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there are a lot of subtle things that i didnt like in the messaging of the barbie movie but i think the main one that stuck with me was that weird barbie was right and helpful the whole time and everyone acknowledges that at the end but no one ever makes any real steps to like. make up for how they treated her. she's just supposed to be this helpful guide who never gets any resolution herself despite being visibly hurt by being ostracized and insulted.

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these people all have the same bmi. you'll notice that they're all either athletes or published their weight loss journeys online, because other people don't announce their height and weight, so if you google it, it will be bullshit.

the bmi of all four of these people is 31, which would classify them as obese.

if you think bmi is a useful or well designed metric, you're exhibiting a room temperature iq

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this little freak keeps sneaking into my garden and rubbing himself all over my flowers??Hello?????

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“Thin brows are back in” “skinny jeans are back” “wolfcuts are out” “this style of eyeshadow is soo trendy right now” “big asses are out, slim figures are in”

Hey do you guys ever make your own decisions or form your own ideas on how you would personally like to look that’s not based around what’s currently being sold to you. Is that not possible

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Pasteups in NYC denouncing Facebook for collaboration with Nebraska police to sentence a teenage girl to 90 days in jail for using using the abortion pill to terminate her pregnancy.

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hi! What is peer respite?

hi anon! I love talking about peer respite :D

Peer respite is a community-based alternative to psych wards. They offer 24/7 short term crisis stabilization-usually for around a week to 2 weeks. Unlike psych wards, they are completely voluntary and all the staff are people with experience with mental health/extreme states/being in the mental health system. Staff are extensively trained in peer support and mental health first aid, and oftentimes staff members will have other degrees in mental health or healthcare related fields. Usually, peer respite is in a house and it is a homelike environment where you can leave at any time, can have visitors, can have your phone, and can bring comfort items and preferred activities. At peer respites, there are no restraints used, no strip searches, and no solitary confinement.

Each peer respite is a little different, but I can tell you about one that my friend works at who is a social worker with lived experience of psychosis! When people decide to come to the peer respite, they usually make a plan for how they want their stay there to look like. Peer support workers will lead optional life skills/coping skills groups throughout the week, as well as other group activities for anyone who wants to participate. There is self-advocacy education, crisis planning options, and art wellness activities. Everyone is assigned a personal support worker who they can go to any time they need a check in or one-on-one support. Staff and guests work together to cook meals, and the entire stay is free of cost.

Since peer respite is an alternative to the psychiatric systems, most peer respites do not provide traditional therapy or psychiatric medications. Most peer respites will work with you to set up outpatient therapy services if you're interested, and I know a lot of people who continue to see the outpatient providers that they already have throughout their stay at peer respite.

A lot of people who go to peer respite have really positive experiences, and there's been several studies done looking at the outcome of crisis stays at peer respite. A lot of people speak positively about the homelike environment, being able to get emotional and crisis support without the fear of institutionalization, and being able to have autonomy about what your days look like, what choices you make, and what healing looks like to you. Some people stay at peer respite and are still able to go to school or work for the week while knowing that they have a safer environment to go back to.

Peer respite is not a perfect solution for everyone's experience of crisis. If you need a longer term stay, are looking for immediate clinical therapy, are someone who is searching for immediate medication support, or who needs immediate physical medical care--peer respite might not be able to meet your needs. Each peer respite house is going to be different, have different staff and visitors, and different policies, and some people might just not feel comfortable in a particular peer respite house. It's shitty and I hope this changes, but some peer respite houses are inaccessible, will have policies around drug use that might prevent people from staying, or have policies that prevent people who are homeless from staying. So, peer respite definitely isn't a perfect solution or something that can meet everyone's crisis needs, but is a really cool option that I hope continues to become available in more states.

Here's a directory with links to peer respites in the US, and here's research done about peer respite!

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because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.

you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.

you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.

don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.

if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.

you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:

how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!

aren't you happy yet?

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Today I learned that having deep conversations with a new friend while walking home together in the middle of the night doesn't require alcohol. The magic of that moment is created when the right people meet in the right place at the right time, regardless of whether these people are drunk.

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The absolute best is an actual sphere map you can hold in your hand. I had one as a kid and it made me realize how small Europe is and how big the Pacific is - both things you don't realize on the standard map.

If there was so much discourse over continents I CAN'T WAIT for you to find out about the south-up map

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Y'know I didn't read the username before writing the ID and it really makes more sense now. The life described there is only ideal if you are a straight white able-bodied cis man in a wealthy western country. Any other identity would've made it way harder to do any of that. And unless this is satire (which it probably is tbh) the only person who I can imagine writing that post is a weed-smoking Christian.

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[ID: A screenshot of a text post by user "LORD strike me down" (@godisgood420) that says: "The ideal life is being born in 1947 being age 20 in 1967 to fuck in a field and take LSD and then buy a house for $5000 after walk into a bank to get a job and impress them with your third grade reading level and then die before 2001 with your well hedged investment portfolio." End ID]

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its midnight here so ill reiterate for myself that you can literally think whatever you want and it will have no tangible effect anywhere outside of your own head. you can hold your baby, think about throwing her against the wall, and your baby will still be alive. you can think about heinous sex crimes around your friends and it literally won't ever matter. many thoughts head at capacity

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And this applies to things other than neurodivergence too. When I was depressed, I thought that non-depressed people were happy all the time, unless they had a specific reason to be unhappy. I didn't think I could ever be like that, so I figured that I would just always be depressed.

Eventually, with meds, therapy, and time, I got better. But now, even though I'm not depressed, I'm not happy all the time. Because that's just not achievable for anyone. Everyone has days where they just don't feel like doing anything, everyone feels sad sometimes, everyone has trouble sleeping sometimes. (Not that that's all depression is - they're just feelings that were also symptoms of depression for me.) And especially when we live within exploitative systems, sometimes we can be perfectly healthy but still feel like shit.

But, a key difference is how often those bad days come. How much they impact your life. Having a bad day every now and then is expected, but having a bad day on most days is a sign of something being off. Which is also why op isn't saying that neurodivergent people don't face any extra issues: neurotypical people just aren't perfect either, and the 100% happy and productive person who never gets tired or overwhelmed does not exist.

I guess what I'm saying is life just sucks sometimes. And that's okay! Not to say that we shouldn't work towards fixing the world, but rather that it's okay that things aren't always great for us. We're not broken just because we're not happy and productive 100% of the time. Nobody is happy and productive 100% of the time. Not even the most neurotypical person with the best mental health in the world. So why in the world do so many of us beat ourselves up for not living up to that standard? Why the hell do businesses expect their employees to be better than humanly possible?

it does more harm than good to prop up the myth of the ‘neurotypical’ who completes tasks cheerfully with no issues. this person is a capitalist fantasy. the more you define yourself in comparison to this myth the more you justify social structures staying the same with minor accommodations to the ‘exceptions’ and the continued pathologizing of discomfort under hostile conditions

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And this includes trans women

A woman in her natural state of body (that is with no make-up, without shaving, etc) is not masculine.

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too many people see evolution as just animals becoming better animals when the truth is that theres a species of boar that evolved to die because its tusks grow into its skull because the males with long tusks fuck the most

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You really can't win as a woman. There's options, but whichever one you choose will be wrong because you are wrong just for existing as a woman.

they don't see it, because it is around them like air. to them, it would have to be through movies, through magazines. they think it happens outside of life, like it must be selected to be interacted with.

but you discovered in the fifth grade that you couldn't wear shirts with words on them, it was an excuse for someone to look at your chest. you were catcalled before you were in middle school. sometimes you look at that memory and deny it - surely that can't be right, you were young. but you were in a skirt, so maybe that was a natural byproduct. it was a skirt from that place "justice by limited too" - a store literally for kids. it was popular around then. you wore that skirt twice and then never again.

you can't wear headphones, because what if a man wants to talk to you? there's a guy on the internet who complains that women shut themselves off from being approached. at night, you often keep the headphones positioned but with the sound off, just in case you need to hear something behind you.

you learned at 12 that you can't make eye contact, don't acknowledge the aggression. just walk faster and hope he picks on somebody else. don't wear your hair like that. do not park next to that kind of car, park an entire cityblock away if you must.

you can't go to the museum, you're sitting and tying your shoe when he approaches you and mentions that nobody understands art anymore. that in the whole world, it's just you-two. you have no recourse for eating a meal (it's rabbit food if it's salad, and someone will roll their eyes, eat a sandwich. it's pick-me behavior if it's a burger, we get it you're a cool girl). if you like mushrooms you are cottagecore, which is cheesy. if you like video games you're an egirl (similar to a pick-me). boys do not get categories, but if you point out the categories are sexist, you are told okay but these girls really exist.

it is somehow developing, a little undercurrent that you've been uncomfortable with. the nickname "karen" went from being "a white woman that uses her whiteness as a weapon, particularly against people of color," to now mean "any woman raising her voice or being even a little upset." the reappropriation of a term used specifically to call out white women for their racism has set your skin on edge. now it is just another version of "bitch," one that can be said on television. recently you saw a woman get called a karen because a drunk driver sideswiped her, and she screamed when it happened. the comments on the dashcam video all say "why do women always scream about everything." "when has the world ever been bettered by women screaming." "this fucking karen. she deserved to get hit."

in the sitcom, it's a joke that the wife is furious; slamming her hands down into the sink. i do everything around here, might as well do this too. in your house, your father is always in-his-office. before you know better, your first boyfriend is the type to say it's just easier for you. you used to beg him to take you on dates. he used to make a big deal about it, about the sacrifice of effort, even if you were the one who did most of the planning.

someone on the internet makes a "POV: the most boring person you've ever met" where he puts a towel on his head and just talks like a normal person. his impression of a boring woman is just a woman that is talking about her pretty-average life without exaggeration.

you are sometimes actually sad in the reverse, because actually you did used to struggle to pay attention in conversations. you were also easily bored of normal things, your adhd pinging off of every radio tower in the vacinity. it took time and therapy and patience, and now you delight in the small things about your friends. you like having them show you their organizational systems and talk about their taylor swift tickets. you are entertained by them because you learned to be, even though your brain is structured to only be excited by novelty. you kind of hate the idea that the reason your father will never actually pay attention to you is that you're no longer interesting. eventually the shine wore off, and you were just a person, not a spaceship. he never learned how to just, like, form an actual intimate friendship. it was always at a distance, this sense - emotional closeness was too much. (and yes. he's homophobic).

you're already tired of whatever the fuck is happening with the words "divine feminine", a rancid take that is basically just a rebranding of the patriarchy in action. what the fuck do they mean "being small and delicate and needing protection" is feminine. the words they are looking for are that they want a partner, not that their desire for equivalent support is relegated to gender. the human desire for community is not actually gendered at all. also, what fucking wolves are these "divine masculine" men even battling. fuckken taxes? shouldn't their "desire to protect" also mean "protect you from emotional neglect", or are all emotions off-limits (and how sad would that be. that's a horrible bar to set.)

and they tell you it's really not bad actually, because it's just there. they suggest you get off the internet or you stop reading that book or you stop thinking so hard about the movie or you stop just-being-a-feminist because honestly it's a killjoy sort of thing and then you tilt your head to the side and there's that little siren in the back of your head. if things were actually fine, being a feminist wouldn't put a stop to anything, it would go completely unnoticed, because you wouldn't have any comment to make about any of this

but you are ruining your own life, they tell you. also, girls don't sit like that. also, all girls are catty. also, all girls are bad drivers. also, all girls just need a cute bracelet and an iced coffee.

you do like iced coffee, is the thing. when you close your eyes, the world around you has this strange note to it. and once you hear it, it never stops ringing.