• My father’s suicide

• Realizing I should never have left my first girlfriend for my second girlfriend

• Graduating from college right in the middle of an economic crisis and finding out that the university degree I had longed for, and that my parents saw as the keys to paradise, was nearly worthless

• Having bad acne as a teenager and thinking nobody would ever want to be with me

• Related to point four: periods in my life with no sex. Dry spells as they are called

• The way the parents of one of my big loves, an Iranian girlfriend, treated me, because they thought I didn’t make enough money to be with her

• The combination of little every day insults by rude and inconsiderate people you meet. Separately you can shrug them off, but they all get stored in the back of your mind and can come back to haunt you

• Human cruelty towards animals and other human beings. I’ve had a pretty good life and most people I’ve met have been nice to me, but there’s such a thing as second degree trauma, and all the awful things I have seen others go through, all the unneccessary hurt, have caused me pain as well, although I was just the observer, just the reader of awful things in history books, or the therapist of the person who had the experience

• Rejections. Many, many rejections

• And last, but certainly not least, all the times I made a total dick of myself and hurt other people or fucked up my life because of my ego, vanity, need for power and special kicks, and a quest for euphoria, etc, sometimes at the expense of others’ well-being. Remembering how harshly I treated someone is one of the most hurtful experiences I know… Especially when it’s too late to make up for the damage you caused