[Flint]

Once upon a time, when I was at the lowest point of my life, and was so desperate and hopeless that my loneliness outweighed my desire for privacy--a rare occasion--so I decided to do something I never do--I opened up and shared several years worth of extremely painful and humiliating personal experiences, just opened up the floodgates.

So many of the people of the Cellar were so supportive. People shared their perspective and similar experiences and helped me to feel that I was part of a community--something I didn't have at that time in my real life.

However, there was one person that took my vulnerability as an opportunity to make an off-the-cuff, extremely demeaning and personally hurtful comment directed at me. It stuck with me. I thought about it a lot because it played into my total lack of self-worth. I stopped coming to the Cellar--it was the place that a very hurtful thing happened to me, and I didn't have any more capacity to be hurt. I literally thought about coming back to the Cellar but made a conscious decision not to.

So, I was not part of a community anymore. Years passed, I tried coming back to the Cellar, on occasion, but never really re-integrated. Along the way I made some dick moves and made people mad. I take responsibility for that part. But I also felt like nobody remembered who I was or valued me as a person anymore, because so much time had passed.