I mean, I’m anti-meds for treating exogenic issues when something can be done for those exogenic issues.

If I’m sitting at home with the heater on and I start feeling warm and flushed, I wouldn’t take an ibuprofen (as an anti-pyretic) to bring my temperature down, I’ll turn the heater off.

It’s the same for mental health, if the sole source of the stress/sorrow is external, medication is nothing more than a bandaid, which is better than nothing if the exogenic influence is outside your individual control (which it often is)… But we are at a point where the majority of people with mental health issues are experiencing a level of exogenic influence and there are enough of us that if we organised we could change the factors that are causing or worsening our mental health symptoms.

So it bears talking about, is medication always appropriate?

Medication is important, especially for endogenic conditions, and medication is life saving. But if you have exogenic depression and the meds aren’t working, the new prescription is protest.

This is what is breaking my mental health.

Life is not guaranteed to be good, nature is cruel and has no rhyme or reason. People die and suffer in horrific ways every day because of nature.

Why the fuck are we adding to that cruelty!?

The chaos of the natural order of the universe sucks and you’ve got to learn to cope with that. But I’ve always found that side of life easy to accept because it is so inevitably universally unavailable.

I was born with a genetic illness, it causes lifelong disability due to structural deformity, but can also just randomly cause fatal aneurysms in young people. That’s nature, that sucks, but hey, what are you going to do? Figure out how to do what you need to do to live and live it.

But then I’m born into a country with no disability discrimination laws, and no right to access laws. Fortunately we had public healthcare and public disability services, and public welfare services, and when I was younger a disability act was finally brought in (though it’s often just lip service)

Growing up I felt safe and secure knowing I had a good social support system…but the public disability services shut down and was replaced by an insurance model, the public healthcare has been functionally split to a semi public copay system and a private paid system, and the welfare pension is so far below the poverty line that people on a disability pension don’t earn enough money to meet the eligibility for public housing.

(yes, You can be too poor, for public/social housing.)

And it’s one thing for law and legislation to lag behind the needs of the people, it’s another thing altogether when an individual or small group of individuals in power systematically impose laws to remove the support and resources you used to have, for barely no more reason than “they want to”.

I can’t help but feel that a significant portion of my suffering is the result of the few people in the local conservative government that shut down the public disability service providers because it was “costing too much” … Even though the insurance model they replaced it with costs the government more and supports less people than the previous system, and supports them less effectively.

And how do you live with that?

Like it’s one thing for nature to have cursed me to suffer, but a human being heard my story, and countless stories like mine, and still said “nah, fuck em” when it came to vote.

We are living with psychopaths and sociopaths in complete control over our lives. The suffering is happening for a reason, and the reason is that those who are causing the suffering are enjoying the situation (because it gives them money, power, influence, or straight up sadism)

How the fuck do you reconcile that and “learn to sit with your emotions” in one CBT session and in the very next session my therapist is going to teach me about “enforcing my boundaries”… How do I enforce my personal boundary to get the homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic and ableist government to stop abusing me? Oh, I don’t, I sit with that emotion.

I can’t afford the pills they recommend.

I’m on board!

I’m a big fan of the word cunt in all of its current uses it’s my preferred slang term for my own, though it’s rare to find someone who’s not taken aback by that in the bedroom.

Would it be a grammatically consistent pronoun? “oh, someone left cunt wallet, I hope cunt come get it” or do we need a cunt/cunter situation? So cunt can collect cunter wallet.

The way the OP phrases it rules out trans men who have vaginas, trans women who have vaginas, and a bunch of cis women who’ve had certain pelvic traumas or cancers and therefore don’t have vaginas.

What he’s trying to say is “if you were born with a vagina and you align with it” which is actually still funny because I was born with my vagina, I like my vagina, I’ll be happily keeping it even after all my surgeries…but if this OP saw my face he would put me in the “trans man” bucket because they lack nuance around identity.

You need to get big into two tone ska, then the fedora is socially acceptable again.

partners they could hypothetically reproduce with

“fertile women”

“women capable of pregnancy”

Outdated, slight red flag option: “gynephile”

Or you could even try “I find women attractive and would love to have kids with the woman I love one day”

There, language isn’t that hard.

I love that half of these are fully gender neutral terms of endearment in Australia 😂

This is super helpful! The legend in question is my great grand aunt (that term is so much less of a mouthful!)

Most of the people I call “Aunty” are my cousins, and the people I call “Cousin” appear to be my 1st cousin once removed, 1st cousin twice removed, and 2nd cousins once removed. (we’ve definitely been using “removed” wrong in my family, we would say “removed” for the lateral move across the tree, not the vertical parent child line. Eg I would say “she’s my 2nd cousin” but I’d mean 1st cousin once removed, or I’d say “he’s my cousin twice removed” but what I’d mean is, he’s my 3rd cousin)

We’re definitely still going to stick with our age based language in our family. No point getting clinical when the language we use is about the dynamics we hold. if you’re 20+ years older you’re my aunty/uncle, if you’re the same age you’re a cousin, if you’re younger than me you’re my nibbling. It’s all vibes based relationship terminology.

I can see how it’s directly linked to “people are out there shooting CEOs for this, you’re next” is threatening, but I dont see how the language of the threat implies that the person saying the threat has any intention to also be the shooter, and not just that they wish and believe that a shooter is out there with this CEO on their hit list.

This, if anything it might clarify a few confusing exchanges we’ve had in the past, and it will certainly help me be a better friend in the the future.

If I already know you, I know you, I’m choosing to be friends with you because of how you treat me and how you treat others when we hang out together. If I had any problems with that, I wouldn’t be friends long enough to hear you tell me about your NPD diagnosis.

Now that said, I’ve had friends tell me about a diagnosis and it shouldn’t change anything, but now that the diagnosis is out in the open they want it to change things and I can’t offer that to the friendship, such as compromising on my own boundaries (eg: I had a friend who after explaining their condition asked me to provide tone indicators for everything I say, but I have alexithymia so that was really difficult for me to do and I couldn’t adjust my behaviour to meet the new expectations of the friendship, so we faded out of each other’s lives, they told people I stopped being friends with them because of their anxiety disorder… No it’s because I couldn’t meet the changed expectations of the friendship, describing my emotions every minute is hard for me and I choose not to be friends with people who require me to do that for their comfort)

“you people are next” doesn’t sound direct to me because “next” for what? Next for a random vigilante to shoot, next to die in general, next to face bad PR?

My interpretation also leaves no room to imply I’ll be the one actioning whatever the “next” thing is. I’d use “you’re next” in the same use case as “karma will get you” or “the universe will balance out your luck” it’s more of a cosmic wish than a rise to action.

It’s not just about the money, seeing the UHC letter in your mailbox when you are not expecting it will bring back flashes of that night and that trauma.

It’s like knocking on the door of a veteran at random intervals throughout the year too show them pictures of the war. It’s dehumanising.

She was my grandmother’s aunt so I think that makes her my great great aunt, because my great aunt is my grandma’s sister. I think that’s how it works? There are several 25+ year age gaps between siblings in our family so everyone is “aunty, uncle, cousin” based on age not relationship, my dad is called “uncle” even by me at family events.

My grandmother’s aunt fled to Australia after half her family died of dysentery. It was a very sad story for a very long time in the family and the town. Her husband moved the whole family across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada away from her immediate relatives in England because of a good job and land prospects. But their household was stricken with a bloody flux a few months later and sadly only the women survived, alone in a foreign country with nothing. It was just a sad and dark part of our family history growing up, we were taught to respect our great great aunt because she’d “been through a lot and faced it bravely” with watching her family die. As a teenager I could tell there was more going on by the way the older adults glanced at each other, but never knew what.

I was 30 when mum told me that my great great uncle was an abusive pick who moved his wife overseas to isolate her so he could get away with more, and it wasn’t a coincidence that he and his “apple that never fell off the tree” son both shit themselves to death after eating a family dinner, but his wife was fine.

You also couldn’t get a divorce for incompatible differences, you had to prove your husband was at fault for some kind of marital crime like adultery or physical abuse. He could leave you with a single penny to your name, lock you out of your shared bank account, and go live with his mistress in another state, but if you couldn’t prove he’d put his dick in her, no divorce for you. Which means you can’t re-marry someone who will let you have access to a bank account, and depending on the exact year you couldn’t even travel alone to chase him down.

Wait, what’s the internet definition of the word?

I thought hussy was a synonym for “loose woman”

What does it mean now days?

Edit: oh, it’s not that hussy has a different definition on the internet, it’s that it looks like “bussy” if you’re not looking closely?

Which I never read correctly anyway because I see it written like that and in my head I’m saying “bah see” not “buo see”

The “Bail out Bed” was a flawed idea because no one wants to get up and relocate in the middle of the night and interrupt their sleep cycles.

He snores, he always snores, tonight won’t be any different, so why don’t I just start in the bail out bed so once I fall asleep I stay asleep and the human freight train I shacked up with doesn’t wake me up.

He finally got a Cpap last year for his obstructive sleep apnoea.

but we’d slept in separate beds for 5 years, and I was used to sleeping alone and having full control over my temperature and I’m a fidgety sleeper, so we couldn’t get used to sharing a bed again.

I think both of us being well rested and refreshed each day is more important to the health of our relationship than sharing a bed. If we’re not fatigued, headachey and cranky, we can spend quality time together outside of bed.

This comment thread now feels uniquely American.

I have never heard those songs, in the 90s at school and scout camps in Australia we would sing Ging Gang Goolie, Alice the Camel, and Ain’t no Flies.

Also for some reason we would chant about how ugly and unlovable we are and resign ourselves to eating worms… Children’s songs are so unhinged.

Super old? 2016?

Brisbane? Their metro is literally a bus 😂 the council are so proud of it too.

Our public transport in Vic leaves much to be desired but at least we have a well developed tram system that reduces the number of tyres in the collective fleet.

We did just outlaw e-scooters which was necessary because the infrastructure and community education wasn’t there and it was dangerous. But long term e-scooters do serve a place in a less car reliant community. Bike infrastructure investment is decades behind what it needs to be.

Much like everywhere, the oversized nature of “yank tanks” seems to be a large factor in every single thing wrong with cars and car infrastructure these days.

Smaller, lighter cars don’t wear through their tyres as fast 🤷