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How have you changed over the course of your life?
Asked mainly out of curiosity and because, personally, most of the changes I've been through (well, that I remember, with I don't do nearly as well as I'd like) as a person are basically the implications of autism often getting weaker with age and just getting hormones like most people instead of anything deliberate or conscious, with the exception of this.
I grew up in a very conservative family and was pretty far right myself. I believed that welfare made people lazy and that people chose to be poor (the irony being that my family worked hard and was still poor and I didn't see it).
Then I got married at 19. To a social worker. The first thing that started to change me was my wife's Type One Diabetes. I realized she would die without insurance and I slowly began to understand the need for universal healthcare. I saw that I was benefiting from the part of Obama Care that lets you stay on your parents insurance until you're 26. Then my wife began working in substance abuse. Hearing the stories she would bring home helped me to see them as real people instead of "Junkies".
The next big change came when we became foster parents. Getting to know the bio parents, seeing how the cards of society were stacked against them really improved my empathy for the impoverished. I saw people working hard and getting nowhere do to things outside of their control.
I'm 26 now, and I'm probably center left, but because of how conservative my Midwest state is most people here would call me a far left socialist.
At one point I was pro-life and (sort of) pro-death penalty... I saw it as a better recourse than "warehousing" people who had zero chance to see freedom ever again. My pro-life stance changed over the course of a few message board conversations (that I wasn't even really a part of), and I saw how little sense it made. I still don't like abortion (clarification: I don't like that it's a necessity), but I've become an adult and realize that me liking something and it being legal and available don't have even a sliver of correlation to them.
And as to the death penalty, I again became an adult and it occurred to me that as long as there's any chance, no matter now minute, that they might be actually innocent that applying a permanent punishment to them was inexcusable.
I grew up with a religious family, so I kind of got taught stuff like creationism, evolution is a hoax, some racist stuff, some homo/transphobia.
I kind of bought into creationism, I don’t remember ever believing the other stuff though...
I moved away for some time when I was 19. I started thinking for myself more and I kind of came to terms with not agreeing with my family on an any of those values...
I would party a lot, get drunk like 5 times a week (I was backpacking and my family was against alcohol and drugs). Later I smoked weed daily for a few months... after my backpacking trip I stopped smoking and I barely drank anymore. (I don’t think I ever had an issue with drinking, we were just backpacking so we partied often)
Another huge change in my life was starting to study.
Now I am 27 and I maybe had like 1 drink in the last year. And I smoked weed once since I was 21...
I also grew up pretty poor, spending a lot of time to save some money, and now I spend much more money to save time, for what it’s worth..
And another thing that changed my life in a huge way was going to same school from primary school till I was 15, getting bullied by my teacher, changing schools and becoming way more social than before.
These are the first things that came to my mind when I read your question... I don’t know if i went into the right direction with my answer
No, that's most of what I was looking for (change in personal habits, personality, etc) with the exception of politics/personal beliefs since I already asked people about that. I was looking for more stuff about having or getting relationships or the mundanities of being in a relationship (platonic, romantic, any of them honestly) in this thread though.
I reached my intellectual peak early on. Back in my 20s, I was on fire. I understood stuff quickly and deeply. In college, I barely needed studying and was always at the top of the class. I graduated with a perfect score to an actual standing ovation (film school, the final project was a movie).
It's hard to read things I wrote back then -- I was so freaking good it amazes me and saddens me because I'm now nothing but a shadow of my past
I was also extremely arrogant and believed I was better than other people. A long sequence of personal disappointments, failures of all kinds, and the unraveling of crippling life-long mental illnesses forced me into becoming a more humble and considerate human being.
I still battle with those demons. I wouldn't have ever grown out of my hubris if I was only met with success, and would probably go back to being some version of my asshole self if I suddenly became super successful once again.
Bonus: I can now talk to women without having a heart attack.
used to be a pretty damn chunky with fairly low self-esteem. i had an "anti" fashion sense, where i tried to look as plain as possible (solid color tees + Dickies). in my early 30s, now... no longer chunky (in fairly decent shape, I think) with much higher self-esteem0 and a decent sense of style. I was a fairly late-bloomer, however... with my life really feeling like it started to kick of around age 26. Before that, my hopes of a social life were just that...hopes. Besides eventually getting in shape, what helped me out was using my neuroses to fuel a humorous sense of self-deprecation... which tends to endear people more than a glum sense of self-hate. That, and being honest about things in conversation (again, generally in a humorous way) tend to go a long way in having your presence be pleasant as opposed to tiring.
I will say, though, that I do feel I had a sort of innocence and purity before I "bloomed", which I miss... a bit.
0: that's not to say there are aspects of myself I no longer dislike.
I'm seeing myself in that post quite a bit, except I'm a couple of years behind you.
How is it, over there in the future?
hey, it ain't so bad! went through a bit of a ..uh.."catch up" period where I indulged and lived life a bit too much (some fun memories...but also some damaging ones). I've recently settled down with another, however, and we've been havin' a grand ol' time!
Earlier in my life I'd extrapolate my current shitty situation into the future and would imagine continued shittiness... which didn't come into fruition... so, keep ya head up!
What do you mean by "using my neuroses"? Did you spend more alone time making jokes until you found good jokes you could use in a conversation and understood what made them good or something like that?
What do you mean by this? The first thing that comes to my mind is people that argue some variation of "maybe making friends and relationships is a unintuitive, contradictory process", which we do our best to argue against (quite justifiably so) but that's definitely not what you're talking about here.
In grade school, I was quite out-going; I would say that I was friendly with pretty much everyone in my grade. I have no recollection of social anxiety, but my memory of that time is pretty hazy. That all changed when my parents started to homeschool me in middle school. I got crippling depression and suffocating social anxiety. I hated my self, and I had a lot of suicidal ideation. This period lessened in high school, but didn't really start to get better until college. I was fortunate enough to have met a lot of compassionate people who helped me get out of this pit. By the time I graduated in 2019, I would say that I was almost through it. The last year and half, while terrible for humanity as a whole, have be the last mile out of that shit. I do wish I could actually enjoy this new found peace, but I can't complain.