Yeah, same here. I can remember a few different scattered interactions I’ve had with OP — enough that if they never posted again, I would notice their absence.
I wouldn’t say that trauma dumps are fun to read, but as someone who has plenty of trauma of my own, being able to relate to a random internet person has sometimes been a rare source of solace for me.
I’m sorry for your loss.
I’m going to share with you a sentiment that I don’t imagine you’ll be able to fully process right now, when everything is still so raw and jumbled, but I hope that in time, it might offer you some comfort, as it did for me.
When I lost my partner back in 2021, it made me think a lot about legacy — in particular, the fact that deciding a person’s legacy is a task that falls to the people who are left behind. On the days where the grief hurts particularly badly, this idea helps me to stay focussed on the duty I feel to carry my partner’s memory forwards, through embodying his virtues and learning from his flaws. It’s a heavy burden, but one I’m glad to carry.
It’s okay if thinking this way is too much for you right now, especially as you have so much on your plate in terms of logistics. I just wanted to share this with you because what you said about your dad’s birthday touched me. Your next few birthdays are going to be pretty rough, but I hope that in time, you’ll be able to remember the joke about how you’re your dad’s birthday present in a way that’ll still hurt, but in a warm, loving way that inspires you to continue making your dad proud. He might be gone, but you’ll always be his birthday present — a birthday present that will continue to become even better as you continue to learn and grow.
I’ve never lost a parent before, but I relate to what you describe about feeling untethered. That’s another part of why I commented. My partner used to be one of the tethers connecting me to the world, and losing him meant I needed to find new ways to anchor myself so that I could be the tether that holds his memory here. It’s disorienting and exhausting and the worst part is that when you feel like you’re beginning to adjust, another wave of grief will hit you when you’re least expecting it. Grief doesn’t happen all at once, nor does it follow a predictable path. Be kind to yourself over the coming weeks and months.
Good luck with taking the dog to the funeral home on Friday, and good luck with supporting other members of your family too. I hope that the funeral logistics go smoothly enough that you are able to find some time to begin the long process of reorienting yourself. And please don’t feel the need to reply to this comment if you don’t have the brain space for that. God knows you’ve got enough obligations on your plate
I’m glad to hear that. It sounds like the bit at the end of your original comment was just a hyperbolic joke. I commented because I had had friends who have said things like that in a context where tensions in the relationship did end up escalating to the level of physical violence, which is never okay.
Since learning about what they went through, I try to be more proactive in pointing out potentially problematic stuff, because for both of my friends, what got them out of that situation was the cumulative effect of people saying “dude, are you okay? That is not something you should be experiencing”. Fortunately, in this case, it appears that this was me being overly cautious
Research has actually shown that people respond better to people with Scottish accents. Apparently at least one big company (might have been British Gas?) factored this into their decision about where to base their upper tier customer service call centres
You don’t seem like you’re very happy in your relationship. Given you got married not too long ago, I can only hope that there are good parts to your relationship that made you want to be married to this person, because what you describe in your comment doesn’t sound healthy or okay. If you want to remain married to this person, y’all should probably try to work through this shit, because it’ll fester into resentment otherwise
I made a wax seal last year so that I could be an extra bitch when sending letters to my friends.
I like sending people letters and postcards, because the added friction of the physical process makes it feel more meaningful. It’s almost got a ritual feel to it.
Oooh, I didn’t know this was the word for this. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with me
I have one, I just don’t know where it is. Do I count as civilised?
Although they’re struggling at the moment, due to their blood being harvested for use in biomedical research.[1]. Although fortunately, there have been synthetic alternatives developed in the last few years, so hopefully their numbers should recover as that is phased in.
Edit: if this makes you feel overly sad, here is a palate cleanser(30 minute long, ideally listened to in one uninterrupted block). It’s one of my favourite things I stumbled across last year, and it makes me feel hopeful about the world. It made me cry, but in a good way.
[1]: Linked article has more info, but the TL;DR is that their blood clots in the presence of bacterial toxins, so it’s super useful in stuff like vaccine development and production. They capture the crabs, harvest the blood and return the crabs alive, and the stats that the system has on this says that only a small percentage of them end up dying as a result of this. However, given that we can’t see how many of them die or fail to reproduce in the weeks and months following their release, we can’t confirm that.
We do know that the numbers of a bird that feasts almost exclusively on horseshoe crab eggs have seen severe reductions over the last 40 or so years, so it seems likely that the impact of this harvesting on horseshoe crab populations is more severe than the official data suggests.
It’s unfortunate because they fall between the cracks when it comes to animal research ethics. For one, the research isn’t being done on them, so they probably wouldn’t be protected under most existing legislation anyway. But also, animal research legislation doesn’t tend to give much protection to invertebrates (with the exception of octopuses, which are smart enough that they get additional protections).
I think it’s a pretty interesting case study of a big gap in the legislation that protects the rights of animals — existing legislation focuses a lot on our duty to individual animals, but here, despite the harm to any one horseshoe crab seeming to be tolerably low, the vast scale at which we have been harvesting them has had an impact on the species as a whole.
My view is that an anthropocentric framework that puts humans above all other animals is probably harmful in general and something we should work to undermine, but that if we are taking that tack (which seems necessary for the utilitarian view of “harvesting these crabs’ blood has saved many human lives” that most people seem to take on this topic), then we must also accept that we have an ethical duty to be good stewards of the natural world. We can’t have it both ways and think of ourselves as so rational and smart, but not accept the responsibility that would come with that.
I find the legislative angle of it especially interesting, because most people I have told this to are shocked to learn of how they’re not protected, and they share at least some of my view that effective animal research ethics legislation should surely account for our duty to ecosystems as a whole. People far more learned than I in legal matters have struggled to think of ways we could effectively legislate this though. It’s possible that additional legislation isn’t the best way to handle this, and that we would be better served to aim to regulate in opposition to the economically extractivist ideology that seems to be the default setting nowadays (because horseshoe crabs are just an illustrative case study of the problem).
I apologise for info dumping in reply to your joyful comment with such downer info. I do feel hopeful about the progress of synthetic alternatives though. I also find it a fascinating topic to learn about, even if it is a bit depressing
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Me.
I mean, I’m not particularly old — only 29. But I’m super surprised I still exist. And it’s not for lack of trying. It just turns out that even though I’m pretty mediocre at living, I’m even worse at dying. Fortunately, I’m in a place now where that’s a thing I’m happy about, for the most part.
I’ve got at least 8 different attempts under my belt, and the way that some of them failed makes me feel like it’s almost offensive to be an atheist. For instance, when I swam out into the sea, as far as I could until I couldn’t anymore, and the next thing I remember was waking up on the beach, not super far from where I’d swam from. I thought that was a thing that only happened in movies. Granted, I’m not a strong swimmer, so I didn’t get very far out, but still.
That was one of my attempts as an adult, but I had a lot as a teenager too. When I was about 16, I was resentful of all the people who cared about me, because the guilt I felt over hurting them was the only thing keeping me alive. Building off of the crisis management advice that I’d seen that said it’s good to try to put some distance between you and your suicidal feelings by trying to hold off until the next day, for instance, I resolved that I would stick around until I was 20, and if nothing had improved by then, I would kill myself and fuck anyone who begrudged me this escape — no-one could say I didn’t try.
Well, it turns out that some things did improve by age 20 — enough that it suggested there was a non-zero hope that I could some day live and actually be happy to be alive. I still struggled a lot after that point, because it’s not like my mental health was magically resolved (it still isn’t), but I’m glad I stuck around.
In a way though, things got harder after age 20. Ironically, there were countless times throughout my late teens in which looking forward to my death was the only thing that saved my life. When things were particularly rough, I would work out how many days I had to go before I could rest, and it soothed me. After I was 20, however, I was unanchored. I had a life that didn’t feel like it was my own, because I never expected to make it this far. Even now, it still sometimes feels like I’m in a bonus level. It’s a bizarre feeling.
But yeah, I, and many of the people who know and love me, are surprised that I’m still around. I’m proud of myself, even if a significant part of why I’m still here is sheer luck. Obviously this wasn’t what you meant when asking your question, but I’ve been reflecting on my progress a lot lately, and the idea of giving this answer amused me. It feels healing to joke about this stuff a bit, I think
My mum didn’t do anything as bad as that, but your comment made me reflect and realise that there weren’t really any instances I can recall of my mum sitting down to help me tidy up my room. I’d just end up shoving everything under my bed when it came time for the weekly check for our pocket money and then doing a massive organise every few months or so (but it would never stay tidy for long.
What’s especially interesting was that I was quite enthusiastic about tidying and cleaning other parts of the house; we could do extra chores for extra pocket money. I wonder whether my attitude towards cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen was different to my room because I had to be shown how to do these tasks, as opposed to being left to my own devices with my bedroom
Explanations aren’t excuses. Especially because the things that drive individuals are systems; we can strive to hold individuals accountable for their actions whilst also recognise the systemic oppression that makes it harder to make good choices
I’m sorry that you lost something of such sentimental value
Including some cool history along with the song suggestions? I like you, you’re very cool
I love that you already have a playlist. My people <3
Not a cheat answer imo — that was one of the three songs that cropped up randomly for my friend. The inciting incident, if you will
Nor can I
I think that distrohopping is part of the experience for power users.
I think it’s sort of like the stages of grief, where it doesn’t happen in any particular order.
For instance, I know a couple of people who started like the top left (they tend to describe this as their “neck beard phase”, who then became the top right. Then they became the bottom left (one is a trans woman, the other still identifies as a man, but enjoys presenting as a femboy sometimes). Then both of them became furries once they had enough disposable income.
I have another friend who started as a furry, but then became the top right when she needed entered the professional world (she was also in boy-mode at this point). Then this made her be miserable, especially because she was even more unhappy in this more conventional mode of masculinity, which made her become the top left. Then her egg cracked, and she turned into the bottom left. She says she doesn’t have the time or money to actively be a furry anymore, but she’s happy because she has a lot of friends who are, so this allows her to be close to a community that was an instrumental part in her finding herself (also for “helping [her] to not fucking kill [herself] as a depressed teenager”)
I imagine that it would be possible for any order of events to work, for different people. And some people may visit certain squares multiple times
Great explanation. I’m a biochemist who loves nerding out about this stuff (and practicing science communication), so I came into this thread prepared to explain more about this works. However, your comment has left me with nothing to do but to be appreciative of your excellent comment