I don't know about "evil" because I don't really subscribe to the Christian good vs evil. Yeah there are people out there who do terrible awful things, but generally speaking the most "evil" things come as a consequence of our amoral decisions.
We decided in the US that cars should be the primary method of transportation back in the 50s in order to stimulate the growing car manufacturing industry. That decision now results in nearly 50,000 people a year dying in car accidents.
We are not much different from the Mayans sacrificing victims in order to bring rain. We do the same thing, but for a different ideological purpose.
This is, in my opinion, much more dangerous and harmful than "evil". Sadists come and go but institutions and ideology remains.
Having said all that, I've been robbed & beaten. I've been through heroin addiction. I grew up as an illegal immigrant.
All of those ultimately shaped who I am today, but there were definitely difficult moments. Life is complex though and I think "evil" had nothing to do with the most traumatic and painful events in my life.
I'm 62 so this happened a long time ago. My mom didn't like novacaine so she found a dentist who didn't use it (I found that out later as an adult). For whatever reason I had 15 cavities one year. I couldn't stand it but somehow I got to the last day of many and I just couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't willingly open my mouth for that pain, I just couldn't.
The dentist took that hooky little metal instrument dentist's have, held it near my cheek, and said, "If you don't open your mouth, I'm going to go in RIGHT. THROUGH. HERE." Those last three words were punctuated by him poking my cheek with that little hooky instrument; once for each word.
I opened my mouth in the worst fear and feeling of abandonment I've ever felt. I now need nitrous and my wife holding my hand to get through a cleaning. Dr. Fryer. A sadist.
People don't understand how much they break people sometimes. I'm sure I've done it too without realizing. I wish there was a way past it but I guess it's just life.
Alcohol withdrawal after months of insane 24-7 drunkeness. I was in a pretty bad place for a number of years. I've gone through withdrawals like this multiple times, usually when I was passed out and woke with no booze just after the legal cutoff for sale at night. There is nothing worse feeling on the planet. No illness or injury (that I've experienced) can compare.
I drink but don't really get hangovers anymore. I think a medication I'm on has that effect.
Because before the medication I would get bad hangovers, extreme agonizing depression and lock jaw. Even just a few drinks would leave me depressed for a week.
I was 6 miles into a very technical mountain bike ride, when I fell and broke my collar bone. No one had any cell service. Hiking out of there was pretty hellish.
I went mountain biking for about a year after that, but then I switched to road bikes exclusively. I found myself focusing way too much on every rock and root while mountain biking that I just couldn't enjoy the ride anymore.
I had a old boomer call for my hanging when I was a teen.
I'm brown. I am minding my business at a store. some boomer said I should "Remember there's cameras in this store." Like wtf? I said, "Those cameras are for you."
And before I know it, he's flipping out calling me a thug and that I'm lucky to be alive because in five minutes, he can have his friends lynch me.
Security guard came over and immediately took the Boomer's side. And told me to either leave or cops will be called.
I survived a drug induced coma and since then my brain just misses a lot of cells. I once had a pretty high IQ and nowadays I can be happy I remembered to take my pills in the morning. The most I can do is a low level sysadmin job, for everything else I basically lack the brains.
It's not really something I have experienced in a past tense, I experience this shit every single day. Hate to be ridiculed for my bad memory especially. My coworkers don't know that and regularly make fun of me.
Oh man, that sounds terrible. It's one thing to be at that intelligence, but to know you used to be smarter and just ain't anymore sounds horrifying. Can I ask is it a memory thing or do you legit feel less intelligent?
I don't only feel less intelligent, I am less intelligent. My IQ dropped about 20%, which is noticeable by everyone including me.
The most annoying thing is that it feels like my brain is underclocked. Some Ritalin helped for a while with that but I had to stop taking it because of the risk for sudden death in conjunction with my other meds and conditions, which is something I wouldn't like to experience.
However even with enhancing drugs I still am not the 80% which my IQ test says, I feel more like half of what I used to be. It's really detrimental to self worth knowing that I used to be smart and now I'm "just average" even though years of therapy told me it's OK to be average.
I can imagine! It's like an athlete getting lame. They can still function but not at the level they're used to. Others might not be able to understand this loss as they see them just being on their level
Oh wow, that's a pretty cool analogy. Stealing that :D
Others might not be able to understand this loss as they see them just being on their level
They even sometimes tell me how smart I am and that… triggers me even more. Bitch, I'm dumb, if you think that's smart you really offend me. Deep down I know that they mean well and think they're giving me a compliment, but it still stings.
My brother is a veteran, and when he came back he started "self-medicating" with meth to treat his PTSD. He was constantly on the verge of crisis and making violent threats (carefully phrased to not be actionable). At the time, I was working at an Amazon warehouse, at times doing 60 hours weeks, and at the time I was on Facebook and if I got off work and wanted to check it, he'd see I was online and if I left him on read it would be a whole thing. I described it as being a 911 operator on call 24/7. I basically wrote him off as dead to me, but my parents wouldn't and that was the worst part. I remember visiting and we tried to go out for dinner but then he texted my mom with another crisis and now she's in tears again, like always. It was constant. And he'd accuse them of all sorts of stuff, my mom still had one of those phones you had to press the button multiple times to get a letter and if she had a typo he'd accuse her of doing it on purpose. All he did all day was be alone with his thoughts, going through the same cycles, shooting up meth and absorbing whatever crazy right-wing bullshit he was listening to.
My parents are pretty well off and they were there for him. They tried to check him into all sorts of mental hospitals and rehab, but he'd check himself out early. There was an incident early on where he checked himself into the VA and they tried to cut him off Xanax cold turkey, which is potentially life-threatening, and he responded violently. This put a flag on his record which made it difficult to get him treatment later, and he was also careful to phrase his threats ambiguously enough to not be institutionalized.
It was pretty clear to me that this was only going to end one way, and at one point I thought about going up there and killing him myself, before he could hurt an innocent person. But the cops kept a watch on his house until it happened and he took a gun and led them on a car chase to somebody's house, pulled a gun on them, and got shot in the arm. When I heard it happened, I didn't know if he'd live or die and didn't care, I was just relieved that it had finally happened and that nobody else got hurt. He went to jail for a bit and that got him off the meth so he's doing better now.
What really gets me about it though is how easy we got off, though. Compared to the people on the other side of the war, the people actually living in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, countless civilians. The children terrified of sunny days because that's when the drones fly. How many times over do you have to multiply the pain and suffering I felt when I saw my mother's face in tears to get even an inkling of the suffering inflicted on those people?
And it's all just out of sight, out of mind. We went to war and people hardly even noticed, everybody just went about their lives as normal like it wasn't even happening. People don't even give a shit about veterans killing themselves on the daily in VA parking lots and waiting rooms because they can't get care, they sure as shit don't care about brown people on the other side of the world that the news treats as subhuman. And now, Bush gets rehabilitated on Ellen and the libs expect me to vote for Biden. It's absurd how little people care about all the people they murdered.
Most likely society's response to the time I was sexually harrassed.
Like it wasn't straight up rape, but I got touched in bad places and boundaries disrespected. I was 16, the girl doing it to me was 16 too. To this day I have no idea if she was into me or if she just got off on how I'd completely bluescreen whenever she did it as a powertrip.
So anyway, being a teenager and certified "good kid", I didn't fight about it, I just knew I hated it. So I went to the adults in my school for guidance... And got laughed out of the principal's office. Because "I was a boy, of course I liked it and I had only gone to the principal as a way to humblebrag".
Got a similar reaction from the other teen boys.
So anyway it took me 10 full years to even start opening myself back up to human touch in general, as I spent that decade terrified of human touch in general.
Lived through and ethnic cleansing genocide. I always laugh when western keyboard warriors start talking about how war is "needed" or "coming" and larping out their movie fantasies. Real war is nothing like TV. Its hell all around. There are no victors in war. Everyone loses.
War is sometimes needed; it's a necessary response to aggression. The genocides in Bosnia? Without a war, they would have murdered all the Croats. One of my teachers in school was a survivor of the Bosnian war, and her family absolutely would have been killed had they not gotten out. Without the Allied forces waging war against the Axis, Jews in Europe would have been completely eliminated.
The option to war is to curl up and hope that you can survive the bear mauling you.
War is never needed though, is my point. Yes unprompted aggression deserves a response (I'd never advocate for just laying down and taking the fascist boot), but war itself only produces destruction, broken homes, and broken families.
My comment was more about those who have not been through an actual war but romanticise it. There is nothing romantic about it.
More recently, I suffered from some pretty severe sleep deprivation as a result of a bout of insomnia. Hallucinations, micro-blackouts, the world stopped operating in a way I could understand properly. I would never, ever wish that upon my worst enemy and I hope I never experience it again.
Living through fall of communism in USSR and the start of capitalist era. One of the memories I have from the period is when food shortages started happening. All the families in my neighborhood would end up lining up at the store early in the morning like black friday, and then the store would just wheel out a cart with whatever they had that day, and people would rush in to grab it. Me being a small kid at the time, I could squeeze between people and get to the cart quicker than my parents. So, I was basically risking my life being trampled to death just so I wouldn't starve that day.
I'm so sorry you had to experience that. I've experienced some wild things as an adult and had/have a hard time with it. I probably wouldn't have made it as kid. It's hard enough as an adult... The extreme confusion and betrayal is all consuming. Then you have to live day to day around people that have no idea of how real life can get.
He died of Covid in prison in 2020 after serving 20 years of his life sentence, thank God.
He had been fighting for parole and never got it.
He was a psychopath and very well could have hunted us down for putting him in jail.