Farewell to 2010s

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

So, what does everyone remember about the latest decade.

You can think of this on several levels!

1. You-wise (Personal level, what happened to you in your, more or less, private life)
2. World-wise (What events did you regard important in the world around you)
3. Nation-wise (Overlaps with the second one)
4. TPM-wise (How did you see the progress of the forums, or was it regression)
5. Pokemon-wise (You have been a Pokemon Trainer for ten years, what Pokemon have you seen and how much medication do you need so you don't have to see them anymore lol jk

I may or may not post my answers later.

[Zak]

1. I went from zero to 100.

2. MAGA

3. MAGA

4. I see it as more of a museum archive, which still happens to be open. Still neat to pop in every now and then.

5. Pokemon Go was fun. As for Pokemon in general, I actually still need to learn Gen 7. I know I used to be the anime guy, I kinda initially fell out of touch after Hoenn mainly due to life and having limited internet access going away for a year as well as other interests replacing them. But, I actually did have a lot of free time several years back and did a marathon/catch-up of the anime. So it was when Gen 6 (Kalos) was just beginning so Gen 4 and 5 were completely new to me, anime-wise. I knew all the Pokes, but knew little to nothing of Ash's journey.
Diamond and Pearl actually I think was a really good generation in the anime and I'd even go as far as saying it was the best (though haven't seen 6 or 7). The writing and character development was top tier. It's kind of unfortunate and hard to believe that's where I initially fell out, but it actually paid off being able to watch it all at once.

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

Neat, Zak! You'll have to wait for my main reply for a while. Also, something critical is happening, but I'll know more about my life next week!

[Magmar]

Hi Mikael!

This decade has been simply phenomenal for me in so many ways. There have been heartbreaks, too, sadness and failures, but thinking back to where I was at 23 to where I am at 33, it's really been amazing. Bear in mind my birthday falls midway through the year.

In 2010, I was still an undergraduate. In the spring semester, I only passed half of my courses. I was working full time in retail, barely making ends meet, and dating a loser who cheated on me and dumped me two weeks before we were supposed to move in together. I was still attempting to maintain a relationship with my abusive parents and had only recently begun the process of coming out as a survivor of intense physical and emotional abuse. I barely made ends meet and was overall very unhappy.

In 2011, I was still an undergraduate and in retail, but I completed my degree that spring. That year, I had the best time of my college life, living with two really fantastic roommates--really, the ones from when I was 23 were amazing, too, but we just had this great vibe at my final year. That year, the final Harry Potter film came out right around graduation, and I remember me and my roommate after seven years in four-year degree programs finally "graduating Hogwarts." I went off to a really good graduate school that looked at all the barriers I'd faced and recognized my potential. I remember walking around feeling amazing. My grandfather also passed away right when I turned 25, and his funeral was the last time I ever saw my mother or brothers. I remember being so angry, angry that they'd ignored my birthday again, angry that they'd stolen my college savings bonds, angry that they'd hurt my sister once I'd been for all intents and purposes disowned as a teenager, and they turned their ire on her.

In 2012, I was a year into graduate studies and finally finding my niche. I started dating an interesting person who was a little older and established. Even though the relationship was doomed to fail, he still invested in helping me develop as an adult and for that I'm forever grateful. I lived in a house near my graduate school with four really cool roommates who sometimes got along, sometimes did not. In this year, I learned that my "happy facade" was just a facade and that I needed to start doing work to address all the issues I had. Regardless, we still had so many fun parties, and we had a total fiasco when I quit my retail job at last!

In 2013, I completed my master's degree. Still in a relationship with this person, within a couple months of graduating (and losing my income from internship / graduate assistantship), I moved in with him. We sort-of got along, but he did not approve of my friends and put up some walls that should not have been there. Once I graduated, I found a great job that was underpaid but provided fulfilling work, and it began giving me the experience necessary to launch a real career. This experience was transformative, and once I began working, I started getting involved in community organization leadership as well. My life was driven by nonprofit work, I biked all around the city in lieu of owning a car, and it was just a lot of fun overall.

In 2014, I was still working at my fantastic job, but midway through the year, my now ex and I split up mutually. He'd said some vulgar things in front of my grandmother and that was the last straw. We broke up right around his birthday, and he very quickly replaced me with some 19 year old or whatever that I called "Juicy" for some reason when talking in code with my friends lol. He'd also been cruel to me about my penchant for the gym and said my body looked ridiculous as it got more muscular. So, I got an apartment with a friend from 2011 and another mutual friend, and the second half of this year was simply amazing. Right on my birthday, I met someone who would become my best friend. This magical guy came at the right time and we just had this... thing for each other that wasn't romantic (as much as I'd wanted it to be), but the friendship was just enough, and so amazing. In this apartment, we would paint, and play games, and have parties, and just be single people in our mid 20s having a ball. I specifically remember my birthday being just so amazing because we'd had a hurricane the night before, so the sky was so clear on the day, and you could see fireworks from everywhere. Loved this weird house.

In 2015, the two roommates had some awful friction between them. There was a lot of anxiety, and I felt like shit for much of it, so in midsummer I moved out, but not before going through a very deep depression. I got very skinny during that time, like, horrendously skinny, we're talking you could see all my ribs. I was highly insecure about my body and couldn't bring myself to tell my therapist about it. I basically stopped eating for a while and kept getting sick; my diet was cigarettes and diet coke with rum. I'd also had a falling out with one of my best friends, which really hurt, because he was the person I'd lean on in times like that. But living alone seemed like the way out. A few days in, my apartment got robbed--in fact it might have been my 29th birthday that it happened. And I started dating someone who turned out to be abusive. He made my life hell for three months, but thanks to help from my therapist and my new friend / next-door neighbor Judy, I had the courage to break things off with him.

In 2016, I realized my life needed to change. My job had deteriorated... Not my performance, but we lost a big chunk of funding due to having unstable leadership. They hired on one of my grad school roommates to be our new director, and her first job was to fire half the staff. She'd worked there for her first job, too, and it just broke all our hearts. She left in a haze of depression after two months working there; that's how bad it was. We eventually hired on this god-awful man who turned out to be legitimately nefarious. In the meantime, I'd taken on all the work and asked for a new title and raise, but got denied for reasons I still do not know, and they scrapped most of our benefits. One night, I kind of had a breakdown and got drunk with my cousin, and we decided to blow our tax refunds and travel to Chicago for the weekend. I met some amazing people and fell in love with the city, and began making plans to leave my home state. And so the week I turned 30, after more silence from my family around my birthday, I packed my bags and moved to Illinois. This was when I instated complete separation, and still have not spoken to my parents or siblings (except my one cool sister) since. I had the most wonderful time there, had a brief long-distance relationship/fling, made some incredible friends, and just had a field day. Having taken on the bulk of the work at my prior job before leaving, I gained some incredible experience that translated to a much higher-level job doing national consulting work. I left 2016 feeling amazing.

In 2017, long-distance dude and I broke up (well, he ghosted after three travels / dates, RUDE), and around Valentine's Day, I met my now-partner on an uncommonly balmy Sunday in February. We had a fantastic time for six months, bopping around Chicago and spending so much time together. Inspired by his academic achievements, I returned to school as well. Rather suddenly in August, his fellowship was pulled and he lost his scholarship, so he had to move home to Missouri and we became long-distance. I also moved out of my three-person apartment into my own place just one block from the Lake Michigan beaches. Although we were long-distance, AMTRAK train services ran between our cities, so we saw each other often. I became very close friends with my now-bestie Drew, and we started going to the gym together every day, and we started a really fun D&D campaign. I had a really great 2017.

In 2018, for the first half of the year, I lived in Chicago as well, and things just kept on getting better. Now in an open relationship, I occasionally had some great sex, and things with my partner were just sublime when we were together. I really solidified some friendships in that half-year and still talk to some of those folks almost every day. In July, I moved to St. Louis and joined a damn rugby team. Phew, I had no idea what I was getting into, but I felt great about my progress with fitness and wanted to try team sports, something I was never allowed to do as a child because of my mother's paranoia that being around other people would cause everyone to abandon her (and because being around other people gave me avenues to disclose the abuse I was enduring, which is why I was homeschooled after child protective services got called after one really gruesome assault that left my face swollen and oozing at 11). Let me just say that rugby has changed my life. I moved into an apartment with Ian and began working remotely. Yet I did not get homesick, because with the ruggers we've traveled the country and soon will go international to play a tournament. I've been accepted as a part of my partner's family, got to hold his baby niece the day she was born, and found a group of people who love me.

In 2019, phew, I finished that graduate program just a couple weeks ago and am proud to say I finished with a 4.0! I also published my first book which is available on Amazon and has sold around 100 copies or so. My partner completed his PhD and actually had commencement on Saturday the 13th, so this is all fresh and new. This year, I received a promotion at work and a real raise--the first time in my life. More of my partner's sisters are expecting babies in 2020 and we are just so excited to have so many beautiful niblings (a gender-neutral way of quickly saying "nieces and nephews") to come. I have traveled to several states to play rugby and have established myself as part of the team's starting lineup in the front row as hooker. There have been some ups and downs, coming to terms with my queer identity and what that means for example, and the disappointment of not immediately being the next Jo Rowling, ha. But I am very proud of everything that I have achieved this year. The best is yet to come, I think, as my partner will fly home with me in a few days to meet my family at last - well, the parts that aren't hysterical about gay people.

Overall, this decade will probably be the very best of my life. I am getting older now and will be firmly middle-age in the 2020s. I hope to continue to be involved in community organizations throughout the decade and to eventually pay off my student debts so that I can give back even more to the community. I'd also like to publish some sequels to my book and actually proper travel a bit around the world to meet some of you, see the places you call home (I'd love to visit OZ and meet Tony, Holden, and Shazza, for example), and hopefully get married too

Anyway thank you for coming to my Ted Talk! I'd say above all this, my biggest lesson learned in the past decade is how to not be so bitter and angry at the past. You know I did not have a childhood, or much of an adolescence for that matter, and when I started out as an adult, I had a lot of odds against me. No support, having to work full time, just... Issues, issues, issues. Nowadays, I can forgive myself for being an angry jerk as a teenager and for learning to let go and just live my life, and be proud of who I am, which isn't exactly what I'd expected, but is exactly where I want to be right now. Cheers to the 2010s!

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

Finally, a long reply in Misc. This is how a traditional message board should work. Congrats on your development, Magmar! My story will have some plot twists (talking about 2011, for instance) similar to yours, but as I said above, I still need to process. Tomorrow will pretty much tell how my decade will meet its ultimate end. Because of the levels I'm going to work with, I'm also wondering how many words my essay will have. If I won't go totally bananas, or if I'll go totally bananas, I'll post it in a few weeks.

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

Soory for the delay, this story wasn't so easy to pull out.

My decade started off in a lunatic asylum. Basically, I had no connection to outer world. I couldn't get to TPM with my primitive mobile phone. However, one night inside my cell, I was playing with my phone. I thought it was broken, so I picked a random phone number.

She told me there was a thread dedicated to my absence at TPM, having spoken with shazza in Messenger. I was super happy, and was sure to return to TPM after getting out of the hospital.

March 2010, I was able to briefly visit TPM. The most notable new thing was the spam forum. My access to the internet was still limited, but that was a subject to change.

Autumn came, and I returned to my Japanese course, but this time as a student. And my teacher was my former student. At some point, I also bought a new computer and even estasblished my own internet connection, so I could get to TPM more often.

Another great thing that happened in my life during 2010-2011 was a friendship and trust I was able to form with a young girl. We played videogames, watched anime and so on. I blew it in the end by falling into a deceiving Facebook chain post, but it was sweet as long as it lasted.

In 2012, I started a work in the library car, which didn't go as planned either. A group of schoolgirls started picking on me and my reaction was to try to befriend one of them on Facebook. I never believed in Facebook, so it's ridiculous how I have let it to control my life constantly.

My contract with the library ended in 2013, and even Mt. Moon started showing marks of dying. Two new short-term Finnish members didn't help and I myself ended up in the mental hospital once again in March 2015. I took the regional election too seriously and thought I should so something quickly before the election day.

I was in the hospital for three months, and the most unusual outcome was this time something you could call a girlfriend. We were together for a half a year, but then I asked if it was okay for her to end it. I regarded it as a hospital romance and not too serious.

2016 was a peculiar year. My town church was burned down, Britannia voted for Brexit, Pokemon Go was released, Visala was shut down, Donald Trump was elected POTUS and I got a new apartment, this time supported by another health care unit. I knew something was wrong with the mental hospital, they didn't even let the church burner in, while people like me had to sit down there for months.

I got the apartment for my very own in 2017 and I also got my own smartphone. Yliveska was finally accepted to my official hometown, having not lived in Kalajoki since 1997! I had a really short-term girlfriend in 2018 and also some contacts in 2019. Those ended up in failure though.

I still haven't lost my positive attitude, and I'm looking forward to great things to happen to me during this decade. I still don't have the depression diagnosis.