#I don't know what the issue even is. I don't know what mental illness I have. I thought it was bpd but what if it isn't

[rebellum]

Keep your meds that you take as-needed next to where you spend most of your time. Mine are in a drawer right next to my computer.

You're not supposed to store meds in the bathroom because it gets hot and humid in their during showers

If you only occasionally use a cane, get a fold-up one and always carry it in your backpack. You can take it out on public transit, even if you have a seat, so that people don't judge you for sitting down. This is especially important if you're someone socially perceived as a young man.

There's no shame in "giving in" to your illness. Do what you need to do. Eg if you're having intrusive thoughts about a certain object, you don't have to force yourself to practice resisting it or practice moving on from those intrusive thoughts. It's okay to just put it in the other room so that you don't think about it. You dont need to constantly practice resistance, you need to practice active compassion towards yourself.

You can fill a pill bottle with various OTC pills are carry that around in your bag. Like I have a mixed-pill bottle that has advil, naproxen, and Tylenol in it, rather than bottles of those all separately.

This is just general life advice: it's good to buy things that will make everyday life more enjoyable. I know this sounds like "well, DUH" but guys I got a mechanical keyboard for Christmas and it makes me SO happy to use my keyboard. Invest in making your daily tools constantly enjoyable and pretty. Things can be better than 'good enough'

You don't need to be someone else's inspiration. You dont need to be the one pushing societal boundaries. It's okay to do what you want or to hide your illness if that's what makes you feel the most safe and comfortable. [Relevance: I'm a trans POC with mental health issues. I am in a position where I could help to normalise 'weirdness' like stimming, counting out loud, and being open about intrusive thoughts and hallucinations. It would be good to do that, because I'm a fashionable young middle class feminine person, so it would help to remove the association of those behaviours with drug users and unhoused individuals. If those behaviours are more normalized it also helps those people, since they are then seen as doing fewer 'bad' things. But it's scary! I'm an openly trans poc! If i get mistaken for being high I could have to deal with police. I'm not in America, I'm not in as much danger as Black Americans are, but I'm still at a much increased risk of arrest and violence. It's okay if I want to keep my mental health issues and neurodivergence on the down-low and not be some sort of activist.]

I've been disabled for almost 29 years. Here's what I've learned.

Tablets sink and capsules float. Separate out your tablets and capsules when you go to take them. Tip your head down when taking capsules and up when taking tablets. Liquigels don't matter, they kinda stay in the middle of whatever liquid is in your mouth.

If your pill tastes bad, coat it with a bit of butter or margarine. I learned this from my mom, who learned it from a pharmacist.

Being in pain every day isn't normal. Average people experience pain during exceptional moments, like when they stub their toe or jam their finger in a door, not when they sit cross-legged.

Make a medical binder. Make multiple medical binders. I have a small one that comes with me to appointments and two big ones that stay at home, one with old stuff and one with more recent stuff.

Find your icons. Some of mine include Daya Betty (drag queen with diabetes), Stef Sanjati (influencer with Waardenburg syndrome and ADHD), and Hank Green (guy with ulcerative colitis who... does a bunch of stuff). They don't have to be disabled in the same way as you. They don't even have to be real people. Put their pictures up somewhere if you want; I've been meaning to decorate my medical binders with pictures of my icons.

Take a bin, box, bag, basket, whatever and fill it with items to cope with. This can be stuff for mentally coping like colouring books or play clay or stuff for physically coping like pain medicine or physio tape.

Decorate your shit! My cane for at home has a plushie backpack clip hanging from the end of the handle and my cane for going places is covered in stickers. All of my medical binders have fun scrapbooking paper on the outside. Sometimes, I put stickers and washi tape on my inhalers and pill bottles. I used my Cricut to decorate my coping bin with quotes from my icons, like "I've seen enough of Ba Sing Se" and "I need you to be angrier with that bell".

If a flare-up is making you unable to eat or keep food down, consider going to the ER. A pharmacist once told me that since my eye flares can make me so nauseous that I cannot eat, then I need to go to the hospital when that happens.

Cola works wonders for nausea. I have mini cans of Diet Pepsi in my coping bin.

Shortbread is one of the only things I can eat when nauseous. Giant Tiger sells individually-wrapped servings of shortbread around Christmas or the British import store sells them year-round. I also keep these in my coping bin.

Unless it violates a pain contract or something, don't be afraid to go behind your doctor's back to get something they are refusing you. I got my cardiologist referral by getting in with a different NP at my primary care clinic than who I usually saw. I switched from Seroquel to Abilify by visiting a walk-in.

If you have a condition affecting your abdomen in some way (GI issues, reproductive problems, y'know) then invest in track pants that are too big. I bought some for my laparoscopy over a year ago and they've been handy for pelvic pain days, too. I've also heard loose pants are good for after colonoscopies.

Do whatever works, even if it's weird. I've sat on the floor of the Eaton Centre to take my pills. I've shoved heating pads down my front waistband to reach my uterus.

High-top Converse are good for weak ankles. I almost exclusively wear them.

You can reuse your pill bottles for stuff. I use my jumbo ones to store makeup sponges and my long skinny ones to hold a travel-size amount of Q-Tips.

Just because your diagnostics come back with nothing, it doesn't mean nothing is wrong. Maybe you were checking the wrong thing, or the diagnostic tool wasn't sensitive enough. I have bradycardia episodes even though multiple cardiac tests caught nothing. I probably have endometriosis even though my gynecologist didn't see anything.

You can bring your comfort item to appointments, and it's generally a green flag when someone talks to you about it. I brought a Squishmallow turkey (named Ulana) to my laparoscopy and they had her wearing my mask when I woke up. I brought a Build-A-Bear cat (named Blinx) to another procedure and a nurse told me that everyone in the hall on the way to the procedure room saw him and were talking about how cute he was. Both of those ended up being positive experiences and every person who talked to me about my plushies was nice to me. If you don't feel comfortable having it visible to your provider during the appointment, you can hide it in your bag and just know it's there, or if you're in a video appointment, you can hold it below frame in your lap.

Get a small bucket, fill it with stuff, and stick it in your bed (if you have room for it). I filled a bucket with Ensure, juice boxes, oatmeal bars, lotion, my rescue inhaler, etc. in October 2023 in anticipation of my laparoscopy and I still have it in my bed as of January 2025.

If your disability impacts your impulse control (e.g. ADHD, bipolar disorder), you should consider setting limits around your spending -- no more than X dollars at a time, nothing online unless it's absolutely necessary, and so on. Or, run these purchases by someone you trust before committing to them; I use my BFF groupchat to help talk sense into myself when I buy stuff.

Feel free to add on what you've learned about disability!

[strobbylemonade]

101 - a dummy's guide to loving and becoming human again

[icewindandboringhorror]

I occasionally wish to reach out to old friends/acquaintances I haven't spoken to since high school/some other even earlier time in my life, but I have SOOO little social energy even for required tasks (like making dr phone calls or etc), I never have any leftover for extra ones, and it would be very odd to message someone I haven't spoken to in like 5 years out of the blue but then take 4 entire months to respond back lol.. My natural curiosity with nostalgia/collecting details of the past/etc. (literally if I were born a little earlier I would definitely do scrapbooking or something lol) is very strong, but, alas, not strong enough to beat out the Social Issues Demons apparently

[amischiefofmuses]

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[mcalhenwrites]

I'm not going to pretend it doesn't make me angry that I spend months and years trying to peddle my work to make ends meet, that I spend so much time mentioning my books and comms and everything, and people ignore that consisently... But the moment I finally break under the hopelessness - when it's obvious that it's fucking futile, that almost no one deems my work good enough to share with anyone else - suddenly they're concerned and scolding me. I'm working several jobs, bathing, generally keeping things clean, and I do this with several health problems including chronic pain. I found out that one of my cysts is growing and I may need to have it surgically removed. Which means potentially missing work to recover. Which means more money I lose. I spend so much time crawling out of the hole and it goes ignored, but the moment I just give up bc I don't have any strength left, suddenly that's my fault and I'm mentally sick. And that kind of makes me wish my entire situation upon people, and when they whine that it's hard, well fuck you, you thought I could ace it so surely you can, babe! I hate being angry about this, but it's just so exhausting to tell people who accuse me of not trying that I HAVE I HAVE SO FUCKING HARD AND YOU DID NOT PAY ATTENTION THEN Or you know you're attempting to gaslight me by claiming I didn't try despite that I obviously have worked my ass off trying, and that's so much fucking worse

[touhoutivations]

"Heya, just popping in for your medicine delivery- ah, you're wondering why I'm not wearing my usual disguise? Well, Eirin and I kinda agreed that it was making me look more suspicious than usual...and while some of the village don't want to take medicine from a youkai, our medicines aren't anything to hide from." "You shouldn't feel ashamed about taking what you need in order to function, and we shouldn't add to that stigma. It'd be ridiculous if I had to dress up like a bandit to give you bandages if you hurt yourself, right?"

"...I know that 'the lunatic rabbit' probably isn't the best to advertise this, but you deserve to be loved, cared for, survive and thrive- no matter what illness or neurodivergency you have. Change and acceptance isn't easy, especially deprogramming from...harmful stereotypes and ideology- believe me, I've been through all that craziness." "It's probably taken you a really long journey to find this out, or accept this, or take steps to treatment- maybe you're still ironing out the big questions- but I'm really proud of you for it. So keep taking those steps, to become more 'you' than ever. Advocate for yourself, and know that there's people that can help you through- even if it takes a while to find them." "That's all from me today, make sure you take some food with them too, alright?"

[hylianengineer]

After two weeks of having almost nothing to do at work except read scientific papers, I think I've finally gotten over being scared of them. Actually, I think I'm starting to have fun.

And then I was doing writing research on a totally different topic and I went wait a second. I can read scientific papers on this. I'm not intimidated by them anymore - well, not much. Maybe a tiny bit, for the ones outside my field, because last week I tried to read a botany paper and oh dear god the jargon.

But I read a medical journal about chronic widespread pain, which I probably have, and it felt very empowering. I understood most of the important bits, googled the vocab when I needed to, and I learned some things that might be important. I read a paper where actual doctors were saying 'people can have mental illnesses and also pain disorders. this does not mean their pain isn't real.'

And it feels very revolutionary that I can just... do that. I can have access to the same information as experts in these fields, and I may not understand it as well or have all the context but it's something. Something I didn't have before.

[musicrunsthroughmysoul]

A controversial thought just occurred to me that I've tried to put into words many times now about my hero (Janis Joplin) and other musicians and people who died "tragically" (especially in a "self-inflicted" way), and that is: every time I see someone online, on Youtube or Facebook or wherever, say something (always unprompted/unrelated to what the video/photo/article/etc. is about) along the lines of, "What a waste of their talent/skill their death was," I think, What a waste their death was? What have you said of their life? Why do you only choose to comment on, and apparently highlight, their death? Did their life, and their accomplishments, and what they brought to the world while they were alive mean nothing to you? Have you not a SHRED of gratitude that they were alive at all?

I am quite sure that there is some sort of psychological explanation (and I say that with the confidence of only having a basic understanding of psychology) for why people focus particularly on people's (in this case, celebrities') "tragic" deaths, but is it not a tragedy in itself to reduce those people's lives to their deaths and the fact that they're dead? Why not appreciate what they were able to share with us while they were here? You know?

[hawkeyedflame]

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[sschmendrick]

Maybe I should go back to seeing my therapist, he was a good person, à l'écoute, but maybe I should explain why I stopped seeing him (on top of work load becoming unbearable).

Same with my psychiatrist though I think it'll be harder to see her because of the summer.

[klara-rosa]

but anyway on another unrelated note, everyday at work I feel a part of me dying inside because my coworkers are all 40 year-olds and up and they were all raised with a conservative catholic mindset and that's how they express themselves. Yesterday it was open homophobia and today open fatphobia. Constantly feeling triggered and having episodes but I'm not gonna say anything because it'd be like running into a brick wall over and over again

[arctic-hands]

I'm the worst person to try to gaslight lol. One, I already know I'm crazy, so between that and my piss poor memory I'll just assume I left the lamp on and forgot about it even if I do have a hazy memory of turning it off. Try to trick me into seeing things that aren't there and I'll just assume I need to up my dosage of abilify. Saying you said something completely different to what you actually said and I'll just go with the flow because I'll assume I just flaked out in the previous conversation and don't want to commit a faux pas

[sinnettini]

I mean no offense, but I think your problem is that you take everything too personally...

hi, well, you know... while i don't particularly appreciate you saying this to me on anon, i do agree

[bisexualcreature]

enough. stop making content out of people's pain

[malachitezmeyka]

I know it's useless to get mad at the dog, she's just a hyperactive little thing who doesn't know how to behave yet. She's left home alone for at least 6 hours every day and she's bored, I can't blame her for tearing apart her training pads or shitting all over the place. Even if I did, she must have done it hours ago, dogs don't get that actions that happened so long ago have consequences and all me yelling at her will result in is her being scared of me. I know all that, I do

So WHY am I still so angry at her?? Why does it feel satisfying to lash out and see her scurry away??? She doesn't deserve to be treated like that, she doesn't know any better. And I don't know how to teach her to know better, I don't have the patience for it. She deserves better than me

[ranvwoop]

i am going to be so vulnerable in public for just a second. literally just for lack of therapy and for the love of psuedoanonymity except. it isn't really