What was your personal "never again" moment?
The title should be enough.
A few months ago I was out of juice to drink and didn't want to drink water, for some reason.
There were 2 packets of powder juice, lemon (how my father got this packet is a mystery to me) and passion fruit. Passion fruit is really bitter or something (I remember putting like 3 spoons of sugar in one cup and it wasn't enough) so I really don't want passion fruit so I, after a lot of lesser evil stuff, picked lemon.
It was powder, so the lemon felt kinda off. There wasn't a lot of room for citrus, so it didn't really feel like lemon. So what do I do? Add sugar! To lemon!
So that didn't feel any more like lemon, it was sweet, and I'm not even sure if the thing dissolved properly in the water!
So, I had to drink a liter of that. And I did. And I don't want to do it again.
When I was a student I decided it'd be a good idea to use a cigarette as a straw to drink my tea. Absolutely the worst taste you can possibly imagine. Almost put me off smoking. Almost.
My god. Having eaten bits of pre-rolled and roll-your-own tobacco, I could imagine exactly how terrible this would taste. I've seen a friend drink out of an "ash can" before, but I think this might somehow be worse?
I once set my McDonald's drink cup on the workbench in my garage. A visitor who was at the house, who happened to be a smoker, discarded his cigarette butt into the drink cup, which still had my beverage in it (I didn't see him do it). He even put the lid and straw back onto the top of the cup, so you couldn't see what was inside of it. I ended up nearly finishing the beverage, without knowing that there was a cigarette butt in it. I found it crazy that I didn't even taste it. Thankfully, I didn't get sick. Your comment reminded me of that, haha.
Ha! Yeh, awful. Urgh.
I had a similar cig experience... my only pack of smokes got rained on while I was camping. I dried them out in the sun and smoked them anyways. Worst taste ever. Wasn't bad enough to keep me from smoking them, as I still needed the nicotine. But it was miserable. Water and dried tobacco don't mix.
I cheated on a girl once. She didn’t deserve to be cheated on. The other girl didn’t deserve to be a “side chick”. It was also terrible for me. It was literally bad for all parts involved. Everyone has feelings. Never again.
I tried adding some cocoa powder to greek yogurt. It was disgusting. It didn't mix all that well and the sour + the cocoa taste was really off-putting. Even after a bunch of sugar (that I added in a last ditch effort to save it) it still tasted...wrong.
Never again.
Edit: I thought of another one.
we were out of regular pepper so I tried to put powdered pepper on some mac n cheese. The bottle tipped over and at least 3 whole spoonfuls of powdered pepper splattered all over my noodles. What got me wasn't the spiciness, but just how bitter it was. Made me a looot more careful with pepper.
I used to eat Twinkies on a regular basis growing up. Once, when I went to take a bite, instead of cream filling, I found mold. The twinkie was not expired. I don't know how this happened. I haven't touched or even considered eating a twinkie since, which was around 16 years ago.
Oof. Even if you see perfectly normal cream filling, you won't dare?
My mother-in-law surprised me with a giant swing ride ticket that she bought me for my birthday. It was one of those swings where you wore a harness and had the swing attached to your back, so you rode in the air almost like Superman. They had a winch that would pull you about 100 feet in the air. It was terrifying to say the least. I don't do good with roller coasters or anything similar. I was yelling like a madman when the operator pulled the cable that let us loose. Legitimately had the feeling that I was falling. Never again haha.
One of the worst days in my life (at least at that point): I'm five, my brothers and I are eating lunch, get to the fruit cocktail with grapes, peaches, pineapple, cherries and pears. The pears are these little clearish cubie things. I gagged on mine, and didn't want to eat anymore. I was then told I couldn't go play hockey when my brothers and dad went to go play because I was "sick," and then to stop crying, it wasn't like it wouldn't happen again.
It never happened again, and I still can't eat pear 25 years later. I don't like the taste or texture. I can drink pear cider, but that's about it.
Dunno if you live in the right climate, but the house my family moved into when I was a teenager had a pear tree in the backyard, and I discovered that I liked pears way better when they are less ripe. They're a little firm but the flavor is so much better and less overpoweringly sweet and pear-ish than really ripe or preserved pears.
I can't speak for OP, but at least for me, pears are off-putting largely because of their texture, not flavor. To me, they're like an apple that got dropped at the beach and is all gritty, sandy, and generally gross.
It makes for fun conversation at work (I manage a produce department) when I have customers ask me which pears are good.
I am moving out with my wife and because of covid we couldn't get the new house before we lesve the old one. So, obviously, we went to live with a friend of mine, what could go wrong?.
Well, he has a new girlfriend and she turn out to be a fucking psycho. All the time she was trying to talk shit of my wife because she thought my wife was trying to still her boyfriend, completely ridiculous.vridiculous. Apparently she also had the same problem with her own sister. Anyway, we left and went to a friend of my wife. This girl has a 2 month pregnancy and has a 5y/o kid. She was bitching about nausea every time she had to do anything so we spent almost 2 weeks helping her to do everything, taking care of the children, cooking, cleaning, etc while at the same time she was calling her husband saying she was doing everything alone. Now we rent an airbnb, never again.
I've heard people say the fastest way to hate someone is to live with them. That's how I knew when I'd met my partner for life. Hopefully you're in your new place already or will be soon. :)
It is true, they are not bad people but made us feel miserable. I think it happened similar to me, one of the things I fell in love for was how easy is to live with her. Luckily, in a month everything will be solved.
Oof. How did that happen? Did someone plug a logarithmic function into your credit card? I've heard interest rates and compounding debts tend to work like that but I don't know anything about personal finance.
I'm not sure that credit is such a huge deal in other parts of the world, and it really says something that it's so important to the US, the land of consumer spending, and yet there's basically zero mandatory financial education for the average young adult/kid in high school. Hard to think that's a bug and not a feature.
psychedelic mushrooms.
I experienced various simultaneous scenarios in which I died in ways that ranged from "terrible" to "unspeakable." For about a year after I questioned my reality and thought the universe was speaking to me. Outwardly, I lived my life as usual and displayed no signs of being insane, or anything of that sort. Inwardly, I was shook.
oh gosh, I'm so sorry that happened to you too. I'm a little over one year in from a very similar experience. it's slowly getting better.
I'm sorry you had that experience, and I hope you're doing well now. Psychedelics are certainly not for everyone. If anyone else reading this is planning on doing psychedelics, please, please, please make sure you'll have a sitter, you'll be in a comfortable environment, and that you're in a good place mentally to begin with.
Same thing happened to me, but with LSD. I was experiencing symptoms of psychosis for years but it never got so bad i felt i should seek help and as far as i know, no one ever knew. In a morbid way, im kind of glad it happened, it really makes me appreciate how i perceive reality now. Ironically, ive taken mushrooms multiple times since then and had a great time.
Driving under the influence. (Not necessarily alcohol). The lanes changed out from under me, I was in the right lane, then the next instant in the left lane. It was only my hazy knowledge of the laws of reality - "I didn't turn the wheel so I'm probably still in the same lane" - that stopped me from trying to merge right off of the road. Never again, it's not worth it.
On a lighter note, NEVER eat a spoonful of salt.
In a similar vein for me: Driving fatigued. I helped my brother move, a trip of about 1,000 mi/1,600 km. We pulled an all nighter. During one of my turns driving I looked up at a billboard and it started to change in weird ways. I opened up my eyes a few seconds later and realized that I had slipped into sleep without even realizing it. Waking consciousness had morphed smoothly into dream consciousness. Thankfully it was a straight bit of road and I was still on the road and in my lane. I immediately pulled off the road. It was a literal and figurative wake up call.
At a forest rave while candy flipping with my ex, we were chillin in inflatable tubes in the small pool/pond thing near one of the stages. On stage there was a guy dancing with a 6' bong. He offered us both a hit. I decided fuck it, why not. Within about an hour I was curled up in our tent having a lot of trouble holding onto reality. My heart felt like it was racing in a way that felt like I was dying. I knew that I was on drugs so I probably wasn't, but I spent the rest of the night drifting in and out of consciousness. I'm not sure I ever slept, on behalf of the loud, bass heavy music.
This is the night I learned to never accept drugs from strangers.
Just yesterday I had one. Sticking with the food theme so far...
We have a nice garden going in the back, sadly one of our pepper plants broke it's stem right as it was starting to fruit. So I have about a dozen bell peppers about an inch long. I wanted to attempt to use them, so I sauteed then up with some sliced yellow squash and a bit of garlic. Terrible and bitter. Never again.
Salvia. I'm sure everyone who tried it has a similar story, so I won't bore you with the details, but I first thought I was being tilted off of the world, then I heard the "song of the universe," immediately before an earthquake happened causing me to run to the nearest doorframe. My trip-sitter was not impressed, and even though that wasn't the end of my explorations with psychedelics, that was the day I said "never again" to salvia. Plus, I think it's illegal now in the US? Good riddance.
e: Oh yeah, and somewhere in there I saw the world being wrapped into a giant burrito before my eyes? And did I mention this was all in about 15 minutes?
I will NEVER take expired medication again!
So back when I was newly 19 I was working at a warehouse in the midwest. I had recently been diagnosed with ADHD and I was perscribed Straterra, a non stimulant SSRI type drug used to treat ADHD. I was still in denial so I ended up quitting the meds and left the bottle in the backseat of my car. Fast forward to halfway through the summer and my fiancee helped me realize that I actually needed the medication and I decided to start back on it.
My dumbass decided to just to use what I had in the car. Not only were these pills expired, they had been sitting all summer in my car. The temps got above 100 F outside, which means the temp in the car was as high as 140.
I took it before starting my shift (4:00 PM to 12:00 AM). Everything was fine until about 10:30. Thats when I started hearing voices.
IT. WAS. TERRIFYING. It was the worst night of my life. I have a lot of empathy for those suffering with severe mental issues. It wasn't like hearing a voice outside of yourself that you can easily ignore. It was coming from within, as though I was the one thinking those horrible thoughts, but at the same time it wasn't me. It was all I could do to finish my shift without running out of there screaming. I called my now wife bawling my eyes out as I drove home.
My biggest fear was that the voices wouldn't go away. Thankfully I woke up the next morning fine. I never took that medication again, and any desire to try illegal drugs is completely gone. Thankfully I'm on a stable medication that is helpful and doesn't have any... side effects.
"Yeouch."I did something like this once, but it was with milk after coming back from a trip to my now dead grandma. I wanted to eat my Kelloggs and I just used the milk that was aging there for 30 days. I can vaguely remember some bubbles forming. Fortunately for me, I ate by spoons so as soon as the first one went in, I immediately knew something was wrong, and the rest of that lunch went to the toilet after my parents noticed.
Just a technical/pedantic question though: by "illegal drugs" you mean "expired medication", right? You said a doctor prescribed it to you, you were just thick headed and didn't take it until way later after leaving it very badly stored, right?
No, I actually meant illegal drugs. I guess my line of thinking is that if something prescribed and monitored by a Dr. can mess me up this bad then the last thing I want to do is to try shrooms or LSD or something like that on my own.
It just turned me off of psychotropic drugs in general. I take what I have to to manage my ADHD/Depression, but I don't want to mess with anything except what I absolutely must take.
Yes, but that's because it had been poorly stored in your car for months when you took it, right? If you had taken it immediately as prescribed, when it wasn't stored in your car at 140F (47 or so Celsius? Idk, that's a sidenote.), wouldn't it have been okay? Or do you mean that normal, appropriately prescribed medication has already ended up being bad for you just by being poorly stored, so you wouldn't dare try anything that intentionally does that to you?
This right here. I get a lot of anxiety whenever I have to change my medications. I just don't want to take anything more than what I have to.
The fear of another "bad trip" outweighs any desire to use illegal drugs.
Disgusting Overshare Warning
I did the keto diet for a while, and I did genuinely see amazing results with it. At the beginning, I was simply heavily restricting carb intake, but I was still eating foods that I recognized (e.g. eggs, spinach, bacon, etc.). As I got more into it, however, I started finding more and more niche keto recipes/experiments that strayed further from what I would consider "real" food.
One of these was MCT oil. It's basically processed coconut oil that is liquid at room temperatures, and its status as a "healthy fat" makes it outright fetishized by some people that do keto. It is a key component of another odd keto food called bulletproof coffee.
Bulletproof coffee was all the rage. People online raved about it, said it was delicious and decadent, that it gave them a huge energy lift, etc. It was treated as a sort of keto messiah. I had a coworker who, knowing I loved coffee and was doing keto, literally asked me daily whether or not I'd tried it out yet. Because I'd had such a good experience with regular keto, and because this MCT oil/bulletproof coffee business was seemingly working for everyone else, I decided to try it out for myself.
There are two things you need to know:
It tasted terrible to drink and the mouthfeel was disgusting.
It later produced the need for among the most urgent and horrible of intestinal evacuations I've ever encountered.
For anyone curious (and I am NOT linking this for easy access), simply search "MCT oil" and "diarrhea". You'll get a flood of articles and forum posts about it. I just did a search myself and my favorite was a post that described the phenomenon as "rampant" and asked "is there any end to this nightmare?"
That poor person. I know their agony well.
Never again.