I read through the post comments on X about the election, and someone insulted someone else by telling him to get out of his mother’s basement, which wasn’t funny. That insult is never funny. What if what he said was true and that the man did live with his mother? And why does the person have to be a man? A woman living in her mother’s basement isn’t considered funny or pathetic, but for a man, it is. Furthermore, what if his mother doesn’t have a basement? Most people probably don’t. But the insulter used a basement for emphasis to paint them as an even bigger loser than someone who lived with his mother but didn’t have one. In other words, he was trapped in a dungeon so to speak.

But suppose it’s there, and he does live with his mother–the insulted I’m talking about–to take care of her. She has a debilitating illness and needs special care. What’s so funny about that? There are dozens of reasons a grown man could be living with her. What if her husband died, and she can’t take care of herself? She’s grieving the loss and living with deep depression as a result.

I’ve been there. Crawling out of depression is hard. I also had to live with my parents for a three-year stint right out of college. No one would hire me. I didn’t have connections, which was the only real way to find a job back then, the way American culture worked, so I moved from Orange County back up north to live with Mom and Dad again at the same house where they’d raised me through high school and some of junior college. The experience was emasculating to say the least. I didn’t feel like an adult any longer or like a “man.” My autonomy was stripped. I had a curfew. They always went to bed early. I had to obey their rules. There were no jobs in that small town either. I had to pick up unsustainably temporary jobs that kept me from leaving my parents’ house.

There were extremely hopeless moments when I thought I would never get out. By the time I was twenty-six, I gambled and saved money with plans to leave their nest again for Los Angeles. The job I had at the time paid me eighty dollars a day. Mind you, the inflation wasn’t as extreme, but still, there was no way I could support myself with such low wages. And this was before taxes. I had just enough drinking money to briefly cure my woes of living with them while they provided housing. Nothing else was affordable.

That summer, I packed up a U-Haul and drove hundreds of miles to North Hollywood to my first apartment since college. The novelty of living free and alone wore off after a few weeks. I had to find a job again to support myself with no connections. Any old job would do. I wanted to become a screenwriter, but I knew I was a long shot. Some people told me to follow my heart, so I did. Other people were detractors who told me what I was doing was foolish, essentially, cliche. Whatever.

I reflect on what I did and think it may have kept me behind, but the past seems meaningless anyway. What mattered then doesn’t matter now. Good thing I took the gamble. Otherwise, I could’ve been still living with them.