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so while i was writing the book, i became violently suicidal.

this was mostly due to the fact that i had a very bad reaction to some meds and my brain stopped producing any serotonin. also i was in the last semester of grad school where it's actually illegal to feel anything but dread. so it wasn't going well.

somewhere in the fog of it i became aware i needed help. nobody was taking clients or my insurance. i didn't want to do inpatient care - it wasn't right for my needs. there's not really an "in between" stage between "inpatient" and "no care," but i was trying to do the right thing. i was trying to activate the chain of command that was my emergency plan. i knew i needed help now.

i used betterhelp.

i know, i know. i'm a straight-A student and so smart and so clever, how could i ever use something so blatantly bad. to be honest with you, i didn't feel particularly keen on it from the getgo - things that seem too good to be true usually are. also, if something online is free, the price is usually your privacy.

the thing is that there was kind of a global pandemic happening at the time and i worked 5 jobs alongside of being a fulltime student and also like writing a book on the side. it is a miracle that i even thought about getting help. i would love to tell you i had the mental wherewithal to like, process whether this was the right choice for me. mostly i was desperate. i was so suicidal that i was trying to find a reason to stay inside of fortune cookies. i was the kind of suicidal that looks like splatterpaint. i hadn't been that bad in an entire decade.

they took my data. i gave them it freely. somewhere out there, they have a dossier on me. on everything i survived. my story in little datapoints, scattergraphed beautifully.

the first woman told me that really i should be grateful, because (and this is a direct quote): "at least you're not anne frank." i said that i felt that statement was antisemitic, as anne frank's life and experience shouldn't be compared to like, a nonbinary lesbian in western massachusetts. the therapist said that i should try to use lucid dreaming to try to picture myself in an actually scary situation, like running from nazis.

i applied for another therapist. i was willing to accept the possibility that there was a bad apple in the bunch. the next therapist and i even laughed about how inappropriate that statement was. and then, in our next session: the new therapist said if i was struggling with body image issues, i should just work harder on my appearance. she spent 3 sessions in a row talking about how she was grieving, and made me memorize facts about her grandmother so "she can live on through my clients."

i am a three's-a-charm kind of person. okay, so what if the last person made me uncomfortable. i figured it was just a misunderstanding of priorities - she had felt she was sharing with me, i had felt like i had to take care of her. i applied for another therapist.

the last woman asked me to help her pray. she bowed her head. i stared at her, frozen, while she said: lord, i beg you: cure her. take the pain of being gay away from her.

i spent somewhere between 2.5 and 3 months on betterhelp. in that whole time, i was not getting the professional help i so desperately needed, even though i was fucking trying.

in the end, i survived this because i finally could get off the meds that were literally killing me. a request for a real therapist finally went through. i survived because my friends saved my life. because nick let me sob myself dry in his arms. because maddie took the razors out of my room when i asked them to. because grace slept over in my bed for like 3 weeks in a row since nobody trusted me not to hurt myself when i was alone. i survived because i got fucking lucky. because even when i was desperately suicidal, i was too old and too self-aware to take "you need to be prettier" as good advice.

the thing is that there's a 19 year old me who isn't like that. who would have heard "just think about how grateful you should be" and said - oh, i see. i would have assumed that is what it means to be in therapy: the same thing my abusers used to tell me. that i am just pretending and lazy. that i am ugly and unworthy.

betterhelp positioned itself to take advantage of an incredibly vulnerable community. it preys on desperation. it knows it is serving people who are not doing well mentally. it saw that there is a huge need for real, immediate, compassionate mental health care: and then it fucking takes your money and privacy.

i still get their ads on instagram. last night i watched as a woman in a pool pretends to talk to a different woman. they discuss her anxiety.

there's a 19 year old version of me, and she didn't survive this. she was too tired, and drowning. i almost fucking died. this thing almost fucking killed me.

in the ad, the woman playing the therapist takes a note on a clipboard and then nods once, sagely.

i have to admit it's a pretty scene. the steam and light coming off the pool water lands on the actresses. like this, it almost looks baptismal, holy.

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no one's around to help

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2003 was a great year for me

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Friends! Country folk! Science nerds! Lend me your ears (ok not literally, put those back on)!

You’ve probably seen my face at this point and know that if there’s one thing I will consistently spam you about, it’s the Mütter museum.

The Mütter houses some of my fave people in the world- permanently- and it fully changed my life.

Recently the Mütter removed all of its online content, citing ethics and respect as their reasoning. However, the current leadership of the college of physicians of Philadelphia (who owns the museum) have made it abundantly clear that they do not like the museum at all. It makes them uncomfortable.

But it’s deeper than that. The current CEO has been heard saying that her life “would be so much easier if only physicians were allowed in the museum”. She has said that she hates walking through the museum. She said that “infotainment” was not a good reason for video content by the museum.

The current executive director of the museum has caused 13 staff to leave since she was hired in September 2022. She has done this at other museums (the Michener, for one). She really is pushing an accreditation for the museum. This would require the Mütter to rid itself of all of its original cabinetry- yes, the cabinets dating from the turn of the 20th century- and make more than $1 million in changes. But here’s the kicker! The fellows of the college of physicians of Philadelphia have actually discussed this at length in the past, and decided that it was not worth the time and money to do, because the Mütter is NOT suffering from a lack of visitors. In fact, there are so many visitors that you need to have a timed ticket to go now.

Neither one of these folks knew that the museum had an audio tour, nor that they had accessible mornings for folks with sensory issues, and “please touch” tours with amazing replicas of the remains and objects within the museum, so that as many people as possible could access the knowledge at the museum.

These people hate the museum and cite accessibility and ethics as their reasoning for content removal. However, if you talk to anyone who has ever watched any videos produced by the Mütter, they’d tell ya (and have told me on insta, and written full ass dissertations on the topic in one case, wherein they compared Mütter content with the content of the British museum and found that the Mütter was the only one that came out equal in terms of content and quality) that every person and artefact were treated with the utmost respect in them.

This is not a museum that highlights and praises colonial practices. This is a museum that helps folks with different disabilities, conditions, and experiences feel seen and respected. It teaches us about the history of medicine, in all of its nitty gritty detail, and let’s us discuss the issues inherent within it. This is a museum that celebrates the birthdays of its residents, when they are known- or at least it did, before the new leadership took over.

And the leadership want to change that. They want to gut the museum because THEY don’t like it, and assume that everyone feels just like they do.

So many of you have shared and commented on my previous posts, and I’m hoping that that will translate into you signing this change.org petition my colleagues and I created.

Remember with change.org that you have to click through the email they send you to confirm the signature. You do NOT need to donate, and in fact, please don’t. We don’t want your money. We want to show the board of trustees and the leadership of the museum that the public cares for the place they want to destroy.

For more info (and so you don’t just take my word for it), see https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-mutter-museum-online-exhibits-taken-down-why/

Thank you for listening to me yell from my soapbox. Please share this widely, and please sign.

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The terrible Gollum game is only the beginning, folks. The Hobbit enters the US public domain in just a little less than ten years, so the current rights-holders are going to be trying to squeeze every last bit of profit they can out of the little fucker before he becomes free to use. You have no idea what's coming.

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you solved my wet riddle ‼️

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maybe yes I’m ugly and I’m not particularly talented and I’m not doing my best and I don’t know anything about myself and I’m still learning names for my feelings

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Attentive bread

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Six Pallas's cat kittens born in Novosibirsk zoo from a cat named Mia

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West Vancouver, British Columbia

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can someone check on the second guy