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Lemmings who made it out of incel-dom, what advice would you have to your previous self?
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Huh. So the depression was using up so much mental bandwidth it made the difference between being able to reflect and improve and not being able to. Interesting. I'm glad you've figured it out.
Parents modeling shitty behavior definitely happens, but usually kids gravitate towards or away from it pretty continuously, depending on their own personality.
I always knew he was a bad example, but having to grow up in that environment gave me a crappy set of social skills for when I was in the outside world from my family. I had to play the transactional game to stay out of trouble, and worry about my own well-being for most things. From spending my whole development years that way, I knew his behaviors were bad, but without any other context, I couldn't grasp that I was doing much the same things. I was just being me and what I felt I had to do.
There's obviously a lot left out of the story, it's 40+ years of life. I started making progress acting like a decent human in my later 20s / early 30s as I moved out and started meeting better people and being able to spend more time around them. After my wife divorced me, I spent a lot of time by myself reflecting and that was when I went to the doctor about depression as I was completely humbled and ready to face up to having problems I couldn't fix on my own.
After getting medicine, it was the last boost I needed, as I was able to let go of a lot of things holding me back. Whenever something would go bad, it would feel like it would drag every memory of me screwing up or people "screwing me over" back up to the surface and it would just swallow me whole. I couldn't get anywhere because I'd just go into survival mode and shut down. Medicated me can tell those memories to shut up because I need to tend to the current thing that needs my attention. Which at that time was for me to stop being a jerk.
I still get mad at myself for all the bad things I did to people and to myself, but now they moreso serve as a reminder to stay being my best than something that really haunts me. Everything is just more manageable is about all I can say. It's hard for me to really accurately verbalize my feelings through all these time periods without really taking a ton of time. I just think a lot of people, especially men these days, suffer with a lot of this stuff, and I'd rather rehash my worst times than see people get sucked down deeper into manosphere and incel crap. I haven't forgotten for a second how bad and lonely those feelings are, and I don't want to see other people go through it feeling alone.