Will not stop dancing

So, my insurance has been trying to not cover my SNRI because it is new on the market and no generic available yet, so pricey.

I apply for a refill and the request gets locked for review. Again. For the 3rd time.

This time I call and immediately ask to speak to the actual doctor making these clinical decisions. Very politely. Must be a slow day because they allow it.

ME: [Teacher voice] I'm calling in regards to the SNRI you have placed a lock on. Why was this decision made?

DOC: Well, there are dozens of other medications on the market in that tier, and far cheaper for you and [insurer]. We have sent a request to your doctor to consider alternatives.

ME: I am aware of that. So, can you do me a HUGE favor and look up my prescription history really quickly and tell me how many SSRIs and SNRIs were only filled once in 2022 for me, showing they were poorly tolerated?

DOC: It looks like eight.

ME: Great job! Now, can you please look at my genetic test for psychiatric drug tolerance and tell me how many medications are listed in the safe category?

DOC: Two.

ME: Awesome! Now, can you tell me what type that other drug is that I'm not taking?

DOC: Yeah, totally, it's an MAOI.

ME: That's correct, you're really knowledgeable! Should I be taking something as dangerous as an MAOI with my other medications, or even just in general?

DOC: It's contraindicated for sure.

ME: It is! So true! So, last question since you've been incredibly smart and helpful. Is it less expensive for [insurer] to pay out for the medication knowing they already get a huge manufacturer discount anyway, or is it more expensive for them to pay for me to need potentially long-term inpatient psychiatric care?

DOC: I'll clear the code, ma'am and flag it as medically necessary. I'm sorry about this.

ME: I appreciate you SO MUCH. You have a great day now.

Colonial America, maybe.

The way Europeans talk about North America when they say it reveals everything about the way they think.

To them, history here didn’t start until they arrived. Not until the so called real people with real culture and real architecture and real timelines stepped off a boat.

Everything before that gets treated like fog, like background noise, like a blank landscape waiting to be drawn on.

Like the Europeans arrived here and just found a land untouched by human hands ready for them to Manifest (European) Destiny in, instead of, like, a continent full of nations older than most European countries, with civilizations, trade routes, astronomy, agriculture, laws, stories, cities, innovations, relationships to the land that go further back than many of the languages used to belittle them.

When Europeans say “America is big,” they don’t even mean the actual land full of over 500 nations of distinct peoples.

They mean the unmarked page they imagine they wrote on. When they say “Europe is old,” they mean “ours is the old that matters.” The implication is always that Indigenous history doesn’t count as history at all, that Indigenous people were somehow outside the timeline until colonialism kicked the clock into motion.

I’m tired of watching it walk by unchallenged and seeing it drift by unchallenged.

North America wasn’t waiting to be discovered.

It wasn’t empty wilderness.

It wasn’t without time or culture or memory.

It was already ancient when the Europeans arrived.

Treating Indigenous people like footnotes or shadows just makes it embarrassingly obvious that a lot of Europeans still don’t see them as real people with real history, real innovation, and real presence.

if your most authentic self is goth, and the way you sourced the clothes is more faithful to goth values, then it's going to be a super comfy goth outfit.

Quickest and easiest way to make a pair of sweatpants look goth is to bleach them. You could either dilute it and spray it on the pants or put a bit of bleach in a container, take a brush and just splash it on the pants. Leave them outside in the sun for a bit and wash them (do not put them with other clothes just to be sure you are not ruining anything). I'll say one hour and you have your personal pair of goth sweatpants.

Another thing you could do is to put holes in them. Take a pair of scissor, cut a small hole and then bush a razor on it to give it a more ripped look.

If you have more time, a bit of money and you want to try something more complicated, you can sew patches, paint them, add some metal eyelets (idk if that's how they are called in english. The metal things in the shoe where you put your laces in), chains, etc.

As for the top, band shirts!! Black shirts!! Black tank tops!! Halloween themed stuff!! You can also find them already goth enough or add patches, pins, laces, etc etc. Same goes for sweatshirts! Be creative! And also accessories!! Spike bracelets, necklaces, etc can change the look and make it more goth even if you are just wearing a pajamas.

When I said "I don't want to look like I'm wearing sweatpants", I did not mean "if only there was a way for me to wear sweatpants", I meant "I do not want to be a person who wears sweatpants in public".

You said there's no way to make something comfy and look good, but people don't innately know "what looking good" to you means, and it can't be sweatpants at all and you would not want to even be seen in public in them. If you want to find tips to feel comfortable in dressy clothing you have to say that from the beginning as well.

It's like you're setting invisible tripwires for people by assuming there's more meaning to your words than you're actually communicating with them. Of course people are gonna trip.

Lining. Business on the outside, comfy on the inside. I suspect a tailor might be able to install some in trousers you like the look of (I vaguely recall you being handy with a sewing machine so maybe you'd be able to do it yourself). Denim could be a bit too stiff for the lining to fully soften, and rips/shredding/holes might not work well with lining being in principle a full second layer. Similarly, skin-tight probably wouldn't leave room for the lining to go. Otherwise, I think most things should work with aftermarket lining.

So, you know, it's not JUST a "quality of life" improvement. It's also a *quantity of life* improvement.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

A lot of people are reblogging this without the addition too which frustrates me because I feel like it's really important to bring attention to the specific sort of discrimination schizophrenic people are subject to.

People will see that you're visibly mentally ill, think that you're annoying and actively look for reasons to dislike you, leading to your presence being constantly fucking monitored and judged because everyone's looking for a concrete reason to hate you. That's what this post is about. this is not a general positivity post or a statement. This is an exasperated vent from a schizophrenic person who has been pushed to his fucking brink so many times.

This doesn't just apply to schizophrenia of course- this applies to other schizospec or psychotic disorders, this applies to personality disorders (ESPECIALLY CLUSTER B.) and this spplies to DID and OSDD and other dissociative disorders. Hell this applies to any even remotely stigmatized disorder. I've seen friends with nothing up with them except for mild autism be treated like this solely because someone found them annoying.