share your origin story. i feel like people might be a lot less antagonistic and more sympathetic to their fellow users out here if they had a bit of context as to how others grew up or their current situation or something

i guess i should start where i was born. i grew up in a place called sampaloc, manila in the philippines. it was pretty much a third world slum but fortunately, it's gotten a bit better these days. it was kind of a scary place bac then since it was a high crime rate area. lotta people got stabbed and shot. gang violence was the norm. lotta kids just did drugs in the street in broad daylight. they mostly huffed adhesives because as bad as it was for your brain cells, it had sort of a benefit wherein you pretty much forget about hunger and stuff for a good amount of time and it was a lot cheaper than food. i never tried it but i can understand if people out here think i was hooked on that stuff just based on some of the things i've posted out here lol but anyway, it was pretty much just me, my brother and my mom since my dad just kinda walked out on us when i was like 5 or something. he took the tv and my piggy bank full of loose change too. what an ass lol. my mom was a strong woman so she didn't give up and did her best to raise us. eventually, she got us out of there but she died young. she got killed by a drunk driver when i was around 18 so i had to stop school and work whatever job i could at the time because i had younger brother to support. that's why whenever i see all this woke stuff on the internet which is pretty much just a bunch of narcissists complaining about first world problems i'm like "wouldn't have minded to trade my third world problems for yours in a heartbeat lol". fast forward a decade and a half later, life is pretty good now. my brother is married to a great woman and i haven't gotten murdered yet by a vengeful psychotic ex-girlfriend and i've had quite a few of 'em lol. i think that's really all a guy could ask for