Not always in a positive way...
My own experiences include riding a very big motorcycle full throttle down a desert highway by moonlight with the headlight off. 120 mph, I didn't look after that.(Newer motorcycles don't let you turn the headlight off...)
Body surfing big waves, day or night, often nude. It was a rough twelve foot surf that finally pounded some sense into me by pounding sand up my ass and into all my other orifices and nearly drowning me. That was maybe my life's most terrifying moment until my wife almost bled to death when our second kid was born. (They were giving her blood transfusions in both arms.)
Bungee jumping. Playing with rockets and explosives...
And then my most dangerous former obsession, running long distances made more interesting by very serious sorts trespassing, often onto military bases and such.
I'm paying the price for all that youthful idiocy now in aches and pains. I go to bed in the evening when I hurt too much, and I get out of bed in the morning when I hurt too much. But I'm lucky I'm not dead.
There are reasons it took me nine years to graduate from college. (I did have a head start, quitting high school...) With modern meds I think I could have easily graduated in four years and been accepted right away to grad school.
When I did graduate from university the dean of my college told me, "Hunter, I think you should go to graduate school. BUT NOT HERE!"
I did teacher training elsewhere, hoping for some kind of Welcome Back Kotter experience, but I'm really too autistic to be a good teacher. The only way I could manage my classes was by being an authoritarian and I did not enjoy that. But that's how I met wife, teaching science. My wife is among the best teachers I've ever known.
The first time I'd been "asked" to take leave from college was for fighting with one of this dean's teaching assistants. (This professor wasn't a dean then.) No violence on my part, I just used words, but the T.A. was throwing stuff at me starting with chalk and ending with fat textbooks. One of my classmates called the campus police.
Of course I was blamed, since I already had a reputation. My mom is a similar sort... 50% inheritance, judging by my siblings. Half of us can be counted on to say the worst possible things at the worst possible moments which is probably why our ancestors fled to America's Wild West.
My Senior Thesis was a gentle "Fuck You" after I'd burned through a few advisors. I did the oral presentation drunk after our college newspaper's year end wrap party. (I was a reporter-columnist.) Half the people attending my senior thesis presentation were there for their own entertainment, curious to see how I would crash and burn. I did not crash and burn, but I could have done better. I put a few transparencies on the overhead projector upside-down and I stumbled over a few words, but that was the worst of it. I was very well rehearsed. (Thanks Sally!)
As a young adult the very worst experiences I had were a consequence of steroids. I have sometimes severe asthma. Whenever the asthma got really bad doctors would prescribe oral steroids. Once the asthma was beaten down I'd feel like Super Man. I was physically fit because I often took jobs such as loading and unloading trucks and moving furniture. After a few days on steroids the psychotic aspects of my mental illness would assert themselves. During one such episode I handed an essay to an English professor that was pretty much a thousand words of gibberish neatly arranged in paragraphs. She convinced me to walk with her to her office after class. I almost ran away, which is what I always did in middle school and high school, but I liked her. We talked in her office a few uncomfortable minutes and then she took me by the hand and dropped me off in care of the student health center.
Of course the triage nurse thought I was tripping out and they put me alone in an exam room to ride it out. I amused myself looking through the drawers and cabinets, up under the drop down ceiling panels (I'd done drop-down ceiling work), playing with the blood pressure cuff and other stuff Mr. Bean style, and then I went to sleep for a few hours.
Life was simpler then, Student Health Services almost never sent students to the big hospital Emergency Room for "recreational drug" stuff. They do so now for liability reasons.
A sharp young physician figured out that it was my prescribed medicines troubling me and not any street drugs I'd taken.
I still sometimes have to resort to prednisone, but oral steroids really scare me. The inhaled steroids I take daily for my asthma put a very minimal dose just where it's needed.
It seems to me Locut0s you are a much less flammable person than I ever was.
Please, be very kind to yourself.
It took me a long, long time, a few years of therapy, and modern meds to learn how to be kind to myself.
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