I almost took this post down. It's very personal but I think it's worth retelling. My childhood was a trainwreck. My apologies- but this story must start here for context. Just a series of awful events. Strep throat every year, chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough. Whatever pathogen happened to be floating by- it seemed to land on my shoulders. And when covid found me decades later, I got a nice shiny ventilator in the ICU for 9 days. But I survived. My family moved 6 times by the time I graduated from high school. My folks fought daily, sometimes physically. Throughout my teen years, I just began to develop a bad attitude. The attitude that thinks this shit is never going to change. Parents taking their problems out on their kids. People know when you have a bad attitude. It's like blood in the water. Folks don't care why you have a bad attitude so much, most people just think you were born some sort of asshole- and they react to that.  People would often tell me, "...