I’ve been on r4r for over a year now. 13 months to be exact. If you were active on this sub in that time frame, chances are you’ve seen at least one of my top posts from my many (since-deleted) alt accounts. There’s a good chance we’ve crossed paths before at some point, too. In my time here, I’ve met up with probably over a hundred people and had conversations with double that amount. I’ve written a lot of posts, deleted a good number of them, and, much like most people on here, had countless days where I found myself aimlessly scrolling through this sub, trying to find something, anything, to fill the void. Now, I think I’m more certain about what I want to get from this, so I’m here again shooting my shot. I don’t know how many times I’ve introduced myself on r4r. But I think this might actually be the last time I will. At least for a very long time.
Hi, you can call me A. I was born in QC and lived here my whole life, but I have an accent so thick that I get asked a lot if I grew up somewhere else. The accent likely comes from how I hated my cultural identity when I was a kid and spent years of my life distancing myself from it as much as I could. Fast forward to post-college graduation, I found myself dedicating my early career working with some of the most marginalized communities at the grassroots level, doing everything I can to live out what it really means to be “para sa bayan.” I’ve undone a lot of the shame I had harnessed over my own heritage growing up, and now, the very things I used to dissociate from are the things I’ll carry with me as I move my life halfway across the world.
While I acknowledge that I’ve lived most of my life in unruffled privilege, I also consider myself as someone who’s all too familiar with the feeling of loss. I experienced an incredible amount of it in the last 13 months, more than I thought I could survive at some points. It has made me both more sentimental with the people that have sustained me, and far more ruthless with the people who threaten my peace.
It was this kind of heartache that made me constantly seek the fleeting gratifications and flimsy validations that r4r interactions tend to give. All the meaningless sex, one-night inumans, and 2 am phone calls gave me so much manufactured dopamine boosts that I felt dependent on those kinds of interactions to feel like my heart was beating again. It was only this year, when I immersed myself again with people and experiences outside the online space, that I realized a lot of what I was seeking was already well within my reach. I had just been too hurt, too lonely, and too self-critical to grasp at it on my own.
Given that, you’re probably wondering then why I’m here on this sub again. What could I possibly want when I seem to have everything — an incredible support system of people that exist outside of my screen, a sense of self that no longer needs validation from irrelevant strangers, and an actual, concrete shot at chasing after dreams that are so much bigger than myself? And simply put, what got me posting here was what drove me to this sub in the first place: grief. Because while I’m off to a fresh start in New York, I still feel a sense of sadness over everything I had lost in the last year. Of course, I’m definitely spending a lot of the next two months with the people I love. At the same time, I find myself craving for a sincere kind of companionship with people who don’t know my past (hence I can more easily forget the past with) or people who won’t see me for everything I’ve been through, but simply for who I am in the present.
I'm hoping to make peace with the life I’m leaving behind, to celebrate the person I’ve become and bring with me happier memories as I navigate an entire new world for the next how many years. So, if you’ve made it this far into my post and spending some time with me interests you, tell me about yourself. Tell me things that go beyond your scripted list of attributes that you DM to every redditor that interests you. Or maybe you recognize me and we’ve spoken before, but parted ways for one reason or another. My DMs are open to re-connections too.
I might not get to reply to everyone, and I definitely don’t have a lot of time to give anyone here either. But for whatever time you spend with me, I promise it can be worthwhile.
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- 2 years ago
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