being uncomfortable becomes easier when you realize that’s literally the point. it’s like working out. if you work out & it becomes easy for you, you already got all you could out of that workout. your body adjusted & is strong enough to handle it now. you’re not improving anymore. that’s why you up the ante with harder workouts, where you’re uncomfortable & not quite strong enough yet. bc eventually you will be strong enough. but if it’s not a challenge, there’s no gain. & that’s exactly how it is with situations out of your comfort zone. the more you put yourself in them, the easier they get—but that in-between phase where you’re struggling is still completely valid and ok and natural. it’s what’s supposed to happen. it’s what’s going to change you as a person. and you should keep doing it
Some tags I found in notes that I feel are a very, very important caveat
It really bothers me that people think oppression needs to come in the form of overt personal prejudices in order to be ‘real.’
Okay, so the doctors I went to didn’t say “I hate you because you are a fat, African-American with no insurance (*cough*money*cough cough*)” but I still got sub-par medical treatment over the course of my life that led to me having multiple strokes and nearly dying.
Each individual doctor doesn’t have to give a damn who I am and what I do, but we live in a country where the system says that people like me are going to die from poor health.
So, -no- I’m not going to let someone tell me that “It’s not racism. It’s not fatphobia. It’s not classism.” just because the words “I hate you” were not spoken.
That’s not how oppression works.
No individual needs to be invested to be an accomplice.
By existing in a position of power & NOT actively working against that power, doctors are contributing to the genocide of our working poor, immigrant workers, people of color, etc.
Just for you, andredesanpaulo: A short history of my body since you’re so interested.
My mother was a physically fit nurse. My father was a physically fit mechanic. My mother lost 2 babies before I was born because she was giving birth at smaller, private hospitals that couldn’t handle the complications her children were born with.
I, as a premature birth, was a surprise. She went to the nearest hospital instead of the most comfortable. I was born in a hospital that could properly deal with the HEART ATTACK I had when I was born.
Funny thing about your heart, is that when you take your first breath outside of your mother’s stomach, the chambers start to close off from each other so that they can work individually but as a team.
My heart, having had an attack, didn’t do this. At the time, we didn’t know.
In any case, I grew up with what we thought was an immune disorder as a kid. I was always a little too weak. A little too worn out. A little too likely to pass out. I had memory problems. I had a randomly presenting speech impediment that never lingered. I could be really active for weeks at a time and then I’d have periods where I could barely move at all.
As I got older, this lead to a bit of weight gain. Not a whole lot. Just enough to make me visibly chunky. My (wrong) diagnosis of some unnamed-but-probably-immune-related disorder changed to the (wrong) diagnosis of being fat.
As a fat kid, tests were rarely done to see what ailed me. I was told that I was fat and Black and female. Lazy, probably trying to get welfare, and stressed. Even as a kid!
Anyway, fast forward to my adult life. I had 3 major strokes before doctors finally realized there was a hole in my heart that should have closed when I was born.
Most people with this health problem don’t make it to the age I was when they found it. I was in great health, on paper, but still visibly fat. My doctors were obviously torn between telling me I was fat and it was probably my fault and… shrugging at the fact that everything that had ever been wrong with me all came down to my heart trying to function with only one big open chamber.
They closed the hole.
I haven’t had another stroke, since.
Now, I’ve had some serious problems caused by the damage done by 3 strokes. But it has been 100% proven that my strokes were 100% preventable. Had I been a little richer doctors would have been more likely to run tests. After all, I would have had the money to pay for them. Had I been not-Black, doctors would have been more likely to really work to hammer down a diagnosis. After all, not many people would assume that a diagnosis would lead me to get some kind of government aid. Had I been male, doctors would have been less likely to blame my issues on stress and try to find a physical source.
My heart would have been checked when I was significantly younger.
I would have had it repaired when I was significantly younger.
I wouldn’t be sitting here wearing an eyepatch so I can see properly with my one good eye.
See, the problem with fatphobia is that everyone thinks they’re an expert. There’s a lot of moral posturing being paraded around as science. My fat was 100% a non-factor in my poor health, but when I went to the doctor it was treated as the ONLY factor. I nearly DIED not because my fat was killing me but because society’s attitude toward my fat made me less valuable and trustworthy as a patient. Anything I said and anything my tests said about my body was ‘obviously’ a lie because I was still fat.
That shit is dangerous and YOU need to quit cosigning it. Today.
i mean this in the gentlest way possible: you need to eat vegetables. you need to become comfortable with doing so. i do not care if you are a picky eater because of autism (hi, i used to be this person!), you need to find at least some vegetables you can eat. find a different way to prepare them. chances are you would like a vegetable you hate if you prepared it in a stew or roasted it with seasoning or included it as an ingredient in a recipe. just. please start eating better. potatoes and corn are not sufficient vegetables for a healthy diet.
European: Americans will be like I’m going to watch a whore movie and eat a hamburger slathered in lard
Americans: it’s true I do do this.
American: British people will be like alright I’m off to eat some wheezy bangers (beans and bread out of a can)
Brit: I’ve seen this reblogged by several people I normally trust so: How mocking British cuisine and dialect has a long classist history and how it became frighteningly normalized on an American (uniquely cruel, uniquely ignorant) internet: a thread. 1/?
“what if people transition and then regret it?” ok. let’s do that with everything. no more straight marriages until the heterosexual divorce rate is below the detransition rates
full res image to share 💜
Hey you good? you reblogged this like three times now.
“vtubing requires money and time so she’s privileged” bruh I started doing this during covid on a shitty old laptop because I had to drop out of college. all my money is from donations. Are you trying to make me sound like fucking bourgeois because I play videogames online? Is it crack that you smoke?
A copy of vtube studio is 10 bucks. OBS is free. A webcam and mic, another 20 bucks maybe. The model I used when I started was free.
Lmao yeah I’m literally always broke this is just how I pay my bills
Disco Elysium voice: Are unemployable queer women bourgeois
This is what happens when you understanding of “rich” and “poor” come from vague aesthetics and not an actual understanding of what things cost, plus a side order of “this would look rich compared to being a subsistence farmer” from third-worldists, which is not false but certainly badly overapplied.
It is very similar to the sort of thinking that leads people to twist themselves in knots over the homeless having a cell phone.
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka “raptures of the deep”
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you’re good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here’s what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they’re not dying, they’re not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he’d told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he’s at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can’t go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
