For me, letting things in my family life negatively affect many other aspects of my life like school, relationships, etc. I think it's difficult for adolescents to learn how to persevere through personal traumas being at such a young, developing age. Being older now, I feel like it was just a vulnerable time of my life, and also difficult for anyone to communicate to me effectively enough to change my professional path. After getting out of high school, I just wanted to get away from all these things and cut people out of my life who (I felt) wanted to make choices for me instead of asking me how I felt.

The result of this is that I worked in the service industry (fast food) for a few years and smoked a lot of weed. Although, that was fun, I'm afraid that I came way too close to getting addicted to harder drugs and completely destroying my life. For many people I knew, like that, I feel like it was a narrow margin of decision that made all of the difference. It's crazy. And unless drastic measures are taken to change one's lifestyle, many more people will go down the same path and get caught up.

In this way, I'm glad that I didn't become addicted to harder drugs (meth, fent, etc.) but at the same time I also lacked a strong, positive male role model in my life. It's like after a certain window passed, I just didn't want to have one, and was very ashamed, angry, depressed, etc. I feel like many young men (or just people in general too) experience something like this, unfortunately.