See this way of thinking has actually landed me in a pretty bad place with my mental health.

“I’m in charge of my own emotions” is not something an autistic person with rigid lines of thinking should internalise, but I did.

As a result I never gave myself permission to feel negative emotions, because who wants to feel negative about anything if they don’t have to?

It seemed so smart and healthy, just be happy, that’s what everyone always says about the easy fix to mental health. It was easy too, regardless what was happening around me, if I pictured myself feeling happy, I’d feel happy.

I’m in my 30s and regularly mistake sensations with other sensations (am I tired or do I need to pee? They both cause a headache) and also I think all my negative emotions are skipping my brain entirely and coming out my arse in the form of IBS.

I can’t picture myself feeling sad to experience sad because I …don’t remember what sad feels like.

I remember what vomiting feels like, because that’s how my body has reacted to “sad” recently.

This, if anything it might clarify a few confusing exchanges we’ve had in the past, and it will certainly help me be a better friend in the the future.

If I already know you, I know you, I’m choosing to be friends with you because of how you treat me and how you treat others when we hang out together. If I had any problems with that, I wouldn’t be friends long enough to hear you tell me about your NPD diagnosis.

Now that said, I’ve had friends tell me about a diagnosis and it shouldn’t change anything, but now that the diagnosis is out in the open they want it to change things and I can’t offer that to the friendship, such as compromising on my own boundaries (eg: I had a friend who after explaining their condition asked me to provide tone indicators for everything I say, but I have alexithymia so that was really difficult for me to do and I couldn’t adjust my behaviour to meet the new expectations of the friendship, so we faded out of each other’s lives, they told people I stopped being friends with them because of their anxiety disorder… No it’s because I couldn’t meet the changed expectations of the friendship, describing my emotions every minute is hard for me and I choose not to be friends with people who require me to do that for their comfort)

Wait, what’s the internet definition of the word?

I thought hussy was a synonym for “loose woman”

What does it mean now days?

Edit: oh, it’s not that hussy has a different definition on the internet, it’s that it looks like “bussy” if you’re not looking closely?

Which I never read correctly anyway because I see it written like that and in my head I’m saying “bah see” not “buo see”

The “Bail out Bed” was a flawed idea because no one wants to get up and relocate in the middle of the night and interrupt their sleep cycles.

He snores, he always snores, tonight won’t be any different, so why don’t I just start in the bail out bed so once I fall asleep I stay asleep and the human freight train I shacked up with doesn’t wake me up.

He finally got a Cpap last year for his obstructive sleep apnoea.

but we’d slept in separate beds for 5 years, and I was used to sleeping alone and having full control over my temperature and I’m a fidgety sleeper, so we couldn’t get used to sharing a bed again.

I think both of us being well rested and refreshed each day is more important to the health of our relationship than sharing a bed. If we’re not fatigued, headachey and cranky, we can spend quality time together outside of bed.

And then you lose any loyalty or banked credits because it’s technically a “New contract”

I had 100GB of data credit in my pre paid phone plan. I got 2GB a month for $5 unlimited talk and text starting in 2014, it’s a good deal for me. And you can imagine how long it took to bank 100GB even with the occasional free bonus data promo… That plan was replaced with a more expensive one but somehow I got grandfathered in to the cheap plan.

So naturally I didn’t want to rock the boat when I was getting my phone for $5 a month (their cheapest plan now is $20)

But they finally caught on and moved me to the $20 this year, they automatically transferred my data bank and sent me the new terms.

I double checked and while this was their cheapest monthly plan the 6 month plan would save me $80 in the long term so I called to get swapped and they said that I’d lose my data bank because it was a new contract. I argued that they changed my contract and I should have had an opportunity to choose which new contract my data gets transferred to.

I spent ages debating it, but there was nothing the rep or their supervisor could do to reward my 10 years with their company or compensate me for the service I had pre paid for (data) that they now expected me to subscribe to on their new terms to be able to access despite the contract I signed saying something totally different.

Their leading budget competitor had the exact same overall rate but for a yearly pre paid plan, and new customers got a 150GB data bank start up bonus. So my phone bill is paid up for the year now and I’ve still got a decent chunk of data and it didn’t cost more than I was prepared to pay the old company.

(and yes I do use it, I’m a substitute teacher so I’m always using my phone as a hot spot when I’m at a different school)

Both the battery and the charger are old and broken in my brain.

If it’s too hot out the battery drains faster, if I’m playing music the battery drains faster. If I’m having to swap between conversations, bye bye battery.

Sometimes the charger works fine but sometimes it just doesn’t charge no matter what I try, and the battery stays low even if I leave it plugged in alone.

Some days there’s a process that’s absolutely and inexplicably guzzling power, but the next day that same process barely takes up any processing power.

Some days it just doesn’t turn on at all, and then on rare occasions I can’t get the damn thing to turn off, it’s just blasting notifications and I’m trying to sleep.

Related: personally I think “old phone battery” is a much better metaphor than the “chronically ill spoons” metaphor that is commonly used to explain the impact of chronic illness.

It feels a little dot com boom 2.0

Hence why star wars is a chosen one, hero’s quest, prophetised fantasy. Not a Sci fi.

When you and your kin are all prophetised to do important shit, there is no coincidence. it’s all part of a bigger divine plan of fate. Or it’s the midi-chlorians or something I dunno, I slept through the prequels.

There are definitely some wars I’d much rather were just MMA death fights between the PM’s and presidents.

And others where I’m glad they aren’t, because the country whose victory would be best for the common good is led by someone who would not win a physical fight.

Exactly, so the idea that millennials the generation older than Gen Z are “too young for cassettes” is laughable.

People born in 1995, and early 1996 are millennials, and billions of cassettes existed around them as they grew up.

Yes! Oh my God, I thought that was a uniquely Australian thing because my partner from the UK had no idea what I was on about. But there was like 2 years in highschool for me where everyone was obsessed with the fitting 3-4 songs on a minidisc.

Though it helped that you could get actual, good music in cereal box mini discs prizes. I got a Missy Higgins single and played it to death. I want to say it was Sugarcane, but the year doesn’t match so it had to have been Scar or Sound of White. (it exploded in our PC disc drive, mini discs were great at doing that) I don’t even remember the song.

I always heard people that I don’t know cassette tapes or vinyls or slide projectors when I was a kid.

Cassettes?

Sorry… Cassettes!?

There’s someone out there who is attempting to insult millennials by saying we’re too young for cassettes?

What the heck else would we be listening to music on, Brenda? We didn’t have discmans, sure they existed but we had kid money, and it wasn’t worth it until anti-skip came along in 1997, by which point at 10-15 we already had a cassette collection… so we had walkmans!

2 billion blank cassettes were sold in 1997, 2 billion the year before… those born in 1996 didn’t get born into a world where the 2 billion cassettes sold that year magically disappeared before the kid was old enough to form memories.

Cassettes were the best, though CD-R changed the game for custom mix “tapes”, I never went back to actual mix tapes after we got the tech to burn cds. Mix tapes were still going around all year levels in my first year of highschool, but it was mostly mix CDs going around when I graduated, and the rich kids were already just swapping usbs. By uni, we’d send each other mediafire links to a zip file full of mp3s.

I can still kind of imagine the sensation of sticking my pinkie finger in a cassettes to rewind when I couldn’t find a pen. Though weirdly, I can’t remember how I used to rewind VHS’s, I can’t picture that feeling. I’m guessing I probably used the rewind feature for video more often, and was find hand rewinding my music.

I think the older generations are forgetting how the passage of time works. Also, just how many of us millennials grew up poor with Gen X hand me downs 😂

In Australia Google maps has issues with routing cyclists on 80km busy truck transit roads that have no bike lanes, footpaths or shoulders. You’ll regularly get stuck behind lost uber eats cyclists whose map took them through a motor vehicle only underpass.

The other day google maps decided to reroute me from a quiet, wide street with no bike lane that was otherwise perfectly safe, and tried to send me through a nightsoil alley, down a heritage stock run that was paved with cobblestones and crossed over a storm drain 4 times in a zig zag.

Yeah, “safer” because there’s no cars I guess, but not suitable for bikes at all.

I keep having this glitch where I’m stuck in the opening scene with the jojo cubicle. I’m supposed to get a letter telling me I’ve inherited a farm but that hasn’t happened yet, anyone else got this bug?

Having had a defecography this is very similar to the encouragement the radiologist gave me…

I’m hard of hearing and terrified of standing in the wrong place at an airport and missing the visual cues to board the flight. Once boarding starts and people start queueing up, I usually get in line because it’s helpful to see what everyone in front of me is doing - the order that they hand over paperwork or get carry on double checked. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to hear the attendant if they ask me questions at the gate because it’s so noisy, so I like to at least feel like I’m prepared.

One time I was flying with crutches and qualified for early pre-boarding because I needed the plane wheelchair (skychair). I sat right next to the gate desk and waited, then I started seeing people queue up so I quickly joined the line, wondering how pre-boarding works when the whole plane of passengers are already vying to be at the front of the line.

I get to the front, the attendant looks at my ticket then after some awkward back and forward eventually I realised they were telling me I’ll have to wait till everyone has boarded to get the sky-chair on. I should have come to the desk when pre boarding was announced. I pointed that I was sitting right in front of them… Apparently they were called my name 3 times over the loudspeaker.

Apparently airports can only comprehend one disability at a time (if that!) they knew I was hard of hearing (it’s on my ticket) but still thought calling me over the PA was the best way to get the attention of the deaf person sitting 80cm from their desk.

So I sat back down and waited for the line to clear, then I got back up when there were 2 people in line, and after another back and forward I learned that they had tried calling my name again about halfway through boarding because they only had one skychair and it was now or never because the chair had told fly with the other passenger because their arrival airport didn’t have a chair, or something, I dunno, anyway I kind of had to crawl down the ailse to get to my chair because in the past I’ve just used the backs of chairs to swing myself along, but the plane was full so I couldn’t do that.

If you’ve been using weed pretty heavily for a while, I’d give it a month T break.

For me the first week is insomnia, muscle pain and brain fog worse than when I’m actually stoned, the second week is depressive symptoms and feeling “dopamine withdrawal” (ie: nothing is fun, nothing is motivating, everything is empty), hyperemesis/diarrhoea, and hypersomia.

It’s not until the third or fourth week of a T break that I feel human and begin to think “this is fine, I don’t need weed, it’s nice, but so is having some time off to be sober”

The frustrating thing is that I know this, but because the voice in my head is my voice and has my accent, “of” and “have” sound basically the same so when I’m speed typing I accidentally write “of” and when I’m proof reading it, either out loud or in my head, it sounds the exact same to read “could of” or “could have”.

I’ve gotten around this in my professional writing by proof reading everything out loud while doing a silly accent. Or getting a screen reader to read it back in a robot voice.

But for random comments on the internet, I don’t bother, so I’ll occasionally get a helpful person explaining the mistake, and they’re always polite and I appreciate it. I just wish I knew how to make it stick when I’m actually writing.

Plus a bunch of stuff that was illegal when you were poor suddenly becomes perfectly legal if you’re rich enough to pay the associated fees.

I mean, sure the police call them “fines”…but still.

I was struck by a truck in April last year when they turned into a bike path instead of turning into their lane.

I was completely fine at the time, just banged up, I went to a private GP clinic and they did a full assessment and billed it under the transport accident commission (a public fund in Victoria Australia for people injured in transport accidents)

Almost one year on, and what was just a bruise on my shin is still just a bruise on my shin. The blood vessels never healed, the discolouration never went away, the odema still causes pain and I can’t kneel or wear boots, and my shin pads for soccer cause pain (and when I take a tackle shin to shin, the pain is so bad it prevents me from weight bearing for an hour or so, and I walked around on a dislocated hip for 3 months, I have a congenital hip deformity, I’m not a stranger to leg pain)

It’s literally just a bruise, my regular GP has been keeping an eye on it because it’s baffling that it hasn’t healed, but it’s not dangerous and it’s not impacting my life enough that I wish I’d done more at the time of the accident.

But it is annoying, and because I was totally fine after the accident, my TAC claim was open-and-close just to cover the cost of the initial “all clear, just some bruising” private GP appointment. And now I have no way of getting reimbursed for the subsequent “it’s been 10 months doc, why is my leg still bruised like I banged it yesterday? Let’s get a CT to rule out issues” appointments.

Hindsight is 20-20, if you have any way of keeping your options open as a traffic accident victim to allow your body time to show the true long term impact, take action to leave that door open, just in case.

There’s a chance, like me, you will be 100% fine and at most just have a strange new body quirk. But there’s also a chance things don’t heal the way you expect and it becomes a lifelong issue.