Ooh, I've got a good one! Unbeknownst to me, I was born into a family with both parents on the narcissism spectrum. Having grown up with physical and worse, psychological, abuse as my norm, I let a lot of shitty people into my life. In fact, I tended to prefer toxic people, as they provide the type of "love" that was familiar to me.

Well, I ended up marrying a malignant narcissistic psychopath who viewed me as a resource to be exploited. I was married to her for more than two decades. She controlled all the people around me, and over time gained control over my family.

By 2019, I was a wreck and in poor health. I knew something was horribly wrong, but couldn't quite figure out what. As I began to pull at the threads, I discovered that my life insurance had been doubled without my knowledge or consent. She was pressuring me to add more life insurance, and also to revise our wills and set up a living trust for our assets. I was also being led to consume things that weren't being consumed by anyone else in our family.

The shit hit the fan in the fall of 2019. In short order, my career as an attorney ended (I believe she was having an affair with one of the partners at the law firm I was at), we separated and she took our children with her, and my "friends" and family constantly brought up the issue of suicide in casual conversation.

In hindsight, I believe the strategy initially was simply to continuously ramp up my stress levels, as chronic stress kills. It boosts cortisol levels and chronically elevated cortisol levels effectively accelerate aging. As I grew older without dying and my 60th birthday loomed on the horizon ($2M in term life policies expired at 60), she ramped my stress up higher, and was trying to either poison me or drug me to warp my mind. She also launched an insidious gaslighting campaign that involved not only all my "friends", but also both my parents and my siblings. When I recognized what was happening and we separated, I was subjected to a nasty campaign of stalking and harassment, and the gaslighting campaign focused on seeding the thought of suicide ("If you want someone to embrace your idea, make them believe it is their own.")

I was left unemployed, in poor health, 100% alone with no family or friends, and due to the stalking it was near impossible to try to build a new social structure. Despite me recognizing what was happening, I had massive amounts of suicidal ideation, with the thought "I should kill myself" popping into my head repeatedly throughout the day. What saved me is that I finally found someone who loved me, and that someone is me. Every time the "I should kill myself" thought popped into my head, it was met with something deep inside me firmly saying "NO!"

Once the divorce fight was over, I decided to focus on my health. I was morbidly obese, had metabolic syndrome, was prediabetic, and had uncontrolled high blood pressure despite being on 3 meds. Though diet and exercise I shed the weight in short order, losing over 100lbs peak to bottom, though unfortunately I didn't do it in the best way and lost a lot of muscle mass along the way. I've since added the muscle back and much more, and at 60 am now in the best physical condition of my life. Most people I meet assume that I am in my mid-40s.

Last year I recognized that I needed human contact in my life, and started taking dance classes to build a social circle and learn a new skill. I now have lots of friends and am very selective about the people I engage with. I am estranged from my family, my children are lost to me, as they grew up under her control and refuse to talk with me. While you might think there is hope they may come around, having lived under her control for more than two decades and having entered as an adult, I know that the reality is that my children have very little chance of breaking free, as the strings were attached at birth and they know nothing else.

Seeing 13 posts by one user in the same community within 2 hours.

A medal for the most crossings of the Atlantic Ocean by a single vessel was awarded to a group of french pirates in the 1700's. Of course they weren't known pirates at the time, but the award led to the Crown's scrutiny into their operation, which revealed they were smuggling arms to the French resistance in Nova Scotia. But of course they were because they were French.

Regardless, the findings effectively banished the now-exposed pirates to Canada where they proceeded to support the French, fuck and make babies, ultimately resulting in my birth.