#but whats the point of doing that if it makes us feel. Not Good. yknow?

[teaboot]

I feel like if you're using a lot of disposable plastic bags in your day to day life, you've gotta do something sustainable to make up for it. Like using bamboo toilet paper or eco friendly cat litter or something, yknow

Honestly I exaggerate for comedic effect, while I DO routinely use ziplock bags to hold spaghetti I cook maybe once a month and the bag itself is usually for freezer storage. I actually throw out maybe one bag a week? I DO hate washing plates and tupperware and junk but that usually just means I eat sandwiches without a plate.

I agree though that needless waste should be avoided, and I do avoid it- biodegradable bags and recyclables, empty butter tubs used to store leftovers, etc.

This said, though, not applicable necessarily for myself but for a lot of others- I feel that it's importat to remember that there are many people who legitimately NEED things like plastic straws, or catheters, or pre-packaged foods

And the idea that that's a moral failing that individuals need to personally make up for when a single billionaire blows out more CO2 in a long weekend than I will in my whole life on a superjet meet-cute in the Bolivian rainforest between humvee drag races funded by the river-polluting textiles plants they planted in a third world country to avoid EPA laws and give an entire village stillbirths and stomach cancer is an idea that those very same bigwigs have spent a LOT of time and money investing in planting in the public psyche.

Like- Glass bottles are infinitely recyclable, so why are so many drinks in plastic now? Loads of drinks manufacturers used to buy them back and clean them for re-use, so why did they stop? If they chose to make something out of a limited and environmentally irresponsible material, why is it my failing to track down a correct process of disposal for them? What if there are none in my area? Do I lobby for more recycling plants in my area? Do I set aside some of my limited time outside the pain factory of my job- which I have more than one of, thanks to rising costs of things just like that drink I just emptied- to properly dispose of this company's waste FOR them?

Say coca-cola just rolled up to your town and started dumping millions of empty plastic bottles in the street, going, "wow, you should really think about building and staffing a recycling depot, it would be really shameful of you to just put these in the trash." When companies purposefully use materials with limited lifespans- because yes, even plastic can only be reused so many times- and tell you it's your own fault if it harms the environment- that's essentially what they're doing, just with more steps.

Yes, its important to be as environmentally concious as we can in our day to day life, but responsible sustainability is not catholicism. We don't get good boy points from our lord and savior Captain Planet every time the average low-income household gathers together to hold hands and repent for a single-use plastic that allows them to access something they need.

Entire families could eat trees and shit dead lithium batteries for years and still not do as much damage to the planet as an average dye plant or braindead celebrity does in a week just for fun, and I'm mad about it

...this went on longer than intended.

TL/DR: DO recycle and minimize waste, but don't beat yourself up over the little waste you can't avoid, and follow the money.

EDIT: Part 2

[softness-and-shattering]

Thats a good point, I see all kinds of neurodivergence in my family but only a couple of us in my generation, afaik, have a diagnosis.

However, my gp attended a recent talk about overlap of queer folk with neurodivergence and also a group of comorbid illnesses including, iirc, POTS/MCAS/EDS/CFS theres a couple others Im just blanking. Digestive issues? Things that we've broadly noticed as a community, and it seems like its starting to be studied.

And also, everyone has some kind of trauma, idk how many people if any have no kind of disability whatsoever, humanity is vast and diverse. And we're wired to look for patterns. Interpret this information how you will, I certainly cant say for sure if these patterns are broader than trans people, or are more people trans than we expect, are we seeing correlation or causation or is there a mechanism in common with all these labels thats the deeper cause, is queerness an interchangeable/'sometimes' factor or a central one, we are way too early to know that yet.

I think its probably not nothing. But we're also not uniquely fucked up. Maybe we're just sticking out, so to speak, so thats where the research is starting. Many people werent taking ME/CFS seriously until long covid prompted more research bc, iirc, there was now a lot more people affected who were harder to ignore. And who were seeking help. Like a lot of people have an allergy or a dodgy wrist or "that weird thing with my digestion" and they dont consider it a disability or seek treatment, yknow? And especially mental health and especially what runs in families, it looks normal to you so why would you ever bring it up to a dr? "Everyone struggles with these things. Everyone feels this way" well you do and your parents and aunts and uncles do and your siblings do, and maybe you told a dr forty years ago you were in pain and they brushed you off so you thought everyone was walking around in agony.

And that gets into an adjacent conversation about medicalising and diagnosing and when does that help and when is it like, making a negative thing of normal human experiences and variations, its not a disorder till its negatively impacting your life, if youre surviving but treatment could help you thrive is it worth the side effects etc etc plus the whole discussion of psychiatry in particular which can be an amount of guesswork and diagnostic labels are often just patterns of symptoms that we see oftrn go together and we dont always yet understand the underlying neurology. (One of my all time best therapists kept up with the latest neuroscience and always had very good and effective suggestions. I only stopped seeing her bc I moved away. If you can be seeing professionals who are keeping up with research, definitely prefer them over someone who hasnt learned anything since they completed training 50 years ago. Always.)

Tl;dr I agree with OP and also this stuff is extremely complex and we're always learning new things about us!

something that should be taken with a grain of salt are the statistics talking about the high rates of mental illness + neurodivergence among trans people (ocd, bpd, adhd, autism, etc)

I see both sides of the political spectrum taking these studies at face value - conservatives say we're broken, and trans people try to come up with reasons why for example autism + gender dysphoria makes sense and why one of them feeds into another

at the end of the day you have to remember that we're the one category of people on this planet who are legally required to go see a psychiatrist in order to receive non-psychiatric medication and surgeries.

more trans people are in therapy by law than any other demographic of people, and as a result, this captures more comorbidities.

if I had to look at my own family & rates of mental illness?

mom, dad, 2 maternal aunts, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, sister, sibling, and me all have OCD.

7/9 of them are cishet, never been to therapy, never diagnosed. 2/9 are trans, required therapy for hormone treatment, and were diagnosed.

you don't have to do any math to just see that the resulting statistics end up intensely skewed.

and we can think back to how autism was virtually never diagnosed more than 50 years ago - ruling out any grandparents being included in statistics - and even my parents' generation (they're in their 60s now) wouldn't have been included either.

I don't think it's to anyone's benefit to accept these studies uncritically. a lot of these things are hereditary and far more prevalent in the overall population than people realize

[tomwaterbabies]

yeaaah also. gonna be away from disneyland for a bit i think. friends and i are excited about their halloween party- ive been wanting to be able to go for years- but after that we're just gonna. let our passes expire or whatever. i know it doesnt really have an effect on what the company does but. it feels bad man lol

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[pollen]

i've been diving a lot deeper into adhd symptoms and comorbidities and misdiagnoses and whenever i tell my boyfriend something i learned that sounds like me he responds with something like

[stop-breaking-my-heart-dragonage]

Me, when Sebastian joins my party for the first time: Okay, this time I'm not going to forget about you, Sebastian. I'm going to make an effort to use you a lot this playthrough so I can better understand you.

Also me, immediately forgetting about Sebastian while finishing Act 2 and making it halfway through Act 3 before I finally notice his Faith quest: ......................Oh. Right. My bad.

[atomiclace]

who knew that some agere people would be the worst type of people to exist (talking about you spinny)

[legofemme]

Vani writing tips + personal thoughts that noone asked for but you will be hearing

1: longer is Not always better. If youre telling a story, then your audience doesnt need 3 pages worth of side material. If youre writing to genuinely draw in an audience and tell a story then you need to not treat it like a game where the goal is to get the highest wordcount possible. You should be treating yourself And your audience with respect and making sure the words you use make an impact rather than trying to fill empty space. Brevity is your friend

2: if you need to make a clarification that your work doesnt endorse what your protagonist is doing, or needs to clarify that the protagonist is a Bad Person, then youre not mature enough to be writing that material. At best it shows that you dont understand the nuances of writing villain protagonists, and at worst it looks like you think your audience is too stupid to understand that saying slurs is a bad thing.

3: you cannot attempt to break the rules of writing if you dont understand them in the first place. You arent douglas adams. You arent Mark Danielewski. You need to stop and learn how to use a semicolon and a hyphen and how different words help describe things before you try to make a thousand word 'stray from traditional storytelling' . At the very least learn the basics from a youtube video

4: YOU NEED TO LEARN HOW TO WRITE DIALOGUE EVEN IF ITS BAD. You cannot dodge around dialogue by just having back and forth phrases in quotation marks. And no marker you use to differentiate speakers is going to be anywhere close to just using "he said" or even "he yelled". Youre robbing yourself of crucial storytelling materials. Even if you dont want to learn every part of how to write you Need to learn how to do dialogue or your entire story is going to crumble

[gibbearish]

btw similar to the whole "if you try adderall at a party and it calms you down, get an adhd test" thing, if at some point in your life you try microdosing shrooms with a friend and end up feeling like a functional person for the first time in your life, get tested for depression. like yeah hallucinogens come with elation so youre probably gonna have some "this is the best ive ever felt in my life" vibes regardless, but like. if that in and of itself feels like finally breathing in for the first time in years, thats for sure a sign that something is up with your ability to process serotonin most of the time. feeling better than ever before should be a nice bonus, not a crushing weight off your chest

[xalygatorx]

was looking for google docs alternatives (and found a couple, yippeeeee) but one of the apps that came up was a fkn ai novel generator

“90k word novel in seconds!” built off the shredded corpses of the graft that came before I guess

with my whole heart, fuck off x

[waywardsalt]

tbh i might go ahead and put dungeons in as a part of the bellum x linebeck fic's plot since like. 1) struggling to actually figure out a main plot and having dungeons as sort of bit points to hit and be little bits of fitting exploration and bonding and 2) i do kinda want to do dungeons. i like thinking of them and again i do think its fitting.

[arolesbianism]

I've been playing the new cotl update and I generally like it but god do I fucking hate like all of the balance changes just let things be strong man

[meateater-rabbit]

(dont read the tags actually)

[perenlop]

There is literally no reason why Lana couldn’t have gotten that Dewpider

[foxcassius]

wait also my tags on that post were about people i knew in freshman and sophomore year of college specifically. i mean some of them i knew after that and most of them i knew from high school but damn some people really made everything about themselves when i was being emotionally manipulated in my freshman year

[yoshistory]

Brought up the fact that we weren't informed about the sudden schedule change at work and she was like "you should've known that already .. we had a meeting awhile ago .. you all got Easter off but ..? Nothing's changed" when NO ONE knew about it and I had to tell the team I noticed it. Like ....

BUT we did end up having a meeting and got divided on A and B teams for working the 2 weeks in a row, 1 day given off

Good that it's GIVEN because they would take away given days if you decided to take off a day that week that wasn't the 14th day you worked, resetting your "days worked in a row" count. so that's. Something.