Heya! That time again! For the new folks, this thread is a space to tell us about something fun and cool you have going on, vent about something, or find an ear that you may need. Hope you’ve been well!
Remember, you are loved 
For my own part, while my attention span continues to get worse and worse, im still powering through Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and trying to keep warm. Pretty nasty out where I’m at, and won’t get better for another week or so. No leads on the job hunt, but I did start looking into nonprofit stuff and got a few apps out, so thats kind of exciting in and of itself. Partner stayed with me for a few days last week, and am arranging a date with someone I’ve been seeing around in local leftist/queer/gaming circles. And by date I mean “come watch movies with the pup and I cause we’re poor.” Or maybe we’ll shoot some free pool at a spot by me, who knows.
Lastly - ayyyyy two months without alcohol! I seemed to have swapped it out with a caffeine addiction though, but oh well. More coffee, anyone?
Hope you’re doing well, friends!
I nearly sliced my thumb off today with a razor sharp santoku knife. That was fun. Never try to stop a knife from sliding off the counter onto the floor. Just get the fuck out of its way.
Oh shit. Was it able to be reattached?
It didn’t come off thankfully, but I definitely sliced some nerves. It cut about a 1/4" deep and I lost a good bit of blood. Did not go to the ER like I really should’ve.
One time I cut my hand open trying to cut a squash. Waited about 8 hours for the stitches in the ER and got bored so I drew a pentagram with my blood. That was the most metal thing ill ever have done.
Glad it wasn’t any worse for ya!
Can you still feel it? I lost feeling in one of my fingertips after an incident with a forklift, which is small but annoying sometimes lol
Somewhat. Very pins and needles feeling and very reduced sensations when touched. Similar to how my left forefinger feels nowadays except much less severe. That’s a much worse story for another day though. Let’s just say I definitely severed the nerves in that finger.
It sucks that the things that used to keep be well, or at least better, are mostly beyond my reach and have been for a long time now.
It sucks that the overwhelming majority of advice for this might as well be cooking lessons for people who are starving or investment courses for people living below the poverty line; better management of a situation doesn’t address it when there’s a fundamental shortfall and often the shortfall itself is what puts the opportunity for better management out of reach.
I’m tired. I’m tired of being tired.
Got myself some of that 2024 vintage COVID
In a queer space, I met a lesbian lady who lives in Pakistan and works for the Department of School Education.
For like two seconds I thought this was cool, but she started talking about how “the tribals” in Punjab are all “dangerous” and “keep their girls from going to school”, and how the Department delivers USAID textbooks, uniforms, so on. Smelt really bad to me, like this is an imperialist thing right? USAID textbooks were also what the Taliban used in Afghanistan for radicalisation, right?
Worthy to note, I just asked her about what she does and how it gets done, I did not unhinge my jaw and spew forth a DOG OF THE USAMERICAN EMPIRE rant, because you know what they say about No Investigation. I do have something like a filter. It was kind of surreal to be sniffing out western propaganda in realtime while talking with this queer woman from Pakistan though. Plus, it was kind of irritating to have libs chime in all UR DOING A SERVICE FOR UR COUNTRY on something that fucking reeks of pinkwashing & homonationalism.
Your thoughts please, thread.
Hope you get an answer! I’m not informed enough to have any response at this moment, but maybe make this its own thread?
Perhaps I shall!
Had a real sudden blizzard in my city, which is way scarier when you work with houseless people. The emergency winter shelters are open but we’re struggling to get enough people to run them, and I’ve been doing a lot of street outreach in the snow.
But in a way I’m happier to be worrying about my local community than about global politics or personal problems. I can cry about that stuff later.
There’s a political crisis in my country and I’m still in my department (state) because our leftist presence is really only effective here. Hoping the comrades out there can bring about a change but not expecting much with how liberal most of it is.
In the meantime, I’ve found a love of making sandwiches.
Good luck on the political project! What kinda sandwiches you been making?
I’ve been having panic attacks all weekend and I’m really over it.
Fien…
Glad to hear it
better than before. legit like 2 days after joining the kapital book club my friend’s mom died so we’ve been caught up with that but things are starting to settle somewhat now, so hopefully i can catch up 🙏
Hope they’re hanging in there!
Year has started with a flu followed by a gout attack and my throat hasn’t really healed and I ran out of vyvanse and it’s been really fucking hot (which probably triggered the gout attack), but other than that it’s actually been pretty good overall.
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Feel better soon!
On the mend
Eh, neutral. Been switching between depressed and fine. Currently on fine, with terrible weather conditions slightly reducing my hours and compelling me to stay indoors and relax a little. Getting some reading in.
Twiddling my thumbs waiting for feedback on my big book draft. I sent out the final section to a few people I know and their responses have all been really positive but they are not strangers and so I worry they won’t be able to read it objectively, even if they try.
Still in a weird purgatory of having done a lot of work on it but having very little “proof” that it’s good enough for publishing. The idea of my book being on a shelf still feels like a fantasy, but my good feedback so far has at least been from pretty serious readers.
Good luck! Hope it goes well! Whats the book about, if that isn’t too much to publicly share?
Caffeine is a lot better and useful than alcohol, though it comes with its own problems (still, not as bad as alcohol, I would argue, but definitely something to manage).
As for me, I was just at a pro-Palestine protest all the way in D.C. yesterday. I felt great being there. Met many other CPUSA comrades as well. Joe Sims was there too. He recognized me too from the Peace Conference. God, that was nice. But damn, was it cold! I may have come under-dressed; should’ve brought my coat rather than a sweater. And it was taking a long time to march as well. We should’ve gotten going earlier, imho.
Otherwise, I’m trying to get my brother a good chair, like this:
https://www.amazon.com/GTPLAYER-Computer-Footrest-Adjustable-360°-Swivel/dp/B0BBPRZHRX/
(Sorry for the Amazon link; I’ll try to get it directly from whatever store it comes from.)
Does anyone have any suggestions at all? Any great chairs you can think of?
I need the best of the best because the current chair my bro uses is from the kitchen and he’s getting damn tired of it (he’s got back issues too).
Thanks in advance!
I’m trying to stop drinking but probably won’t give up caffeine, at least for now. It’s a dependency that I’m aware of but alcohol is worse like you said. I don’t wanna try and cut out energy drinks since it’s one of my treats I still allow to get through the day but I can just do like tea or coffee in the afternoon. If I’m after a pick-me-up.
Good luck with the sobriety thingy!
Yes, of course!
Can’t help you on the chair, but good work being at the protest! I’m sure it wasn’t the most fun thing in the cold.
I’m having some communication issues with a comrade at the moment that are really piquing my anxieties and some old trauma wounds. I need to suck it up and talk to them I guess.
other than that, I’m doing miraculously well.
Glad you’re largely doing well! Good luck with the talk!
thank you, I love your account name btw, very enjoyable mental image whenever i’ve seen it pop up.
Great job cutting out the booze btw, and good luck with the job hunting, it can feel really crushing at times… I sent out 80 applications last year to proper orgs, big businesses etc, and ended up getting a job in a shitkicking but stable job through a friend (at least it’s nice though!)
Thank you so much for the kind words! Glad you were able to find something!
Also feel free to dig through my post history to see the corgi behind the laptop!
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Unsolicited advice but…
Whenever I hear treatment resistant depression and it’s someone who has been through the system for a long time and they’ve played antidepressant roulette so many times that the doctors just kinda shrug instead of having ideas for where to go next with treatment, I always encourage people to consider stuff that’s somewhat off the beaten path.
Adult ADHD is typically where hyperactive traits from childhood, if they existed much at all, tend to turn into inattentive traits. Not always and not 100% but I’ll spare you my idle hypothesising about why that might be. The important thing in this is that ADHD and especially the inattentive traits can often resemble TRD.
For very complicated reasons, autism can also end up resembling TRD especially in adults.
This next part is armchair expert stuff but I have a suspicion that the overlap between TRD and catatonia is much higher than is recognised in mainstream psychiatry and I’m staking this claim on the fact that the symptoms and most effective treatments for both have a major overlap.
I also think that it’s worth starting from a clean slate with regards to symptoms and mapping out what they are in an objective fashion while withholding interpretation to try and identify if there’s any outlying symptoms that are indicative of an underlying condition which has gotten swept up into the TRD diagnosis or a condition which has gone completely unexamined. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that it’s really common for long-haulers to just attribute symptoms to TRD immediately without a critical assessment of whether this is accurate, and often this is something that is imparted to the person by the attitude of experts who treat them. Sometimes going over things with a fresh perspective can yield new options for treatment or symptom management that haven’t been considered yet. Sometimes the “small” symptoms that you just deal with or ignore can actually be more central to the condition(s) than you realise and because you’re so busy trying to manage the “big” stuff (or perhaps it’s better to think of this as downstream symptoms), you never find the opportunity to examine the “small” symptoms or to treat them which can sometimes be the key to achieving better outcomes. Sometimes you have the interplay of more than one condition simultaneously which introduces complexity in terms of diagnosis, treatment, and management that does not exist for a solitary condition.
This is even more important when you start bringing in physical symptoms too, as mental health generally gets treated as its own discrete matter rather than looking at things in a (ugh) holistic sense. Not like crystals and chakras holistic sense though. You get what I mean.
Is it possible that you’ve got TRD due to the luck of the draw - a shit childhood, unfavourable living conditions, your particular neurochemical makeup, stuff to do with brain physiology like your particular development or taking a knock to the head at some point that has just turned out badly due to misfortune? This kind of thing is absolutely a possibility.
But I’d urge you not to let doctors just write you off and consign you to the too-hard basket and especially not to take that on board yourself. Even if you’ve exhausted all your treatment options, which is actually rarely the case in reality, this can indicate that the model of treatment itself is wrong and not that you’re truly at a dead end.
I’m going to talk personally here as an analogy. I’m asthmatic. I’m also unfit because my mental health has been absolute garbage in the past couple of years in particular so it’s been a matter of survival taking precedence over my physical fitness. Sucks, but that’s life.
Imagine if I looked at being unfit through the lens of asthma - superficially the symptoms line up and you could make a decent case for why it’s asthma. But imagine if I was operating under the idea that what I was experiencing was all just a case of poorly managed asthma or severe asthma. Maybe the argument for why this is right is convincing because, at least some of the time, my symptoms respond to asthma medication. But maybe I start avoiding exercise because I’m worried about it aggravating my asthma symptoms or triggering an asthma attack - by operating under a false paradigm or an inaccurate application of the paradigm (Yes, I’m asthmatic but no, that doesn’t mean that every time I’m out of breath that therefore it’s asthma) you can conceal what’s really going on or you might even follow treatment/symptom management which aggravates the underlying cause (e.g. experiencing breathlessness -> avoid exercise -> become more unfit -> experience being breathless more often).
Am I telling you that your diagnosis is incorrect or that how you’re treating it is actually making the symptoms worse? Fuck no - I don’t know the first thing about your situation.
Am I telling you that your symptoms—all of your symptoms—are valid and deserve to be treated with the highest levels of respect, consideration, and care and that you’re allowed to think about your condition as being “treatment-unexplored depression”, and that it’s better to give up hope for the diagnosis being accurate than it is to give up hope that the condition itself is treatable and that there might be options for better symptom management? Fuck yes, absolutely.
