Search Results: being alone

To me, the idea of eating with others is far more foreign than eating alone could ever be to most people, or at least that's the vibe I'm getting.

As a kid, my father got home 2-3 hours before my mother did, leaving my brother and I to eat with my dad. My father provided for me, but that's all he did, he never helped raise me, teach me, all he did was insult, threaten and scold me and my mother at every opportunity.

My brother was the son he wanted and I'm the one he wishes he didn't have, that's how he's made me feel every day since I was born.

For this reason, I started taking food to my room to stay away from him. In school, the noise and frequent rejection from others pushed me to find a teacher willing to let me and a few others eat in a room away from the cafeteria. Even then, I never went to talk, I went because I didn't like my classmates and didn't like being around them.

I never felt welcome or belonging, only 2 people ever made me feel anything but unwanted. For all these reasons, eating alone was pretty much the only way to eat.

It has been 16 years since I sat at a table with just my parents and brother, and I will never eat with my father alone, and I'm sorry to say that I really do mean that.

In high school, I ate at the table closest to the door, I ate fast, usually just a couple minutes. I didn't talk to anyone, I just ate, took my enzymes and went to the courtyard to throw the football. I'd accepted that aside from throwing a football outside, me and others just weren't ever going to have any kind of relationship, discussion, we were never going to spend time together, so I kept to myself, and frankly, I was as annoyed with their presence as they were with mine. So the hatred was very mutual

As you've noticed, I've been more open but still, I have no shortage of hesitation to change eating from a necessary refueling of the body to a social environment.

But I'll get there. Is eating a social event for you?

The Knoxville Area is my hometown, and I have lived here most of my life. It has radically transformed here in the past 10-15 years alone, and it is incredibly heartbreaking.

We have seen a rapid influx of Northerners, Californians, and foreign nationals. I went with my wife to a Japanese buffet for our Valentines Day date, and it was almost unrecognizable with all the minorities.

Why are longtime locals not fighting back and being more vocal about this?

I've been thinking, and I've come along a train of thought which holds not wanting to ask for help as a culprit for a ton of issues I've faced in the past.

As a guy, there is a desire to not rely on others for help and to handle things alone, but this is a dangerous idea as it encouraged me to step outside my lane out of a desire to prove I can handle it.

This is a huge barrier to progress as a desire to handle things alone doesn't mean I will succeed, it just means I need to step back and humble up, ask the right questions, have an experienced person handy, and then maybe.

But this "I gotta do it alone", that needs to stop. While I don't intend to rely on others, I do intend to educate myself more, explore my natural skillsets while gaining new ones, and knowing my place.

One instance where I felt ashamed to accept help was last year when I was hospitalized for a serious lung infection which came as a result of my alcohol problems leading to being taken off Trikafta, a medication for my Cystic Fibrosis which has done nothing less than give me a new life.

Now alcohol is gone, Trikafta is back, coughing and labored breathing are gone, too. But in the hospital, I recieved IV antibiotics, but the IV machine kept on stopping.

Not wanting to keep bothering nurses when all I needed was the IV machine to go back to working, I asked one nurse how to fix it, so I wouldn't be such a burden on the staff.

She giggled and playfully hit me with a newspaper, she was right, those liberties aren't mine to take, the whole reason I was sick, at all, is because I was an irresponsible mess who drank more rum than Jack Sparrow.

This issue was fixed by a PICC line being inserted in me, which I used to finish my rounds of antibiotics and from there, I changed my life but I still feel ashamed to keep hitting the call button when I just needed the machine to work again.

Have you felt ashamed to ask for, or accept assistance from others?

All the agnostic women I've met besides the ones I'm related to (except the ones my age of course) are liberal feminists who don't want children and they don't want to be a traditional wife. All the religious Christians I know my age are married and have traditional wives already. Do I pretend and join the cult or do I stay myself and risk being alone for the rest of my life? I have Christian values and morals I just don't believe in the deity. Please help.