The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Your Dad sounds like a bully.
One thing thats stuck with me is that in this atomized modern world, that the true value of friends and family that care about you. So while you can buy a cake from a bakery for yourself, you will get no joy eating it by yourself.
But you can't put the weight on others to give you a reason to live. You're enough of a reason to live and thrive.
From your description I would first focus on friends, being a good friend, having friends, planning things with friends. Focusing in the romantic after being secure in socializing with peers. Once you do focus on the romantic, I would say be upfront, don't try to be someone you're not, if you're not set up by friends, and the other person has no clue about you, on the first or second date the say your waiting till marriage. Its kryptonite for some, but not for all.
I appreciate your words, and everyone else's, too. I think a lot of wisdom has been shared here that has been helpful to me and made me not regret posting what I did.
However, I have to reply to you to tell you I disagree that you shouldn't put weight on others to give you a reason to live. Humans are social animals, so it makes a ton of sense to me to tell someone that they must live for others. It helps build community, it's a very obvious and plainly true statement to say that your own death will hurt those around you and if you care about them at all, you must never purposely die. And I also take the stance that you should use whatever works to achieve your goals; for me, it's to avoid the Bad Ending. There are many Bad Endings to get, many failure paths, many ways to make people shake their heads at what happened to you. Pity is not an emotion I want to evoke in people, but I understand that there's some amount of pity that people feel for me already that is unavoidable.
I do agree with you if I modify your statement a little: "you can't put the weight on a small amount of others to give you a reason to live". To directly place my fate on one or two people is pretty cruel and creates intense pressure on them to never hurt me in any way, which I think is toxic. That's why I think involving yourself in a community with many people you care about is important. The cost is distributed, and you make many more people happy to be friends with you, and it's a greater motivation to be the best version of yourself so that you hurt people as little as possible.
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