-- (Age 0~4)

I'm a 25 year old white male, born in a third world country (Brazil), to a family of fairly average income. We were never rich by any means, but in a country where the minimum monthly wage is lower than 300 USD, we were better off than most. I never lacked for anything I needed to survive, though I met many people who did.

Ever since I was a kid there was something special about me. I was smarter than the kids my age, even those older than me. When I was 3 years old, my dad taught me the shapes of the letters and how to spell the syllables and was surprised to find me reading out loud from a children's book all on my own, mere days later. We started reading together every day and through this I grew to love books from an early age.

My parents were young, in their early twenties and I was an unplanned pregnancy. Sadly, their relationship wasn't very stable. My dad worked (and has worked since I was born) in an oil extraction company called Petrobrás, which meant he worked in an oil rig hundreds kilometers off the coast. His work schedule kept him away from home for weeks at a time. My mom couldn't take it, having to raise me mostly on her own, so they split up when I was five years old.

I rarely got to see my father since then. He was my role model in life, but I was lucky if I got to see him for a weekend at a time, once every three or four months after that. My dad was very smart and I tried my best to emulate him. My mom wasn't' as nice. She provided for me but I felt like she resented me. I was born too soon, and she had to forego the things she wanted to do in life to care for me. I later learned she meant to abort me, but my father convinced her otherwise. She eventually remarried to an abusive asshole I'd come to hate through the years, with whom she'd have another child... But more on that later.

-- (Age 6~11)

You're supposed to start school at 6 or 7 years old here. I started at 4. The people at the school didn't want to admit me so young, but once they saw me climbing the staircase running and had me take some simple tests they accepted me. I was always the runt of the litter at school, but all the other kids would follow me and play the games I suggested. A born leader the teachers would say. Strangely, though I'm 25 years old now, I still have vivid memories of those days...

Before my teenage years I was a fairly normal kid. I played the same games the other kids did, although I was often better than they were, except on sports where the older kids were stronger and faster than me. I grew up a popular kid, at least at first. The other kids admired me although a few of them grew jealous of how much attention I was getting and would gang up on me from time to time.

Once when I was 9, I got pushed into and locked under some stairs where they kept the sports equipment like footballs and such and stayed there the whole day, banging uselessly and begging to be let out. Eventually a school janitor heard me and let me out. Out of cowardice, I didn't name the kids that did it, fearing retaliation. I just figured it was best not to stand out so much after that...

School was easy through the years. I always had a knack for learning and I loved reading. I read everything I could get my hands on. I'd read the shampoo labels in the shower out of sheer boredom, and soon I was even smuggling books into the shower, or coming up with up with creative ways to read them without getting them wet. This was in the 90s, so cellphones were very rare, expensive and looked like massive bricks that could only make calls.

Eventually I got into the habit of reading my text books over the summer vacations, so by the time the school year started I had already learned nearly the entire year's worth of material. It was so much fun reading and learning, I didn't understand why I couldn't just do that and had to go to school and spend a year sitting there listening about the same stuff I already knew... I used to get perfect grades on account of that, but soon school became something of a chore. I wasn't interested on it anymore, I had already taught myself most of that year's materials so instead I started spending the classes doodling on my notebook and writing shitty poems and stories, and fantasizing about going home so I could play videogames.

-- (Age 8~14)

Videogames were a big part of my life growing up. My dad bought me a Nintendo 64 as a birthday present when I was eight. I grew up loving Mario, Star Fox and Zelda games. I can safely say Ocarina of Time changed my life. It took me almost a year to beat it. I didn't speak English beyond a few basic words, so I mostly had very little idea of the plot and where I was supposed to go, but I brute-forced my way through the game all the way to the very end. That game was amazing. It inspired me to learn English, as I couldn't help but feel I was missing so much from not being able to understand the text.

And so I started getting my hands on every English book I could find in the school library, looking up words in the dictionary and correlating with words I knew in Portuguese. I systematically taught myself to read in English over the months. After a year I could perfectly understand almost the entire game. But I had horrible pronounciation. There was very little connection between how a word is written in English and how it's pronounced, unlike Portuguese. Sometimes English music would play in the radio and subtitled English films were common enough on TV, so I would avidly watch these in hopes of learning how words were spoken.

When I was 10 I finally managed to convinced my mom to enroll me in an English course, in a place called "Cultura Inglesa". It was a 10-year course, but I took an aptitude test and skipped the entire first 6 years. Had my pronunciation been better, I probably would have skipped more. So I studied it for 4 years, mostly brushing up on conversation skills and whatnot, and finished when I was 14. I didn't learn anywhere near as much as I had from videogames, but it was nice to practice speaking to other people for a change.

So I guess thanks to Ocarina of Time I'm now here typing out this story, 15 years later, in a language not entirely my own, but that I've come to learn and love.

-- (Age 8~15)

My childhood wasn't all that bad in retrospect. It was really in my teenage years that trouble started...

I mentioned my abusive step-father earlier. My mom remarried when I was eight. This guy was a total jerk. He was always unemployed. He used drugs. He'd argue and fight with my mom constantly. He was mean to me a lot too. He'd ground me at a whim, and not let me go out and see my friends. I caught him deliberately making a mess in my bedroom once just so he could tell me to go spend the day tidying it up... He never sexually abused me, but not for the lack of trying (unless you count touching me against my will in the showers he insisted I had to take with him as sexual abuse). I hated that guy.

They had another kid together, 7 years younger than me. I loved my little brother growing up, even though they doted on him and every single thing he did or broke was immediately my fault. He grew up spoiled by that, and while we were friends our relationship grew strained. I had grown to resent him a little, even though it was not his fault, despite how much I loved him, simply because of how he was treated perfectly and I was mostly treated like garbage.

We moved a lot. My mother worked for the government and she kept being relocated all over the place. I must have gone through 6 or 7 different schools. It sucked. It took me a while to warm up to people and make friends, and every time it would happen, I'd move again and lose contact with my friends. As such I never grew up to have many close friends, and even though I tried getting back in touch with old friends from school, it's just... not the same, it's too long ago, and most barely remember me at this point.

Eventually I had enough of my stepfather's abuse. I ran away from home at 15 years old, took a bus to an entire different city and went to live with my grandparents. Luckily they took me in. It was really either that or smothering my stepfather in his sleep at that point...

-- (Age 15~18)

The last of my teenage years were a pain. I was in a different school yet again. I had trouble socializing at that point. I was still extremely intelligent, even more so than usual in comparison to everyone, as this was now a small school in a small town. I was also very frustrated. Most students clearly didn't want to be there, and would glare at me for asking questions in class. My teachers weren't exactly competent either, and would routinely misinform students and teach them factually innacurate things that they should have known to be incorrect, if they actually cared to read the same damn textbooks we used. I got in the habit of correcting them and pointing these instances out, but this made me hugely unpopular, both with the class and the teachers. The students would call me a "nerd" and the teachers started to deliberately jeopardize my grades, even when I would answer correctly, either by being extremely nitpicky or by outright blatantly failing me. They also started expelling me from class whenever they could under the most shallow of premises.

What saved me was that I made friends with the headmistress. She was our Philosophy Teacher and was a kind, smart old lady, who quickly saw I was above average. I confided in her and told her what I to deal with, with the other students and teachers. She set the teachers straight and she told me whenever I was not enjoying class I was welcome to leave and spend the day at her office instead. Things were a lot better after that. We got to talk and she was a really kind and understanding lady.

I told her I felt it was a huge waste of time for me to be in school. I felt ready to try and take the "Vestibular" (that's how the admission tests are called to join a university here, before the standardized test, the "ENEM" was implemented) and join a university. I rationalized that surely, in a university everyone would be smart. It's higher education after all, and you're there to learn about things you care about, rather than what you were supposed to learn, so certainly I would only meet intelligent and like-minded individuals... God, was I wrong... But more on that later...

Unfortunately there was nothing I could do. You're not legally allowed to advance grades here. Homeschooling is also illegal and you're not allowed to join a university until you're 18 years old. So I was inexorably trapped, forced to bear that hell for three more years... That's when I turned to the Internet.

-- (Age 11~18)

I always liked computers. My dad built my first computer out of spare parts when I was 11. I still remember the specs. I had an AMD K62 CPU, 256 MB of RAM, a 5GB Hard Drive, a 64 MB AGP Voodoo graphics card and Windows 98. It ran like ass but at that time it was all I knew so it was amazing. I didn't have access to the Internet yet, so there wasn't much to do on it, but I had some basic games and I would tinker with the Operating System, learning how to use the command line shell and such. I taught myself all I could on computers and read every book I could find on it. Sadly there wasn't much in-depth material in Portuguese at the time, but I ended up learning about a lot of random obsolete technology I never got to use like ADO and COM and old database formats just from reading random books on computing.

Then I got Internet access when I was 12. Everything changed. I found myself with unlimited information at my fingertips. Where before I only had books as a source of knowledge, I know had the entire world wide web. This was in the early 2000s, Google was brand new. There was no Youtube, or Facebook or any of the sort. I started learning more and more about computers, and started meeting people online and communicating with instant messaging software. First it was ICQ, then MSN Messenger, then IRC. All I had was dial-up Internet, which was massively inconvenient not to mention expensive. I could only really use the Internet after midnight or on weekends, when the phone companies would only charge a flat rate rather than by minute. And it would disconnect constantly. Yet dial-up was all I had well until I moved out to uni. Broadband simply wasn't available where I lived.

There was very little Portuguese material out there in the Internet. Most of it was in English. Luckily I was already fairly proficient in that language at that point. Getting to talk to native English speakers for the first time was a mind blowing experience. Hearing about their lives and how things were so much better in their countries, and how they could be home-schooled or join a university regardless of age made me so jealous. And the technological gap! We were at least 5 years behind on their tech. And it was so damn cheap and accessible over there. We had to save for years to buy a videogame console, or for my shitty computer. I was lucky if I could get to play a new game every 6 months...

At 14 I found a software called RPG Maker 2000. It was a simple game engine for making SNES-esque games. That thing was awesome. I started making my own Zelda clone, using ripped A Link to the Past assets. I spent more than a year on it, even ported the game over when RPG Maker 2003 came out. I honestly wish I could go back and replay it. I vaguely remember parts of maps and gameplay from it. It had over 30 maps, a unique plot and was maybe halfway done before I lost the game and all my other projects when my hard drive died on me... I didn't have backups... Hell I didn't even have a spare hard drive or a CD burner... USB drives didn't exist here yet. All I had were a handful of floppy drives but my game would have never fit on that.

Still, losing all my digital files was a huge blow. It was... my whole life at that point. I didn't really have any friends anymore and all my things were gone. I would have probably sunk into depression, but I still had people I talked to online and they helped me out of it. I learned the importance of backup. I saved as much money as I could and eventually bought a 250GB hard drive.

I started archiving as much as I could. All the awesome things I found online, mostly text, games, pictures and music, I would save. Video wasn't very common back then still. I was determined to create an offline backup of the entire Internet if I could. All that knowledge at my fingertips, but... What if it disappeared? I couldn't bear it. I had to have it all. Naturally, I pirated everything. I had absolutely no money to spend, everything was in American dollars and I had no credit card anyway. I learned that there was such a thing as a "Crack" which was a small executable that removed protections from software and games so you could use them for free. It was fascinating.

-- (Age 14~18)

I started learning to program. I had very limited programming experience from my days of RPG Maker, which allowed you to create imperative driven events, but had no actual code. I started looking up online what would be a good language to start learning to code in and eventually settled for Visual Basic 6. It was rumored to be easy and was by far the most popular language at the time. There was tons of code and materials available on VB. I read everything I could find on the subject, and within a couple years I was a proficient self-taught programmer.

I had a deep fascination for computers and security in general. This eventually got me into the hacking scene. At the time the scene was pretty big on Trojans or R.A.Ts (Remote Administration Tools). I joined groups like Evil Eye and ChaseNET, makers of famous spyware such as Optix Pro, Bifrost and Poison Ivy. I eventually started learning to code my own security tools, crypters, binders, patches, even my own RAT. I was young and inexperienced still and all I really did with it at the time was infect my school mates and mess with their computers. I had no idea the kind of stuff I was getting into, but I was learning so much, and computers were awesome. Eventually, I moved on from VB6 and picked up Delphi, C and ASM x86 skills on the way through improving my code.

I hung around the scene for a few more years and made some really great friends. These were people like me. Intelligent people who were rejected by society. I made closer friends online than any I had ever had in real life. I first read the [Hacker Manifesto](http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html) when I was 16. It described me to the letter. I had finally found where I belonged. Not on the real world out there, with the thousands of mediocre underachievers, but with the intellectual Digerati, breaching security protocols for the fun and challenge. I had an inkling that some of this stuff wasn't exactly legal, but I wasn't really engaged in the kind of shady things that some people were doing, like creating and selling botnets or being paid to hack into servers and whatnot. Those people were invariably careless and would eventually disappear from the IRC channels, only for the rest of us to learn they had been busted by the feds. I thought better not to mess with that kinda stuff altogether, even though I lived in a country where the ramifications for that kinda stuff were minimal at best.

I made a few close friends who I hung with constantly back then, mostly from the US and the UK. I loved these guys. They saw I was young and eager to learn and would point me towards resources and give me tips and soon enough I was among the most talented of the bunch. I started a security group with a handful of them and we released all manners of hacking tools and shared code internally. They started making plans to go to DEFCON, the world's largest Hacking conference in Las Vegas. I was 18 now. Broke as fuck, obviously, and I didn't have a job so there was no way I could afford it. The bastards saved as much money as they could and bought me a plane ticket and offered to pay for my accommodations. All I had to do was get a tourist visa to the US and I'd be on my way to meet them IRL finally and be at the world's greatest security conference. I felt like I was living a dream... Sadly it turned out more like a nightmare...

I started the process to request a US tourist visa. It cost me R$300 to apply (about 100 USD) to apply and took a month. The trip was in a little over two months. I made my way to the consulate in Rio all by myself. I was rejected. I thought I'd get to speak to someone in an office and explain to them in person why I wanted to travel to America. But it turns out I just had to wait in line with a bunch of other people while they were called one by one to sit in front of a booth and talk to a disembodied voice behind a pitch black glass... When the officer saw I was 18 and traveling alone I was quickly rejected with barely a chance to explain myself. I was devastated... I already had the plane ticket and everything... I owed it to my friends to go... I worked for weeks doing chores and saved up the money to apply AGAIN for a visa. I made 100% sure I had all the proper documents this time and I even convinced my dad to go with me... Alas it was for nothing. I was rejected yet again, on account of my age, traveling alone and "being unable to demonstrate sufficient links to your country", despite having a plane ticket that showed I'd only be in America for two weeks for the convention...

I learned that day that sadly, Americans were very xenophobic. My friends from the UK didn't even need a visa to go the US... But as I was Brazilian, a citizen of an inferior thirld world country, I wasn't allowed to go there, because no doubt once I laid eyes on that "Golden Land of Freedom" I would be immediately converted into an illegal immigrant... Or something like that.

Alas, that was the end of my days in the Scene. My friends resented me for spending so much money uselessly on some third world kid's unfulfilled dreams. I couldn't bear to talk to them anymore and they hated me now. It was just too painful. Most hacking groups were also closing up those days, so there was little motivation to remain. I hung up my boots, 7 years ago. I wonder if I never had, how great I could have been. I learned extremely fast in the 3 years since I joined. I'd probably be world class by now had I not stopped. Ah well.

-- (Age 18~21)

At last I was done with school. It was a major pain in the ass, but I had pulled through. It was time to take the next step and pursue a higher education. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, ever since I was a kid. I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to learn about EVERYTHING.

Computer Science was always one of my primary choices of career, obviously with my love of computers, but the main reason I didn't choose it was because I already knew a lot about programming, and being fresh out of school where I had spent ages "learning" stuff I already knew, I desperately needed a break from that.

Apart from computers, I was utteraly fascinated with the Universe. The Universe is truly amazing, you know? It's inconceivably large, intricate and beautiful. The odds of any of us ever being born is so insignificant and yet here we are sharing a world, in some forgotten corner of a spiral galaxy, just one among trillions of galaxies in the visible Universe. Completely oblivious as to whether or not we are alone in the cosmos.

I read all the physics books I can could get my hands on. Stephen Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell and a Brief History of Time. Practically everything Brian Greene ever wrote... I leave you with the [introduction to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything](http://awordintheworld.blogspot.com.br/p/short-history-of-nearly-everything.html) which is absolutely phenomenal and thought-provoking.

So Anyway. I wanted to be a scientist, and my deep love and curiosity for the inner workings of the Universe led me to choose Astrophysics as a career path. Sadly, in a third world country such as mine there are very few opportunities for an esoteric filed like this. Only a handful of universities throughout the country offered courses even remotely related to the subject. I applied to all of them and decided to take a Bachelor in Physics with an emphasis on Astrophysics, a far less profitable option than Computer Science but just as interesting.

Let me interject here for a second and tell how you higher education works in Brazil. There isn't really much of a College and University distinction over here. Rather you can either join a "Technical School" where you learn practical skills like woodworking or computer maintenance, or you join a University where you learn from a wide range of mainstream academic topics. Of the two kinds of Universities there are Public and Private Universities. Private Universities usually (but not always) have worse education than Public Universities, however they're very easy to be accepted in. Essentially you just have to pay the expensive biannual fees and take an easy test and you're in. Public Universities are free and paid by our taxes (although you still have to pay some small fees when enrolling and whatnot), and often have better education than Private Universities, which makes them extremely competitive. As a result, of the thousand of students who apply, only a handful, sometimes less than 1% are accepted.

That was my fate. I applied to three different universities, passed the tests and was accepted in two of them. With a twist. I had 48 hours to be there in person and confirm my intent to enroll. The university was in a fairly small city, 10 hours away from where I lived. Classes would start the very next week. I struggled to pack all I thought I would need and left the same day to take a bus and start my new life in a city I had only been to once and knew absolutely no one.

-- (Age 18~21)

And so it was that I joined my first university. I found a place to stay in a pension, renting the spare bedroom of an old lady who lived alone. She was kind enough but very strict. I had to be in my bedroom no later than 10pm and the lights and Internet would be turned off at that time (sometimes I would surreptitiously sneak out and turn them back on, then off again before she was up at 6am. Luckily she never caught me).

I chose to pursue a career in Physics so, sadly, there weren't many girls to speak of in my classes... There were a couple that I wouldn't really consider attractive, and even so most of the class was already doting on them, so I figured why bother. There's a particular kind of girl that I'm attracted to, and regrettably they are extremely rare. More on this later. It's honestly quite discouraging to witness the kind of sausage-fest that are science and technological courses. Really girls. Please consider a career in the sciences. Don't listen to anyone who says women aren't cut out for that. That's a load of crap.

Anyhow. I started my university life with the expectation of *finally* meeting like-minded intelligent individuals. Not to say there weren't smart people there, but... It wasn't quite what I expected. A lot of the people in my class were stereotypical "nerds", in that they knew enough of the subject matter they chose to pursue but were very shallow otherwise. They would have their heads buried in the textbook at all times and thought of nothing but studying. I loved reading but I was nothing like that. I did it for the pleasure of learning, while they did it for survival basically and seemed to take little pleasure on it. The very last thing they wanted to talk about was the kind of things we were supposed to be learning about. The other kind of students were your average guys who were into sports or whatnot and weren't even sure they had chosen the right profession. A few had only joined the Physics course because it wasn't as contended as the rest, and were hoping to transfer to a different course later on, which is considerably easier if you're already a member of the student body. You could tell these guys wouldn't be around very long, either transferring away or failing the course.

I eventually made friends with a guy in my class, once we were randomly assigned to perform experiments together in the Scientific Methodology class. He was really tall, like more than 2 meters in height, and I was barely 1.7m tall, so this guy was a giant, but a gentle, awkward, nerdy giant. We got to talk and he was kind of alright. I later found out that we were actually neighbors and he lived in the house next to mine, what are the odds?

Anyway, I visited him at his place eventually to do some assignment and met his roommate, some kid who was taking Information Systems in the same university. That's like of like Computer Science but more geared towards the administrative side of I.T. I enjoyed talking computers with him, he didn't really know or care all that much about it, but he did love gaming just as much as me.

I had a really shitty desktop still at this point. I had been slowly upgrading my old K62 desktop bit by bit when I could with spare parts from other computers or saving money to buy a part. Technology is really expensive here, prices in excess of 3x as much as in the US are not uncommon, so sadly I had to manage with what I could afford. This was in 2008, and I was still rocking an Intel Celeron D with 2GB of RAM and that same old Voodoo card from forever ago. My friend had a decent "gaming" laptop (which in 2008 wasn't much, specially around these parts). People used to say it wasn't possible to game on a laptop back then, but we managed somehow. It was the only machine that could somewhat handle modern computer games at the time, so we had an alternating sleep schedule during vacations so we could take turns playing on his computer. I think Dragon Age Origins was one of our favorites at that point in our lives, what a great game.

-- (Age 18~21)

Still, I didn't really make many friends in university.

You see, the Internet changed me. All that time I spent online all those friends I made, with people in First World countries led me to become much more like them than the average Brazilian. There is now very little overlap between my interests and an average Brazilian's interests. It pains to me say it but most people in this country are incredibly shallow. It's not their fault, they're raised that way and that's the kind of culture they're immersed into, but as a result I grew up to feel like a foreigner in my own country.

I grew to dislike my country's culture and the sort of things Brazilians are fond of (popular Brazilian music, carnival, soccer, soap operas, etc) simply do not interest me. Even my primary language is now English -- Portuguese is a great and extremely rich language, yet the vocabulary of most Brazilians is extremely poor. It's sad really and it ultimately put me off of my native language. At some point I had become so proficient in it that I could easily write texts people couldn't even understand. So I just stopped bothering.

I don't even look "Brazilian". We're a mixed bunch in this country, but I'm often mistaken for a foreigner due to being very white, as my family is of European descent.

As such there were really just a handful of people I talked to during my days at university. Wild college parties don't really interest me. I don't drink alcohol or use drugs (although I did experiment with weed, and that was a surprisingly interesting experience). This, coupled with being so damn different from other people made me basically an alien with the other students.

-- (Age 18~21)

My course started with 60 students and in less than two years there were less than 10 left. Everyone else had transferred, failed classes and fallen behind or dropped out.

The classes were really freaking hard and the teachers were quite sadistically proud of it. There was a LOT of Math. I always did have an interest for Math, but was never specially gifted. I had joined the course expecting (well hoping really) that we would discussing the universe and what it represents and analyzing it in detail, but instead it was just infinite senseless math problems... It wasn't really my kinda thing sadly (I think I'd be better suited to something like Philosophy or Epistemology, thinking was always the one thing I was good at.)

I had hoped to engage in philosophical and intellectual conversations and debates with my fellow classmates, but they weren't interested in that kinda stuff in the slightest. Schools and universities here don't really have official "clubs", you're basically limited in interaction with whoever you're studying with.

And so it passed that ultimately I dropped out of Physics myself and transferred to Information Technology and went to study with the roommate of my colleague. By now I had moved in with them and left the old pension I was living at. It was cheaper that way, although I no longer had a room of my own. It was at this time that I met my first real girlfriend.

-- (Age 7~14)

Now if you've been thinking there has been a conspicuous lack of romance in my life so far... That's because it really deserves its own section and ties in closely with my recent crisis, hence why I left it to the very end.

My romantic life was a source of much pain and frustration in my life. I always considered myself romantic, always foolishly so. But as they say, romance is dead these days, specially here. My first experience with romance was when I was 9 way back in school. There was a beautiful girl in my class I was attracted to. She was my best friend's sister. I sought to woo and impress her with my intelligence, and it kind of worked, we spent more time together and even shared a sappy kiss during one fateful school break (not a french kiss of course, that'd be gross). I felt like I was in love. Valentine's day arrived and my brilliant 9 year old self thought she'd love if I gave her roses. So I dropped by a flower shop, this little kid in school uniform and asked for the most amazing bouquet of roses I could afford, with the lunch money I had saved for two weeks. And off I go to school. Only when I got there did I realize the folly of my ways. The other kids made fun of me and sang stupid songs ridiculing us. I think I tried making some sappy excuse that the flowers were for the teacher instead to save face, but that didn't really work. It was after Valentine's day... It was humiliating. My girlfriend at the time was terribly ashamed and didn't want anything else with me after that...

It broke my heart. A gesture of love cost me the girl I loved. It was terribly confusing. Really I should have heeded the signs early on and realizing that there was no place for romance in relationships, specially as a kid, but I was just too thick headed.

At the very least I can look back and laugh at my early attempts... I moved not long after that and went to a different school anyway... Perhaps it was best, it would have been worse if we were still together and I was forced to abandon her.

Things didn't really improve much after that. As a kid I'd fall for the girls that seemed smart and attractive. Shared interests weren't really relevant back then. Sadly, they weren't usually interested in me. I'm actually a decently attractive guy now, and was considered good looking as a kid, but I just wasn't "cool" like the guys that were great at sports, and kids care little about intelligence.

It wasn't until I was 13 years old that I fell hopelessly in love with a 12 year old girl from a class below me. She was beautiful and she could sing with such an angelic voice. The school would usually have her sing in events or religious Mass (most of all my schools were catholic). There aren't school buses here. Either your parents take you to school or they rented transportation to take you. My mom was always out working and my useless jerk of a step-father wouldn't take me to school so my mother hired a van to come pick me up and take me to school every day. The same van would drop by the other student's houses and pick them up, and once all 12 or so students were in, it would head towards the school. I was like the third in line, and the same girl I fell for was also in my van. She was the second in line, so she'd already be in by the time I got in.

Classes started every weekday at 7am and ended at 12:45pm, which meant I had to wake up at 6:00am every day as the van would be at my place at 6:20pm. I'd rush to get ready for school in 20 minutes, often without breakfast (maybe a glass of chocolate milk if I was lucky, but usually nothing till I got home).

Up until this time, I didn't really have any music I liked except videogame music and classical pieces (which my grandma used to play), but neither of each ever played in the radio. So I just universally considered music to be boring until then. And then this girl happened. She introduced me to bands like Linkin Park, Evanescence and Nightwish and got me into Metal and Rock music. We used to sing together in tune to the songs on our way back from the school (people were sleepy on the way to school and didn't like us singing then). It was awesome.

I fell head over heels for this girl but how could I tell her? We weren't even in the same class, so I only saw her during breaks and in the van. I started hanging out more and more with her, we made good friends and for a few years it was good. It was hell, being so in love and constantly afraid of saying something that would mess things up. I think she liked me too at some point, but was equally shy and you know how it's completely socially unacceptable for a girl to come onto a guy so that was't going to happen... It was all onto me. I didn't have the courage to just flat out tell her I loved her. So I wrote a letter. I poured all my feelings on it. I perfumed it. I bought a heart shaped box to hold it. I even added a bow tie, and couple chocolate truffles inside. The whole package. I was 13. Damn, I'm even blushing now remembering all this. I must have looked quite stupid. I gave the box to her one day after school, told her not to open it until she got home... She blushed furiously but agreed.

The next day she wasn't in the van. Or the day after. Or the day after that. I was desperate. Was it because of what I did? Was it my fault? Finally the next week she came back. She wasn't speaking to me anymore. With much reluctance I got the story out of her. Her mom saw my gift and took it from her and berated her saying she was much too young to have a boyfriend and other such nonsense like how she had to remain chaste and pure and whatnot. She wasn't allowed to talk to me anymore... She did at least say she liked my gift.

It broke my heart. Again. Yet another act of love that cost me a loved person. And I was truly in love with this girl. I was miserable for years. I moved to a different school soon enough though and that at least helped some, seeing her occasionally during school breaks would truly break my heart. Fuck, 10 years later and I still cry when remembering this stuff.

--- *Reached character limit, continuing in the first comment* ---

-- (Age 15~24)

There were other girls I had momentary crushes on but nothing like that again. Mostly I just got friend-zoned. A lot. Looking back I was too much of a nice guy. I should have been more bold, or more like those jerks that got all the chicks by mistreating them. It's sad that this strategy even works. I expected better from the opposite sex.

Which leads us back to my first real girlfriend.

You see, though I was popular as a kid, I was always introverted. Though not necessarily shy, I never quite knew how to approach strangers. Still don't, really. I can hold a conversation just fine, but I can't bring myself to walk up to an attractive girl and strike up a random conversation without seeming like a loser.

So I met a girl online. She was from Colombia. I had joined this organization called AIESEC in university that promotes student exchanges with other universities throughout the world. I figured it would broaden my horizon and lead me to new interesting experiences. I met this girl who was from an AIESEC office in Colombia and what started as a "business" relation quickly evolved into friendship.

We started talking about everything, and soon enough we were flirting openly and soon enough there was a spark. I could tell she was in love with me. I felt conflicted. She was from a different country, and I had never had a long distance relationship before. How would that work? We had never even met. I wasn't as sure about the relationship or my feelings but I couldn't bear rejecting someone who loved me and making them sad.

So she came to Brazil, using AIESEC to make an exchange on my university to do social work for three months. She did it because she always wanted to make an exchange and also so she could be with me. And so we met face to face for the first time. It was quite momentuous. She was my girlfriend but we had never really met. I was pleased to find she was even better looking in real life. After looking at her for the first time (my heart beating like crazy) we ran and embraced each other passionately. We kissed moments after and I gave her a ring I had bought long ago as a gift, and planned to give to my first girlfriend. She still keeps it. :)

The very next day, we both our lost our virginities at my place. June 2nd, 2011. I had just turned 21 and she was 18. I put some nice relaxing celtic music to play. Strangely I remember the events leading up to sex more than the actual sex, but I remember she asked me to be gentle, so I did my best to take it slow and make her comfortable. It was pretty nice overall and we cuddled afterwards. I was too ashamed to admit I was still a virgin at 21, so I lied about it being my first time. She seemed to like that I was "experienced". I later told her the truth and she teased me to no end.

It took a while to get used to having a girlfriend. Things weren't always smooth but I enjoyed finally having someone in my life I could open up to. But we only had two months to be together and that time flew surprisingly quickly. Before long she had to go back to her home country. We cried and kissed passionately in the airport and promised to see each other again.

It took six months before that happened. It was my turn to visit her, so I made an exchange to her country this time and met her family. I stayed there for three months, during vacations, the longest allowed on a tourist visa. Colombia is unbearably hot, and this is coming from a Brazilian (it was summer and 35 C and up at all times). We had a nice time, although I couldn't convince her mom to let us sleep together in the same room until the very last day. Sneaking off in the middle of the night to have sex downstairs in secret was really quite the experience though.

Sadly I had to return to Brazil once more, after another tearful and heartfelt goodbye. She came back to see me in late July. She studied International Relations in her university in Colombia. Apparently they have to take a "practical semester" abroad, so she chose Brazil so we could be together. She couldn't come to same city I lived however, so out of love I did something rather bold and unexpected (and probably stupid).

I applied to a new university in the same city she was coming to. I then passed the admission test and transferred my education over there. All so I could be with her for the six months she would be here. I even got an apartment and fully furnished it so we could be together. Blew all my savings on that, but it was worth it, I thought.

We spent another six months together and yet another heart-rending tearful goodbye at the airport. I don't wish these on anyone, and I've had more than my fair share...

Nine long months passed until we saw each other again. Our love was really hanging by a thread at this point, the pain from not being toogether was just so great, but we persevered. I continued my studies in the meantime, and then i went to visit her in Colombia during summer vacations once more (and melted once more in the summer heat -- the things we do for love).

Things were strained from so long without seeing each other, but we were determined to patch things up. She had just finished her university and was determined to come work in Brazil so we could be together for good. And so she did.

Three years we lived together. She got a job here and was quite successful. She wanted to pursue a post-grad but was unable to do so in the same city we were living at, and so she kept putting it off so we wouldn't be apart.

Sadly, over time things didn't quite work out... In truth we didn't have all that much in common, and although we were good friends and enjoying being together, we were fighting fairly often over trivial things. The distance that separated us for so long pushed us towards being together, but it wasn't until we truly got to live together for an extended period of time that things really unraveled and we sadly discovered that, although we liked each other, we weren't truly soul-mates. We also disagreed on some pretty fundamental life choices. I wanted to start a family some day, and she didn't want kids. I respected her decision, but it ultimately meant we couldn't be together for life.

Our relation had deteriorated at that point, and we weren't spending as much time together, even though we lived and slept together still. I knew I was holding her back from her goal of getting a post-grad, so it was just a matter of time until she'd leave to pursue her dreams. I didn't fault her for it. Ultimately we just silently realized our 4 year long relationship was going to come to an end, but we were still together, out of convenience if nothing else.

-- (Age 24~25)

Knowing that she would ultimately leave was extremely depressing so I took to the internet and online gaming to drown my sorrows. I started playing in a Minecraft server and made a few new friends. After a few months I met a girl and we got quite close and I confided in her. She was a very troubled girl, dealing with suicidal tendencies and depression. I discovered she had been ready to go through with it, but meeting me and talking kept her mind off of ending her life. She was really an amazing person who had been unfortunate to have a terrible life with horrible parents, so despite not knowing her personally, I made it my goal to nurse her back to health and make her happy again.

Helping my new friend also helped me in a way, to remain sane and focused instead of worrying about the impending break-up that loomed ahead. Sadly, it also likely sped it up, as I spent even less time with my then girlfriend, and she understandably resented that I was talking to other women.

I kept talking to my new friend and we discovered we truly lots in common, in fact, I've never met someone who has so much in common with me. We like the same games, the same music, the same activities, and she was one of the smartest girls I had ever met. I couldn't bear to stop talking to her for fears that she'd sink back into depression and kill herself. And sadly, that ultimately drove the last nail in my relationship and my girlfriend moved out. Ultimately however, we remain friends, although she lives far away and we rarely see each other.

Being alone after a 4 year old relationship nearly broke me. The only reason I managed to pull through was because of my mission to help my new friend. She too had been following with me, and I dare say it was mutual. She lived in Canada however. Even further than Colombia. And much more expensive. I feared yet another long distance relationship, and I was certain I could not afford going to Canada. Our currency is much weaker, and the wages here are much lower. It was simply beyond my financial limits.

Yet we talked, and talked and our love grew stronger. I desperately wanted to be with her, to hold in her my arms and say everything would be okay and she could stop crying and there was no more need to suffer. She was even more broken than me. Her father had forced her into child pornography as a kid, and sexually abused her and her sister. Her mother treated her like garbage and didn't let her do anything. Yet despite all that she grown up to be such an intelligent and talented woman.

She was into World Building and had created an entire sci-fi universe worth of characters, settings, planets and events, and built a Wiki spanning thousands of articles on her own imagined world. It's the most ambitious project undertaken by a single person I've ever seen. She's built it over the years as a way to cope with the stresses of what she had to go through. The level of detail, scientific effort and sheer effort she put into it stunned me. She even had created languages to go along with the races. We spent many a day talking about her fictional settings, and I became more and more bewildered by this woman, and certain that I had at last found my soul mate.

We were fully in love at this point and wanted nothing more than to be together. We agreed that the best way to do that was if she came to visit me. Canada was just too expensive, I couldn't afford to go there. Her family's financial means were also greater than mine, and any money she brought would have been tripled simply from the currency conversion. So she talked to her mom about traveling to Brazil, trying to warm her up to the idea over the years.

Her mom was extremely controlling and was very reluctant to let her daughter out of her sight. After half a year of this though, she seemed to have accepted the idea however, and even helped her daughter get a passport, bought her a plane ticket and gave her some trip money. At long last we were going to see each other and meet in person.

That's when disaster struck. With one day left for her departure her mom abruptly changed her mind and seized her passport and canceled her plane ticket. Things began to spiral out of control. They fought and her daughter ran away. When she came back things weren't the same anymore. Her mother said that if she wanted to leave her so much then she well should and kicked her out of the house (!!). She had nowhere to go. She couldn't come here because she didn't have her passport and her mother refused to return it. The cops were called, but to no avail. She had to go stay with friends, but her mother found out where she was and got her kicked out of there also.

With no recourse, I urged her to go to Toronto and apply for an emergency passport. I was ready to pay for her plane ticket myself if need be. She was blowing all the trip money just staying in hotels in the meantime. Her passport didn't come in time. She ran out of money entirely and had nowhere to go, so she had to stay out in the streets with all her things.

I couldn't handle that. This person I loved, yet had never met was out in the streets with nowhere to go and it was my fault. If I hadn't ever got involved with her none of this would have happened... Although she says if I never did, she would be dead by now...

I told her to go to the airport and wait for me. I spent my life saving's on a plane ticket I bought with mere days in advance and crossed half the world to meet her and help her however I could...

-- (Age 25)

I was terrified yet ecstatic at the same time. The reality of what I was doing, going to a country I had never been to, to meet a girl I had never met, had finally began to sink in. But more importantly, I couldn't wait to finally meet the woman I was certain was my soul mate.

And here at last. We arrive at the crux of my life... The great motivation of this entire venting. For you see, dear reader, fate had other plans in store for me.

-- (Age 25)

I arrived at the airport in Toronto. Though I was fluent in English this was my first time in an environment where it is actually spoken, and where I *had* to use the language to actually communicate with people.

I got my bags and got out of the gate, expecting to see this girl I had only seen in pictures yet loved so much, my heart stuck in my throat...

Words fail me at this point...

She was there... But... It wasn't her. The person I met. It both was and wasn't her... I don't...

The reality of the situation finally dawned on me and I felt incredibly foolish. I had been catfished. I had considered it before but never until such a point did I truly believe I could have been lied to like that.

The girl I met looked nothing like she did on the pictures she sent me. In fact, I came to discover, she was actually trans-gender, and had never had the courage to tell me...

So you see... My life fell apart that day.

For a whole year I had been speaking to this person, deeply in love, ready to spend my life with them. Had it all been a lie?

I must say, I wanted to go right back into the plane and head back to Brazil, crying the whole time. Hell I wouldn't have minded if the plane crashed and it was all over at that point. I never felt so miserable in my life.

But I stayed. I stayed because despite being betrayed like this, here was a person that genuinely had nothing else. They had given up everything on the dream of being with me, a person they had never met in real life. A person whose life I had saved and was now responsible for.

While she looked nothing like the woman I thought I loved, she was still deep down the very same person. The lie she kept for that entire year had tortured her, but I was her link to life. Telling me the truth would have no doubt led me to abandon her in disgust that she had lied to me about who she was really was from the start. And doing so meant death for her.

So yes. She acted selfishly, and though I was repulsed and dismayed beyond all words, I could see that clearly at least.

So I chose to stay. My return ticket was for one month. I had brought enough money to spend one month in Canada, though it had cost my life savings. What good would be turning tail and running back to Brazil and abandoning this person now?

I hugged her and took her to a hotel room. Our first day together. It should have been the happiest day in my life. Instead it was the most miserable. She felt rightfully incredibly guilty and I couldn't stop crying. My dreams had died that day.

I felt like I could never love again. I still do.

But alas. I decided to make the best out of a horrible situation and dedicate that one month I was there to helping this one person I had just met put their life back together.

It was by far the most singular experience of my life. Stranded in a different country with a person who I knew so well yet truly knew nothing about, overwhelmed by the sights and smells and even temperatures I had never experienced before.

My heart broke that day. I fear it might have broken for good.

-- (Age 25)

One month. One month I spent in Canada. Caring for this stranger who I loved so much, yet felt so terribly betrayed by. There was little time to sightsee. We spent most of the time in and out of hotels, and later AirBNB properties which were cheaper.

The original plan was to bring her back with me, but now? How would that work? I wasn't even sure how I felt. She was trans-gender, and though I'm an accepting person I am heterosexual, and had never harbored illusions of homosexuality before. And then this dropped on me in the span of a single day.

She looked even more miserable than me, truth be told. Her mother had forced her off her hormonal medications, so she was looking dreadful. She was losing her hair and her physique was slowly reverting to a male's. She didn't look remotely like the beautiful ginger girl in the pictures she sent me, though she assured me it had indeed been her once.

What could I do? I couldn't just bring her back and marry her not after all this. I needed time to work it all out. But she didn't have time. She had nowhere to go.

So instead we travelled to Ottawa, the capital of Canada and I had her apply for Welfare. They would give her a monthly allowance to get her back on her feet and find her a place she could stay. But this meant we wouldn't be together and there would be nothing else I could do to help her. And I still had several weeks before my return ticket.

So I shit you not dear reader. I contacted another guy from Canada I had met in the same Minecraft server, who knew us both in passing as gamers. I said I had come to visit her in Canada and that we should totally meet. He agreed, thinking it would be cool, so we went to his place. With nowhere else to go and all the bags.

We had never met this guy in our lives, but in true Canadian fashion he was welcoming and nice. He said we could spend the weekend in his house, and even invited us to go to ComicCon which was in a few days. We did go, and it was one of the most exciting experiences I ever had. My life was a fucking roller-coaster at this point, and it was moving at the speed of light.

Eventually I explained the situation to him. I omitted a few details such as the girl actually being a trans-gender out of respect for her, but I did tell him how she had been kicked out of her house by her mother, abused by her parents and had nowhere to go.

I shit you not dear reader, this is what happened next:

He listened intently to our story and then told us that his mother was actually in charge of an NGO dedicated to helping women who had been abused and victimized and if we were to tell her his story, she could probably help us.

We talked to his mother and explained the situation. She put us in touch with the people who could help drive us to places, rush her Welfare process and she even offered us a place we could stay. Her brother had a spare room in his flat, and we could stay with him.

So out of my decision to contact a guy I never met outside a fucking Minecraft server, I had now made friends that helped us in our time of need and actually got us a place to stay. All the while speaking a language I had never truly spoken outside of an English Course ten years prior.

If there was ever a day that made me consider divine intervention was real, it was that day.

-- (PRESENT TIME)

And so we reach the present time dear reader. If you have managed put up with this story for so long, I am truly humbled and immensely grateful that I could finally get this off my chest and tell another soul.

I am back in Brazil, for six months now. My girlfriend/boyfriend/Idontevenknowfriend remains in Canada. She continues to live in Ottawa, in the spare bedroom of the uncle of a friend I met in a Minecraft server, surviving from a paltry allowance that the Government of Canada pays her, all the while desperately seeking a job and without a doctor that can tend to her hormonal issues (apparently there is a massive shortage of Family Doctors in Canada, and she can't find one).

Despite all that happened, despite traveling halfway across the world to meet a person I was so certain was my soul mate, only to be catfished and find they had been lying to me... I truly wish I didn't have to leave.

I am all alone here now. There's nothing left for me in this country. I am nothing like the other Brazilians. The one month I spent in Canada truly felt like home. The people I met there were the kindest and most welcoming people I had the chance to meet and helped us in our time of need despite being complete strangers. And most importantly. They were people like me.

I want to go back. I want to move to Canada and start a life there. Wether it will be with this girl or not, only time will tell but there is no life here for me.

But I can't afford that. I blew my life savings to go there overnight to save her life and now I can scarcely afford to pay my bills.

Even if I did get a job here in Brazil, a monthly wage of a high-paying job here is around R$3000-4000, barely more than a thousand canadian dollars.

The Canadian government website quotes a figure of 100,000 CAD for a citizen to sponsor someone else's immigration to Canada. I would like to study there, but sadly I can't afford the 20,000 CAD tuition for College education in Canada. My only hope now is to somehow get hired for a job in Canada so that I can go there with a work visa. I'm a kickass programmer, though I never did finish my formal education at the university, as you well know if you read all this thus far.

In the meantime... I'm stuck here, miserable and alone, in the wrong part of the world where I know I don't belong... Writing my story in part to get this off my chest and in part to ask for help, in the hopes that once again kind strangers or perhaps divine intervention might shine a light where I can only see darkness.

So what I ask you, dear reader, whoever you may be...

Help me...

--

P.s.

Thank you so very much for reading this, this was very painful to write and took nearly 6 hours to type. If you read all the way through you're an angel and I am truly honored to be speaking to you.

I am genuinely at a loss and have no idea what I should do next in my life. I have always acted alone and never sought help but this time I don't think I can do it on my own.