@Heather 👻 My therapist spent years trying to resolve my trauma at the root of my negative self image through talking about it and then interrogating me about my emotions.
Two problems:
I don’t need trauma to hate myself. Neurological disregulation does it all by itself.
I am surprised they didn't start you on Methylphenidate first, as Elvanse is usually a second-line treatment. Do let us know how you're getting on with it. I'm using far fewer energy drinks than pre-treatment so I think it's working.
@Natasha_Jay The world (and eventually the USA) will be a better place if Europe, China, and the rest of our trading partners just get on with creating a world economy that leaves the USA on the sidelines.
Went out for dinner with Zoe’s parents. Shut down at the end as I tend to do.
Then had to walk back home through the city centre which was a riot of overstimulation and horrific. Just needed to get away so I walked really fast.
Every time I did this before I was like, “what the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I like this?” And I’d get angry with myself and that would often devolve into an argument.
That sounds like the best thing of your recent diagnosis, learning to accept you are what you are. I’ve never thought WHY I am like who I am, just that I am. And yes I relate to the shutting down…
I went with NHS but am now on complaint#2. First assessment was with a yr 1 specialist GP in training, no supervisor, claimed I had the inattentive bits but no hyperactive so said it wasn't ADHD. Complained, got "second opinion" with consultant who said he thought I had ASD and refused to even discuss ADHD without school reports.
... Yup. I'm pretty sure a care plan shouldn't be "Akkikins will come back with school reports. I refuse to see her until she produces school reports. I've referred her for ASD assessment" ASD questionnaires came back very unlikely to point not put on waiting list (AQ50 6/50, cambs behavioural empathy score of 69/80) so... Guess I was right? But refusal to assess me properly. Yay.
Problem with streaming series is they don’t have enough material to fill the seasons they’re given so instead of filler episodes we’re moving to entire filler seasons.
It’s just boring. It’s all boring.
And with years between seasons, nobody can remember what is actually supposed to be happening.
Let’s get back to TV where they get the fuck on with it.
@m0rpk Then we have the opposite end of the spectrum, with the last Matrix film looking like it had been developed and pitched as a series but ended up as a single film.
god I'm so confused with it. No idea what's happening. It's very pretty; the costumes are nice and the twinks are cute. This sums up the reasons I'm still watching.
@anandamide It’s very simple. There are some acolytes and I’ve forgotten most of their names but they did some stuff and now they must go to this other city except, no, wait, they’re going to a slightly different city. Just meeting up with the baddie from the last season because we do coffee now. It’s a thing. Ooh, look at the one in red walking in an evil way! PSYCH! We’re actually going to a different city! Oh no, they stole the McGuffins of power!
I was always confused by the choice, given that platforms 9 and 10 were out in the shed to the side with two tracks between them (although it looks like they've renumbered 11 as 10 and there are only two tracks there now). First time I saw the 9 3/4 exhibit it didn't have a queue of people. I was mildly amused by it, even if it was in completely the wrong place.
@David Hough They lost one of the platforms in the suburban station, yes. It went as part of the Thameslink Programme because the paths into suburban are the same ones needed to access the tunnel into the Thameslink core.
@David Hough Railing’s stupid invention would have sort of worked had they re-numbered after opening platform 0 because then 9 and 10 (present 8 and 9) would have had what is now the floor under the Parcel Yard pub between them.
@David Hough The lesson in all this is that if you’re gonna be a massive transphobe, you need to make damn sure the shit about trains in your books is watertight because WE WILL KNOW.
Bordeaux is a wine that definitely needs aging. If you'd told me that you were drinking 5 year old Bordeaux in the bath I would have worried about you.
In my wine classes, I was taught that for drinking in the bath (usually a shared bath) a red sparkling wine is a good choice (my preference is a quality Lambrusco).
@Alexa Devreux-Swift So look, I emptied the bin because it wasn't the dishwasher. Now I had to put my keys back and take my shoes off and return the bin and put a liner in it and throw away some chicken bones and take my teabag out of my mug and put milk in and close the fridge and drink the tea and then maybe I can stare at the dishwasher a bit more.
Yes. That is how I think. No. I did not know it wasn't normal.
The more I come to terms with the pervasiveness of the ADHD I’ve been in denial about for so long, the more it utterly blows my mind how *alien* the way neurotypicals see the world is.
Honestly, it’s just pervasive. Attitudes to snacking. The idea that unloading the dishwasher doesn’t have to be soul destroying. That listening to someone talking slowly doesn’t have to be enraging. That holding on to transient thoughts is possible. That you can stop the music. That you can just DO something even if it’s not urgent or interesting. That emotions aren’t zero or a million decibels. That hyperfocus isn’t a thing for them. That it’s not a constant fight against self loathing for not doing the thing. That they can just switch off. That telling someone that something that’s bothering them isn’t that important is actually supposed to help rather than annoy. That you don’t have to constantly seek approval that you’ll never get. That burnout doesn’t have to be a sword of Damocles.
@llwynog what, you mean people don't battle almost every day at work forcing themselves to do stuff and beating themselves up for all the stuff they didn't manage? That they're not expecting to be fired for all the work that didn't happen, and dreading the call that never comes?
Also in retrospective it shows that a lot of work isn't actually important bc no-one notices when you don't do it. Although I am very good at doing other things that get some attention so that helps.
A less charitable definition is "a dev on a team with Big Ideas, that does not want to reach an agreement with their co-workers, but instead asserts their will unilaterally".
Why does all the personal funding require current enrollment in school? Why are all the internships only for students? Why do those certain jobs only hire recent graduates?
Age discrimination for exploitative employment of children under thirty
100% bet that original poster had childhood emotional neglect and/or serious self esteem issues so has no idea whats coming or going (at least from my personal experience of all that)
Severance: I want to love it, but I can't help thinking they're doing the Lost and BSG(2004) thing of "jerk the viewer around because we didn't actually think beyond the elevator pitch" thing.
similar on my trip today if I didn't know the number already, I'm not sure I would be able to pick it out - also on trains today, and the accent of the announcer on Northern means "see" and "say" sound exactly the same and it's oddly jarring.
Argh slow speech. My mind wanders between each word.
In discussion with friend who prefers instructional videos: yes sometimes you need to watch what to do, but most of the time gimme the text. It should be an alternative for many (most?) things.
@ajlanes there'll be a time when Youtube Longs can be made to loop like YouTube Shorts, and people will be vying to make videos where it's hard to tell that it's even happened.
@StrangeNoises @ajlanes How about having a coherent list of error codes and what does they mean instead of heaps of barely useful videos, infuriating ms support pages and quora paywalled articles or a frigging AI?
you have managed to perfectly convey this feeling in this post. kudos.
If it helps: If the video has a transcript (next to the description) you can search that with ctrl f. But it is still a video, the least dense form of this kind of information.
The high-speed rail link between Porto and Vigo, in Spain, will be completed in 2032, giving the North of Portugal and Galicia “a unique geostrategic position”, according to the Minister of Infrastructure.
Well now I'm going to have to reconsider the old advice for what to do if life gives me lemons. Though to be honest, I'd always suspected that I'd make limoncello anyway.
Hey did you know that Iberian rail gauge is what it is because Portugal used 5 Portuguese feet for their gauge and Spain 6 Castilian feet for their gauge and the are so damn close that splitting the difference wouldn’t have a detrimental affect on rolling stock for either. And so its officially 1668mm!
All these neoliberal politicians know what their oligarch masters want, and it's been agreed informally, behind the scenes, that Farage will take the reigns in the UK after this shambles of a Labour government
This is from a thread I posted on Bluesky last night. I usually keep my transposting there, but it's been suggested that I need to publish it long form.
So here it is.
Storytime.
Once upon a time there was a little girl called Sarah. This would have come as a surprise to her parents because they thought she was a little boy called something else. Sarah herself also didn’t know she was called Sarah because she hadn’t yet met the friend who suggested it to her.
But what’s in a name? Point being, here she was.
Except for some reason everyone told her that she was a boy, and when naked she kinda looked like one. Sarah found this quite confusing and also didn’t understand why the other kids who looked like her were so bloody horrible to her.
But again, that didn’t matter so much, because there were plenty of girls to play with and Sarah got on with them quite well.
One day Sarah was watching TV with her parents and a comedy sketch revealed the existence of, “women who used to be men”.
Sarah asked
... show more
This is from a thread I posted on Bluesky last night. I usually keep my transposting there, but it's been suggested that I need to publish it long form.
So here it is.
Storytime.
Once upon a time there was a little girl called Sarah. This would have come as a surprise to her parents because they thought she was a little boy called something else. Sarah herself also didn’t know she was called Sarah because she hadn’t yet met the friend who suggested it to her.
But what’s in a name? Point being, here she was.
Except for some reason everyone told her that she was a boy, and when naked she kinda looked like one. Sarah found this quite confusing and also didn’t understand why the other kids who looked like her were so bloody horrible to her.
But again, that didn’t matter so much, because there were plenty of girls to play with and Sarah got on with them quite well.
One day Sarah was watching TV with her parents and a comedy sketch revealed the existence of, “women who used to be men”.
Sarah asked her mother what that was about, and her mother explained that there was something called a “sex change operation”. Young Sarah noted two things:
This was a real thing
Her parents thought it was a very very bad thing.
As Sarah grew a bit older, she would notice other things from popular culture. A man had accidentally discovered how to permanently remove facial and body hair with lasers. There were people called transsexuals. There were men who liked dressing up as women.
All these things seemed important.
But they were also scary, and also clearly not the sort of things that her parents or anyone in their circle would approve of if they knew that Sarah was thinking about them.
One day Sarah was playing dress up with her friend, Kirsty. She was about 7. Their mums saw Sarah in a dress and laughed hysterically. Sarah was humiliated.
It slowly got harder and harder for Sarah to play with her friends. It was becoming clear that whilst this was considered cute when Sarah was 4, or 5, or even 8, it was starting to get a bit much, but the boys were just dreadful. Sarah got on ok with a couple of them, but mostly she just played with her computer.
Her parents, especially her father, thought she was doing this too much. Sarah was terrified of her father, who bullied her, and bullied her mother.
When Sarah was 9, her parents divorced. They were both having affairs. She carried on living with her mum, and her little brother, and the two siblings did not get on. Their mum had to work a lot of hours to make ends meet. Sarah’s old friends weren’t much interested in her any more; they were more interested in the boys that Sarah was supposed to have stuff in common with.
Sarah spent more and more time alone learning to use her computer. She got really quite good at it. Her mum worked evenings in a pub near a local Catholic private school. The teachers drank there.
Her mum would tell the teachers about her kid, who was “really good with a computer”. Eventually this interested them enough that they wanted to meet this kid.
Apparently Sarah made a good impression on them, because they offered her a scholarship. At 11, Sarah went off on a full scholarship as a day pupil to this Catholic boarding school. It had a uniform. Different for boys and girls. Sarah had to wear the boys’ uniform.
Sarah couldn’t make friends with the girls and the boys bullied her, but Sarah’s teachers were fond of her. She did well academically, even if she got in a lot of fights.
It was clear to Sarah though that her teachers and the priests who ran the school thought that people who had the feelings that Sarah had, the ones she didn’t tell people about, were going to hell.
Sarah started to go through puberty. She felt extremely alone. She carried on doing well academically, but the light started to go out of her eyes. When Sarah looks at old photographs now, from that time and later, the eyes just look dead.
And then Sarah’s body started doing … things.
And the girls that Sarah desperately wanted friendship with, she now wanted other things from them as well.
She wanted physical intimacy, but more than that, she wanted to be one of them.
And she couldn’t tell anybody.
And it hurt.
A lot.
There were TV programmes that occasionally featured “transsexuals”. These people were all portrayed as pitiful parodies of women. They all seemed sad and the things the programmes showed … well Sarah didn’t see herself in them.
Sarah was 15. Sarah didn’t know how full of shit the media was. Yet.
Because she wasn’t like the transsexuals she saw on TV, and because she was going through puberty and occasionally had blood in her testosterone stream, Sarah assumed that this must be some sort of transvestic fetish that she had. She didn’t know that when people do weird sex things, they don’t actually occupy their every other waking moment either, like when they’re brushing their teeth, or walking the dog, or doing their homework.
Sarah was good at maths and sciences, but she could be a bit slow on the uptake in other ways. If Sarah had thought about it more, she would have realised that a person’s core identity will manifest throughout their personality and sexuality is only one part of that, but she was operating in a limited information environment, and anyway, her sexuality was disgusting and she was going to hell for it. Everybody said.
And her eyes were lifeless.
And she had nobody to talk to about this. It didn’t even matter that they would hurt her if they found out.
It mattered more that she was so utterly ashamed that if anyone found out, she would have to die. Nobody would want her. Not even her own mother.
Sarah was by now a shell of a human. She lived for her special interests and not much else.
And there was no light in her eyes.
Occasionally, when she knew that she wouldn’t get caught, she would borrow a bra or something. Sometimes this gave her a sexual thrill. This just confirmed that this was a fetish. The whole “I’m not even a person any more if I’m not a girl” stuff was obviously irrelevant background noise.
Sarah got the grades to go to Cambridge and study computer science. Away from the priests, and exposed to new ideas, she started to realise that a lot of what she’d been told was bullshit. Especially the hell stuff. Especially the stuff about how LGBT people were bad people.
But she was still very ashamed. That stuff runs deep.
And her eyes were still dead.
During her time at university, Sarah, who had never actually had any kind of intimate relationship because she was a hollowed out shell of a human being, met Sylvia. They became friends.
Sylvia was also studying computer science but in the year below. Sylvia’s mother was profoundly emotionally abusive and she didn’t want to go back to her during the university holidays.
When Sarah graduated and started working, Sylvia got a summer job at the microprocessor company Sarah was working at. Since they really only knew each other over the summer; everyone else had got jobs elsewhere one gone home, they spent a lot of time together.
And then one day they ended up in bed together.
Sarah wanted to tell Sylvia the thing, but she was ashamed. So ashamed.
Eventually, Sarah and Sylvia ended up engaged. Sarah couldn’t marry Sylvia without letting her know. It wouldn’t be fair.
But she was utterly fucking terrified. Sarah was 26 years old by then and the company she worked for had floated on the stock exchange and made her wealthy. She paid off her mum’s mortgage and thought about looking for a house with Sylvia.
But she had to tell her this one, catastrophic, world-ending thing. She didn’t know how.
She told her she felt better in a dress sometimes. Felt better if she painted her nails sometimes. God, it was terrifying!
The world didn’t end.
The. World. Didn’t. End.
THE WORLD DIDN’T END
Sylvia was not disgusted. Sylvia, it seemed, was a little bit bisexual.
The dam started to crack. Sarah grew her hair out. Told a few of their friends. Some of them actually thought it was cool and fun.
One of them told her she looked like a Sarah.
Sarah’s friends started calling her Sarah in private.
Even if her eyes still had no light in them.
Sarah reached 30. She’d told people the thing. She wasn’t even really hiding it any more.
But she still remembered the pathetic transsexuals she’d seen on TV.
And her hair was starting to thin on top. There didn't seem to be much time left to do what she secretly knew she needed to do.
Sarah’s friends told her she had amazing eyes. Particularly her female friends. That there was something that triggered profound emotions with her eyes.
This is because if you looked into Sarah’s eyes, they were dead. All that was in them was pain. Deep, endless pain.
She had read some stuff, in secret, when nobody was looking, and then less secretly, about transgender people.
Some of them took oestrogen apparently.
Sarah didn’t understand why. It seemed controversial. She thought being transsexual was about an operation. Nothing more.
And then one day, just after her 32nd birthday, when she was presenting as a woman half the time in public anyway, but increasingly realising her body wasn’t going to keep letter her do it, Sarah got drunk, broke down in tears, and said, “I have gender dysphoria and I need a sex change”.
And over the next months, Sarah saw doctors. She saw several. Most were useless. Her last hope was a private doctor called Dr Curtis. Obviously though he would tell her that she wasn’t actually like the people on TV, and therefore he couldn’t help, and if he said that, there was nowhere left to go, and no possibility of further existence.
He didn’t say that. He said that he thought Sarah was a very straightforward case of transsexualism.
And a few months later he gave her an oestrogen prescription.
Sarah started to take the pills, and over the next few months, for the first time since she was a little girl, the light came back on in Sarah’s eyes.
The light is still on. It’s been back for 19 years now.
Epilogue: the media lied. They picked people carefully. They edited carefully. They utterly misrepresented these trans women because their audience wanted titillation, not education.
Well, most of them.
Sarah met other trans women after that. Lots of them. They were not sad parodies. They were amazing strong women who loved their lives and their womanhood. They are the best of us.
The media lied about them, and who they are. It still does.
And it was always about the oestrogen. The media lied about that too.
Or rather they simply did not get it, because nobody ever thought to ask the actual women taking it.
If by some chance you read this, and you see yourself in it, and you’re crying, or you want to but can’t (that’s testosterone doing that to you, by the way), know this:
Sarah, out there somewhere on the internets and posting about, I don't know, just existing, helped create the environment that allowed Julia (hi! Third-person narrative is hard) to exist/instantiate.
Thanks for that! My youngest daughter said one of the OWL (Our Whole Lives sex-ed program of our UU church) was the day they got to meet and interview a trans woman. Although I am cisgender I saw a bit of myself in your account in regards to a few things. I was bullied in school. Quit grade 9 because of it (I would return after a move and go on to graduate). I also developed a reputation as the kid who knows computers in our small town. My dad was not impressed and often said I was wasting my time. Later he did come around on that score when he saw it was indeed a real job. Transgender is unfortunately under attack by the Trump administration here. The community needs all the support it can get. Your post and others like it are important.
Our stories aren’t exactly the same, but they sure do rhyme. Thank you for giving me a good cry, because little Sophie was also there all along, even before she knew it was possible to not be the person everyone told her she was and be herself instead. 💜
I never realized (or connected enough to recall) that you and (redacting brother's name for privacy) didn't get on when you were younger. Seemed to agree well enough as adults that one Christmas I was visiting...
Heather 👻
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Heather 👻 • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •@Heather 👻 My therapist spent years trying to resolve my trauma at the root of my negative self image through talking about it and then interrogating me about my emotions.
Two problems:
Heather 👻
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Heather 👻 • •@Heather 👻 Sure. I've got shit tonnes.
But I'd likely still think I was an arsehole without it.
corruptian
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to corruptian • •corruptian
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I think there are healthy and unhealthy sources of dopamine, varied in degree and with who you are.
Heroin is mostly-bad but part-good, Reddit is all-bad.
Sarah Brown
in reply to corruptian • •