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I'm a very vulnerable butch. I'm chronically ill, invisibly physically disabled, and have a lot of mental health issues. My masculinity doesn't inherently make me more strong or powerful.

But there's a huge amount of butch culture built on butches being protective of femmes, or just being strong and working in very physically laborious jobs. It feels disheartening to be locked out of a major part of my culture, just because I'm disabled.

So here's to all the disabled butches who want, or are expected to, be strong because toxic masculinity has taught us the mascs are the protectors, but we can't be.

This is what Americans are saying when they call their wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam (or less commonly Korea) "mistakes".

It's not as "progressive foreign policy" as they might want you to believe, it's a very subtle form of genocide apologia.

America chose to drop those bombs, on those homes, where those people lived. It was planned and ordered, it cost a lot of money and required a lot of effort. It was no accident, no "blunder".

he has been baked alhamdulliah

One somewhat worrying pattern I’m seeing in the reblogs of my post about POTS, is that when I briefly described chronic fatigue, a lot of people said things like “Isn’t that just depression?” or “I thought that was depression”.

For one, a lot of chronically ill people (not just those with POTS) are depressed. Think about it:

How likely is it to be in perpetual pain, have no physical energy to even think, much less to do things, and NOT become depressed?

Being chronically ill is depressing, especially when you have no effective palliative treatment, or when you don’t even realize that you’re physically sick and start to think that you’re just a lazy and useless piece of dumb shit.

A lot of us get disregarded by doctors and told that we’re just depressed or anxious, prescribed an anti-depressant or anxiolytic, and sent home.

If you’ve been diagnosed with (only) depression and your anti-depressants don’t seem to work, PLEASE consider if the tiredness comes from depression (only) or if it’s physical. Also consider it if the things most people do to fight exhaustion at best don’t help you or at worst make it worse.

This is a video about chronic fatigue. To be clear, she talks about being diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ME, but she recently found out that she has hEDS instead.

If you want to jump straight to where she describes what chronic fatigue is like, the difference between it and depression, as well as just being tired, go to 3:10 - 10:32.

Here a doctor describes the similarities and differences between depression and fatigue, though his specific focus is on patients with cancer:

Here’s another much shorter video showing basic differences between tiredness and chronic fatigue:

And here’s another video talking about fatigue in general and some possible causes:

Chronic fatigue, like other chronic illness symptoms, isn’t NECESSARILY present non-stop for the rest of your life.

Some patients go through phases in which they feel better (especially if they’re under relatively effective treatment), and then relapse for a period of time. That’s what we call “flares”, which can be pretty unpredictable.