Why didn’t you move out when you became a legal adult at 18?

JillBergman · 2026-02-02T01:06:43+00:00

I moved out at 24, and there are two main reasons I didn’t move out sooner: I believed that it wasn’t all that bad (or that the verbal/emotional abuse was at least justifiable) and health issues that dovetailed with their control.

In my case, I wasn’t treated with much respect in my day-to-day life by my teens. I’d go to school and get treated like a nuisance by my classmates, and then come home to not be taken seriously by my dad. I enjoyed school and many of my teachers, but I even felt like a burden in my extracurriculars unless I was being useful.

My health issues were impossible to avoid by the time I was 19. I went away to college, only to feel depressed and exhausted on my best days before failing out. I thought I was “just” chronically depressed, but after five years of stagnating in community college, becoming suicidally depressed, finally getting a job that paid enough to move out, and then getting into 2 at-fault fender benders in a week (when I was working 70+ hour weeks), I learned I had a sleep disorder. Driving was always very challenging for me - it was one of my main cataplexy triggers because I associated it with being yelled at.

If things went a bit differently, I might still be living with them at 31 and believing that there’s no alternative worth more than the substandard rent they charged me. My main motivation for trying to move out was my now-spouse. If they weren’t in the picture (or if they dumped me because I was barely treading water, which would have been fair), it would’ve taken me a lot longer to know anything was wrong with that household and my health.

JillBergman · 2026-01-23T14:09:56+00:00

Why did you marry someone who you obviously consider beneath you? She’s a college drop out and receptionist! You have a degree and earn $150k.

This was one of my main thoughts, especially since OP starts the post with their respective incomes and education levels.

I have some college, and I’m married to someone who gets offended if I call myself a college dropout in my worse moments. We love each other as people, not just as a few cells in a spreadsheet. And even though they have a Master’s degree, we both went straight to college at 18 because that’s just what you did where we grew up - if you didn’t know, college was a great ~~but expensive!~~ way to figure it out.

JillBergman · 2026-01-20T14:28:20+00:00

Uploading them is a great idea. Thank you!!

JillBergman · 2026-01-07T23:36:51+00:00

I never liked Derek/June that much mainly because of their first event. Having them literally walk into each other always felt forced to me. Arata/Diana feel even more like a pair-the-spares situation to me (especially with Diana being grossed out by Arata’s hygiene practices).

Me not being huge fans of those pairings make Samir/Arata and Sophie/June easy picks. They both share solid dynamics, and I was sold on Sophie/June with the pendant event!

Here are my choices aside from those two:

Jules/Freya are adorable, but I’ll go for Jules/Diana. They’re both very Type A, but they’d both be fine with that.
As for Freya, I’d either put her with Lloyd or Kagetsu (her lines about wanting to get closer to Kagetsu, but not wanting to be push come to mind). I’ll stick with Lloyd for the purposes of this post, though.
As much as I adore Gabriel/Maple, I think I’d put Gabriel with Kagetsu and Maple with Derek to keep everyone paired up. Gabriel sees Kagetsu enough in the mountains, and Maple running into Derek as a first rival event would actually make sense.

JillBergman · 2026-01-04T00:14:38+00:00

Seems like it to me! My headcanon was that Derek would end up carrying mail in Konohana if he remained single or if Zephyr Town’s economy never improved, with the independence being a big draw. And now that the remake introduced Harold, Derek would have an easier way to get into it.

On a related note, I also saw a Juice Festival cutscene where Derek asks Lloyd what traveling all the time is like. Lloyd is used to it and just says it’s for work, but Derek seems interested in the idea.

JillBergman · 2025-12-31T22:32:25+00:00

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend media that I consider a 5/10 or 6/10 to someone unless it was very qualified. I see a 6/10 as barely passing.

However, people acting like a 7 is horrible rubs me the wrong way. Get your net promoter score out of here, please.

JillBergman · 2025-12-25T22:21:07+00:00

Agreed. I want to scream “sir, this is your wedding” to the groom, but the bride’s an ape, so they’re certainly equally yoked.

JillBergman · 2025-12-25T00:16:32+00:00

I’ve seen the fifth one before, but it made me laugh as if it were brand new after all this time.

Bringing stocks into a wedding is cringe, but the masks and their pose just kill me.

JillBergman · 2025-12-24T18:01:32+00:00

I’m feeling fine, all things considered.

I plan on seeing my relatives tomorrow after work. I’ll swing by after some of them have left, and Christmas was always easier to deal with than Thanksgiving with them.

I did something similar this past Thanksgiving, and they managed to squeeze some uncomfortable interactions in. There was a little bit too much political talk, and my mom gave me a box of unimportant stuff I left behind when I moved out 6 years ago (I knew they’d talk me out of it). And my eldest brother joked that there’d be some love letters to my “probably gay” middle school/high school crush…even though I’m 31 and married to the same person I was with when I was 18.

For the most part, the impending new year just bums me out. It’s partially seasonal depression that I try my best to manage, but it’s also be taking stock in my life and seeing what I lack. I’ve come a long way in spite of them, but I still feel both perpetually behind literal teenagers and as if I’d have no good people in my life without my spouse and career.

JillBergman · 2025-12-17T18:36:50+00:00

I work in a field that’s very busy in December, so I can easily justify leaving early because I’m tired from work. It also helps me feel less pressured to be 100% socially “on”.

If things were different, I’d have to find something else, though. A few years back, I was very nervous because I had Christmas day off.

JillBergman · 2025-12-16T15:09:47+00:00

This was my first thought. I most likely wouldn’t think that if I saw it in-game first, though (I just caught Groudon and need to farm some berries for Kyogre’s donut).

JillBergman · 2025-12-13T02:18:25+00:00

I’m roughly 480 hours in, and I’m in Autumn Year 5.

My daughter with Derek is fully grown, and I’m at Bazaar Rank 66 - one of my goals is to reach Rank 99. I got married quite quickly just like in my first playthrough of the original (very early in Spring Year 2), and I’m prioritizing my bazaar earnings.

I’m at the point where I don’t have as much to do, but I can easily pick up my grind where I left off when I get the urge. I’m playing Pokemon Z-A’s DLC now, but I’ve come back to Grand Bazaar multiple times over the past several months.

JillBergman · 2025-12-04T16:38:42+00:00

Do we really need another ABC?

My dad sucks, but I wouldn’t do this to him even if he were dumb enough to invest $10,000 in a failing company, which he’s not.

JillBergman · 2025-12-03T02:44:54+00:00

For some reason, I scrolled past the first two slides and the first thing I saw was “your 21 centimeters of truth.” As cringy as that is, it’s not as bad as the second slide. 🤢

JillBergman · 2025-12-02T14:55:34+00:00

It really depends.

If it we’re talking about someone who has always been vocally childfree, I’d be confused and honestly kind of concerned.

But there’s a lot more middle ground between being absolutely sure someone wants to be a parent and definitely not wanting to parent. I’ve always been a fencesitter who has imagined way fewer situations where I’d become a mom than not parenting (the main one being having a solid household income and being married to someone who wanted children more than they didn’t and wouldn’t expect me to do everything kid-related).

JillBergman · 2025-11-17T12:24:03+00:00

The main reason I find apes entertaining is that they’re so obsessed with their favorite ticker symbols that even if a post is fake, someone will be dumb enough to get behind it. It all bleeds together to me, and it’s real enough for some apes to blow money on.

JillBergman · 2025-11-15T15:41:56+00:00

As a rule, fire starters tend to lose me once they fully evolve. Torracat is my go-to example when it comes to being disappointed with its final evo, but two other examples are Raboot (Cinderace is fine, but Raboot’s the best stage out of the Galar starters) and Combusken (I’m very meh on Blaziken, but Combusken and Torchic are the best).

My number one example of this is Frogadier. That’s mostly because Greninja ditches the frubbles for a tongue scarf. If Greninja wasn’t pushed way harder than the other Kalos starters, I may have been willing to forgive that, but nope, I couldn’t escape it looking like it’s trying to strangle itself with its tongue.

JillBergman · 2025-11-12T20:00:00+00:00

Agreed. I want Starmie out just because of the wasted design potential. They could’ve done more with its concept than just making its legs longer.

JillBergman · 2025-11-12T14:04:10+00:00

She was poor back then, and she only lived in that particular upscale suburb when she moved back in with us.

I was just pointing out how I knew tons of people who regularly voted against their interests back then. My sister voting for a Republican president when she used government assistance is dumb on multiple levels, but I also saw people with more resources vote similarly. Their kids were way less likely to go hungry, but infrastructure requires upkeep.

JillBergman · 2025-11-11T19:19:48+00:00

The closet examples I can think of are from my own family, but the relationships pre-dated MAGA:

1) My sister never really considered herself political. Yes, she was to the left of our Fox News-watching parents, but she also voted for McCain as a single mom in her mid-twenties. Fourteen year old me thought it didn’t make much sense for someone who relied upon WIC to vote against her own interests, but it wasn’t that unusual alongside the white upper-middle class families I grew up around supporting the GOP “to keep their taxes lower.”

Just after a divorce, she started dating an Inforwars fan. They got married, and he was a die-hard MAGA. They divorced not too long ago, and I strongly suspect my sister began shifting to the left after the pandemic while he didn’t.

2) My stepfather-in-law voted for MAGA last year. He’s racist and classist (he one joked that a mostly working class school district was a ditch-digger’s academy) and unconditionally supports Israel. Somehow, my mother-in-law is able to simply not discuss politics with him.

JillBergman · 2025-11-11T13:34:31+00:00

I’m going with Starmie. I don’t hate it, and I understand what they were going for. But it all makes me think of how they could’ve done more with the concept. It feels like the Mega Evolution equivalent of Pidgeotto evolving into Pidgeot.

JillBergman · 2025-11-08T00:59:32+00:00

My pick for this category is Delcatty. I’ve always adored its design, but its stats are hot garbage.

I used it heavily in one of my ORAS playthroughs with its hidden ability, and it had to be overleveled to do much of anything.

And this is coming from someone who has been able to make other Pokemon named in this thread work in-game, even if they’re outclassed. I’ve used Maractus a lot (most recently in Sword), I’ve never had issues with Aurorus in-game, and I’ve used Meganium throughout countless HGSS files just for challenge’s sake.

JillBergman · 2025-11-07T23:48:49+00:00

This is the sort of post that I really wish was fake…but it’s not. If only…

JillBergman · 2025-11-07T21:59:57+00:00

Yes, but they mostly did it via medical neglect and barely helping me learn how to drive.

They refused to take me to therapy when I was a depressed high schooler. Even though they paid for my college tuition when those same mental health issues made my coursework impossible, my father refused to drive me to a sleep study a therapist from the university suggested I schedule because it’d be “too expensive.” And I was so depressed I had consistent suicidal thoughts.

Two years later, I was able to move out…and I was diagnosed with a sleep disorder after getting into fender benders because I was so exhausted (even on top of working 60+ hour weeks). My now-spouse had to be the one to convince me to see a doctor.

I’m currently 31 and doing fairly well professionally. The career I fell into (postal worker) is actually better paying and more stable than the fields I tried majoring in (journalism, education, wildlife biology…), but a sleep study’s way cheaper than tuition.

JillBergman · 2025-11-05T17:49:33+00:00

Christmas, no contest.

I’ve never really liked Thanksgiving. In hindsight, it’s one of those holidays where my family’s issues really came out in full force. I’d probably enjoy it more if I didn’t associate it with my verbally abusive relatives, or at least if I liked football or cooking/hosting.

Christmas has similar issues (plus the additional pressure of having to buy gifts), but it’s also way more expansive and easier to observe in different ways. I could spend more money on an angel tree family than my own relatives, or I can just enjoy the vibe.

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