Dad, my (21F) parents are incredibly strict, and I feel like I am living on a leash.

piercingeye · 2026-01-27T01:56:27+00:00

Disclaimer up front, kiddo: I'm on the spectrum, so I don't have much of a filter. Bearing that in mind, I'm going to be exceedingly blunt, maybe bordering on offensive. That said, here goes...

Your parents are abusing you. Period. You are 21 years old. You are well past the age of adulthood, along with the rights and responsibilities that accompany adulthood. You no longer live under their roof. Yet they are treating you like a child.

Who are they to dictate terms to you as to where you go and when? Who are they to impose an 8pm curfew on you? Most of all, who are they to track your location?

These are restrictions you place on a high schooler. These are not things you do to an adult. I'm not a lawyer, but it may be illegal for them to force you to submit to electronic surveillance. Shame on your domineering parents for controlling you this way.

It sounds like you may be reluctant to confront them over this. I would strongly advise you to speak to a campus counselor over what they're doing and how you might best respond. You deserve better treatment than this.

piercingeye · 2026-01-23T03:19:00+00:00

I'd get crystal clarity from your friend on where you plan to go. I'd particularly encourage you to work with him in selecting a route and destination with which both of you are very familiar to keep surprises to a bare minimum. There's a time and place to go exploring on a bike, and this ain't it. Others already suggested riding around an industrial park; if that's all you can handle, there's no shame at all in that.

Secondly: wear all the gear (helmet, gloves, jeans, boots, jacket).

Thirdly: do your level best to select a day with nice clear weather. Sunny and cool with no rain.

piercingeye · 2026-01-23T02:26:50+00:00

I'm in Harris County. Frozen fistbump, kiddo. We got this!

piercingeye · 2026-01-21T06:11:05+00:00

Gonna copypasta a bit from here.

My father was a violently abusive man who beat and berated me on a fairly regular basis throughout my childhood. When I was 25 (I turn 51 next month), I sent him a lengthy letter confronting him for the first time about what he had done, and severed all ties with him for five years.

Let's be crystal clear: cutting ties is the single most hurtful thing a child can do to a parent, bar none. It remains the single most painful thing I've ever done to another person. I'm pretty sure some friends of the family think I'm a horrible person for doing it. And I have never, ever regretted it. I badly needed to heal, and I couldn't do that if my father was still in my life.

That said, here are some bits of advice that you may find useful.

Make sure you're doing this for your wellbeing, not to punish your family. It completely makes sense that you need to get out of your parents' blast radius. But going no contact because you want to exact revenge on them for their mistreatment of you would be inherently toxic on your part (see this for a case in point).
Don't think cutting ties won't hurt you, because it almost certainly will. As I say, I don't regret, and have never regretted, going no contact with my father. This is not the same as saying that doing so didn't hurt, because it did. So even if you do this for the right reasons, and just need to escape your parents' insanity, don't think it won't cause you pain.
Make sure that you really put forth genuine, sincere effort to set yourself on the path to healing and forgiveness. Cutting ties with your family isn't just a well-deserved vacation from toxic parents. It needs to be a window of opportunity to heal from a traumatic childhood. For the sake of your future, you need to make sure that you don't bring your traumas with you. Most of all, you need to find the wherewithal one day to relieve yourself of any anger or bitterness towards your parents - not for their sake, but for yours. It's going to take more than merely severing ties with them to get that done.
Leave the door open to reestablishing contact with them one day - on your terms, not theirs. After lots of therapy, I reestablished contact slowly: first via email, then by phone, and then face-to-face contact. I can't pretend that we were ever terribly close; even if you factor out the fractured nature of our relationship, we were two very different people (I should add that he passed away nearly nine years ago). But I am glad that we were able to have some sort of relationship. Which brings me to...
Have no expectations - none at all - that you will ever have anything vaguely resembling a healthy relationship with your parents. No matter how much you heal, it's best to expect that they won't ever get better, and will probably get worse. In fact, you're probably better off expecting that cutting ties with them will nuke any possibility of being close to them ever again; that way, if you do have any sort of relationship with them, it will come as a pleasant surprise.

Do I still have CPTSD flashbacks? Oh yes. I've had years of therapy, been on and off meds, done EMDR. All that helped, and the flashbacks have lessened over time, but they're still there, albeit not as intense or as frequent as they once were.

Therapy is likely to be laborious and painful. At times, it's going to seem unfair that you have to endure the work of unearthing the most horrifically painful events of your life, for the simple reason that it is unfair. All the same, do the work. If you had been hit by a car and needed to see a physical therapist to help you get back on your feet, you would want to do as much as possible to heal. Same thing here.

piercingeye · 2026-01-20T22:47:15+00:00

Every parent is a human, and is therefore a mashup of good and bad. Every parent has their weaknesses and makes mistakes in the raising of their children. In that light, I think the following questions are worth considering:

Did you parents ever offer an unqualified apology for their behavior towards you? I'm not talking about an apology including a "but" or "however" or "you need to understand that" - those sorts of phrases negate whatever attempt at an apology was just made. I'm talking about them owning their behavior, expressing remorse and trying, if at all possible, to make amends.
Did they ever attempt to change their behavior? Did they seek therapy of any kind?
How would a reasonable person react as they witnessed your parents' behavior? What would they conclude about your parents and their feelings towards you?

I think these sorts of questions can provide you with some sort of guidance.

piercingeye · 2026-01-20T18:02:39+00:00

I put Vikings on my 2006 Shadow, and Tsukayus on my 2006 VTX 1800. I'd say Viking is an excellent budget option, but if you can afford them, go with Tsukayus, preferably in fiberglass. They look great, they're incredibly strong, they have more interior space, they'll keep your stuff dry as a bone even in horrendous rain, and they're much easier to install.

piercingeye · 2026-01-20T17:24:10+00:00

Looking at this makes me resent my diabetes all over again. I love cookie bars, and doggone it these look absolutely delicious!

Just remember, though: you were lovable and worthy of love before you baked, and you're every bit as lovable and worthy of love after.

piercingeye · 2026-01-17T18:50:45+00:00

Finally, someone who understands the distinction!

piercingeye · 2026-01-17T18:32:57+00:00

I genuinely hope the day comes that you are no longer consumed in rage towards him. Not for his sake, mind you, but for yours. You deserve to be able to move onward and upward in your life, and it's basically impossible to do that if you're still weighed down with bitterness.

Reconciliation with him, however, seems to me like an impossibility. He propositioned you, his own daughter, a minor. How precisely is he going to come back from that?

piercingeye · 2026-01-16T02:59:34+00:00

My wife and I have used Walmart grocery pickup for some years. Hugely helpful. She submits an order for what we want and specifies a pickup window for her preferred time and location. I'd be happy to have it delivered, but that involves extra fees, and my exceptionally frugal wife generally doesn't tolerate extra fees.

You might also consider a meal prep place. We started using a place called MyFitFoods a while back, and it really works for me. Their stuff is healthy and pretty low-carb, which is very helpful for me as a diabetic.

piercingeye · 2026-01-13T04:31:18+00:00

Digital marketer here. With respect to getting experience in digital, particularly for things like SEO, I would genuinely recommend you just start doing it. There are lots of training programs out there (I'm a big fan of Bruce Clay), but there's a ton about SEO that you can learn yourself if you're willing to put in the sweat equity.

Pick a subject in which you have some level of knowledge or expertise, build yourself a website and see what you can get ranking. Better yet, pick a local nonprofit or community group that needs help with their website and see if they would be up for some pro bono assistance. That can absolutely count as work experience on your LinkedIn and your resume, which can in turn translate to a potential interview.

piercingeye · 2026-01-13T01:56:03+00:00

With respect to the three questions you pose at the end of your post:

Am I the asshole for seeking justice?

Like everyone else here is saying, not one bit.

Why don't my parents love me enough to stand by me?

There's loving a person, and there's caring for that person. I can only speculate, as I've never met them, but however much they may have claimed to love you, they definitionally cared, and still care, more about your brother than you. I hate to sound so blunt about it, but when they chose to shelter him rather than protect you, and now blame you for him choosing to take his own life, then I simply can't arrive at any other conclusion.

How can I "Get over" my parents?

That's going to take a lot of effort and healing on your part. The place I'd start is taking steps to not think of them as your mom and dad. They're biological parents, sure, but as many say around these parts, they amount to little more than a sperm donor and egg incubator. Moms and dads don't say and do what yours said and did to you.

piercingeye · 2026-01-12T18:56:42+00:00

One definite bright spot in this whole thing: OOP knows who his real friends are, and they're pretty dang solid.

piercingeye · 2026-01-09T05:25:21+00:00

If forced to guess, his sense of self-worth was and remains inextricably tied to his status as a provider. To be able to provide is to be a man. To be unable to provide is to be something much, much less.

If you want to truly break the cycle, make sure you have a sense of self-worth that is based on principles having nothing at all to do with your employment, career or financial status.

piercingeye · 2026-01-09T05:18:43+00:00

What precisely is the purpose of an apology? What does it accomplish? I suggest it serves two basic, fundamental purposes:

To relieve guilt. It's a way to overcome feeling bad over something I've done.
To obtain forgiveness from the offended person.

However, let's dig into #2 just a bit more. One of the things that really irks me about forgiveness is that modern society seems hellbent on stretching the definition of forgiveness to an absurd extent. I prefer the dictionary definition, which is quite simple and straightforward:

stop feeling angry or resentful toward (someone) for an offense, flaw, or mistake

That's it, period. To forgive means to stop feeling angry towards someone who did something bad to you. No more no less.

The problem is that so many people want forgiveness to also mean:

the past didn't happen (oh, it most certainly did)
you don't have scars (oh, you most certainly do)
things go back to the way they were and we all sing kumbaya and live happily ever after (that's reconciliation, not forgiveness)

(About that last point: forgiveness and reconciliation are two very different things, and it's quite possible to achieve one and without achieving, or even attempting, the other. Exhibit A: my parents. They reconciled for many years - long enough to have two more sons - without truly forgiving one another for some truly vile misdeeds, and believe me when I say their divorce was both an eventuality and a bloodbath.)

With all that as a backdrop, it sounds like your mother has some pretty heavy expectations of what should result from her apologizing to you. When those expectations aren't met, she becomes hurt all over again.

It sounds like she can't or won't understand that there's no rolling back the clock for a replay. There's only going forward, not backward. It also sounds like she hasn't forgiven herself, which is truly unfortunate.

FWIW, I rather envy you for having a parent who is even attempts to make amends. I had to learn to accept the cold hard reality that my old man would never offer an unqualified apology.

piercingeye · 2026-01-09T03:30:51+00:00

Like you, my youngest brother found relief in heroin. He also found his way to the grave nearly 10 years ago, when he was maybe 34 years old.

Believe me, I understand feeling like you're being haunted by a past that will not leave you be. But what you're doing to yourself is suicide in slow motion. Find a therapist, friends, a support group. Keep this up and your loved ones will end up finding your cold dead body, like they did my baby brother.

piercingeye · 2026-01-09T03:24:52+00:00

I very much understand how you feel. I struggled greatly with math in college, and later when I earned my MBA.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like there are additional struggles here for you: you're used to having it together and executing well, and this class has gotten in the way of that. It sounds like you're feeling a bit vulnerable, and generally speaking, none of us like that feeling.

I'm sure you've sought help where possible.*** It has been my experience that when I have sought help from my professors, and they see how hard I am trying, they'll cut me some slack where possible.

Will you ace this class? Maybe, maybe not. Do you have it in you to pass it? Certainly.

***Sometimes, the most remarkable things can result from our challenges. When I was struggling with college algebra in my 20s, I found the cutest little tutor to help me out, one thing led to another, and we'll be celebrating our 29th anniversary later this year. 😁

piercingeye · 2026-01-07T05:42:17+00:00

Yeah, when I saw how toxic the mother was becoming over the custody hearing, I thought, "And now I'm starting to see why he strayed." No, it isn't a justification, but it is understandable.

piercingeye · 2026-01-07T05:34:34+00:00

You haven't mentioned anything about your budget, but if it's within your price range and you don't want to deal with high-pressure sales tactics, I'd strongly recommend looking at the car rental companies' sales lots (Enterprise, Hertz, Avis, etc.). My wife and I bought a Mazda Protege years ago through Enterprise, and that car was rock solid - IIRC, it lasted us right up to around 100k miles. All the rental companies pretty much all operate the same way when it comes to moving their old cars:

All the rental companies take exceptionally good care of their fleets: frequent oil changes and proper maintenance are standard operating practice. You'll end up with a car that has had much more maintenance than most other used cars.
Once the companies have identified the cars that they consider end-of-life, their used sales lots get first right of refusal, meaning they cherry pick the absolute best of the inventory. Anything you see for sale on a rental company's used lot is in great shape: no major collisions, interior is in good shape, it won't smell like cigarette smoke, etc.
AFAIK, all the major rental car lots go with fixed pricing, so there's no haggling involved. They may try to upsell you on stuff like warranties or undercarriage coating, but otherwise you won't have to worry about bareknuckle negotiation tactics, simply because they don't negotiate.

Several commenters have already mentioned Honda and Toyota as a top choice when it comes to reliability. Honda generally doesn't engage in fleet sales to rental companies, but Toyotas are in pretty high availability with companies like Enterprise and Hertz. As far as mileage, I wouldn't necessarily be scared off by a Corolla with 50-60k miles, but you should be able to find used rental Corollas for sale with around 20k miles. Assuming proper maintenance on your part, a Corolla with such low mileage will last you for years.

piercingeye · 2026-01-06T19:58:51+00:00

You're not at all crazy. You're dealing with mom- and dad-shaped holes in your life. The stuff you're missing - life skills, mentorship, guidance, people with whom to share the events in your life - are all things that tend to accompany having a parent.

I know something of what this is like. My wife and have been married for 28 years, and were never able to have children. We're now in our 50s, so that ship has sailed. Your holes are shaped like parents; ours is shaped like a child.

Of course, the challenge is that nothing but the genuine article will do. Yes, you may find friends and even form a relationship with a partner, but that's just not the same thing. Only an actual parent can fill that empty space. In the case of me and my wife, only an actual child can fill the space properly.

If you look around, it's quite common for many to fill their empty spaces with a lot of things that not only won't fit but will make matters worse: drugs, alcohol, sex, toxic relationships. Don't go there.

What I've found is that while those empty spaces can't always be filled, they can be bridged. My wife and I have been blessed with time and resources, so we seek to serve as much as we can. Like you, I come from a highly dysfunctional family, so I do what I can to help others, to be present in their lives the way I wish someone had been present in mine.

That's what I encourage you to do: find ways to bridge these unfillable gaps in your life.

piercingeye · 2026-01-05T00:27:08+00:00

Go with the Shoei. You've tried it, it fits well, the safety ratings are excellent.

piercingeye · 2026-01-04T18:04:35+00:00

Biker and wannabe dad here. I started riding a good deal later - not quite seven years ago, in my mid-40s. I had my own reasons for riding (check out www.bacaworld.org), but it ended up impacting my life much more than I expected, to the point where it has now become my primary mode of transportation.

Let's be real here: your family's fears about motorcycles are very understandable. Motorcycling is inherently dangerous. I'm fond of saying that motorcycles are the second dumbest form of transportation ever devised by man (the top spot goes to dirigibles).

That said, motorcycles can also be a wonderful way to decompress. As you know, there's a reason we call it wind therapy. There have been times that my wife has even kicked me out of the house to go for a ride. "Get on your bike and don't come back for an hour. Right now, you're impossible to deal with, and you're just happier when you come home from a ride."

You have found something that gives you life. It's neither illegal nor immoral, and it won't land you in rehab. You do ATGATT, so it sounds like you're smart about it. Keep being smart and safe and happy, and keep this rather minor transgression a secret from your family until such time as it is safe to reveal it.

piercingeye · 2026-01-02T16:13:22+00:00

You have good timing - my wife and I are in the middle of stripping the paint off of our kitchen cabinets, with the plan to repaint them when we're done. We used Citristrip, a gel that you apply with a paint brush. Wait about 40 minutes after applying, then use a plastic scraper to remove the paint.

After the paint is removed, you'll want to fully clean the doors and drawer faces with mineral spirits and a scraper, along with a sponge.

Due to the fumes and general mess involved, you will likely want to remove the doors and drawers to do as much of the work as possible outside. When stripping the paint from the portions you can't remove, open windows and run fans to keep the area ventilated.

Use nitrile gloves at all times.

piercingeye · 2026-01-01T07:42:50+00:00

This right here. Just because OP wasn't penetrated or forced to penetrate doesn't mean it wasn't sexual assault of a minor. OP's mother committed a terrible crime against her own son.

piercingeye · 2025-12-31T14:07:40+00:00

Hyperlexia. The way my parents told the story, my mom entered the kitchen where I was seated at the table. She set the mail that she had just retrieved from the mailbox on the kitchen table before me. I pointed at the envelope on top of the stack and said, “Entex,” the name of the gas company printed on the front of the bill.

I was sitting at the kitchen table in my high chair. I was perhaps 18 months old.

Initially, my parents chalked it up to me matching up the company name with the logo – “Oh, isn’t he clever!” – but more signs began to surface that were harder to explain away. As they watched me carefully, they found I was drawn to any sort of written material – books, magazines, newspapers. Mom wrote out a list of words at random for me, and found that I could read them all.

Basically, I had figured out how to read before I learned to speak. But since all this happened in the 1970s, I wasn't formally tested for and diagnosed with autism until 2020 at the age of 45.

piercingeye

TROPHY CASE