[edit: This is another post brought over from Dead Charming, this one is relevant to some of the posts coming up in my “What I’m Looking For” sequence, so think of this as background material. This is not funny. This is not light-hearted in even minimal ways. This post is about the saddest and most challenging personal experiences of my life.

Many people have gone through far worse, and I’m certainly not trying to claim some kind of prize for a hard knock life, because I’ve had it INCREDIBLY easy…but to my surprise, this made a couple of people cry; and I’d never seen one of them cry before…so take that as a warning of sorts…or something. If you choose to skip this, please know I won’t take it personally. It’s long, it’s the worst moments of my life, and the new material at the end isn’t there to even remotely “make it better,” even with eleven years of distance from the events.]

During job interviews and on internet quiz memes there’s a question that comes up more often than I think most people really want to hear the answer.  I’ve avoided it many times before, but tonight I guess I’m finally ready to talk about it at large…to try and explain how, exactly, a reasonably normal white-child-of-privilege ends up in his early thirties, struggling emotionally just to climb out of bed every morning.

I’ve probably been asked “What’s the most difficult thing you’ve ever done?” about two dozen times that I can think of since July 24th 1999. I think I might have answered it honestly twice.

So, what follows is the most full and complete answer to that question I can compose with almost a decade of distance since the events began to transpire.

The worst days of my life…