u/HyperactiveMouse

She is. We’re still best friends to this day. It’s been a very hard journey with plenty of backslides, and plenty of times I thought I was doing so much better only to realize I had fallen back on old habits. The emotions are sometimes too big for me to handle and I don’t always handle it well, but I get better every day. I’ve gotten friends now who feel like they’ll last a lifetime, a true family with no blood between us. Couldn’t have gotten here if she had decided not to notice, or not get involved or that it wasn’t her problem or something. I wouldn’t have blamed anyone in the same situation not handling it well, or not being able to handle what was happening and try to ignore the clear problem I was presenting. But she noticed and refused to let her friend be in pain now that she knew I was. And I thank her every day that with her help I’m here today, anywhere near as mentally and emotionally healthy as I am now.

I don’t want this body type but god I wanna be snuggled by this body type :3 I wanna be small and cuddly

My first job was at an Italian restaurant in my small town as a dishwasher. I was told they run the business like a family. Apparently, family tells a high schooler to work from 2-12 AM on weekdays, has them do numerous illegal shit like dumping cleaning solution for the mops into the sewer grate outside the back of the restaurant, and the final straw that made me quit when I was told I had to come in for a 18 hour shift right after a 12 hour shift. Fine, whatever, what am I there to do? Deep clean the entire restaurant which hasn’t been done since it opened 30 years ago. I saw shit in the fryers that looked like rats fell into them, but honestly it was so fried it was hard to tell what it was, it definitely had been in there for years with how hard I had to pull to get it to come off the floor of the fryer. The oven had cockroaches come out of it when I opened it up that was for pizzas. The fridge and freezer had black mold growing and several veggies had started sprouting in the freezer somehow. The carpet in the dining room was completely infested with insects, and the floor tiles in the kitchen easily came off to reveal plenty of other bugs. Oh, and it was all unpaid labor I was supposed to do.

So I did what family is supposed to do and I quit on the spot and sent pics to the health inspector. It was closed for massive health code violations a few days later, which I got a screaming text about. I told him family stages interventions when they’re in need and blocked him. I honestly only looked around because I was curious just how bad it would be. Even if I hadn’t said anything to the health inspector, I was dry heaving afterwards after realizing everything that had touched the food I’d gotten from there, don’t know how the cooks were stomaching what they were eating, at least I had had no idea

Abstinence only education. The teacher was going on and on about how dirty a woman is who has had sex before marriage. The usual suspects of gum already chewed, already used shoes, though the one nobody has ever heard of is where the teacher has a cup of clear water and asks if we’d drink it while a single Cheeto is passed out to everyone. Then when we say yes, they go to the first kid and ask them to chew the Cheeto up and spit it in the water. After asking everyone to do the same, they hold up the very disgusting water cup and ask if anyone would drink it. Obviously not and he says that the cup of water is your sex, and the Cheetos are every sexual partner you have. A girl got up and sprinted out of class sobbing afterwards. She had been a sexual trafficked victim who already had a kid at 15 due to it. Being told by a teacher that over and over again how worthless she was because her parents had rented her out to numerous people to pay for drugs. I’ve never hated abstinence only education more than in that moment. I only knew about that because I followed after her because I wanted to help and she explained once we found a quiet space under the bleachers. We never really became friends, but she was always nice to me and we talked a good bit at lunch sometimes. She just needed a shoulder to cry on. I still don’t know what I could’ve said to make anything better…

If I were into that kinda thing (and maybe I am, but am too nervous to actually try, only would know for sure by trying), I could see myself trying to find something at home if I for some reason wasn’t able to find a toy. Equally I exist in a state of mind of “If I’m talking to a doctor about something stuck in my ass, I’ve already given up my dignity, I can’t sink lower by admitting I was a horny idiot with a thing stuck up my ass, I think I’d only sink lower by trying to deny I was a horny idiot and was actually just an idiot.”

I misread autonomy as anatomy and barely even blinked because of the comic in question

That’s not grand admiral Ashgrave, that’s clearly a misbehaving kitty cat!

Oooh, I’ve been getting really into curry but I haven’t actually tried making any, do you have any recipes I might be able to try?

I ran away from home for something I’ll admit was stupid, I think I was just upset a toy got taken away or something, I dunno I was 5 and the end of the story is the bit I remember best. I equally had no idea what I was supposed to do now that I was ran away. I stayed away for hours, it was bright and sunny when I left and the stars and moon were out by the time I was done. I remember being upset I wasn’t very far from the house and I never saw them leave looking for me. I went in through the door crying and my mom looked at me confused, “You left? I thought you were in your room playing video games. Anyway, you’re grounded for playing games past your bedtime and for not listening when I yelled at you to go to bed.”

I wasn’t home to do any of that stuff and thought of running away again just because I thought it was unfair to punish me when I wasn’t even home doing that. So I was grounded instead for running away. It… didn’t feel any more fair and didn’t help me feeling like they didn’t care that much.

Huh, you know I’ve never had goat before, but I’ve had goat cheese before. That was actually really good on pizza! Maybe I should try some more goat offerings, including the milk. It was weird realizing I’ve only had goat when it was milk, but curdled xD

I don’t necessarily finish with the best thing, but the thing with a flavor I most want enjoying for the foreseeable future. Like, maybe despite not thinking mashed potatoes are the greatest ever but still loving them, and having a plate with salmon and green beans, I’ll eat the salmon, green beans, then finish with the potatoes instead of my favorite, the salmon. It’s most often a texture thing, I know only in the moment what’s going to be my texture for the next few hours my mouth is gonna be buzzing about

I’ll try that next time I have the hiccups!

I get rid of hiccups by focusing on breathing. It’s supposed to just be your diaphragm twitching, so if I focus on the control of my diaphragm and calm breathing, I should be able to stop it. Can’t do it in a busy environment, but it does work when I’m able to focus on it!

Do you happen to have a link to that post?

I thought dogs were always boys and cats were always girls, and I distinctly remember that I learned boys and girls made babies, so I assumed cats and dogs made babies that made cats when they were girls, and dogs when they were boys. It wasn’t until I was around 11 or 12 that I met my first boy cat and girl dog and I realized I might have just been an idiot who made assumptions because they’d never met a boy cat or a girl dog

Is hyperfixation not effectively an addiction? When I’m hyperfixated, it’s all I can think about, all I dream about, all I learn about. Even if I’m not actively in whatever I’m hyperfixated on, my head is still stuck on it. I’ll struggle to sleep, eat or drink or otherwise take care of myself if I don’t actively take steps to force it as my brain is convinced nothing else exists in the world and/or it can sustain itself just off the nutrition of learning more. By your definition, I’m always addicted when I’m hyperfixated. I just have systems in place to ensure it’s not up to my hyperfixated brain to determine what it needs because I know it leads to me hurting myself unintentionally through such lack of care for myself. Before I had these systems, you could tell just by looking I got hyperfixated on something, I was extra skinny, bags under my eyes, constantly muttering to myself about it, and was desperately trying to refill my hydration and food stores in my body as it catches up with me.

I wonder if he asked her to change an aspect of her life how she would react. Especially if he framed it as something childish she needs to stop to be more adult. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with having childish interests. I love Bluey and have otherwise a love of cartoons, especially ones made for kids, but that doesn’t really make me less adult. It just means I have fun with my interests and don’t care if it’s considered childish, the ones who’d judge me for it aren’t worth listening to anyway

I remember what it was like when I was hearing voices because my insomnia kept me up with maybe 30-60 minutes of sleep, if that, for over a month. I was brought to a mental health hospital for sleep-deprivation psychosis or some sort of psychosis like that. Everyone was talking and whispering about me, talking about how little they wanted me around but they were just too nice to say it. I struggled to maintain a grip on reality.

All this to say that you’re very right if it’s anything like what I experienced. Ever since then I still experience mild hallucinations, but luckily they’re very minor and mostly just are me seeing things out of the corner of my eye that aren’t there, and nothing in that area could’ve suggested to my eyes that the thing I saw was there. There’s nothing to create a pale face out my window when the moon isn’t out that night. Or a bad paranoia I only recently realized I had and started working on. Doctors have checked me out a couple of times and determined I’m not schizophrenic, but yeah, get your sleep guys. It really can change you if you ignore it. (Just so everyone doesn’t worry, nowadays I get upwards of 9-10 hours of sleep a day and find that’s the sweet spot for me to feel rested and recharged. Not everyone works off of just 8 hours, though it does hamper my day to day sometimes because I slept too long. Frustration)

My dad called me controlling for begging them to reconsider their vote for Trump and being upset they wouldn’t, as well as being upset and hurt that people actively refused to use my name and asking why I was in more trouble for being upset with it than they were for refusing to show basic human respect of calling someone what they want to be called. Somehow, he wasn’t controlling for telling me when I came out as trans that I am not trans and that I just didn’t try hard or long enough at being a boy for 28 years, for deciding whether or not I was allowed to argue against people not using my name, and for telling me that I have to be okay with their vote for Trump because nobody should have an issue over politics, among tons of other examples. Turns out that I was only okay in the family if I never asked that my feelings be considered, or that I have emotions or needs at all. If I’m taking up any amount of space, that was unacceptable and had to be corrected. Also I had to consider everyone else’s feelings before I was allowed to even think about considering my own feelings, and even then I really shouldn’t cause I should just know not to have those.

But I believe you Dad, you would do anything for your kids. You would die for your kids. You just wouldn’t do anything that involves considering what they actually might want or need, only what you decide they actually want or need, and that’s frequently decided to be nothing when it was me in question.

I spent my whole life forcing myself to only have certain emotions, only act in certain ways, never take up space or have needs or wants, and always be ready to give more of myself up for people who needed it more, which was literally anybody but me. I shoved myself down and down and down to the point I struggle even now sometimes to tell what’s me and what’s a coping mechanism for surviving my family. If I wasn’t happy all the time, then I failed everyone and nobody would want me around. If I wasn’t entertaining at all times, then I was worthless and should be left on the curb with the other trash, but at least the trash might have value to a dumpster diver.

One day, I had my best friend visiting who I hadn’t seen in over a year at that point, and they had the whole day to hang out with me, planning a sleep over, a day just filled with fun and activities and games and food and it was gonna be great. About an hour into it, she gets a call and reveals that plans had to change now and she had to leave so she could go to work immediately. I sat there a moment, and I was just so upset. Without even being able to control it, tears started falling down my face as I was so upset that my best friend was taken after a year of not seeing her after only about an hour of seeing and hanging with her. All the activities we had planned were already set up, and I would have to think about that the whole time as I tore everything down. And worst of all, now I was ruining the last moments we’d get to hang for a while by being upset that she couldn’t stay longer. I kept apologizing to her because I needed to be happy to keep her around and I wasn’t able to, and kept trying to shove the emotions back down but then they just came back out even harder. Notably, this friend had never seen me cry in the over 20 years I’d known her. She was so confused on why I felt I had to be happy when I was clearly desperately upset, that it was okay to be upset. I told her she doesn’t have to be nice to me, I know I’m ruining everything, that I deserve her to leave me for ruining it all and not staying happy. She stopped the car, called her boss and said she wouldn’t be able to make it in because as she was getting ready her dog got hit by a car (she didn’t even have a dog), and let me sob until all the emotions were out. She told me I can be upset when I’m upset, she isn’t leaving me just because I had a reasonable emotion to the situation. I kept trying to explain that I knew she was just trying to be nice to me but it wasn’t necessary because I don’t deserve it for now not only ruining everything, but effectively taking money out of her pockets by her calling out of work. She smacked me once and told me I would listen very closely to her, not to whatever bullshit someone put in my head. She was my friend, my best friend. She is around me because she likes me, not because I’m happy all the time. She admitted she actually had found it creepy at times I didn’t have normal emotional reactions to things, but never said anything because she thought it was just how I was, but she could tell now something was deeply wrong with my thinking, do I truly think so low of her that she would abandon me because I got upset about not being able to spend as much time with each other as we had planned?

After all was said and done, we hugged, she reminded me I was allowed to have emotions other than just happiness, and told me that she loves me, but I need to go see a psychiatrist or therapist because something was seriously wrong. Turned out I had major depression and was masking myself so hard that it took years to finally start removing even some of the mask. Fast forward 10 years to now, and while my emotional regulation is still very off, and I likely will never be on the level of someone my actual age because I repressed my emotions so hard from the age of 5 to around 20 that I missed many critical years for learning emotional regulation, I’m slowly becoming me. I’m weird, I’m goofy, while I tend to be pretty happy I have actual emotions and get better every day at expressing them, even when my brain still gets convinced those emotions will lose me friends, I decide then I didn’t want the friends who only want me around when I’m happy and giving my everything to them as I do for anyone I’m friends with. But above it all, I’m discovering who me is every single day after spending decades trying to pretend I didn’t exist.

Even if I still wanted to be in the public eye with that fraction of money, I’d want to just open food banks people can go into and get the food they need, no questions asked. I’d want to buy up land to produce housing for the homeless, specifically focusing on providing for the homeless first. I’d want to be seen as a public good who can step in where the government refuses to, not enforce my desires across the world. If I opened a private sushi bar for myself with exotic, ethically sourced fish at that point, who’d give a shit, i’d have done so much good nobody could argue im being selfish doing that. Hell even if it wasn’t ethically sourced, I doubt I’d get much pushback when most of my money is going towards communities to get people struggling to struggle just a bit less.

One of the first times I smoked weed, I was smoking with a seasoned vet and she smoked a lot more with a lot higher tolerance than me. I made the critical error of going blow to blow with her as we passed the pipe back and forth. By the end, I was so completely blitzed it was hard to remember how legs worked or that I had them, but eventually, hunger overtook me enough to figure out my legs again and I very unsteadily got over to the microwave and tossed several hotdogs in. And then I sat and waited, watching. After about 10 minutes, my friend asked me what was taking so long with the hotdogs. I said they were just taking a bit for some reason. She got up to see what was up and realized I was very very high when she realized not only did I forget to actually put anything in the timer for the microwave to start cooking, but I forgot a plate too. She sent me back to the couch and I fell over the back of it after I got frustrated with these weird attachments under my torso that I forgot about again cause they felt like lead weights. When she got back with the hotdogs, she asked if I wanted to smoke another bowl. I was more than happy too after we ate some, so I definitely didn’t learn my lesson in the moment. Still don’t think I’d learn my lesson if offered more weed than I could actually handle, but that’s a lot more nowadays

I hate unsubscribing to people. I might not watch everything everyone I’m subscribed to puts out, hell I probably don’t watch 90% of my subscription feed because it’s too much and not always super relevant to my interests. But if I’m subscribed, it’s because I know I like the content and want to find it easily in the future too so I can watch more content, not necessarily to watch everything a creator puts out

Do you know of a place I can learn more? I’m not certain I’m going into IT, but I’m heavily considering it in the hopes of earning more money to be a bit more comfortable in life rather than living paycheck to paycheck in my current job, and if it’s important to know for a job in the field I’d love to know more

I thought Verso was an old Gustave and had no idea how he was actually connected to Renoir. Equally, the various motifs of painting I completely wrote off as a gameplay convention and never even vaguely considered it might be important, and I felt like I was wearing a dunce cap when I realized just how important they actually were. The problem with playing so many games is you just get used to accepting things are because they are, gameplay conventions just to ease a player into the world a bit unnaturally but simply. It was truly a treat realizing it wasn’t just a gameplay convention or a fun theming