r/AMA

I’ve hit the 15-year mark of living in Berlin after leaving New York back in 2011, and now looking back I could have never predicted how my life would have turned out. I’m a 39-year-old Chinese-American landscape engineer with the city's the parks department. For a while, I lived a pretty traditional life. I met my ex here and we were married monogamously for 7 years. After the divorce we've maintained a great relationship as co-parents. These days ENM is my preferred relationship dynamic (closer to solo-poly/relationship anarchy) and I enjoy Berlin's rave and alternative lifestyle scene (with moderation!). Some things you can ask me about:

• What it’s like working for the Berlin government as an immigrant.
• Transitioning from a 7-year monogamous marriage to the Berlin ENM scene.
• Co-parenting abroad while maintaining an alternative lifestyle.
• How Berlin has changed from 2011 to 2026.
• NYC vs. Berlin/US vs Germany culture shocks, identity, or German visa struggles.

I was constantly living with a lot of stress; I started having a lot of headaches that I ignored by taking some painkillers. After a month the headache became more intense, I started experiencing dizziness and numbness on one side of my body until I fainted and ended up in the emergency room.

I spent a week in the hospital; my stroke was due to poorly controlled blood pressure caused by constant stress. I was discharged, but with many aftereffects. I can't speak clearly, sometimes I have brain fog, I can't move half of my body, I have to depend on others for almost everything, I'm doing physical therapy but I haven't seen any improvement I feel like my life is ruined

Guys, please don't live under constant stress 🙏🏼

I am a (now retired) motorcycle racer, and raced on short circuits (like Silverstone), Irish road circuits and at the Isle of Man TT.

Happy to answer any questions, as lots of people seem to think road racers are crazy!

I have played chess since I was 9 years old, I have gained my first title when I was 16 years old and I competed against numerous chess players that were much older than me. I'm one of the top 15 chess players in my country and will gain the Grandmaster title very soon.

I sparked a lot of controversy with this statement on a subreddit for immigrants in Sweden and I have never been more downvoted. I want to share my honest experience after living in Sweden for almost eight years and interacting with a lot of locals and other immigrants. I hope to have a healthy discussion about the pros and cons of living here but if people want to attack me or downvote me for doing this AMA, you’re welcome to do that. I am open to sharing my opinions and experience living here and also what I have seen happening at the companies where I’ve worked and maybe some of the stories others have shared with me. So go ahead and ask me anything about living in Sweden as an immigrant.

Edit: as I said I’m open to talk about Sweden but please don’t ask me personal questions as I won’t answer those, it’s not the point of this AMA and I don’t want to share my personal health condition on the internet. I’m obviously open to sharing my opinions and experience though. I also started getting very overwhelmed by all the questions where I’m from. I answered at some point and I’ve also said I’m white but then I deleted some of those details since I really don’t think it makes such a big difference to my experience in Sweden. I really wanted to keep this AMA about sharing my experience in Sweden and hopefully having a healthy, open and nuanced discussion instead of explaining my skin color and ethnicity in details.

This post exploded so I will provide a summary of the most common questions and my answers:

Yes, I speak Swedish, not perfectly as I have an accent but unfortunately I can’t improve my accent that much. My pronunciation will just never be truly Swedish it seems.

I moved here for work but stayed for love. I am planning to move out as soon as I find a job elsewhere which takes a while since the job market seems to be extra tough everywhere. Where I move to next will depend a lot on the job I’m offered and I’ll make sure to do a ton of research in advance.

I think moving to Sweden was my biggest mistake since I am convinced that my career, social life and savings account would have been much much better elsewhere. I am jealous of my acquaintances who have similar background as me and are better off elsewhere in Europe. I’m also jealous of many of my immigrant friends who left Sweden and are happier elsewhere so I’ll move soon too.

Taxes - no, I have no issue paying taxes. My issue is that I keep on hearing that healthcare, social security and institutions are good in Sweden and that’s not my experience.

Immigration and racism - the racism I’ve faced is subtle, not in my face and behind my back. I think it’s obvious how Sweden treats immigrants nowadays if you look at the institutions. I am one of the 100000 immigrants who have been stuck in the application process for citizenship for years and there’s even a court decision that my application should be processed as soon as possible. However, I’ll most likely just be rejected in a few months due to the new rules and the fact that I don’t pass a test for Swedish culture that doesn’t even exist yet. Then I’ll need to wait for the test to be created and possibly wait a few more years in the queue again. Currently 75% of the decisions for citizenship are decided within around five years which is the reason why my application has been untouched for years. I would have hoped that I’d get a more fair process as an immigrant trying to integrate here and gain the right to vote and have say in politics but at this point I just want to forget about all of it and move out.

Here racism isn’t really in your face but more like behind your back. If you want to read more concrete racist comments you can go to r/Sverige As for my personal experience with what i would claim is racist there’s always assumption that I moved here to work in a warehouse or some other lower-paying job as that’s what immigrants do apparently. Ive also heard about questions behind my back about my education or my beliefs or values as they of course must be worse than people born and raised in Sweden. I’ve even been accused in a restaurant about not paying my bill for some reason and the accusation was dropped immediately when my Swedish friend appeared. In general, the treatment I get from others when I’m alone is extremely different compared to if I’m with a Swede. My non-white friends get way worse treatment and comments behind their backs.

As for being safe - in my neighborhood yes but I’ve been harassed many times around the city and even in public transport. It even reached a point when people around me had to call the police in a few cases. I also always get asked whether I was harassed by Swedes so I’ll just add that most of the people (not all of course) harassing me were blond and spoke perfect Swedish. Never asked them where they were born and raise though as I was too busy trying to get out of a bad situation. And yes there are ghettos here but I don’t go there as I never had to

Healthcare - my experience is quite bad. I moved here with a prescription and diagnosis and it took me eight months to get help again. I’ve been told to just go private since it’s better and faster. My subsequent experiences with healthcare were similar - basically endless waiting time and just told to go elsewhere, referred from place to place to place forever.

I see that so many people assume they can find my medical history from my previous posts. Some also assume about my adhd and that I came to Sweden looking for stimulants. No, I didn’t move here looking for them. I’m receiving dms in addition to the many comments here asking about my conditions and claiming it was self-inflicted even... I haven’t and I won’t talk about it online and I hope people respect that. The few posts I have online about my health are open and you’re welcome to read them. I definitely won’t disclose anything more. If anything all the disrespectful comments, targeted messages, calling me things and prying show me that sharing my experience is not a good idea.

Sick leave - I actually find it very unfair that if you’re sick the first day isn’t paid. I know some think this is a better system but I’m tired of colleagues coughing around me or working from home with fever because they don’t want to be on sick leave. Then for two weeks you get 80% of your salary and after that you get money from the social system. When I was sick for more than two weeks (yes it happens when you live somewhere for eight years) I waited for four months to even get my application started. I know people who are high earners and were sick for more than a year and just went back to work because they couldn’t afford to be on sick leave anymore since they were earning half their regular salary (if you’re sick for a longer period of time then the sick leave payment decreases). I also know maaaany cases where people were laid off while on parental leave or sick leave. All this makes me say that I don’t have any confidence in the safety net here and I don’t want to risk paying most of my income in taxes and have little savings since I know my savings are my only real safety net and I won’t get much if I get seriously sick some day.

Social life - it’s hard to make Swedish friends in my experience and almost nobody around me has Swedish friends. I think integrating here and having a social life is incredibly difficult. I made some very good friends over the years but almost all of them were immigrants and left for other countries so I had to start trying to integrate again and again.

This post gathered more than 575 comments in less than two hours and I’ve been trying to do my best to answer all questions and provide a summary in my edit in the post of the most common questions instead of saying the same things over and over. I’ll try my best to answer everything as soon as possible. I initially set aside four hours for this AMA but I’ll need additional time later to go through it all.

Edit 2: i really tried my best to answer all the questions directly as a comment or provided a summary in my post as some questions were overlapping. I know that probably some people think my answers were not detailed enough etc but I tried my best during the four hours I allocated to this AMA.

I’m going to randomly check some of the notifications even after the AMA is closed but won’t focus as much on replying to each because it’s no longer an active AMA, and i don’t have the time for all the hundreds of new notifications.

I got a lot of hate in some comments and dms and I see some comments were deleted since they were found to be disrespectful. If anything, it makes me feel that sharing my opinion and experience is not welcomed by many even on Reddit. To those, sending me some kindness - thank you, it’s really appreciated.

Take care everyone and as I wrote many times, I hope for more kindness and tolerance in the world!

So a few years ago I was cheering at games, doing dance routines, stunts, all that stuff.

Now I spend most weekends inside a mascot suit entertaining crowds, messing with refs, dancing badly on purpose, and trying not to pass out from the heat.

I kinda fell into it after helping with promotions for a local team, and it turned into actual paid mascot work. Since then I’ve done games, school events, commercials, social media stuff, birthday appearances, etc.

People always think it’s easy until they try wearing a giant foam head and padding for 4 hours straight while running around stairs and getting swarmed by kids.

AMA!

So I'm on the east coast USA and it usually takes a while for my body to wind down because I'm the type of person that once I'm up I'm up for a very long time lol. I long to find friends who are in a different time zone than me because most of the people I chat with are on the east coast and they go to bed quite earlier than I do lol. Feel free to ask me anything. I'm willing to talk 🙂

I've always had a deep interest in criminal psychology, planning to go to school for it soon, and I've been writing letters to infamous prisoners for nearly a decade now. But, I've taken a hiatus for over a year now because of personal issues, but I feel like this would be an interesting thing to do an AMA about. I've sent over 100+ letters and have received replies back from quite a good amount of them.

I have a few rules for doing this; 1. No criminals linked to do anything with minors. Absolutely not. 2. No terrorists and / or hate groups. 3. No overly gruesome/disturbing crimes.

Here's a list of a few individuals who I have received replies from back to me. Charlie Bronson/Salvador, Charles Manson, El Chapo, Ted Kaczynski, and Joe Exotic.

I do hope this post will stay up, I will absolutely and completely understand if this post gets taken down. However, I will obviously not comment about certain details about these individuals if this post is allowed to stay.

AMA!

Edit: its currently 5:30 am where I am and I gotta head out to work soon so if don't reply right away I will respond when I return! Thank you and have a good day

A few years ago she admitted she married me because I was a “good idea and a good man” and people we trust said she should. I married because I was in love and wanted a life together. 10 years, many adventures and multiple kids alter and I’m not loved but more like a good friend/no change. AMA

EDIT: this is genuinely been very helpful for me. I really appreciate all of you people taking time to give your opinions, input and experiences. I’m not closing this out yet as it has been helpful to answer some of the questions you guys ask. I did not expect it to become such a popular post, but I thank you for you guys being willing to take the time.

"My brother was born in 2001. I’m the second child, two years younger than him, and later my mom had a third son. From early on, my mom noticed something different about my first brother — he struggled to stand up or run compared to other kids, even compared to us younger siblings. By 2009, the signs were bigger: walking on his toes and falling often.

In 2010, my mom started taking him from hospital to hospital. My parents even sold our only house to afford more expensive hospitals, hoping for answers. Instead, most doctors told us to just take him home, that nothing could be done. Some said there was no treatment; others told us not to waste money because he would die young. Some even returned examination fees and sent us away.

Because of this lack of awareness and the way doctors spoke to us, my family turned to traditional fixes and faith. Those methods only caused more damage. My brother died at 19, in June 2020, at home. What hurts me most is that if doctors had simply told us clearly: ‘He has Duchenne muscular dystrophy.' 'There's no cure, but here are resources, guidance, and supportive care,’ we could have prepared and cared for him better. Instead, they threw out one sentence—'he will die young’—which gave us nothing.

Now my youngest brother, born in 2022, is showing the same signs at age 4. I’m 23 now, and I’ve grown up realizing how much damage those hospitals did to us. Pinterest pictures and YouTube videos have given me more awareness and guidance than doctors ever did. That makes me angry, but it also pushes me to share our story.

Hi, I’m 19F and was born and raised in Khasavyurt, Dagestan. I currently have moved away to study in university and sooo many people are shocked to find out I am from Dagestan. So here I am to answer your questions)))

Parents divorced.

My father went MTF in the mid 90s before I entered 6th grade and detransitioned in the early 2000s after my siblings had children.

I went to 3 differently located middle schools away from the religious primary school I attended and a completely different state for 2 different High schools.

My ex-fiance ended up transitioning after proposing.

Had an ex cheat on me with a MTF.

Had my husband's best friend transition MTF.

AMA

**Y'all have a lovely night. Thanks for asking questions.

okay, few things right off the bat. yes, it was for medical reasons. i’m an insomniac with a variety of anxiety disorders. yes, i’m off it now but this was less than six months ago so it was pretty recent.

ER/trauma nurse of 10 years on a boring zoom call, Ask me anything! Currently on an education zoom call that could be an email, love spending my day off with stuff like this🥰 ask ask ask ask ask ask ask away :)

As already said above I lost my daughter at 38 weeks during pregnancy. I went to a normal check up just two weeks before the actual calculated birth date and there was no heartbeat anymore.

This happenend to me last year in June and I wanted to do an AMA ever since, however only now I feel stable enough.

Please ask me anything!

At the ripe age of 13, my uncle (23 at the time) took his life in front of me. It really helps me to talk about it and I’m comfortable with sharing details for those curious. I made this AMA for selfish reasons, to maybe make me feel a bit better or to find someone who (very unfortunately) relates to my situation.

I got kicked out at 19, because my mother accused me of sleeping with her husband. (No, I didn’t do this. Ew.)

I asked my father if I could stay with him and his wife and two children, he told me no and slammed the door in my face.

I had to live with a coworker from work for 4 years for free until I got on my feet after having a baby at 20. (No guidance. I was dumb. And, convinced of keeping the baby, I wanted an smushmortion.)

Got into an abusive relationship from 18.5 to 26. Left after almost being killed in front of 2/3 of my children. Got a stable job and now, on my feet in a loving relationship.

Still no relationship with my parents. AMA?