#No this isn't about Walmart

[idkirllyneed2pee]

If one more motherfucker asks me where something is and it's two feet away from them I'm ending it all

[inkskinned]

they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?

they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.

you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.

you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.

mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.

you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.

[uncanny-tranny]

I was always enraged at the way capitalism has devalued some of the most important labour in human history, but now I'm even more angry since I have started getting more into crafts.

So many people are alienated from the world to such an extent they don't realize how fucking important textiles and construction and art and culinary labour is, because its all ubiquitous under capitalism: it is all profit, and if it isn't profit, then it is worthless. People don't realize just how revolutionary all of the labour was, how important it is, and was, to our survival. And that enrages me.

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

For someone who's autistic and poorly socialized, it's surprisingly not often something happens to me socially that I just do not fucking understand or feel like I would have to make wild assumptions to wrap my head around. Normally when I am confused it has slightly more to do with being on the asexual side of demi and not understanding that people flirt sometimes.

So truly baffling interactions with family are rare. Usually I understand what's going on socially from an objective standpoint, even if I can't groc why they are treating me that way and can't seem to realize the absurdity of it, etc...

But the scenario is as follows:

Background:

I have had more than one stalker by the age of 18. One of which is banned from multiple public places because his MO was to hang out in public placed you would be known to frequent, like a mall, catch someone alone and beat the ever-loving shit out of them, usually for being gay or trans. We are talking multiple 'peace bonds' against this person by the time he was 18-20 himself. He also has a habit of cornering younger women and pressuring them for sex when they are someplace isolated and around a general tendency to make threatening comments. He started dating me when I was 14 and in the years since I broke up with him and left town I have become increasingly openly gay and trans, and he has done a lot of asking about WHERE I went off to.

I am not unaware that him specifically asides, people can use recognizing me in shared public spaces as a way to target me without knowing my exact address, the the rule has been that anyone who knows me isn't allowed to tell anyone else even what city I live in. I take other precautions like not having myself or my home in photos that haven't had the metadata scrubbed, like using a vpn obsessively and not taking photos outside with potentially recognizable landmarks or landscapes, etc... But very generally the main rule everyone else has to follow is just not fucking allude to where I live or where I will be visiting ahead of time because someone who used to know me might figure it out and if he can figure out even what mall to wait at, he might hurt me, or someone else might use the same MO.

That fact that multiple other exs since have taken up some stalkery-ass behaviour is kind of just terrible icing on the issue. The fact that I voice strong opinions online and might become a somewhat noted author at some point if I get my way is kind of a side note, but also relevant.

The problem so far:

My sister has fucking habitually refused to stop mentioning where I live or where she assumes I live or where I will be visiting for the holidays. She makes allusions to it or mentions she will visit my mother and I at the same time when I actually lived close to her and etc...

Neither of them would take this threat seriously. The fact that my sister is a compulsive liar who will just invent information and insist on it to try to get her way should be beside the point, but instead it means my mother believed her account of what this guy is capable of or interested in more than my own, and -for whatever reason- despite trusting my judgement on most things when it's convenient to her, will not trust my judgement that my city of residence being public knowledge is actually dangerous to me.

My sister would not stop mentioning where I live, accurate or not, so the rule became not to tell her where I live. Period. So my mother started playing this game of letting her guess and assume where I had moved to and simply not correcting her when she got it right.

My sister also has a habit of being very verbally abusive to me and just yelling at me the entire time I am trying to have a conversation with her, so at some point I cut her off for a couple years, and then told her the rules were that she could talk to me on the condition she stop calling me names. And that she was not allowed to know where I lived.

During the time we weren't speaking my mother kept saying shit like "So what? I'm not ALLOWED to have both my *daughters* in my life >:(" and generally guilt-tripping me about not speaking to my sister, and still basically ignoring the rule about not telling her where I live.

And my sister may have eventually stopped even vaguely alluding to having contact with me, but mostly after she stopped having any contact with me.

The current problem:

My mother will start to agree with me that I am being reasonable and that she's plenty capable of doing what I am asking if she finds out I am going to move, and still refuse to move in with her, and right after I move until she gets my address again, and then she just cycles back to the same bullshit, including trying to talk me into living with her so I can take care of her all the time and so I have no choice about her or my sister knowing where I live. Always under the guise of saving costs.

So I find out my mother has been -in effect- continuously confirming for my sister where I live, no matter how many times I have reminded her that the general city is as important a secret as my exact address. She was all "Well obviously she knows you live in [redacted]!", when there's no way to know that without her losing a game of 21 questions or telling her, and when I got upset and tried to explain the FUCK AGAIN why it has to be the city too she cycled right back to "Oh get over it! >:(" and "can't you just live in isolation alone for ever and never make an opinion know online so no one has any reason to target you so that I can just keep doing what I want without you bitching!?!"

And I just... After the realization that she was always going to cycle back to this once she personally had gotten my address out of me, and that it was going to make it unsafe for me to live anywhere forever, most of all in the cities I loved the most, my second pick, my third and so on... I just... I finally just hung up on her.

And I got the expected slew of unacceptable texts, suicide threats, guilt tripping, emotional manipulation...

But the thing about your parents trying to use guilt and shame and emotional manipulation to control you since you were a literal toddler, is that the "grey rock" response isn't an act, It's genuine, it isn't just an automatic way to cope, or pretending not to care so they don't feel like their shitty behaviour is being rewarded, you genuinely stop caring, lose interest, and emotionally shut down about the issue. She flicked the switch in my brain where I go from hyper-empathy towards the well meaning, to absolutely no empathy at all for people who are intentionally trying to take advantage or cause harm, and I am not in control of that. So she can throw tantrums all she fucking wants and there is literally no going back. Sorry if you want to know why I am like this look at the people who fucked to make me and then screwed with my head for 16 years and called it parenting!

My sister in the meantime had started tentatively texting and calling me again after years of being allowed to but simply opting not to, probably out of fear she would fuck it up. And we were getting along! She wasn't being mean and we were good!

But the moment I cut off my mother and dropped to 2 texts a year for birthday and xmas, and any necessary legal shit for paperwork, my sister stops talking to me.

No response to happy birthday or merry x-mas [which I don't even celebrate but whatever]. Nothing. Dead air. One text where she tried to defend that mom never technically told her where I lived. And then silence.

And two things stand out to me:

I get the sense that this is about her feelings towards me because I specified multiple times this was nothing to do with her at this point, that the rules for her hadn't changed, and that now mom was just on new boundaries because she couldn't fucking be trusted to respect mine

I get the nagging sense that despite that mom guilt tripped the shit out of me for not talking to my sister, she is not, in fact, bitching at my sister to text me back. I get the sense that instead she is trying to commiserate with her about how unreasonable and cold-hearted I am, and perhaps even trying to convince her to cut me out to teach me some kind of lesson.

But these are wild guesses because my sister has not communicated fuck all to me except to simply stop talking/interacting. I actually have very little idea if any of my suspicions as to why actually hold any water.

This is not an AITA post because victims -or anyone- deserve to set boundaries about their personal information and have them fucking respected regardless of how rational you think they are being. I don't think it's unreasonable that if shutting up about my location is just not physically or mentally realistic for them that they shouldn't get to know where I have moved to. They don't get to demand to have that information and also demand to do whatever they want with it even if it makes me unsafe.

I am just genuinely a little lost as to why cutting my mom off means my sister has decided she doesn't want to speak to me, or if she thinks this somehow means I don't want to speak to her.

That's it though. That's the reason I don't speak to my sister either since my mom "fucked up", I didn't cut them both off as some kind of unit or packaged deal or something [lumping someone in thoughtlessly with my sister by association is their job]. She -again- stopped talking to me the moment there were new boundaries involved. And to be honest, I actually do not know why this time. It's as inscrutable to me as whatever the real reasons are my father never bothers talking to me.

Anyway if my mother actually wanted both her kids in her life she could have stopped perpetuating the reason for contention between us, she could have respected my boundaries herself and she could respect my fucking gender. She could have actually bothered to be on her best behaviour for my sake instead of only pretending to respect my boundaries when other people were watching, or if she figured I wouldn't KNOW [and therefor would have no idea I was in danger].

And if I the fuck find out she's been trying to pit my sister against me now [we did not need help struggling to get along bitch]...

[microwavetoaster-selfships]

Congratulations, Kane! You've successfully determined a grocery store was from the UK by looking at one small section of the shelf and only zooming in and looking for the currency symbol on the price tags after you figured it was from the UK.

[queerlyglittering]

All this time I've been kind of deliberately ignoring twitter/x (and now bluesky) and Instagram like "what do I need those for, I'm not popular enough/interesting enough/opinionated enough to have things to share on there." But now I realize: I can go there to post all the shit I *would have* shared to the group chat, if anyone in the group chat actually gave enough of a shit about me to interact with anything I say or post.

[ur-stepdad]

the butchest woman i knew when i was a kid was my Aunt Hazel. she was my great-aunt, the sister of my mom's dad.

whenever i bring up Aunt Hazel to my mom, she always feels the need to say that she wasn't a lesbian, she liked men, and she wore very feminine pajamas when she was at home. she died a few years ago, so i have no way of knowing how Aunt Hazel saw herself or the way she wanted to be seen by others.

i only ever knew Aunt Hazel as a tough old broad. she spoke loudly and took up space. i remember her as she was in her 60s - heavy, short gray hair, big glasses, always wearing men's clothes. she said "goddamn" a lot, and i'm realizing now that that's a term used much more often by men than women where i'm from.

she was a greeter at walmart when i was a little kid, but i knew that she used to be a tow truck driver. i asked my mom what decade Aunt Hazel started driving her truck. she said that she was doing it by the early '80s and worked that job for a long time, but walmart had better benefits. i always thought it was awesome that my aunt was a tow truck driver.

something that i did not know about my Aunt Hazel until I was older was that she had been married to a man who abused her when my mom was a kid. for some years in the late '60s to maybe mid '70s, Aunt Hazel was in prison for killing her husband.

my mom says Aunt Hazel didn't always wear men's clothes, and probably started when she was driving the tow truck. i realize now that this means that she started wearing men's clothes after she was no longer married to her husband, and after she had been incarcerated.

i'm pretty sure that she was let out early because it was eventually determined by the court that she had killed him in self defense. she got her kids back, but i assume she didn't regain full legal freedom with her record. i would imagine that as a convicted felon, a male-dominated blue collar job was one of the only places that would hire her. or maybe she took the job because it's what she wanted to do. i can't ask her now.

i'm glad that Aunt Hazel was in my life and i've been thinking about her on this Butch Appreciation Day.

i'm also thinking about all the other butches who are tough old broads, who have survived domestic violence, who work blue collar jobs, and who are or have been incarcerated. i'm also thinking of the butches we've lost to domestic violence and incarceration. the butches who never returned from women's prisons, men's prisons, and psychiatric institutions.

[kyuponstories]

Guess who came up w/ yet another story idea instead of working on my current wips?

🤡👈🏾

[wheatlev]

sometimes I wish the whole fuckin internet wasn't laser focused on the goddamn USA all the time.

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

i know that amazon has so much wrong with it, it’s a little ridiculous to be complaining about Yet One More Thing. but i find it super depressing that it’s also just devolved into...such a bad online store? we pay for prime yet i avoid shopping there, because their third-party seller system (in addition to exploiting the sellers) is erratic so i refuse to buy things amazon isn’t selling directly--but they’ve removed the ‘seller’ option from the sidebar choices when you���re narrowing down a search! sorry amazon, i get that you did it because you hope people won’t distinguish between those differences anymore...but all it does is make me trust you less and switch websites to buy things elsewhere

[elysianfiields]

One of the funniest things to me is the people who supposedly hate us so much yet end up making groups that are just ours wearing a trench coat

[lesenbyan]

you ever really realize how deeply someone has fucked you up bc the idea of asking for anything from them- even if it's a normal-ish request of a parent- fucks you up so so bad?

[xxxemilyg1996]

I think Walmart discontinued their apple fritters and honestly I might just kill myself

[nosferatufaggot]

How come websites that have existed for over a decade are becoming worse? Like the website design has been there and in use so why is it now worse?

[astralikacastle]

"stop playing 5e just play Worlds Without Number"

looks inside worlds without number rules

rules specifically disincentivize parties without humans

looks in camera like it's the office

[harbingrs]

On the flip side, if you don't wear sunscreen because:

it's greasy on your face

it breaks you out

it irritates your sensitive skin

it doesn't sit well under make-up

it leaves a white cast on your skin tone

etc

Please rethink. There are more sunscreen options out there than ever before, including many formulations designed to tackle each of those issues.

If the $3 supermarket sunscreen doesn't work for you, that doesn't mean you can't wear sunscreen. It's well worth the trial and error to find something you can wear comfortably day-to-day.

If you search for "best sunscreen for [your specific scenario] reddit" there are stacks of recommendations. Kbeauty brands have some really innovative formulations and are relatively easy to order online worldwide.

You can also get creative with it - like if you have combination skin, you can use a different sunscreen product for oily vs dry areas, or a different sunscreen under make-up vs for reapplication. As long as you're getting the coverage you need, you're good.

When it comes to preventing breakouts, the most important part is removing it thoroughly at the end of the day. A cleansing oil or cleansing balm is most effective at breaking down sunscreen. If you're prone to breakouts or clogged pores, you'll probably want to double-cleanse at night (using an oil or balm cleanser + a regular kind to make sure all the oil/balm comes off, so nothing's left to clog things up). If sunscreen is breaking you out and you're just using a regular cleanser or cleansing wipes at night, it's likely the sunscreen isn't coming off properly.

And yes, all of this sounds like 'overconsumptioncore' when I'm getting into things like double cleansing, but it's not. It's 'doing what allows you to wear sunscreen' as opposed to not wearing it. If it means washing your face twice, wash your face twice.

The Tiktok still has a point re: the obsession with sunscreen as an aesthetic measure to prevent your skin ageing. If it's framed as aesthetic, it makes it seem more reasonable to skip sunscreen to avoid greasiness/breakouts/etc as a trade-off. Unfortunately ageing is mandatory but skin cancer isn't, and needing cancerous or pre-cancerous spots cut out is not a great trade-off, even if you're lucky enough to avoid the more serious outcomes.

Also:

Don't rely on SPF in make-up as a substitute for sunscreen - it's better than nothing, but something like foundation isn't usually applied in the right quantity to really protect you or reapplied throughout the day

Make sure you're applying ENOUGH sunscreen - if it's spread too thin it won't work

How you apply (eg. patting vs rubbing, using a little at a time, etc) can make a difference to how it sits on the skin too