WHY

Cause like

I dont know about anyone else

But I am perpetually hovering three inches above the strong subconscious belief that everyone knows what they're doing at all times except me, so if you change your normal patterns and I notice, then I will assume it is an intentional choice with a thought-out plan behind it and I will avoid interfering

"I feel like I'm the only one who does this chore. Can we start taking turns?"

"I'd like you to ask me how I'm doing more often."

"It bothers me when this area stays messy so long. Can you do X when Y happens?"

"I feel like the onus is on me to initiate X, and it's wearing me down. Could you try making the first move more? Like 3-4 times a week?"

"I'm feeling upset right now and I'd like to spend some time with you."

"When X happens, I feel like you're taking my work for granted."

"I'm feeling neglected. Could you do X?"

"I'm burnt out and need help."

"I feel like I'm the only one putting effort into X."

"Do you notice this?"

"Are you bothered by this?"

"I am bothered when this happens."

"X habit of yours bothers me."

Women who suffer bad cramps are told cramps shouldn't affect school/work/etc, but no one ever investigates further because no one can possibly know if what someone experiences is just typical pain or something much worse.

Well after 15 years of stage 4 treatment-resistant endometriosis that came with pain as bad as, if not worse than, actual labor contractions every month, all the while being told I was 'typical' and 'just had bad cramps', I've finally been healed (another post for another time). I have had what everyone describes as the elusive 'normal period pain' for several months now, and I am begging you to look me in the eyes and listen because I need everyone who can hear this to hear this.

I have been on both sides of this. I have the hard-earned knowledge of what a period 'should' feel like.

If you have to put in any effort to hide your cramps, you need to get help.

Even during of the PEAK OF CRAMPING (i.e., as bad as your cramps possibly get), you should still be able to stand, speak, walk, eat, work, and sleep with no problems. These tasks should require very-little-to-no extra effort beyond what you would normally do when you aren't on your period. When you do these things, you should feel grumpy and a little bit icky and maybe a twinge of nerves and NOTHING MORE.

If you have to sit in the corner and hope no one approaches you because you can't speak or stand without showing pain, even slightly, you need to get help. If your pain is showing on your face, you need to get help. And most importantly, IF YOUR PAIN DOES NOT RESPOND TO 1-2 TYLENOL OR IBUPROFEN, YOU NEED TO GET HELP.

Your period cramps should make you grumpy. Your period cramps should make you feel a little icky and tired. Your period cramps should make you feel your insides existing/moving a bit and a twinge of nerves that makes you groan slightly then the "pain" should stop there, NOTHING MORE.

If your cramps put you on the floor but you make believe you're the captain of a ship who has just been stabbed and has to hide it to fight on, and you force yourself to power through the day, please understand: you are not okay, that does not make you okay. Just because you can power through the pain doesn't mean you aren't sick. If you have to force yourself through any basic task beyond the effort it takes you to do when you aren't on your period, and I am holding your face and looking you in the eye as I say this because I need you to hear me: You aren't normal. You don't 'just have bad cramps'. You are sick and you need to get help.

Now most people will tell you if your cramps are beyond a 3 out of 10 on the pain scale, you should see a doctor. While this is usually true, you have to consider chronic pain CAN AND WILL BREAK YOUR PAIN SCALE. Most people will only compare pain they currently feel to pain they may experience one day but probably never will. "Sure these cramps feel bad now, but if I had a leg amputated with no anesthesia, that would hurt WAY worse, so this pain can't be that bad-" No. Your pain is what it is, objectively, full stop. My cramps were at a 10 out of 10 every. Single. Time. And nobody told me claiming they were a 6-8 because I thought to myself 'what if I lose a limb one day?' was completely wrong. 10 pain is 10 pain. And if there's something that hurts worse than that, guess what. The thing you are experiencing right now is still a 10 out of 10 on the pain scale. Just because you experience it every month doesn't mean it's magically not as bad is it is. And if your pain is worse than a 3 out of 10, you need to get help.

Now when I say get help, I mean find the root cause of your pain. You can't just throw drugs and hormones at it without knowing what it causing your pain. Endometriosis, fibroids, pcos, cancer, adenomyosis, polyps, thyroid issues, there is always a cause. And if you leave it untreated, it will grow and get worse to the point where it resists treatment and the drugs and hormones you've been throwing at it for years don't work anymore. You have to find a doctor that will investigate. If your doctor tells you you 'just have bad cramps' get a new doctor. I know you've been told that but please hear me: no one ever just has bad cramps. A healthy human body doesn't spontaneously cause itself pain so bad you can't stand up; there is ALWAYS a cause.

I was sick for more than 15 years. My entire life was put on hold and now I'm in my late 20s trying desperately to play catch up for everything I missed. I want to pick up 12yo me, spin her around, and tell her she doesn't have to die before she finally stops hurting. I don't want anyone to suffer the same fate I did simply because everyone told them they were normal. A little twinge of pain here and there is normal, suffering is not. I promise you your pain is real, it is not normal, and dear heavenly day I am begging you you need to get help now.

this one has been passed around recently from the mayo clinic and that actually makes me so happy because how many of transfeminine people are aware of what their options even look like?

I'm like. I'm trying to take my palatable foaming-at-the-mouth lefty ideals and tone them down to an extent that will be approachable by people who are not foaming-at-the-mouth lefties and present them with unbiased language and a clear demonstration of evidence that will be both A) readable by a wide audience and B) very clearly show their work in terms of sourcing evidence to gently encourage readers to check the work and see the evidence for themselves.

Stuff like this password manager post that explains a lot about password managers but also about how to check the veracity of information you find online.

Have you been using the same password for your accounts for twenty years?

If so, please do the following:

Go to HaveIBeenPwned.Com. In the search box, search your email address.

If the bottom of the page turns red, it means that your email is in at least one set of data from a breach.

2. Scroll down on the page to look at the breaches your email was in. I want you to look specifically for breaches that include passwords.

What this means is that your email address, which you have used as an account name for twenty years, and your password, which you have used across platforms for twenty years, are available for anyone on the web who wants to look. It's pretty easy to go and find too!

This is how a LOT of identity theft and fraud happens these days.

Let's say you created your LiveJournal account when you were fifteen. You used it a lot and by the time you were twenty the credentials you created for it were familiar and you plugged them in whenever you had to create an account. You plugged them in when you created a Facebook account. You plugged them in when you created a bank account. You plugged them in when you created the account that lets you see your lab results from your doctor's office.

All that someone has to do to seriously fuck your life is to do the following:

Find your email and password in one of these lists.

Compare to other lists and see if the same information is present

Seek out the most common account types (gmail, facebook, yahoo, hotmail, icloud, amazon, and one of about five financial institutions)

Start entering your username and password

Literally, profit.

That's all it takes. If you used the same username and password in two accounts in a breach, you probably used it elsewhere. Maybe you put an exclamation after the password, or entered your birth year, but those are pretty easy things to guess about and well worth it if someone can send themselves all the cash in your bank or order a shitload of giftcards from your amazon account.

And look: I know it 's really easy to not take warnings about passwords seriously. I know that if you haven't been screwed by this yet that it's easy to think that your password is strong enough, that you're going to get overlooked because you've got less than a hundred dollars to your name, that you're not going to have a problem with this.

People re-use passwords all the time. They re-use passwords constantly. And a lot of people don't understand that those passwords are freely available out on the internet.

Think about what would happen if someone locked you out of your primary email account and there was no way to get back in. You go to change your password on social media and what does it do? Sends a confirmation to your email, which you now don't control. Is your primary email one of the ways that you get information from your bank? Is it how you log into and track orders from online resellers? How do you log in to the profile on your phone? Do you have a browser profile? Do you log in with your email address? Does your browser profile save your credit card numbers?

This is why we use password managers. This is the advantage to password managers. With a password manager there is ONE password you have to be very careful to keep safe (the password to your password manager) and all the other passwords are disposable. Did your email get revealed in the Tumblr breach? NBD, use your password manager to generate a new, unique password for your tumblr account, change it, and you're good to go.

I know it seems like a giant pain in the ass to start using a password manager. I know it seems like a much bigger headache to log into a password manager and copy passwords than it is to type in the password that you KNOW. But I promise that using a password manager is a much smaller headache than freezing your credit so that people stop applying for credit cards in your name, or trying to start a brand new email from scratch when you get locked out of your old one, or tracking down all of the photos that someone could download from your cloud storage and making sure that they aren't getting posted on revenge porn sites.

Bitwarden is a secure, open-source password manager that has a free option for individual users. It has apps available for iOS and Android, and extensions for Firefox (which is also supported in Firefox Mobile) and Chrome. It has an extremely comprehensive tutorial series to help you learn how to use it. If you're thinking about signing up for a password manager but you're not sure, I strongly recommend checking out some of those videos.

I also promise that using a password manager gets easier the more you use it. It's a big hurdle to jump over when you're getting started, but it gets easier pretty much immediately.

And this doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. You can create an account with a password manager and just save one login to start. It's actually easiest if you keep it low-key and just update your logins whenever you find yourself needing to log in to a site instead of trying to go through and do it all at once before you're familiar with the program.

I'd recommend starting with at least two things: your primary email and your primary bank account. After that update any major online retailers you shop frequently and any social media that you use often.

A password manager is also a great place to store account recovery codes, answers to security questions, previous passwords, PINs, and secondary contact methods.

A lot of people worry that a password manager is an even bigger risk than just reusing passwords or creating memorable passwords or writing passwords down in a notebook because if a password manager is breached then all of that very important data is exposed. This is a reasonable thing to fear, and that's why it's important to be careful about what password manager you use.

This is why I recommend Bitwarden. Bitwarden uses a very secure encryption scheme and never stores any of your data in plaintext. If Bitwarden is breached and leaks data, all that will be leaked is gibberish. What you need to worry about to keep your password manager secure are the following:

Create a good, complicated, unique password for your password manager. This password DOES need to be memorable, so pick something that will be easy for you to remember. I like to use song lyrics and the year a song was released for this, so something like "Nggyu,Nglyd,Ngraady82" if we're using "Never Gonna Give You Up" as an example.

Make sure that you have secure recovery methods for your password manager; save your recovery passphrase in a safe place (I have a notebook with info like this and software activation codes and so on that I keep in my sock drawer, as well as a password protected folder on my desktop)

Only log in to your password manager from devices that you use a pin or password to log into - if you aren't doing that, at least make sure to set a short vault timeout, so that your password manager will log out after a set (short) period of time

Do not use the password for your password manager anywhere else

Do not tell anyone the password for your password manager

Make sure that your devices have good security and don't allow people remote access to your computer or devices.

Basically YOU are the only way that someone can get into your password manager. Your password is the only thing that can unlock it, which means that A) you have to ensure that you won't lose the password and B) you have to ensure that nobody else has access to the password. I know that first one sounds scary, but there are a LOT of ways to recover a Bitwarden account if you take the time to set them up. The second one is much simpler, and is the thing that is going to keep your password manager safe.

This is actually a great question. You *SHOULD* be suspicious when presented with websites that ask you to enter your email or when given advice from randos on the internet.

One of the easiest things to do when you see a novel piece of information and you want a general background on it is to check wikipedia.

The wikipedia page does a pretty good job of explaining what it *does* and does suggest that a lot of people use it, but that's not really enough info to know whether to trust something. So it is perfectly reasonable to do a search of your actual question: "Is haveibeenpwned safe?"

This is somewhat complicated, because various search engines are going to return various answers and it's not like any of those answers are definitive either.

So, you know that "is haveibeenpwned safe" is a computer security question, so it's worthwhile to see what security and computer focused people say about it. The Register, PCMag, ZDNet, and HowToGeek are all computer-focused resources; you can search "haveibeenpwned" on those sites and see what they say.

The Register describes it as 'reliable,' PC Mag says that it is very useful, ZDNet cites it as a source, and HowToGeek has a whole bunch of articles about the site, including updates on the project going open source and instructions on how to use it.

But you might not trust those sites either. You may want to ask a group of internet-savvy users users. It's kind of a joke that you need to add "reddit" to the end of a query to get a good answer these days, but sometimes that's an effective way of getting an answer!

You can also take into consideration the history of the site: It has been around for about 10 years now, and if it were dangerous or risky to use there would be a lot of articles out about it. But when you search "is haveibeenpwned dangerous?" pretty much every site agrees that it's safe.

Part of why I recommend Bitwarden is because THIS IS NOT CORRECT - with a good password manager, you should be able to access your passwords on as many devices as you want to!

Bitwarden exists as a browser extension and an app, so you can install the ios app on your ipad and the android app on your phone and the extension in your opera and firefox browsers and if you are away from any device that you own or have the ability to use, you can log on to the website and access the passwords in your web vault!

I use breadcrumbs for making meatballs and breading fried food and other such things and it's hard to find g-free breadcrumbs that avoid my other allergens, so this is what I've been doing to get around that for the last few years.

Turn bread heels into breadcrumbs

Make stock from the bags of veggie and meat trimmings that I save when cooking

Check for any open bags of veggies or fruit that are getting freezer burned; if there are any open bags that are getting freezer burned, make plans to turn the veggies into soup and fruit into pie. (Basically any vegetable can be a 'cream of' soup no matter what has happened to the texture and any nearly any fruit can become a compote - for fruits that aren't good for compotes, like bananas, I consider whether I want to make them into ice cream or use them in a smoothie or thaw them and make quickbreads)

Check for any meats that have been in the freezer a long time, if so rotate them so that the newest frozen meats are toward the back and the oldest are towards the front and *write on a calendar on the fridge* when I will cook them and what I will use them for. If any are getting freezer burned, they become soup.

Easy things to make from your freezer findings:

Cream-of-Whatever soup - good for veggies and chicken. Thaw your freezer-burned ingredient and chop into small pieces (unless it's chicken, in which case you'll shred it after it's cooked in the broth). Sautee some onions and garlic with oil in a large pot (and celery if you want to). Add your freezer-burned veggie (this is good for one type of vegetable, like green beans or spinach or squash, at a time rather than a mix of vegetables) and sautee for a few minutes, then add seasoning to taste (different seasonings work with different veggies but I find that salt, pepper, paprika, bay, and parsley will go well in most freezerburn soups) and heat for a couple more minutes. Add broth or stock if you have it, water if you don't, and bring to a boil. Let boil for thirty minutes then check for flavor and add seasoning/salt as needed. You can use tamari or soy sauce instead of table salt for a stronger umami flavor. Let boil for thirty minutes and check again for flavor. Once you're close to the flavor profile you're aiming for, add half a cup of heavy cream, then reduce by about 25%. If you want to, you can add sour cream for a tarter flavor profile, or you can make a vegetable starch slurry to add for a thicker soup. Check seasoning one last time, serve on its own, use as a casserole ingredient, or serve over rice. If you find cream-of-whatever soups boring, play with the seasonings - adding curry spices to a cream of spinach soup rules. Soup is, literally, what you make of it. Do whatever.

Chili - good for freezer burned meat. Thaw your meat and dice it into approximately half-inch cubes. Coarsely chop two large onions and sautee in oil in a large pot. Add as much minced garlic as your heart desires, and a can or two of diced chilies (or fresh chilies if you've got them) if you want a spicier chili, and heat with the onions until the onions are starting to be translucent. Add your diced or ground meat and brown in the pot with the onions and garlic. Add your chili seasoning if you're using a packaged mix; if you're using your own spices use chili powder, cayenne pepper, paprika, black pepper, white pepper, and cumin, then whatever else sounds good to you (I like to add mushroom powder and I'm heavy-handed with the cayenne and cumin). Add two cans of kidney beans and two cans of pinto beans (unrinsed, keep the fluid), a can of crushed tomatoes, a can of diced tomatoes, and half a can of tomato paste to the pot. Stir until incorporated and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Reduce to a simmer, test for flavor and adjust seasonings - at this point I usually add tamari or salt (because you're retaining the liquid from the canned beans do NOT add salt before tasting). Allow to simmer for up to an hour to allow the flavors to blend, serve with chopped raw onions and shredded cheese; this will rule if you put it over pasta.

Compote (liquidy, for serving over ice cream or mixing into yogurt) - put frozen fruit into a pot on the stove and add enough water to just cover the fruit, add one to two tablespoons of sugar per cup of frozen fruit. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then turn heat to low and reduce volume of the mixture while stirring frequently.

Pie filling (thick, should set with a gel-like consistency after it cools) - put frozen fruit in a pot and add set a low heat; as fruit thaws, add 3/4 cup of sugar a quarter cup at a time, stirring into the fruit. Add up to a half cup of water as needed to thin the mixture to a stirrable/pourable consistency. Add 1/4 lemon juice - or more for flavor - and bring the contents of a pot to a low boil then remove from heat. If the mixture is too liquidy, you can add a couple teaspoons of a starch slurry to thicken it. Bake in your pie shell and allow to set for a minimum of 4 hours before cutting. (Stir gently at all parts of the process; the fruit will dissolve if stirred too vigorously).