I'll always be a broken person.

[hunter]

8. I have no idea how I created a social safety net around myself.

I do know when I'm in my darkest places "new hobbies and adrenaline" tend to end poorly.

For a long time I was really good at knocking myself out of a deep depression in ways that hurt me.

I needed to feel *something* even if it made me bleed.

My last crisis like that wasn't all that long ago and landed me in the locked psych ward.

I've told some of my more amusing stories here on DU, like losing my clothes on a beach past midnight and, stark naked, enlisting a newly minted cop with a flashlight to help me find them, or falling off of cliffs and surviving, but most of it isn't that fun.

My mind went sideways in adolescence. When I was twelve years old I knew everything and the world was my oyster. In my late teens and early twenties local cops and campus police regarded me as a harmless diversion from their usually sordid graveyard shift routines.

At twenty five I had 95% of my shit together and graduated with a respectable university degree, and it's been that way ever since, but the 5% sucks.