Thank you @Just Games for saying I’m invaluable. That’s too kind of you. Thanks to those who supported that sentiment. I’m so glad to see @Murakami_1 here again. Although @Unsigned suggested a reasonable guess for my absence, I’m afraid I wasn’t “walking about” or camping, or even having a good time to be honest.
I decided to take some time out for a few reasons. I began to stare into an abyss. Some soul searching and introspection was involved. Apart from some contemplation about my presence on this forum, a few disquieting things have also been occupying my thoughts including the latest anguish of one of my few friends suddenly being on death’s door with a body riddled with cancer.
I am very grateful to one member in particular (they know who they are) who reached out to me and had me looking further into myself, and basically helped me return.
I thought about what more I might have to contribute to this forum, the value of anything I have thoughts of posting, the struggle I have in articulating myself well enough to have people understand what I'm really trying to convey. It's one of my biggest bugbears, the deterioration of my vocabulary and articulation. I've become, actually I've probably always been to some degree, a slow witted responder. I have to take my time to put into words what I really want to say, and even then I'm editing and re-editing my written words. I've become rather hopeless in real time conversations, or I should say, confrontations. In hindsight, I honestly don't know how I managed as a cop for over 20 years, and even more-so as an actual negotiator dealing with people in desperate situations. Perhaps that's what all lead to my mental collapse in the end. I was one of the good cops. I really was. One that people liked to ask for and was respected even by people I charged with crimes. I don’t know why, (maybe because I was a fellow sufferer) but I really clicked with the 1000’s of people suffering mental health problems that I had to deal with, and old ladies. For some reason the old ladies always took a liking to me. But so did little kids and dogs, and we all know that dogs know. They just know.
This is a good forum, a valuable forum, for different reasons to different people. Sometimes there are clashes, which can happen for a myriad of reasons, but that doesn’t mean any of the people involved are bad people. Sometimes we can clash with our best friends, so it’s only reasonable to assume that we would clash with people who aren’t close to us. Later we can even find that when we get to know the other person better, that we actually have a great deal in common, and we wonder how the heck the clash happened in the first place. It can happen for various reasons as we all know; having an off day, something in our own life that is occurring suddenly being unwittingly triggered by the smallest innocent word, misunderstandings, assumptions and so on.
I sincerely apologise if I’ve hurt anyone in recent times with any of my comments. I do have some autistic and OCD traits on top of my depression and anxiety issues, as my children have pointed out to me and I’m always chasing clarification and further understanding of a topic and sometimes that comes across as interrogative or accusatory, which isn’t my intention. I just need to fully understand, so comments that to me appear vague or evasive leave me a little wanting. But all that is on me, so I just have to take a breath before I respond sometimes and reassess what was being conveyed and then respond a bit better so as to avoid a wrong impression. I will try to do better. It’s my failing.
I have spent some time going through a lot of the posts written in my absence and it’s good to see the forum become a bit livelier.
I decided to take some time out for a few reasons. I began to stare into an abyss. Some soul searching and introspection was involved. Apart from some contemplation about my presence on this forum, a few disquieting things have also been occupying my thoughts including the latest anguish of one of my few friends suddenly being on death’s door with a body riddled with cancer.
I am very grateful to one member in particular (they know who they are) who reached out to me and had me looking further into myself, and basically helped me return.
I thought about what more I might have to contribute to this forum, the value of anything I have thoughts of posting, the struggle I have in articulating myself well enough to have people understand what I'm really trying to convey. It's one of my biggest bugbears, the deterioration of my vocabulary and articulation. I've become, actually I've probably always been to some degree, a slow witted responder. I have to take my time to put into words what I really want to say, and even then I'm editing and re-editing my written words. I've become rather hopeless in real time conversations, or I should say, confrontations. In hindsight, I honestly don't know how I managed as a cop for over 20 years, and even more-so as an actual negotiator dealing with people in desperate situations. Perhaps that's what all lead to my mental collapse in the end. I was one of the good cops. I really was. One that people liked to ask for and was respected even by people I charged with crimes. I don’t know why, (maybe because I was a fellow sufferer) but I really clicked with the 1000’s of people suffering mental health problems that I had to deal with, and old ladies. For some reason the old ladies always took a liking to me. But so did little kids and dogs, and we all know that dogs know. They just know.
This is a good forum, a valuable forum, for different reasons to different people. Sometimes there are clashes, which can happen for a myriad of reasons, but that doesn’t mean any of the people involved are bad people. Sometimes we can clash with our best friends, so it’s only reasonable to assume that we would clash with people who aren’t close to us. Later we can even find that when we get to know the other person better, that we actually have a great deal in common, and we wonder how the heck the clash happened in the first place. It can happen for various reasons as we all know; having an off day, something in our own life that is occurring suddenly being unwittingly triggered by the smallest innocent word, misunderstandings, assumptions and so on.
I sincerely apologise if I’ve hurt anyone in recent times with any of my comments. I do have some autistic and OCD traits on top of my depression and anxiety issues, as my children have pointed out to me and I’m always chasing clarification and further understanding of a topic and sometimes that comes across as interrogative or accusatory, which isn’t my intention. I just need to fully understand, so comments that to me appear vague or evasive leave me a little wanting. But all that is on me, so I just have to take a breath before I respond sometimes and reassess what was being conveyed and then respond a bit better so as to avoid a wrong impression. I will try to do better. It’s my failing.
I have spent some time going through a lot of the posts written in my absence and it’s good to see the forum become a bit livelier.
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