Where I started

Where I ended up

Image descriptions

1st image: - A heavy set person who appears to be a man, in baggy jeans and a t-shirt, leaning against a wooden handrail, holding a laser skirmish gun

2nd image: A curly haired woman in makeup, wearing a teal coloured dress

I started drinking at 13. Blacking out weekly by 15. Full blown alcoholic in 20s. The problem was, I was fairly successful so it was hard for me to admit I was truly fucked up. I managed a good career, family, friends, house, etc. I drank until blackout daily. In late 30s is when the true around the clock drinking started. Morning, noon, night and throughout the night. DT’s. Started taking Xanax to fight off the anxiety caused by around the clock drinking. That was it. That’s when I lost control. I had a moment of clarity after days of straight blackout during the first month of Covid quarantine. I asked a friend who had been sober for 15 years for help. Went to rehab. Took it seriously. Spend 2.5 months away from my family. Came back determined to live a life of sobriety and focus on family and career. I’ve got numerous promotions, my family is great and I’m 3.5 years sober and work daily to stay that way.

Tldr; lifelong drunk. Got sober at 40. Best decision I’ve ever made.

I was born into an impoverished extremist right wing family. I enlisted in the military back when DADT was a thing. I was disowned as an LGBT teenager, and medboarded out of the military after being committed to inpatient facilities multiple times. After that, i was homeless for a couple years, living out of a car and then a backpack.

I finally ended up in this little town in Georgia, got a job at a little retail store, and moved into a trailer with one of my coworkers. Her friends kind of adopted me and i felt accepted for the first time in my life. We were all broke kids, but i told them i was going to be a millionaire by age 30. I was still pretty emotionally unstable and eventually moved on from that friend group, but it gave me the hope i needed to rebuild my life.

I slowly built a career for myself after that, working 70-80 hours a week for a couple years, until i had my foot in the door. It got a lot easier after that. I didn’t quite hit my goal by age 30, but I’m close. I founded my first company at age 28, and raised a 10 million series A. My company is now worth 60 million on paper, but of course that’s meaningless until we IPO. But it’s profitable, and in the meantime, I’ve adopted a little family of people like me, and built a comfortable life for us. Life is good, and I’m content.

Accidental reinvention story.

I was an independent IT Management Consultant and in my free time I started a side project making a dark ride in virtual reality for the Meta Quest headset. Then Covid happened and my career paused suddenly giving my lots of free time so I focused on the title. It ended up being the 5th highest rated app on the Meta Quest App Lab store out of many thousands for the past year and a bit. I have not gone back to my old career, as well, this is my new career now. The insane part is that I always wanted to be an Imagineer since I was 6 years old, but my life really did not provide those sorts of opportunities. Then one day, when my title was released and the reviews started to come in, I realized suddenlythat I am now an Imagineer. Been 3 years and I still cannot believe it. Love what I do way more than my old career and with AI assistants, I am imagineering faster and faster which is nice as the only complaint I get is where is the rest of the theme park. Currently I am just about to update the single dark ride and add to it an open world theme park around (small today), the first bit of the second dark ride, and the ability to ride with loved ones and friends which is surprisingly magical. Like looking over at someone you know sitting with you on the omnimover and going through a highly detailed dark ride together is so much fun, especially for non gamers who want to try VR.

I am 50 years young.

36yo, I’m in the middle of tunnel currently.

I’m a spoiled, privileged shit. I have a very nice family, good friends, money to live comfortably in a big city. But my life is miserable still: after a succession of failures, I hate my job and suffer painful lonelyness, and I’m too shy to do what most normal human beings do.

I’m almost out of depression but I’ve yet to go through the reinvent yourself part. I feel like I’m going backwards.

I feel like that’s the opposite of what the question asks. Ask me to delete if needed.

I became physically disabled at 42, I’m 49 now. I was the main / usually sole provider for my family. I was pretty suicidal for a while and had a really really tough time adjusting. Midway through I was diagnosed with bipolar and medicated appropriately. I’m doing fairly well now and actually looking forward to the rest of my life.

I was born into an abusive “family”. Fled into my head. Became the quiet brainy kid. Underfed and sleep deprived but did well in school and most people ignored the abuse.

Eventually studied at university, very high achieving, still hiding in my head. Super awkward with people. Autism didn’t help. The awareness that I was autistic made several light bulbs go on in my head.

I stopped contact with all of the exfamily and after uni wanted to focus on healing the trauma. Picked up several chronic diseases, realized I was non binary, got adopted by a cat.

Currently fighting to be able to work, if I manage I’ll not go for academics as I always thought I would but for helping animals. Trying to get out of head. Have emotions, talk to people.

I started off in the late 1980’s in a mid-sized midwestern city… I was smoking cigarettes, a lot of pot, drinking and carousing with the same friends that I’d had since high school, but I was in my second year of college. I was getting decent grades, but I was really distracted and having some drama with bad girlfriends.

Two weeks after my 21st birthday, I left for Southern California - I had a parent out there, and I ended up staying for 16 years. I stopped smoking basically the minute I got there, spent a lot of time driving around a new city and thinking… and basically came to the realization that since nobody there knew who I had been before, I could approach social situations without the baggage of all those previous decisions that I’d made with my old circle of friends. I was less of a “pleaser”, less of a doormat, and less afraid to speak my mind - and my new friends responded positively to it, so I was encouraged to cultivate that. It helped me be more decisive and independent, and gave me a foundation for everything that followed.

I finished an associate’s degree, got a black belt in a martial art and taught for about six years, and met the woman who is now my wife. We got married, traveled to other countries together in Europe and Central America, quit our jobs to live on a horse ranch, and eventually moved BACK to that same midwestern city to start a family.

I wish I could say that since we moved back, I’ve never felt like the person I was before - but I have to confess that I feel like being back here HAS eroded some of that confidence, like I couldn’t hack it out West and ended up back here after all.

I know it’s not true, but San Diego is where I became the person I wanted to be. Back here is where I had been the person before that. They say “you can’t go home again” - I submit that you CAN, but that maybe you shouldn’t.

I had the most abstract corporate software job you can imagine and had to dress up every day for it. One day coming back from lunch I saw my entire future laid out in front of me. Fat piece of corporate garbage without talent and around people I hated.

I applied for a job with an industrial machine designer. Never looked back.

Start: Woman

End: Man (WIP)

Can’t reinvent myself more than that.

@edit: Sincerely, accepting myself as transgender was the best thing that happened to me. I went from depressed nerd who sees his body solely as a puppet for his mind to someone who actively cherishes their body. Now I’m reading fitness books and fashion guides because I like my physical existence on earth and want to perfect and protect it. I have a goal on which kind of life I want to have and how I want to look instead of aimlessly asking myself why nothing ever works for me. Being trans is pretty fucking awesome for me.

It wasn’t always like this, so to my transmasc friends depressed about their appearance, here is what I needed to read.

I didn’t reinvent myself so much as I started being honest about my identity.

When I was younger, I was very talkative and social, and I was punished for it in elementary school because it was disruptive. This is probably because I was surrounded by family and felt comfortable talking to anyone about anything. Over time, I started to become reclusive and have a severe fear of authority. Eventually, my friend group started shrinking in high school until I had what felt like nothing. I stopped attending school and slept for six months during my senior year. Eventually, I started returning from my shell and interacting with people online.

Since I was still in my depressive state, I thought it was all too good to be true, and I faked my death online because I thought no one would care and it would be an easy transition into something else. I was very, very wrong. People I had met online started creating memorials and trying to contact people I knew IRL to give them condolences. It was the first time that I realized people liked the person I was unfiltered.

After that, I got my GED and moved to a new town where no one knew me to go to college. While there, I decided to be the person I was and not the person I had been trying to be because I thought that was what people wanted. Even then, I was introverted until COVID happened, and I fell back into depression due to a lack of human connections.

I’m glad to have learned this all now, but I wish I had known it 20 years ago.

I grew up in a religious home and was always pretty religious myself. In college i ended up leaving the church and religon entirely. I think the last straw was that there are so many mutually exclusive religions, but only one or none can be right, so how did all the “wrong” ones form? Turns out humans are very good at creating religions and cults, and it’s way more likely that my religion is no different.

Leaving the church set me on a path of having to actually think about ethics rather than just going by “whatever the bible says”, but besides not going to church on sundays my life didn’t change a whole lot. But in thinking about ethics the only thing that seemed to be able to solidly root ethics was pleasure/pain, or more broadly wellbeing/needless suffering, not an in-the-moment stereotypical hedonistic view of it but broader, factoring in long term results and the impact on others.

That was fine for a while, until an argument with my dad where he pointed out “if that’s what you base ethics on, why don’t you include animals in it” and at first i was like yeah obviously kicking a puppy is wrong and that’s captured by my view, but it got me to think deeper about it and my actions and i realized that all sentient beings are morally relevant, and i could no longer eat them for my own pleasure. After that i also learned fish are sentient and that the dairy and egg industry are very cruel too, and i couldn’t support them either, and i went vegan.

Now my perspective is more refined, i would describe my ethical views most succinctly as sentientism, an antispeciesist extension/improvement on humanism

Nothing too extreme, but I’m in my mid-30s and this year has been one of the most productive of my life. I started a new job in late December. The pay is similar to the job I left. The stress is much lower. Immediately I felt like I had a better work life balance. I have so much extra energy every day.

I started dieting and taking long walks. I lost 35 pounds in 6 months. I listened to a bunch of audiobooks while walking and I’ve also read some ebooks. Together I’ve read 25 books and counting this year whereas most years I’ll read 2 or 3. Once I was nearing my goal weight I increased my calories and started exercising more intensely, with a goal of gaining muscle and losing fat while maintaining weight. I picked up indoor rowing. I’m on week 11 of a 24 week training program. I row hard (working up an intense sweat) 5 days a week Monday- Friday in the mornings. In addition to this I’ve started weightlifting 2 days a week and will gradually increase to 4 days a week while keeping up my rowing routine.

Financially, I started budgeting with YNAB and it has transformed my personal finances. My savings rate has increased significantly and wasteful spending decreased. I moved my savings into a HYSA. I left a financial advisor who was charging excessive fees and moved my investment and retirement accounts to Fidelity where I now manage my portfolio myself. Some of my reading was investing books which gave me confidence I could do this. I’ve tripled the amount I’m contributing to my 401k.

Although I’m new to my job I’ve received constant praise from multiple people in the time I’ve been there. I feel like I have room for growth to move up positions. At the rate I’m going I think I could realistically expect to move up in another 6 months or so.

I was a factory worker, warehouse worker, and machinist for most of my adult life. I learned a lot of really cool things in those industries, but I never made much money.

So I took some classes, taught myself Autocad, and somehow talked myself into a CAD position at a precast concrete company. And the difference between then and now is amazing from both a financial standpoint and a quality of life standpoint. Of course there are valid arguments that having enough money is a quality of life issue.

Even when things went wrong and the precast company started to spiral the drain, I went to find another job… and in two days I had to turn down four job offers.

Around 23 I was jobless, I had no HS diploma, depressed, had recently gone through a bad breakup, and if I wasn’t able to move back in with my dad, I would have been homeless.

In the span of about four months, I got my HS equivalency diploma, applied to college, got a job, then quit that job to start college. ~5 years later, and significantly in debt, I had two additional pieces of paper that said I knew things, and I went on to struggle to find work in my local area.

I work in IT, there’s a ton of jobs, none of the good ones are local to me; so I’m now slowly working off my debts, at menial jobs that don’t challenge me, for menial pay that doesn’t nearly reflect the amount of skill and knowledge I have.

Don’t go to school kids. You’ll accrue debt and nobody cares.