I felt the need to post this today. No, I did not leave my cheating wife or girlfriend. I'm not living a luxury life and not about to buy a new convertible. However, in its weird way, this subreddit gave me something very substantial - inner peace.

Now in my late 20s, I frequently look back on my childhood to try and understand why I am the way I am. Will not go into much detail, but I had a father who worked 2 jobs to provide for our family of 4. My mother worked as well, but halfheartedly. We lived in a small town, so opportunities were scarce. I barely had father-son time with my dad because of that growing up, and when I did see him, he was so tired and resentful, that any interaction would never end well. The smallest things would set him off, like me accidentally slurping on a very hot soup. Meanwhile, a combination of being closer to my mother, while also having an older sister, and a school with all but 2 female teachers, raised me to have a typical nice-guy mentality, indoctrinating the 'if you do X for women, you will get Y from women' mentality. Anyway, I could write a whole book on this, and it will be one you will have already read.

Ever since my final years of school, I had been feeling like I was put on an ever-moving treadmill - excel in academics, get a good job - the usual stuff. Here's an analogy for how that feels. If you imagine the energy of your whole being as some concentrated finite supply, then with every step or every thought you take, it gets depleted. You realise this and go, oh shit, so you start slowing down, hoping that will stop the energy bleed. You start doubting yourself - am I moving in the right direction? But you keep moving, and keep losing that energy still.

You then become aware of this void you need to patch up. Naturally, you go - well, what am I doing this for? To become an attractive partner to a good woman. However, as you try and apply what you'd been taught by women themselves to real life, you see that there is no feedback loop. So, in your attempts to recoup and compensate for that lost energy, you end up bleeding yourself even more, like a vicious fucking cycle. In panic, you start moving frantically without direction until you are bled dry and lifeless.

So, if I could describe how I felt before I started going down the rabbit hole of MGTOW or the men's rights movement, it would be like a pinball of energy in my head, just jumping around, inducing anxiety, losing energy with each movement, bleeding you dry, anything you replenish spent instantly. So the process of educating myself was the process of trying to control and harness that negative energy.

Exposing myself to thinking about what it means to be a man today, with the help of this subreddit, helped me to stop this energy dead in its tracks, gather it in intense concentration and have it sitting there, ready for me to draw upon as I wish. These last couple of days, for the first time in 12 years, I have been feeling this unfamiliar sense of serenity. I thought it was depression at first, but then realised it was much more. It feels like my mind had been filled with anger and anxiety, and now there's all this free space and total inner solitude. I now look at a woman with the same feelings I look at a piece of lounge furniture that I walk past at my work - rarely useful, or worn out and overused. All I know is - I'm not going to stub my toe on it.

For myself, I hope I can can preserve this. For you all, I hope you find what you're looking for.

Thank you.