As someone who has suffered from night terrors and other disturbingly vivid dreams, I would recommend starting to do “wake checks”.

Set an alarm on your phone to go off every few hours at random times during the day. When the alarm goes off, do something that produces a reliable result, like turning a light on/off, turning on a faucet, checking the time on a clock, or pinching yourself. Make your checks as varied as possible, and do them in a different order from day to day, because you don’t want the results to become part of a pattern.

Once you are in the habit of doing that, start doing those checks any time something ‘out of the norm’ happens. What ‘out of the norm’ means is up to you, but essentially any time you think that something is weird or out of place, do a check. What you are doing is training yourself to check whether you are in reality or not.

Once you start doing that, you will probably continue that habit when you end up in a dream. However, these checks will not produce reliable results when you do them in a dream. Turning on the faucet won’t make it give water, the time will change drastically, lights won’t turn on when you flip the switch, etc. These are now your cues to see if you are awake or not. If one of these things ever DOES start to give reliable results in a dream, stop using it immediately and substitute a different one.

Once you have a way of determining if you are awake or not, you have a way to wake up. Most people wake up after realizing they are in a dream, and even if you don’t, realizing you are dreaming should result in a massive shift in what is happening in the dream.

One warning though: if you have night terrors where you end up paralyzed, you will want to have a contingency plan. My night terrors usually started in a situation where I was unable to move, and that is the main reason I struggled with them for over a decade. The only thing that helped there was meditation where I would focus on “feeling” my fingers and toes and how they moved, and then getting myself in the habit of using that meditation as an anxiety response. Doing that in a dream will usually end up waking me up because it forces my brain to focus and eventually move my body irl.

Anything that was a major thing in your life, good or bad, can be missed in some way once it is gone. The trick is to remember that quite a bit of that feeling is missing the predictably of daily life, not necessarily missing the thing itself.

I was also kicked out, though it was during my college years, and there are still times I find myself missing my parents, even almost 10 years later. The feeling isn’t as strong, and it is mostly just me lamenting the fact that I will not have a lot of experiences most people consider universal, such as having family to visit for holidays, or having someone to talk to no matter what you have going on in your life.

It is a bit like grief. The parents you thought you had are gone, even if they are physically living, and you had no choice in the matter. The feeling will come and go, it will change over time. But it will get easier.

This is obviously horrendous on the face of it, but in addition, he doesn’t even consider people who take medication classed as antidepressants for other issues. I am on a tricyclic antidepressant that does help my depression, but I also take it because it significantly reduces migraine attacks and mitigates my IBS symptoms. So even if you do think that depression is ‘all in your head’ (ignoring all modern information and proof to the contrary), you still should be enraged by the mere suggestion of a policy like this.

Saint Francis of Assisi did this. He renounced his family name, inheritance, and (according to legend) the clothes on his back when his dad took issue with him giving alms. He spent the rest of his life wandering with a small group of other penitents and providing comfort to the sick, especially those with leprosy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi?wprov=sfla1

Good thing hormones are only prescribed in a minority of trans kids anyways, even though the vast majority of them do not desist as they get older. In fact, the majority of them continue on to transition as adults, and 99.5 or so percent of trans kids given just puberty blockers, much less hormones, grow to adulthood with no regrets.

Also, before you ask, I can provide sources, but that which is declared without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, especially when the dismissal is in line with literally every major medical organization, including the World Health Organization, due to the sheer amount of clear evidence that transition is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria at any age.

Tofu! I never got a chance to try it growing up, but when I started reducing my meat I decided to give it a try. It is possibly the most versatile ingredient in my kitchen, and by far the easiest way to get protein.

You can whip up a tofu scramble, throw it in smoothies/shakes, cube it and toss it in soup, fry it and serve with sauce over veggies, bake it with an herb coating to toss with pasta, even bread it to make katsu sandwiches! It takes on the flavor of whatever you cook it with, so it isn’t hard to make the dish taste the same as if it had meat, and it is much more forgiving.

The trick is to get firm or extra firm tofu instead of medium or soft. Some people like super smooth tofu, but I find more people prefer the more solid versions.

An honorable mention also goes to nutritional yeast. It is often that ‘something extra’ missing from dishes that have a cheesy taste to them, and is a great option to add depth to dishes if you are concerned about MSG for some reason. I like to toss some on my popcorn to make it taste like white cheddar, but you can use it in any savory dish. It is also an excellent source of B12, which a majority of people are deficient in.