A list of some things that happened in roughly chronological order

This is not a comprehensive list.

1) S*** M****** kills himself. He/we would've only been 15/16/17 years old at the time, or younger.

2) I'm sexually harassed by a supervisor at work. He was married with a young child. I remember feeling "sick" in the same way that you might feel when you've done something that would make your parents angry when you're a toddler.

3) 2007: I move out of home at seventeen years old (my parents lost the house in their divorce, or something, so I never really had a "home" to go back to, regardless).

4) J**** W**** kills himself.

5) 2008: Sophie Elliot is murdered by a University of Otago staff member. She was twenty two years old.

6) I meet Brad Anderson, also a University of Otago staff member. He was around ten years older than me. Having been, let's say "sheltered" as opposed to "socially inept", I'm unable to discern whether or not someone's too drunk to drive. I therefore almost die in at least several drink driving accidents. Years later I realize how strange it was, but not surprising, that nobody intervened.
He (mostly unsuccessfully) attempted to pressure me into unprotected sex. Given his preference for barely legal young men, I imagine that he might have had a little more luck pressuring other younger men into unprotected sex, unfortunately.
After I made it clear that I no longer wanted anything to do with him, he used his administrative privileges as a University of Otago staff member to contact me with what essentially turned out to be a suicide letter.
Not that we'll ever know, but a lot of us wondered at the time if his suicide was a result of discovering that he was HIV positive. If so, he might have infected some other people, too. We'll never know.

7) 2009: My Japanese tutor threatens to veto my application to study abroad in Japan. Apparently he did this because I wasn't "social" enough in class. It may be easy to therefore conclude that the threat of a veto was somehow all my fault. Take into account, however, that he used to invite female students back to his office for "gifts", then get flustered and quickly end the invitation if they ever turned up with friends, instead of alone. You know, just in case anyone needed a proper frame of reference as to what kind of a person he really was.
Besides, given everything else that happened at that university, as I've described above, it's not surprising that I was no longer in the mood to be "social".

8) The University of Otago closed the design department (where I was studying) without due process. The city still had enough money to build yet another sports stadium, though, obviously.

9) Date unknown: A friend of mine is ineligible for compassionate consideration when he has to undergo surgery for a contagious and life-threatening condition. Cue an additional entire term/year of study, and hundreds if not thousands more added to his student loan.

10) Years later, the University of Otago would attempt to censor the student magazine due to their criticism of the university's response to COVID (or lack thereof), among other things. Par for the course for a capitalist degree farm that hires murderers and sex pests, I suppose.

11) 2011: Fed up with all of the above (and in the absence of a department left to study at), I transfer to a different university entirely (University of Victoria).

12) In the absence of any significant in-country experience, due to the incompetence of aforementioned sex pests, I decide to pay my way to a few weeks in Japan on my own. The dates of this planned trip coincided with the presentation of a Japanese assignment. I ask my lecturer if I can instead present my work early before I leave for Japan. He says "no", and that if I don't present on the designated day, then I automatically fail the entire paper. As a result, I just straight-up withdraw from the paper entirely (too late for a refund, of course).

13) My lawyer says that I can't publicly talk about the most significant parts of 2012/2013 yet.

14) Assignments are deleted from my university account. To avoid this, I start saving my assignments to a USB stick instead. One day, I forget my USB stick. Luckily, I get a message from someone in the same class as me saying that they found my USB stick and handed it into lost and found. I go to lost and found. They confirm that, yes, the USB stick was handed it. Mere moments ago, in fact. In the very next moment, they tell me that it's "lost".
This doesn't sound all that important, but years later, I remembered a very public incident (covered in news websites at the time) where a postgrad student from the US, I think, had some of his material stolen by a University of Victoria staff member. There was video footage and everything. The university refused to fire this particular staff member.
The postgrad student affected by the theft wrote a blog providing very in-depth details about how other university staff, including tutors and lecturers from the very same department that I was studying at, refused to give any help in the incident whatsoever. The postgrad student then left the University of Victoria entirely.
Anyway, as a result of the above incident involving my USB stick, I fail an entire paper.

15) I am sexually harassed by a supervisor at work.

16) I can't really fit this in anywhere chronologically, but there's an active pedophile working at Weta Workshop. Someone from Utah. This tidbit is basically just aimed at anyone brain dead enough to say something like "I love New Zealand. They filmed Lord of the Rings there!" Man, shut the fuck up and kill yourself. God knows we know how cheap human life is at this point.

17) Disturbing sexual powerplays towards students at the University of Victoria by staff members at the (insert name of Japan-affiliated New Zealand government institution here) are an open secret at this point anyway.

18) Years later, the University of Victoria would attempt to charge students for unoccupied dormitories during COVID, only stopping after significant backlash, among other things. Par for the course for a capitalist degree farm that hires and enables thieves, rapists, and psychopaths, I suppose.

19) There's an active sex pest (adult man) sexually harassing young women at my workplace at (insert name of New Zealand government institution here). Nobody does anything about it.

20) I'm noticing a theme...

21) 2016: Noticing aforementioned theme, I leave New Zealand and never return.

22) I meet "J". Years later, J is revealed to have been a racketeer for NXIVM after his involvement is shown in graphic detail in the Netflix documentary. The signs were always kind of there, in hindsight.

23) How many near-death experiences is that now... ?

24) There were actually a few more near-death experiences I'd like to describe, but they involve individuals that need protecting.

25) I have now blocked mostly 99.99% of people I ever knew in New Zealand (friends or otherwise). This includes mostly everyone from my so-called family, apart from my Dad (and his wife), because, in all honesty, the self-hatred was "coming from inside the house", in a way. My Mom stopped loving me a long, long time ago. Same for that one brother of mine. I don't mind.

26) Mostly avoiding the expat community and the gay community here was absolutely the right decision.