Get REAL- Question everything!

“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”

Tablets sink and capsules float. Separate out your tablets and capsules when you go to take them. Tip your head down when taking capsules and up when taking tablets. Liquigels don't matter, they kinda stay in the middle of whatever liquid is in your mouth.

If your pill tastes bad, coat it with a bit of butter or margarine. I learned this from my mom, who learned it from a pharmacist.

Being in pain every day isn't normal. Average people experience pain during exceptional moments, like when they stub their toe or jam their finger in a door, not when they sit cross-legged.

Make a medical binder. Make multiple medical binders. I have a small one that comes with me to appointments and two big ones that stay at home, one with old stuff and one with more recent stuff.

Find your icons. Some of mine include Daya Betty (drag queen with diabetes), Stef Sanjati (influencer with Waardenburg syndrome and ADHD), and Hank Green (guy with ulcerative colitis who... does a bunch of stuff). They don't have to be disabled in the same way as you. They don't even have to be real people. Put their pictures up somewhere if you want; I've been meaning to decorate my medical binders with pictures of my icons.

Take a bin, box, bag, basket, whatever and fill it with items to cope with. This can be stuff for mentally coping like colouring books or play clay or stuff for physically coping like pain medicine or physio tape.

Decorate your shit! My cane for at home has a plushie backpack clip hanging from the end of the handle and my cane for going places is covered in stickers. All of my medical binders have fun scrapbooking paper on the outside. Sometimes, I put stickers and washi tape on my inhalers and pill bottles. I used my Cricut to decorate my coping bin with quotes from my icons, like "I've seen enough of Ba Sing Se" and "I need you to be angrier with that bell".

If a flare-up is making you unable to eat or keep food down, consider going to the ER. A pharmacist once told me that since my eye flares can make me so nauseous that I cannot eat, then I need to go to the hospital when that happens.

Cola works wonders for nausea. I have mini cans of Diet Pepsi in my coping bin.

Shortbread is one of the only things I can eat when nauseous. Giant Tiger sells individually-wrapped servings of shortbread around Christmas or the British import store sells them year-round. I also keep these in my coping bin.

Unless it violates a pain contract or something, don't be afraid to go behind your doctor's back to get something they are refusing you. I got my cardiologist referral by getting in with a different NP at my primary care clinic than who I usually saw. I switched from Seroquel to Abilify by visiting a walk-in.

If you have a condition affecting your abdomen in some way (GI issues, reproductive problems, y'know) then invest in track pants that are too big. I bought some for my laparoscopy over a year ago and they've been handy for pelvic pain days, too. I've also heard loose pants are good for after colonoscopies.

Do whatever works, even if it's weird. I've sat on the floor of the Eaton Centre to take my pills. I've shoved heating pads down my front waistband to reach my uterus.

High-top Converse are good for weak ankles. I almost exclusively wear them.

You can reuse your pill bottles for stuff. I use my jumbo ones to store makeup sponges and my long skinny ones to hold a travel-size amount of Q-Tips.

Just because your diagnostics come back with nothing, it doesn't mean nothing is wrong. Maybe you were checking the wrong thing, or the diagnostic tool wasn't sensitive enough. I have bradycardia episodes even though multiple cardiac tests caught nothing. I probably have endometriosis even though my gynecologist didn't see anything.

You can bring your comfort item to appointments, and it's generally a green flag when someone talks to you about it. I brought a Squishmallow turkey (named Ulana) to my laparoscopy and they had her wearing my mask when I woke up. I brought a Build-A-Bear cat (named Blinx) to another procedure and a nurse told me that everyone in the hall on the way to the procedure room saw him and were talking about how cute he was. Both of those ended up being positive experiences and every person who talked to me about my plushies was nice to me. If you don't feel comfortable having it visible to your provider during the appointment, you can hide it in your bag and just know it's there, or if you're in a video appointment, you can hold it below frame in your lap.

Get a small bucket, fill it with stuff, and stick it in your bed (if you have room for it). I filled a bucket with Ensure, juice boxes, oatmeal bars, lotion, my rescue inhaler, etc. in October 2023 in anticipation of my laparoscopy and I still have it in my bed as of January 2025.

If your disability impacts your impulse control (e.g. ADHD, bipolar disorder), you should consider setting limits around your spending -- no more than X dollars at a time, nothing online unless it's absolutely necessary, and so on. Or, run these purchases by someone you trust before committing to them; I use my BFF groupchat to help talk sense into myself when I buy stuff.

this is my own flowchart I made for managing executive dysfunction and task initiation with ADHD. It’s *really* complicated so might be too overwhelming for some folks, I just like it like that myself because it’s thorough! I have this printed out in multiple places around my home that I tend to get stuck.

(I’m in the zone where we will get a total eclipse)

Her name is Bramble and she was a requested stone carving for a charity fundraising event. I love the lower part of the bear that has some really interesting striping going on, almost like she's sitting in water.

Also consider Mikinakoos' as they're extending support beyond their traditional service areas due to the scale of this emergency!

Donations for Namaygoosisagagun First Nation:

Donations for Whitesand First Nation:

According to Peter Toft, the National Museum of Denmark’s Greenlandic fur clothing expert, this beaded, furry thong was intended to be displayed not just during intimate moments, but in polite company. Inside the warm homes of the Greenlandic Inuit, a naatsit “was the only thing worn even when having guests or visiting the houses of other families,” says Toft. "This shocked the Danish missionaries of the 18th and 19th century, who tried to convince the Inuit to wear European linen (longer) underwear indoors. This attempt was not very successful.”

I'm imagining the thousands of years of complex clothing technology employed by the Inuit while early-medieval Europeans were still using Squares of Fabric.

Today, it has been nine years since anarchists and other anti-fascists converged in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose the “Unite the Right” rally, which brought together neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and suit-and-tie white nationalists in an effort to establish a fascist street movement.

Today, many of these fascists are working for ICE. The fight continues.

One of the most popular theories of trauma says there are three steps.

Escape the trauma and find safety.

Process the trauma.

Consolidate the trauma.

Sometimes this can be a relatively quick process. If you get into a car accident while turning left in a busy city street, you might get trauma symptoms that cause feelings of fear and anxiety when you're driving your car, or travelling by car through a busy city.

"Finding safety" would mean learning to handle your anxiety and fearfulness by re-training your body to seek calm, even when reminded of the trauma. This might include things like breathing or muscle relaxation exercises that actually affect an anxious brain and help you stay centred, as well as slow exposure to situations that are stressful and traumatic so you learn to tolerate them again.

"Processing the trauma" means to look back at what happened that has given you significant psychological symptoms, and re-process those memories and the lessons you took from them so they are less damaging or hurtful. That might be revisiting your memories of the accident until they aren't so painful to think about, or it might be working to be more comfortable with driving again.

"Consolidating the trauma" means that when you've settled those memories, you take your new, healthier understanding of yourself forward into your life. That might make you a more cautious driver, or cause you to be more mindful and value every moment because you've seen how quickly your life can change. It is what you make of it.

When you try to do these steps out of order, that's more of a problem. If you want to dive straight into revisiting your memories of something that happened, but you have no defense against the panic attacks and nightmares that remembering causes you, you're not safe, not so far as your brain thinks. Your brain experiences raw memories of trauma as though it were still happening all around you. You can end up even more traumatized than before, so that even seeing a picture of a car makes you feel like you're back on that street waiting to turn left.

If a trauma is particularly old, complex, or strong, it can take a long, long time before you actually feel safe enough to go back into the memories that haunt you most. That's especially true if you're still in a situation that feels threatening, like if it's your job to drive around downtown. Or in other situations, if your abusive parent is still alive and in your life, or if you're still a member of the group or club you were abused in.

I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.

Just because I wasn't deconstructing the shit that happened to me when I was 4 for the past couple decades, it doesn't mean I wasn't working on my own healing. I did all the work that got me to here and now.

Also this bit from Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold:

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.