Adult Living

the thing you must realize is that the fear of Looking Hysterical is something that can be and often is weaponized against us by those invested in maintaining the institutional status quo. they will simply say "if you're worried about this, you're an irrational hysteric" and SO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE will just immediately go "oh ok! well *I'm* not an irrational hysteric, so I guess I'll just be really skeptical of people who are worried about that :) Because I am so rational and intelligent"

i love how the government can go "we are purposefully going to stop tracking and measuring the harm done by this disease" and everyone just falls in line instantly like "uh oh, we don't have enough information to speculate!" like yeah they knew you would say that. that's why they did it. they know that limiting the amount of information we are able to even have at all is an instant potion of "general public will assume anyone who thinks this is important is crazy conspiracy theorists" lmao

too lazy to retype this but . insane interaction w coworker last night

I'm curious your thoughts on the naming convention of long COVID. It's always irritated me a bit and it feels like it's been dubbed something vague and unserious sounding on purpose? I've always thought it should be called like. COVID induced disability or something that maybe actually describes what it is. It wouldn't fix people being weird about it, obviously, but I feel like it'd help with larger perception of it being an Actual Big Deal

fwiw long covid was actually named by patients gathering in support groups (beginning as "long-haul covid," though that name and the endonym "long-haulers" has somewhat fallen out of use in the past three years). it is, to my knowledge as a medical sociologist specializing in illness experience, the only illness entity to ever be named this way.

misdreavus is the best pokemon of all time as it turns out. she's stylish, she uses her hair as hands, and she just wants to scare the shit out of people and eat their fear, which she does by sneaking up behind people and biting them or by emitting horrible wailing

Expectation:

relational trauma has to be healed relationally. the best way to practice having relatively "safe" interactions with ppl is joining a hobby group/club/whatever. I've recently joined like ten Fancy Leather Bag groups on fb out of deep curiosity and interest and the communities ppl will build around literally everything I swear to god. I've seen multiple ladies in these purse groups being like "thank you everyone in this hobby for getting me through my chemotherapy" like ... sometimes we dismiss the middle aged purse lady demographic but you know what they have got is a functional community where they support each other that just happens to be centered around purses. having now read many posts from these groups for several weeks I can see that the object being collected IS important, and is certainly the superifival draw into the space as well as something that provides an immediate shared interest, the actual benefit of localish hobby/collecting spaces is largely community and social support.