#idk if this was an experience unique to me but i used to not be able to listen to this song

[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

[enchantrum]

Secrets of the Obscure is alright and all but am I the only one kinda miffed that they ripped off a lot of it from Dragon Age: Inquisition and didn't really add or change enough to be it's own unique thing?

even the rift hunting mechanic is Exactly The Same, because you Open the rift, then fight something then close it. the animation is almost 1-1 and even the eye in the rift looks like the Inquisition eye. if it wasn't for the fact that Even The Mechanic is the same I might not have noticed it so much, but the more I play the more blatant it feels

and then their wizard lore also just feels like how demons come out of the Fade in Dragon Age to possess mages. it's almost exact

disclaimer that I'm still enjoying it because it's fun and I like that we get to see Zojja again and have a better map for practicing skyscales for those who don't have one yet, but uh...this whole plot was stolen!

and yes I know there are certain fantasy tropes that re-occur in fantasy over and over, but this doesn't feel like that. it feels like the writers legit just snapped the base ideas from DAI and then barely added or changed anything to make it uniquely Guild Wars

imo it's definitely the weakest of all the packs

which is a shame because I LOVEDDDDD the intro. the whole sequence of having to defend yourself and run for your life was so ridiculously tense, I really felt like I was playing a horror game

but now I'm on Ep. 7 and all the potential feels wasted because I feel like I'm playing the underwritten fanfiction of another game that I already played 10 years ago and didn't like that much the first time

[cosmicrhetoric]

i know like i just know in my heart of hearts that sanji has been smoking the same shitty bedraggled cigarette the whole time. three years. he takes one puff and puts that thing right back in his pocket and it gets waterlogged and messed up and dries out eventually and then he does it all over again and that's why it looks worse and worse with each arc. id normally never give him this honor but honestly? line cook behavior.

[disastercit]

me when my card declines at therapy so they bring out the

[cliveguy]

hi! i wanted to ask, what did you mean by "that specific type of nonbinary people" in your post about the term tme? i'm asking this out of legitimate curiosity, i'm kind of new to all of this (had to google what tme stands for), but hopefully i'm not overstepping!

not overstepping! ive had a bit to drink so im not articulating myself well, but i just see so much transmisogyny from tme nb people who don't fully understand what trans women go through because they personally haven't experienced medical or institutional or workplace transphobia. this doesn't mean they're invalid as nb/trans people, it just means they don't have this specific experience and can perpetuate bigotry bc of it. eg; i'm gay but not bi, i can perpetuate negative stereotypes about other queer men bc of this.

as a trans man i know trans men can be extremely transmisogynistic, but i think i have more in common with a transitioning trans woman than i do a tme nb person who doesn't want to transition in terms of life experience. ofc everyone experiences gender differently etc etc, but if we're comparing experiences that's where i am. and i've experienced as much transphobia from this type of nb person than i have cis people so i do think having different experiences can beget ignorance.

[toytulini]

i feel like the makeup standards are not necessarily going to get Worse, just. stay the Same. "raised by sephora and ulta" christ alive yall act like this shit is new. as if this hasnt been the standard to blast young girls with makeup ads and shit via magazine and tv and imposed beauty standards anyway. the only real difference is like, idk, accessibility of tutorials for how to apply it well

[moe-broey]

.

[cyeayt]

Enough about kolob, enough about cain/Bigfoot, enough about secret languages and creepy occult shit that sure, might be believed in flds cults down in the south of the state but that aren’t that relevant to wider church culture. The only similar thing that should be talked about is polygamy, and not in a "oh those crazy mormons i bet they all still do it hardehar har" but in a way that reminds everyone that the founders of this religion were horrible men and the whole thing has been sexist from the very beginning,

lets talk about soaking, about repression, about feeling trapped and making what seems like the biggest decision of your life at eight years old, even when you all know its not really your choice. lets talk about how impossible it is to be rude, when rudeness is considered saying no to anyone or not talking to people who make you uncomfortable. lets talk about the racist and colonialist foundations of the church, how no one will say it but technically yes our children are taught that native americans are the descendants of the evil race who killed all of our heroes. lets talk about missions as a tool of colonization and power and how they're not only a way to beat down the young people who go on them to solidify the idea that the world hates them and only the church is safe, but also to assimilate and collect money from people all over the world. lets talk about all the shit that makes this religion a horrible oppressive environment to grow up in, the way that afab people are taught from like three years old that one day they will grow up to be mothers, and everything else that i cant type all of because its really just a whole horrible culture of fear and shame packed into beige carpeted walls and squeaky gym floors.

tldr, the stuff that makes Mormonism bad isnt that different than any other religion, its mostly sexism racism homophobia and transphobia, and of course the terror of polite manners and the implications thereof.

this post is actually supposed to be funny because me and my cousin couldn't stop cracking up about soaking, like, a couple on a dating app looking for a third but its not for a threesome its for soaking, cmon its hysterical. anyway,,,,

[shoezuki]

one thing that has stuck with me from the latest kerfuffle i got into on twitter is like. there was one person arguin w one the homies that my bio stating i was white isnt accurate because white people cant be people of colour or a poc so putting 'white' in my bio was the reason people wouldnt acknoweldge Im mixed. and like. that shit has stuck w me

cuz to me that seems fucked up towards mixed ppl like me who have that white background mixed with some non-white identity. but thinking about it i can ABSOLUTELY understand the idea of it due to the notion that white people cannot be poc. cuz that sentence in itself is SENSIBLE. like oh Obviously white people cannot be in the non-white community, so therefore mixed people 'cannot' identify as white????

but i keep thinking about it cuz. wow that shit really pointed out an issue that is so obviously present when it comes to recognizing and acknowledging mixed people like me. Because regardless of how much of a Person Of Colour i am or how much aboriginal background i got, i look very white. I have possibly more typically white experiences than typically aboriginal ones. I have blue eyes as when i was a kid I had naturally blonde hair and there was the joke that i was the whitest in my family because of it. which despite the joke is pretty damn true. people dont see me on the street and say oh thats an indigenous person, and the extremely rare times someone sees me as non-white its usually another indigenous person yknow.

I think its like. its kinda led to this revelation of mine i suppose. On one hand i've come to terms with the idea that i am Aboriginal AND white in the sense that i cant just pick either or as both aspects of me have influenced my entire existence as a mixed person. but its really hit home on why i've struggled so much with seeing myself as being in the non-white community or recognizing myself as a person of colour. because the only 'requirement' of being a poc is Not being white. but does that instantly eliminate all mixed white and non-white people like me from being anything other than white? does that not just further the notion that mixed ppl have to just 'pick a side'? Wouldnt decrying my white identity to be a poc then just diminish my own experiences with white privilege and passing as white?

[hella1975]

im being so serious besties i am not cut out for academia

[destinyandcoins]

have we talked yet about the possibility that UFOs and every suspected bit of extraterrestrial evidence could actually be originating from the advanced civilizations living in the trenches of the ocean just as bemused and wondering as we are about the world beyond them and reaching out in exploration? because given the fuckoff incomprehensible expanse of ocean floor we've yet to actually study or even really guess at what specifically is down there, I think there's a real possibility there's a complex society of, idk, particularly clever sea slugs and other amalgamations of physical matter like hydrogen and thulium and other shit we've never considered as a viable fundamental building block of life. and the fucking whales are the only living creature with the kind of planet spanning range and intelligence to know there's two complex evolutions of sentient life existing on opposite spheres of reality from each other who would really benefit from learning about the other, but we're both too fucking stupid to understand how whales communicate

[paintingformike]

lot of people in the st fandom misuse the term comphet...or maybe its just a tumblr issue in general

[peapod20001]

I actually do have very complex thoughts about many different things, it’s just a bit challenging to connect the inner voice to the outer voice sometimes </3

[chocobox]

i think what makes developing my art style especially wonderful is looking at my older art and seeing the bits and pieces being there, but unrefined and lacking in confidence. like that's obviously me, that's my art, i'm just not sure what i'm doing yet. i love it so so so much and seeing pieces of my current style in my older art makes me feel all the more confident in the direction i'm going in.

[raiiny-bay]

finished s2 of heartstopper & ngl, i kinda didn't like how they handled the ace rep

[number-one-hog-hater]

All this rpf talk reminded me of when my friend wrote a fanfic about me and my boyfriend at the time, btw we were all between the ages of 11-13 ish I can't remember the year.