Ironed Orchids

* before 18

* 18-21

* 22-25

* 26-29

* 30+

* I STILL don’t feel grown up

* it’s complicated

* see results

Thank you for talking about everything and anything, Mr. T. You made me happy tonight and for that, I wish you well on the journey of life! ♡

-☆

Oh my god

Okay full disclosure when I started this blog I had no idea anything I ever said or did would have any impact on anyone ever, but now every so often I get to hear about someone who feels the way I felt and feels seen or someone tells me I helped them in some way and it makes me feel this wonderful warm light in my chest and so I really, really wanna say thank you back???

And hell yes, you're right, you can do whatever you want with your life! It's YOUR life!!! Everyone always told ME "ohhh, you'll want to start dating eventually" or "your feelings will change later" or "it'll be different when you're older" and you know what??? It ISN'T

Getting older and becoming an adult..... some things slow down a bit, but you don't stop being YOU! You learn to appreciate stuff like good quality baking pans and good-smelling dish soap and getting your tax return back on time, but you'll STILL love dinosaurs and action movies and swimming and making paintings!! That doesn't dissolve into thin air!!

Life has been complicated, and not always happy, but I can tell you right now that the number one difference I've found between being an adult and being a kid is that now that I'm an adult, *I* make up the rules! And after I do all the responsible stuff that keeps me alive and healthy I can spend all day in my pajamas pants eating jellybeans, hot-gluing together a cardboard fort in my living room for my beautiful cat son!

IMO, the only REAL 'losing' in life is the time you waste trying to fit into a mold that doesn't make you happy Just to kep up the appearances of being "normal and successful".

Which means if you're already aiming for "happy", you're ahead of the curve!

I have a BMI of 35. I am the cutoff for most of medicine. My size or larger, we can't access:

Fertility treatment

Gender affirming surgeries

Most surgeries, in fact

bc we can't donate our bodies to science and drs don't study on larger bodies. Medications aren't made for us bc we're often excluded from scientific studies. We're systematically excluded and then blamed for poorer outcomes.

I don't care whether you 'like' looking at me or bodies like mine; we deserve equal access to healthcare [all caps].

In one now-removed article on its site, ISBNdb said that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text, and ingesting these books could prevent model collapse. The article also suggested that book authors who might be opposed to this use of their work could just write with manipulating and sabotaging AI models in mind.  404 Media spoke to booksellers and saw reports online detailing a sudden uptick in sales recently. “It's not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders,” one bookseller told 404 Media. “The type of books [...] there's no rhyme or reason to it. Also, there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.”  “Purchasing paper books at scale from the secondary market does not deprive any creator of income they would otherwise have received,” one of ISBNdb’s now-removed pages said. “These are books that have already fully discharged their financial obligation to their creators.”

And yeah, sure, why don't all of us who value writing as art just spend the rest of our lives sabotaging that vital imperative by trying to screw up what we do enough to screw you up. Absolutely. Makes perfect sense.

All those "spend just 35 minutes doing a bunch of really hard exercises and you'll feel great forever!" videos are really discouraging. I usually end up doing like, 2 minutes of some of his while waiting for my shower to heat up, and ykw?