in India” or implying I’m suggesting something weird.

For example, when we were planning our Indian table for the multicultural fair, I suggested buying little Indian flags to display in our table. They explained that the flag is currently associated with the Indian government and its actions, which many people disagree with, so it wouldn’t be appropriate. I don’t know the full political landscape of India but I’ve been trying to educate myself, and as a result I don’t hold any fully educated opinion on Indian politics. I genuinely didn’t know that context and was completely fine with not using them, but the way it was said felt unnecessarily passive aggressive. the other Indian American girl on the club board suggested the same thing and they didn’t react as negatively.

Today we were planning a collab with another club and discussing props for the Desi drawing model, since it was going to be a Desi themed figure drawing night. suggested a decorative peacock fan because I actually have one at my home in India and have seen family and friends use them when I visit. We use it around the house and sometimes in religious rituals. One of them looked at me like I was weird and scoffed and the other girl laughed at me and said it was probably just an upper class Indian thing and not very common, so that would never work. All of my ideas are always shot down because of similar reasoning.

Maybe they are right, and I’m obviously not going to know everything about contemporary Indian culture because I grew up in the US. They’re also North Indian while I’m South Indian, so I wonder if there could be regional differences too. But the repeated feeling with any encounter with them is what bothers me. They have this air of being above me for being authentically Indian, and I’ve unfortunately had this experience with many other people from India, but not all. I’ve felt not Indian enough for most of my life, and sometimes I feel like because I grew up in America, my experience of Indian culture is automatically seen as less legitimate.

How do you deal with having a different cultural experience without feeling like you have to prove that you’re “Asian enough”?

I’ve always only done surface level cuts, nothing too deep. Most of the time I just stab myself with a pencil really hard to the point where it leaves an indent in my skin, or just purposefully scratch myself with a razor when shaving body hair, till I’m bleeding. Sometimes I bite my nails and skin until it’s bleeding. I feel like a coward for not cutting deeper because I’m scared that it might get infected or something like that and it will get noticed. I feel weirdly jealous of people who cut deeper. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, sometimes I try to go deeper but then I stop right before I go too deep. Am I the only one who feels this way?

This is my first year at ANYC, and I have a Sunday ticket. Since I bought it just recently I had to do the retailer pickup option, but I won’t be able to pickup my badge until the Saturday before, Aug 22. Would this be too late to pickup my badge?

i'm so fucking tired of feeling like i have to defend the fact that i cared about you because i know i did. i know i hurt you too, and i know i wasn't there for you when you needed me the most, and i don't think i'll ever stop feeling guilty about that because i know how much pain you were already in and i know my absence made it worse. i've apologized because i meant every word of it. i wasn't apologizing because i wanted forgiveness or because i wanted to make myself feel better, i apologized because i genuinely wish i had done better. i wish i had checked in. i wish i hadn't disappeared for months. i wish i had realized sooner how much i was hurting you. i know intentions don't erase the impact and i never expected them to. but somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like we were talking about what i did and started feeling like you were telling me who i was as a person, and that hurt in a completely different way.

i think that's the part i can't get over. i can accept you telling me i hurt you because i know i did. i can accept you saying i wasn't there because i wasn't. i can even accept that i'll probably carry guilt about this for a really long time. but i can't accept you telling me what was in my own heart. i can't accept you looking me in the face and telling me i never cared because i know that's just not true. i remember why we became friends. i remember how easy it felt talking to somebody who actually understood what it was like to be sick all the time without me having to explain every little thing. i know those moments were real. i know i cared. i just wasn't the friend you needed by the end.

what hurts even more is that i don't think you ever realized i had already been reaching my limit long before everything finally fell apart. i don't think i woke up one day and decided i didn't want to be your friend anymore. i think i just slowly got worn down until one day i realized i didn't have anything left to give. every conversation started feeling heavier than the last and i kept convincing myself i wasn't allowed to feel overwhelmed because your situation was objectively worse than mine. every time i wanted to say i was struggling too i talked myself out of it because i thought it would've been selfish. i knew you were suffering more than i was so i kept telling myself to just keep going, to just be a better friend, to stop thinking about myself for a second. but my feelings didn't disappear just because i ignored them. i just buried them until i couldn't anymore.

when you kept saying you carried my pain while i never carried yours, i don't even know how to explain why that hurt so much. maybe that's how it felt to you, and i'm not saying you're wrong for feeling that way. but i wish you knew how heavy everything had become for me too. i was dealing with my own health, my own grief, my own life completely falling apart, and i felt like i was barely holding myself together. i know i never really told you all of that. maybe i should've. maybe that's on me. i don't think i ever stopped caring about you. i think i confused reaching my limit with something i could just push through, and i think you confused me reaching my limit with me stopping caring about you. those aren't the same thing, at least they never were to me.

i'm also angry because you kept saying i never communicated. i know i wasn't perfect at it, but i did try. i remember telling you months before everything happened that i was overwhelmed. i remember sitting down and trying to explain that i didn't know how to keep carrying everything anymore. i wasn't trying to tell you that your pain was too much or that you were an inconvenience. i was trying to tell you that i was drowning too. then i found out you genuinely believed i saw you as some kind of burden and i don't even know how to describe how much that hurt because it made me feel like we'd somehow lived through two completely different friendships. after that i don't think i ever believed you saw my intentions the way i meant them.

and maybe what i'm the most angry about is that i don't think there was ever room for me to be hurt too. i spent months thinking about everything i did wrong because i knew your pain was bigger than mine. i never brought up my own hurt because i genuinely felt like it would've been unfair. i knew you were already past your limit, so i didn't want to add mine onto yours. but i had been hurting too. i had been overwhelmed too. i had been slowly falling apart too. i don't think you ever really knew that because i never let you see it, and maybe that's my fault, but when i finally did try to tell you it felt like there wasn't room for it anymore. every time i tried explaining where i was coming from it somehow became another reason why i was a worse person instead of just another piece of the story.
i know i failed you. i'm not running from that. i don't need anyone to remind me because i've been reminding myself every day for months. but i refuse to believe that failing you means i never cared. i refuse to believe that the worst thing i've ever done to someone suddenly defines every feeling i ever had for them. i cared about you. i also reached a point where i couldn't carry our friendship anymore. both of those things are true no matter how much you refuse to believe them.

i think that's the saddest part of all of this. you left believing i abandoned you because i didn't care. i left knowing i hurt someone i genuinely cared about while also realizing i'd been hurting for a really long time too. i don't hate you. i don't even really feel betrayed by you. i'm just sad. i'm sad that we met because we understood each other's pain better than most people ever could, and somehow we still ended up becoming another source of pain for each other. i'm sad that you'll probably always remember me as the person who abandoned you, and i'll probably always remember you as the person who couldn't believe i ever cared. i wish we'd met each other at different points in our lives when we both had more of ourselves to give. maybe things still would've fallen apart. maybe they wouldn't have. i guess i'll never know.

I've been sitting on this for months now and I genuinely don't know how I'm supposed to feel anymore. A friend of mine confronted me about not being there for her while she was going through severe chronic illness, surgery, and some of the worst pain of her life. The more we talked, the more I realized there were things I genuinely did wrong. I should've checked in after her surgery. I shouldn't have told her I'd respond and then disappeared for months. I apologized for those things because I do feel remorseful, and I know that even if hurting her was never my intention, my actions still did. I don't think intentions erase impact and I never really argued that they did.

But it turned into her telling me she doesn't believe I ever cared about her at all, that my intentions were meaningless, and that she hopes I never treat another disabled friend the way I treated her. That part has honestly been messing with me because I also have a chronic illness, and the reason we even became friends was because we bonded over that. Before college we would text each other all the time about appointments, symptoms, random life stuff, and it genuinely felt like I had found someone who understood what it was like to have your body constantly working against you.

I think what I've finally admitted to myself is that becoming roommates completely changed our friendship. There were so many things that happened throughout the year that I never really processed at the time because it always felt like there was another crisis happening, another situation to deal with, another thing that needed my attention. I kept telling myself I just needed to push through it because she was struggling too, but looking back I think I had already started pulling away almost a year before all of this happened. It wasn't some conscious decision where I woke up and decided I didn't want to be friends anymore, I think I just got tired. Then my own life completely fell apart. I was dealing with my own health issues, deaths of friends and family, abuse, and probably the worst year of my life overall, and I think I subconsciously withdrew because I genuinely didn't have anything left in me.

I know that doesn't excuse what happened, and I don't want it to. The thing that keeps bothering me though is when she said she carried my pain while I never carried hers. Maybe that's genuinely how it felt to her, and I'm not trying to take that away from her, but I don't think she ever realized how heavy the friendship had become for me too. She listened to me talk about what I was going through and I will always appreciate that, but from my perspective I felt like I spent so much of the friendship trying to help her through constant situations that by the end I didn't even realize how drained I was until I had completely shut down. I cooked for her, hugged her while she cried, took over her chores and brought her/did other things that she asked. I did so much physical (as in present labor that helped her daily life feel much easier) that I feel I didn’t listen to her vent/talk about her issues enough, which is something I am so remorseful for.

I also realized after all of this that I'd been carrying hurt from the friendship for a long time too, but I never really let myself think about it because I was so focused on how I'd let her down. Every time I tried bringing up my own perspective during our conversation it always came back to how much I'd hurt her, and I understand why because she went through something horrific, but I walked away feeling like there just wasn't room for my side anymore.

The friendship is over now and I honestly don't know what emotion I'm supposed to have. I feel guilty because I know I hurt someone who trusted me and needed me. I feel sad because despite everything, I did care about her. But if I'm being completely honest, I also feel relieved, and that relief makes me feel guilty all over again because I feel like I shouldn't be relieved after hurting someone this badly. I don't think I'm relieved because she's out of my life, I think I'm relieved because I don't feel like I'm carrying something that had been slowly crushing me for almost a year anymore. I keep wondering if that makes me a bad person, or if it's possible that both things can exist at the same time. That I genuinely hurt someone, genuinely feel remorse for it, and also genuinely reached a point where I couldn't keep carrying the friendship anymore.

Edit; spelling/typo

My family recently bought a new house, and today I (18F) spent 4 to 5 hours straight helping move heavy items to the new house with my mom (43F). I’m home from college for the summer. Because of all the heavy lifting, my hand—which is already prone to chronic pain—is hurting worse than usual right now.

Shortly after finishing, my dad (49M). was on his way back from being at my brother’s (12M) game and called me and asked me to still wait there to help him fix something at the new house. Because my hand was hurting, I asked him exactly what it was he needed help with. I wanted to see if it was a task I could actually manage without injuring my hand further. I never once said or implied that I wouldn't help him.

Instead of just telling me the task, my dad got incredibly defensive. He refused to tell me what the job was and accused me of "acting like I'm special" just for wanting to know. In his mind, asking for details automatically meant I was trying to get out of doing the work. When I told him about my hand, he said that meant I wasn’t doing my hand physical therapy exercises properly, even though I’ve literally done it in front of him before. I felt this was an unnecessary and false comment.

He’d already asked me to help him yesterday but I said I couldn’t because I had committed to finishing something a group project already by the end of that day. He did the same thing when I tried to ask him for details; he wouldn’t tell me and asked me why I wanted to know what it was.

After that blow-up, he completely shut down, ignored me, and stopped asking for my help altogether. He just went ahead and started doing the project by himself while enlisting my mom for help.

Afterwards when my mom called me outside to tell me something, he pointed to my head and said to my mom unprompted “Don’t you think her hair is balding because of her birth control? I’ve told her this multiple times and she’s been refusing to stop it immediately.” This was a completely unrelated issue and I don’t know why he brought it up.

He then said he needed to go to our current home to get a tool and said he would drop me at home while I’m there. My mom offered to do it to avoid him berating me in the car ride but he just glared at her. I said I wouldn’t go home with him because I didn’t want to deal with his lectures for even longer. He just stared me down and said that I was always attention seeking like this and I would never change. Then he went back to his work and ignored me, living me to go back inside.

I feel like it’s completely reasonable to ask for details about a physical task when I’m already hurt, but his reaction is making me second-guess myself.