This came up elsewhere, and a few from here have asked me about it in other venues, so I might as well share it here.
I've struggled with depression for a very long time. I've usually been able to cope with it, and indeed one of my coping mechanisms is the reason that I've always been seen as a calming influence.
I've also had back problems for many years. It all came to a head two years ago with a prolapsed disc that gave me severe nerve pain in the lower back and legs. I had corrective surgery, but it ruptured again three weeks later. I had the surgery again and it's fixed, but the nerves in my lower lumbar don't know how to stop, so I'm always in some pain.
If I get even the slightest bit of discomfort anywhere in my back now, those nerves go into overdrive and I get searing pain all down both legs and up my spine. At its worst, it goes right up into the head, and it's like a team of stunt blowtorch dancers are perfecting their Sammy Davis Jr impersonations.
While all this was going on, I had bouts of just wanting to shut the world out. So when excuses to shut bits of it out presented themselves, I took them.
A couple of months ago, an incident on social media between dear friends that escalated beyond all reasonable proportions tipped me over the edge, and I almost pulled the plug on life completely. I knew I was in trouble, because I was rationally assessing what was the best way to do it without leaving a mess for Mrs Slash to clean up, so I wrote a blog post about it (link below).
Luckily, some of my friends read the post and reached out to me straight away. One of them sent me pics of her norks, and advised me that I should open a secret twitter account to look at the seamier, more light-hearted side. It made all the difference.
On reflection, much as the forums pissed me off on occasion, that's the thing I shouldn't have cut out, and in the last couple of weeks I've been making a concerted effort to contact as many from RDF initially, but also from here and Ratz, as I can.
I bumped into one former member on Twitter that I remember interacting with on Facebook in the immediate aftermath of the closure of RDF. She's had some pretty severe health issues that have affected her long-term memory, and she's pretty much deleted her entire internet history, including an extensive blog, and taken herself offline.
She has no memory of ever being part of our little shitshow, and I can tell it give her a great deal of pain. Because my association was mostly on Facebook, and whatever I knew her as before has been replace by her real name, I thought that asking the admins to reactivate my accounts might give me access to search and see if I could find any clues, so that I can find her in the RDF archive I have and recover some of her writing (her writing is exceptional). Also, because of the awesome catharsis of interacting with old friends on FB and twitter, I thought I might find some here.
So, the story of hack, why he was briefly a cunt, and why he's back.
https://www.hackenslash.co.uk/2018/02/torture.html