When I go through something rough, I often like to draw, write about, or watch videos/read stories related to that event. Like when I got rear-ended in '08, I went and browsed YouTube for videos of cars being rear-ended. Is that weird? And am I psycho or something?

It sounds like a coping mechanism and it seems you are interested in others experiences who have something in common perhaps because it helps to know you are not alone in having gone through x, y or z. Or so that's how I interpret it with what information you just gave.

Everyone has coping mechanisms, some good and some bad. As long as it is not bad like lashing out at others because you are having a bad time and it feels good to emotionally hurt others or harming yourself, others, etc. Otherwise, some coping mechanism are fine.

Not at all weird. I like to watch tv, nap, play computer games, walk, or read when stressed.

You might be trying to cope in a way opposite to most people's advice on the matter. If I didn't know better, you are trying to figure out if someone or something is at fault.

Maybe so. Funny thing is, when I was very little - like four or five - I had a horrible nightmare of a witch grabbing me from my mother's arms (we were in the kitchen of my first house) and I dealt with it by changing the scenario and it really helped. My parents and especially my grandma helped me make her disappear in my imagination. Also would draw witches and put them on my window. Kinda interesting and weird.

And when I was being picked on in livejournal, I would visit the journals of the jerks who were writing crap about me. That wasn't very healthy though, and I started to just stop looking at their pages. It really helped my sanity, though years later I did start looking at their pages and stuff, and try to make sense of it. I did reconcile with a couple of them, and one of them told me that one of my other tormentors is essentially a narcissist who will never change. Started playing it out and realizing that I was being a dumbass and during that stressful time, I was letting a pathological liar who traced pictures bully me into being at her beck and call. Lots of other factors too.

But I was kind of interested in maybe playing out the rear-ending. It was my first time getting into a collision that severely damaged my vehicle. It really reminded me of my female privilege, since when I got rear-ended, I screamed, and I was crying. The guy driving the rather large pickup truck came out and comforted me and admitted to being at fault, while also cursing the fact that he just lost his job and this was the second time in one year that he had gotten into an accident like that. The white truck looked new too, and it had to be towed. It had pushed the trunk of my car into my back seat, and a lot of the stuff I put into the trunk just scattered all over the place. People who drove by were like "Whoaaaa..." and I was walking around in my gym clothes and crying. Now if I were male, I would have probably gotten into a shouting match with the driver or something like that. He just wouldn't have been as nice.

Also, a few years after being rear-ended, I was driving to a therapy session and a truck pulled off the side street in front of me, and I T-Boned him. My tiny car broke the rear-axle from his Ford F-250 4x4 pickup, and I was just screaming at first out of shock. The driver and a woman in scrubs were like "Are you alright? Are you alright?" and I was screaming, and then I finally yelled "You scared the FUCK outta me!" to the man. 'Nother reminder of my female privilege. Tow truck driver told me this was one for the records, as he had never seen a tiny Ford Focus take out the rear-axle on a Ford F-250 4x4. Very scary situation.

This reminds me a little of my father. He was a WWII vet and he watched WWII movies endlessly. I think he was trying to make sense of his experiences, sort of process them all. What you went through was very traumatic and you're lucky to be alive. While you see the man's response to you as female privilege, I think it had more to do with your crying. Comforting you was a natural response to that. If you had been stony silent or petulant, he probably would have yelled at you.

I see... and yes, I am lucky to be alive.

Nah, it's not weird. Writing is a perfectly fine coping mechanism. It lets you sort out your feelings, or channel them into imaginary characters. Same with drawing.

These things can help with processing and coping. It lets you kind of get used to the thoughts, and maybe to spot things you didn't previously see. It can also lead your thoughts away from the matter, to focus on something healthier, or just something else for the time being. As long as you don't dig too deep or get completely preoccupied with whatever the thing is, because that can in some cases have the opposite effect.

However - at some point it may be time to put single events like the rear-ending behind you, especially if it happened a while back and everything is already squared up. If you're still hung up in it several years after it happened, then maybe it's time to lay the matter to rest. Be happy nobody got severely hurt (except for an ego or two), and that cars can get fixed or repaired.

As for bullying/harassment, this can cause problems for quite some time, even if it happened long ago or during your childhood or teenage years. Having that experience can make you more prone to have doubts about yourself, trust issues, anxiety, PTSD-like episodes, crying, anger management issues, etc. and in situations where you experience something that causes a break in your ego and shakes up your self-confidence, those feelings have a knack of resurfacing whether you want it or not. Dealing with that particular monster in your backpack isn't easy, because that thing eats the nightmare monsters under your bed for breakfast...

Good thing monsters can't read...

Oh don't worry - I don't get hung up on either of my accidents anymore. I mostly just look back at them and think "Whoa... that was an adventure" or "I'm lucky I wasn't hurt! lol!"

I do kind of dwell on one thing though: something that happened when I was three or four, and my mom had taken me across the street to visit with an old couple, Pat and Ed. Pat was nice enough and my mom was chatting with her, and whenever I tried to wander off, my mom would rather sternly call me to come back. Pat and Ed had some birds and cats, and when I went to look at their colourful birds, I remember my mom telling me to come back and stay with her, and Ed was like "Oh it's OK, she can come," or whatnot. I vaguely remember his face to this day.

A few years later when my mom and I are driving around near my old neighbourhood, I ask about Ed, and she tells me he died, and that he was a molester. A few years later, she tells me more: He molested his two daughters and his granddaughter. She didn't know back then, but she had a sort of suspicion since she had worked with the Sheriff's Department before I was born. See, one of his daughters was morbidly obese and had no teeth, and wasn't playing with a full deck. She let her daughter visit him, and her daughter got touched. His other daughter would have nothing to do with him - no calls, no visiting even when he was sick, nothing. When he hurt his granddaughter, she told, and his little secret was out. But she didn't have a happy ending; her mother let him move in with her.

See, I remember that incident, and keep thinking that I was so close to getting molested. If my mother wasn't so attentive, if she didn't listen to this gut instinct, I would have been hurt. It's chilling. A pedophile lived right across the street, and had my mother hadn't paid so much attention to me, I would have gotten hurt and probably not been equipped to report it. Or I would have thought it was no big deal.

As for the assholes on livejournal, well, I now feel as though I let Neelix intimidate me. I feel so damn stupid for fretting all those years and wishing I'd been treated better. See, I could have just not had anything to do with those people, who obviously just wanted to torment me, and no matter how I tried to improve, or even meet their demands, I would never have made them happy. Looking back, I was a fool.

Taking the blame for something bad someone did to you isn't healthy. If they did something bad to you (or anyone else), they get the blame for it. That's how it works.

A lot of these people are manipulators like you wouldn't believe, and they know exactly which buttons to press.

It's easy to feel foolish for such things, especially it's much easier to see all the mistakes in hindsight - but at least you learned from it and can be more cautious the next time you're in a similar situation.

The fools tend to be the ones who keeps doing the same thing in the same situation and expecting different results, while not learning a single thing.

Taking blame for others? Nope. They were assholes, but I was an idiot for keeping on trying to make them like me. I was a total fool for trying to get them to stop talking about me when all I would've had to do was just... not look at their journals. And yes, I was often doing the same thing and expecting different results. I mean, look at the comic where a stick figure pushes a button and gets shocked. Then below, there are two panels: Normal Person decides not to press it again, while Scientist wonders if pressing the button again will give the same result or a different one.

I had this weird feeling today like I wanted to throw myself down the stairs. Strange, considering my near death experience when I was 5 involved my older half sister throwing me down the stairs.

Any of you had something that strange happen to you where a bad experience is later drawn back to you, ALMOST full circle?

In the end, I slowly climbed down the stairs holding onto the rail. But it was the strangest of feelings.

Yikes. That's horrible!

Don't worry. But I should mention my bathroom door is right in front of the staircase.

It's one of the scarier design flaws in my house.

The benign ones include a backwards round doorknob for the half bath (turn it the other way!) And the door to the master suite's walk-in closet collides with the door to the master suite. There is a giant crack in the ceiling corner in my room and a switch that if you flip it, all plugs are shut off on one wall, because that switch breaks the circuit. Not to mention our water table was low enough that when the pump burst, we had to drain 5 inches of water and throw out paper that got dusty and wet

Did I mention my grandfather hired my Uncle John's construction team to build the house?

We've got a few quirks in our house - mainly because the contractors we hired messed up when building the house and then ran off with our money - we couldn't contact them or anything.

Let me see, a few of my cabinets are crooked and don't stay shut, none of the paint matches, for some unknown reason there is a 2.5 foot wall at the end of my built-in drinking bar, the oven won't open unless I open the drawer next to it, my fridge covers the built in chalkboard, there are switches that are in my bedroom that have no purpose, only the kitchen, bath and dining room have actual ceiling lamps, I have this cheap weird plastic vanity thingie where the doors barely slide open between the mirror and sink, my backyard has a wall that makes me feel like I'm in prison, and the shower has no pressure even after I switched the heads. But at least my Sakura tree is nice.