I found EP during my darkest time. I was depressed and suicidal. EP helped a lot. I left EP before it was shut down because I had become far too dependant on it. When i looked it up some years later I was sad to see that it was no more, but was glad to have found it's replacement.
Didn't come from EP but a site like it. I left there because I was going through living hell on the site I came from and it was pushing me to a really dark place again.
I'm just here to make people laugh and get stuff out of my head because therapy has been a joke 😒
@Coralmist Lol…. funny you should appear. I meant to apologize for hijacking your “What’s for dinner?” thread with Human and our talk of indoor plumbing and using buckets. Lost track of how verbose we were getting. Anyway, hope maybe you made use of the “stop” feature so you didn’t have to watch us blathering on and on. 🙄
I was from EP originally and joined THAT thinking it was a forum only on anxiety or abuse. I was quite wrong lol. I stayed because people were kind and uplifting. And I enjoyed the connection..thats why I decided to join SW too. Although I didn't right away after EP. About a year later. I get more from it than the off days of trolls or a few rude replies. So I always felt it was a decent place to come back to🦋🙂 How about you?
@Coralmist I actually joined EP because I thought it was a creative writing site, granted it did allow me to post my creative writing but I made a lot of connections too.
I wasn't sure really. SW stands to be the same thing I hoped EP to be and in a way it is - a place to vent to people who don't know a thing about me.
A world separated from my reality - where I can talk about how I feel without feeling ashamed or that I have to be a certain something.
What I found though is that when I vent, it's not as supportive as I remembered it to be. Tended to be ignored so I only really vent here now when I'm truly at the end of my rope.
Was on EP to figure out who I really wanted to be if I didn't have the social restrictions. I have sometimes gotten as much insight about myself from my time here as I have from any therapy session. Lots of times the two go hand-in-hand, where my SW experience becomes the springboard for a conversation with my therapist.
Usually I will hang out on SW for a month or so before I lose interest and drift away. This round I have been here for I think four months? I have more connection in the DMs this round.
I had left EP for a long time and was looking for it in the net. Got SW instead and came to know that lots of users have joined from EP. Though it’s not the same, I joined and stayed.
I was looking for a fun question/answer site since a lot of the original ones/ones I liked shut down. Reddit is sadly monopolizing message boards and Q&A type sites, it seems!
I was one of the original dozen or so Founding members at EP's inception which occurred back in 2005. EP was originally designed as a descriptive writing site for worldly people to share their travel experiences with young people who had Muscular Dystrophy and were therefore unable to travel. Those home-bound and often bed-ridden MS patients would then experience a life of travel vicariously through those who did travel extensively and were willing to share those memories of traveling the world.
At the time, I was a teenager in high school and the only traveling I did was on a team school bus going from one sports venue to another for regional gymnastics competitions. Who I'd been contributing my experiences with on EP were people who flew on private jets, plus those who traveled cross-country in RV's.
For me, EP started out as a creative, descriptive writing outlet which others could benefit from as they'd interact with our short stories, but then EP came to a grinding halt after the site was sold to a new webmaster who had no interest whatsoever in continuing the original objective of EP in being a website devoted to sharing travel experiences, hence the name Experience Project.
EP shut down in 2015 after it was allowed by that new webmaster to turn into a wild-west show for the 5 years preceding EP's eventual demise. When SW was then started up in 2016 following the implosion of EP, this website was and still is marketed as the official replacement or alternative for EP, but in fact is nowhere near what EP was nor ever will be, even at EP's darkest moments in time.
The reason SW is no good whatsoever for creative writing is because it's web format was originally designed as an online game of trivial pursuit as evidenced by it's Q&A style of interaction, thereby leaving nowhere on this website that is actually dedicated to writing short stories like EP had been set up to achieve right from it's original inception.
SW-User
@swirlie I did not know this. Thank you for sharing the EP story
@SW-User You're not the only one who did not know this. Even that total inept as well as obtusely incompetent webmaster who bought EP from it's original owner did not know this about EP before he bought it.