Welcome to the Void. yes it is SCP002. thanks!

No one, *ever*, tried to persuade me to transition.

Our fucked up dolphins

Our fucked up porcupines

Our fucked up snakes

This

>have to work a 4am-12pm shift at work to help get a new store in your company open

>acknowledge that there was no way you were getting to bed where'd you'd get enough sleep

>for some insane reason instead to shoot for getting No Sleep instead of Not Enough Sleep

>youre 30 years old. you haven't pulled an all nighter since your early 20s outside of the time covid gave you insomnia and you were awake for three days straight

>the day before you watched the classic Eminem as a 2nd Century Warlord video on repeat

>get to your 4am shift

>youre already exhausted. you got a coffee en route to try and help. you never drink caffeine, and as it always does, it combines with your Mental Illnesses to make you feel truly insane

>time passes miserably slow as you spend 6 hours doing constant manual labor as you and a bunch of people are running all over lifting and putting down boxes full of merchandise all over

>entire time your brain as if in some desperate need to find something to attach to in order to ignore the State you are in repeatedly goes "first day as a second century warlord-" at random intervals

>you're so tired. you're in Pain. you've been awake for 24 hours at this point. you've seen the sunset, the night run its course, and then the sun rise once more. you've been on your feet without the chance to sit down for 6 hours now

>start coming up with your own 2nd century warlord stuff. 17th day as 2nd century warlord you're too nervous before the day of an early morning battle so you decide to stay up all night only realizing it was a bad idea when you arrive at the battle with your men and you're too tired to properly direct your troops

>last two hours of your shift hits and you blessedly now just get to spend the rest of your time opening up & putting out t shirts

>pop earbuds in and listen to music during this final stretch to try to ignore how tired and In Pain you are

>look down at your phone. 20 minutes left. nearly 8 hours of torment almost over. you're so tired. your legs and arms and back and hips and feet hurt so much. you've spent the last hour getting by envisioning the nap you're going to take when you get home

>pause your music to answer a question from another person working

>realize some of the other people there have a speaker on with music of their own playing

My parents pulled me for the fourth grade, and I was homeschooled until the end of high school. Nine entire years. They pulled me from the public schools for a perfectly reasonable reason — my mental health was in the toilet and I needed to be away from other kids who might hurt me as they had spent all of my third grade year doing. My mom has a fucking PhD in neuroscience and tutors math professionally. She was, during the ten years that my siblings and I were homeschooled, the best, kindest, most caring, understanding, lovely teacher you could ask for.

But I'm still broken. That's the thing about homeschool. You can have the best experience possible in homeschool and still come out a fundamentally broken person. My social development stopped at the age of 10. I'm a 22 year old adult woman with the social skills of a 10 year old. That's not to say that that COULDN'T have happened in public school, but being homeschooled only made it more of a certainty. Both of my siblings and I have fewer coping strategies on average than our peers with similar neurodivergencies because we basically did not live in the real world for a decade during key developmental years.

Don't ban homeschooling because of the religious nuts. There are plenty of them. Hell, I KNEW plenty of them. But there are also plenty of quote unquote "good" homeschool families. Ones that do everything you would hope the model homeschool family does. And they are still hurting their children, even if unintentionally, because homeschooling is an inhrently traumatic experience. It's isolating. For seven entire years of my life, I had no friends. Not because I was a social outcast, but because I didn't even SEE anybody regularly enough. But, nonetheless, I knew people. You generally do if you get involved in the community.

Ban homeschooling because it breaks and utterly destroys everyone who goes through it.

Everyone.