Me either for the most part. The Academy was later, instead of going for college when I decided on Starfleet as the place for me. The Federation DOES give some priority to its humanitarian disaster survivors,and my parents had both been career and I was born offplanet so it added up to me getting in a bit easier than some others though, so I got lucky there.
That's got to be hard. I was six, with my parents, when the shit all hit the fan on my home planet. Which sounds a little bit insane in this day and age, I know, but the colony was running out of food and the governer decided he was going to...
You know Thanos, from the Avengers movies?
That's pretty close to what Governor Kodos pulled. I mean, not literally a finger snap, but firing squads and dwindling food supplies and...
I guess I'd say some bits of that are haunting still, but not in the same way as yours. Less personal since I was so small.