What in your life, did you believe to be the hardest thing you had to go through?

A divorce. Especially difficult with two young kids. But johnpowell can easily top that.

My mother shot and killed my drunk and abusive father. This led to a chain of pretty horrible shit that most people will hopefully never need to deal with.

A brother dying when I was four and being abused by someone in my childhood.

A heroin addiction

See. I told you.

moving away for college 12 hours from my family because i wanted to be with my then-boyfriend, failling college, being dumped after being with the guy for 5 years, being in a new city alone(after the break-up) with no family or friends to help me out and having to pick up all the pieces. i am fairly young(20 now, this all happened when i was 17) and i know it might not sound that hard to some people but, it was and it still is on some days for me. i am doing well now though…i stayed in the city, found a job, got a new apartment, re-enrolled for college 2 years later and am now doing amazing! :) i guess everything happens for a reason.

sorry to hear everything you guys have gone through…you’re all very strong people.

The past three years. I thought it was letting up, but nope. Just got kicked in the teeth again, so we’ll see.

Wow, I guess I’ve had a pretty good life then. The only thing I can remember being hard on me was when my dad had to have his leg amputated because of diabetes. I was only a teenager then and it was kind of hard for all of us to see my dad go through that.

Having a complete breakdown to the point of being suicidal, then spending a month in the state mental facility.

@johnpowell I am so sorry. My ex-husband’s dad shot and killed his mother. I can’t possibly comprehend the magnitude of the pain and trauma, but I know very well that he has been through absolute hell. I am just so sorry.

I once had someone put something in my drink at a party… I tried to literally walk through a brick wall that night… I couldn’t do it. It was too hard to get through.

Other than that my father abandoning my family when i was 16 and only speaking to him twice from then until the day of his death.

I can’t pick one.
But my top three are equal in my mind:

-Every type of abuse from ages 2–4.5 I remember it all.
-Severe depression after losing my best friend, which led to suicide attempts of my own.
-Drug addiction which led to me miscarrying a baby I didn’t know was there.
More drug addiction as a result of that.

herion addiction. cold turkying off methadone

All of mine seem highly insignificant compated to most of the ones mentioned here, but I’ll mention them anyway:

Watching my grandmother degrade as her Alzheimer’s got worse. The nicest person in the world whom I visited as a kid so much didn’t know who I was anymore and was angry at everyone and everything.

Also, the crippling homesickness I felt at the beginning of college was pretty awful. Luckily that has completely changed. And of course the time when I convinced myself the only way to go through life was to pretend to be straight and live a lie for the rest of my life. It didn’t last too long, but while it did, I was pretty unhappy.

Getting out of an abusive relationship was the toughest thing I’ve ever gone through.

An ectopic rupture. A divorce. The death of my grandmother.

My daughter nearly being raped by several boys while on the way home from ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. She no longer felt safe at school, and made allies with, and eventually became part of, the Nortanious Gang (XIV). That led her into gang life, drug life, drug manufacturing and sales, and 4 years away from her family. She claimed we were unsuitable parents, and my wife and I had to go to court over it.
Just thinking about it now (it happened 15 years ago) is enough to make me sick to my stomache.

@johnpowell
Win

I would say seeing my father one Christmas who I really hadn’t talked to in years and at the same time seeing my brother with a former girlfriend of mine whom he later married. My father died two weeks later, and my brother married my ex the following spring. She is now my sister in law and the mother of my niece and nephew. I have a friendly relationship with her but it still takes effort for me to keep my emotional stability. I think it has made me stronger. Ironically he is jealous of me.

I once would have said that to have a serious argument with your hubby of one year because of his indifference to your new baby was the worst, and he slams out of the house in a rage. But then I received a phone call saying he had died when he smashed his car into an overpass abutment.

For some people, having your second husband say he wanted a divorce would be the worst, but it’s much worse a few weeks later when he says his doctor diagnosed pancreatic cancer and he only had six months to live, and his new fiance ran off when she found out, and then he dies in your arms 90 very short days later.

This thread has totally depressed me.

I was sexually abused throughout my childhood by a family member. My mother never stopped the abuse, and remained friendly with my abuser until his death. Several years ago I ended my relationship with my mother. Wow, I have finally managed to boil that down to it’s essence… my early posts on this could probably fill a book!

All of us have, or will, experience some terrible hardship in life… it doesn’t really matter what the hardship is, but how we deal with it.

{hugs} to all of you.

@augustlan You said it all in your last sentence!

Puberty.

Also my sister’s anorexia. She is taller than me and weighed 60 pounds . . . 14 years old and she looked 60. Thank god, she recovered . . . and developed bulimia.

@everyone – BEAR HUG.

@everyone :)

Well, my hardest thing was when I was ten and my mother got cancer. To this day I have neuroses that can be traced back to that year.

To everyone who responded: I’m so glad you all survived to get here. Yes, it is awful that all this stuff happened but you are here and better because of it. Thank goodness for people like all of you who have this kind of strength!

My Mother’suicide a week before Thamksgiving and the subsequent havoc it wreaked upon my younger brother and sister who were in their older teens at the time.

My kid brother was the one who found her when coming back from a driving practice outing. Massive (undeserved) guilt propelled him into several years of heavy drinking, wrapping cars around trees, Stupid Daddy continues buying him more.

My sister’s (already scheduled) marriage a month later and subsequent divorce less than a year later.

On the plus side, my brother hit “bottom” with lightning speed, dragged his ass into rehab and is still sober to this day.

My sister remarried a few years later and is raising her four kids.

I got my ass into therapy for about 6 years and got myself and my issues sorted out thoroughly.

Her death was more than 20 years ago and we all survived and became stronger as a result.

But holiday time still ain’t no walk in the park. But at least we’re all still alive and functioning productively.

Two things that are close in equality, Family issues with the law. Being with my ex boyfriend for 10 months was one of the worst experiences ever, very very verbally abusive and I believe if we had stayed together he would have got physical seeing as I know for a fact now he used to beat the girl he was with before me. He was controlling and manipulative, so that was definitely one of the hardest things to go through

I guess I,ve lived a charmed life—the hardest thing I ever went through is a stainless steel door.

Reading this I feel thoroughly humbled and unable to post anything I can think of as being hard in my life…

This thread has totally depressed me, but also has made me realize how people can often come from pasts you wouldn’t expect. Not knowing their pasts is not bad though, they come out (for the most part) stronger and more ready for the small and large challenges in life, and that is why you cannot read into their pasts.

You are all incredibly stronger than I, and while I don’t wish any of these tragedies upon anyone, I wish we could all have the same sort foundation changing character outcomes.

A bad relationship and an even worse break-up. No question, hands down the worst thing I have been through, and I’ve had my share of terrible physical injuries.

My mother died when I was fifteen due to a combination of factors from a blood clot in her leg. On the last night my sister and I got woken up at 3 am to go to the hospital and see her. All these things went wrong and she was unconscious and had swollen up to what seemed like twice her size, and lost blood circulation in her limbs, so her hands felt cold, hard, hard and rubbery. After that my sister and I went to live with my dad and stepmom, and I have never gotten along with her.

This second fight with Cushing’s disease. The first time through wasn’t exactly easy but I was hopeful and had a positive attitude about it. Then it came back, and it came back worse. Now it’s just frustrating and it’s taking forever to get things sorted out and the surgery risks are much higher and I’m just sick and tired of it all and I feel so worn down and hopeless. It’s not a lot of fun.

I applaud everyone in this thread who had the courage and will to live through these hardships…. and then reveal them online.

Unfortunately, I guess I’m not entirely at peace with some of my hardships because I can’t bring myself to talk about them openly. I was forced into a position of responsibility over my little brothers at a young age when my father took off and spent my whole life trying to fill his shoes while not being sure of how to fill my own. I worked very hard to be an example and a role model, and achieved much success and honor, but at some point, I just burned out (when everyone least expected it). Like a star that shines very brightly and goes out suddenly. To this day, I would say I still haven’t found my footing.

The hardest thing for me was my first broken heart. Sounds pretty tame especially as I was abused as a child and surely that should be the hardest thing to deal with. However, as much pain as the abuse has caused me throughout my life breaking up from my first love was harder because (and here’s the difference) I was losing the first man I had been able to trust since the abuse. I never want to feel loss or pain like that again.

@efritz my mother was anorexic for at least the first 20 years of her life. I am surprised she is still alive and (finally) has it under control.

The time when nerves were often on edge after our twins were born.

This thread helped me remember that everyone has a struggle. Sometimes you think you’re the only one, but it’s not true. Thanks guys.

Escaping the pernicious early influence of my toxic biological family; a process that is ongoing.

I used to be in a relationship that everybody else could see was going to fail but me.
My mother was convinced the girl was going to slip up, and end up pregnant.

I remember her parents went away one weekend and I was staying over, when I got home my mum asked me ‘I hope you were careful!....’, to which I replied, ‘of course I was I parked my car round the corner in the pub car park!.....’

Anyhoo, not that I think its only the girls responsibility to be protected, but I did keep asking this particular girl (naively) are we alright (pertaining to getting jiggy), to which she always replied ‘yes’.

Months went by, and I surpose to everbody else inevitably (my girlfriend at the time) fell pregnant. We moved in to our own home two weeks before she was due to give birth at the same time I was getting made redundant. Two weeks later our beautifull daughter Ellie was born.

Twelve months of arguments after the birth as well as both of us having to work put a huge strain on our relationship, but that by itself would have been easy to cope with, the one thing I couldn’t cope with was the sentance my daughters mother would always come out with to try and hurt me, and win an argument, she would always say,

“I don’t care anyway, all I have to do is call the police and get you kicked out and you’l never see Ellie again!”

The months rolled on, and a couple of months after Ellie’s first birthday, true to her word, after an argument she called the police and said that I had assaulted her. By this time I’d had enough, and my only option was to move back in with my parents.

That was the start of a nine month battle to regain access to my daughter through the court system, and I never got to see my daughters first steps, or her first words.

During that period I was left empty inside, my mother told me the emotions I was expressing were that of a person who was grieving over the loss of a loved one, and in a way I was, only to me it seemed much harder because I new she was only around the corner.

Nine months later, I was given one hours supervised access at nine oclock on a sunday morning, which I had to endure for several months. the problem was that in my mind I was still expecting to see my little one year old child that used to giggle and scramble up the stairs in our house as I chased her, but this child had gone, and had been replaced with a walking talking two year old that didn’t know me, and didn’t even have a consept of ‘daddy’ anymore.

Many years have passed now, and my little Ellie is thirteen march 2010. She stays neally every weekend, and my life would be completely obliterated if I were to loose her again.

But heres the problem. I feel even now that somewhere there is a child crying for daddy, my mind still struggles to accept that my little ‘cheeky chops’ is gone and I will forever grieve for her.

The greatest crime in our times today is for a parent to have their child taken away, and visa-versa so please lets stop these foolish wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Too many farthers, mothers and innocent children are loosing their families, whether they be western, european, south-central Asian or from any other geographical area, its all wrong.

Lets bring our boys and girls home to their families alive and in one piece.