At a time or total?

I stopped being so upset by it once I started examining social systems and propaganda. If you’ve been conditioned your whole life to think of women as weaker and smaller and someone to be protected to maintain your “manly state”, someone who doesn’t fit that mold is a threat to your subconscious sense of self worth. Same for women who don’t want to date shorter men, “if I’m not the property of someone who’s the biggest and the strongest, I’m worth less to this society.”
‘Society’ thinks men who are smaller than their woman are weak, and that the woman must be defective or she’d be with someone who ‘fits’ better. They’re dead wrong, but that’s the unexamined subconscious judgement that our society has conditioned into people. It’s easy to be less upset with individual people when you realize they just haven’t had the space to examine the abusive systems they’re forced to exist within.

Yay! I’m glad it helped. X) As to the faces, I use Gboard and there’s a ASCII art library in the list of emoji/gif options. It’s quite entertaining. (⁠_{⁠￣⁠³⁠￣⁠)⁠} ⊂⁠(⁠・⁠﹏⁠・⁠⊂⁠) ᕦ⁠(⁠ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠)⁠ᕤ (⁠ノ⁠｀⁠Д⁠´⁠)⁠ノ⁠彡⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

TLDR: be happy to be alone, truly and genuinely. then it won’t matter if you find a partner, but you will be able to choose them with a clear mind if you do.

I’m basically a complete flip of you physically but I had the same problem for a loooooooooong time. I’m a tall, strong, heavy woman, and all i kept hearing was “you’re beautiful, I just don’t want someone taller/stronger/heavier than me”. I totally get it, I didn’t want to be taller/stronger/heavier than my partner either. But I’m like Fezzik- “it’s not my fault I’m the biggest and the strongest, I don’t even exercise”. except I did do cardio to try to slim down, I’m just built to survive famine I guess. ¯⁠\⁠(⁠◉⁠‿⁠◉⁠)⁠/⁠¯

What I didn’t understand was the ones who said they just wanted to be friends, because i just wasn’t their type, but would happily be fuck buddies, so long as we kept it hush hush. ಠ⁠ಗ⁠ಠ

Anyway, eventually after a bunch of very bad attempts at relationships where I took way more BS than I should have because I was just that hungry for affection, I decided I was just better off being single forever. I couldn’t seem to find a decent person who was attracted to me both physically and intellectually, so I decided to just stop looking. Not just stop looking, stop wanting. I actively wanted to be single for the rest of my life, in large part because I was just tired of the pain of being lonely. Like, “Jesus titty fucking Christ, we’re gonna cry ourselves to sleep because we’re SOOOO sad we’re alone AGAIN?! FFS, JUST STAHP!” So I stopped wanting a partner. I found I had so much more time and energy to do the things I was passionate about when I wasn’t futzing with all that stuff. I became the queen of getting shit done, remodeled my house myself, landscaped my yard, built a garden, went to the gym regularly, did weight lifting till I maxed out all the leg machines at the gym, and got close to maxing some of the upper body ones too. I was happy being single. I WANTED to be single. I craved my free time, the peace i found in solitude was better by orders of magnitude than any of the toxic relationships I’d clung to in the past.

After about two and a half years of that, a long time friend/ acquaintance started coming to me for massage ( I’m a deep tissue massage therapist with a focus on injury recovery and pain relief) and we would just talk throughout the sessions. Politics, philosophy, movies, anime, music, goals, food… Just everything. Eventually, after we’d just spent two more hours talking in the car after the two hours talking in the session, he said “Sooo… you know I’m flirting with you sometimes, right?” I turned him down. I said, more or less, “I’m happy single, I’ve had such a garbage time dating that I can’t pretend I’m not a decent part of the problem. I value our friendship and don’t want to hurt your feelings, and I’m not NOT attracted to you, I just don’t want to date ever again.” He was completely chill, said “no worries, no is no even if you’re attracted to me too. if you ever change your mind, let me know.” And he dropped it, never brought it up again… And fuck if that wasn’t the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. We kept being friends and talking and spending time together, talking about goals and wants and life plans and we found that our wants and goals in life were so in line it was uncanny. Importantly, neither of us wanted to get married, neither of us wanted kids, neither of us wanted to live with a partner ever again… It seemed like I could keep my peace, my space, my autonomy, AND have a partner who cared about my mind and emotions while also finding me wildly attractive. So we talked about what dating would look like and agreed to try it. It’s been 2.5 years so far and I’ve never been happier in a relationship. I still think if we stopped being romantically involved I’d probably prefer to go back to staying single, but I’m happy with him as a partner.

I tell you the whole story, kinda long and rambling as it is, because I don’t think I could have found a happy relationship if I had continued to want one with the same frantic energy as I had previously. I don’t think I would have been a person who could be as open and honest as I was with who I was if I’d still wanted a partner when we started to really get to know each other. I don’t think I was a whole person when I was looking for my “other half” and I don’t know if you can really find a good match if you’re not a whole entire person on your own. If I could distill the idea down to it’s core, I think it would be: be happy to be alone, truly and genuinely. then it won’t matter if you find a partner, but you will be able to choose them with a clear mind if you do.

Crunchy peanut butter and low sugar strawberry jam (it’s more tart is all, DGAF about the sugar content) mixed together, use as a dip for pretzels. Only done it with crunchy pretzels but might be fire with fresh hot pretzels.

Hi Utah!

Thanks!

It’s the best look!

Awww, thank you!!!

Like a handful of other people in the comments I never dress up or wear makeup, it’s black pants and a t-shirt for me. It’s usually a graphic t-shirt that is silly so if someone’s like “oh cute t-shirt” sure, that’s fine. But if they’re talking to me specifically cute feels infantilizing. I’m a 33-Year-Old woman, I either look fine, nice, beautiful, or like a deranged raccoon holding a knife.

I’m currently on an autism diagnosis waiting list cuz there’s just not that many adult autism services in my area so maybe it might be that too ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

That! My Boo has the hardest time figuring out if I’ve listened to a song or not because he tells me the name of the song and the artist and I go “I don’t fucking know dude”, so he tells me some of the lyrics, and I go ¯⁠\⁠(⁠◉⁠‿⁠◉⁠)⁠/⁠¯, so he plays me the song and within the first two notes I’m like “oh yeah I’ve heard this a billion times” 🤦‍♀️

https://screening.mhanational.org/screening-tools/adhd/ This seems like a useful test to me for getting a better idea if you should talk to a psychiatrist or not. It’s ups and downs getting diagnosed, especially as an adult. I had one psychiatrist give me their full test and questionnaire and decided I was borderline but wouldn’t diagnose me or prescribe anything, (I was already on a med that helped but not any of the controlled ones) The next psychiatrist I went to a few years later didn’t even have me do the test, we had an in person appointment, (which I was late to) and after we’d talked for about 20 minutes I asked “so, when do we schedule the ADHD assessment?” He said “Oh, no, we don’t need to do one, you very clearly have ADHD.” XD Honestly though I learned more about it from the experiences of people on social media who had it than I ever learned from a doctor. I’d start with searching ADHD hashtags and see if you resonate with other people’s experiences.

I have ADHD and I find I have lots of difficulties with auditory processing in high noise floor situations. Also got my hearing checked because I couldn’t understand people in loud spaces. Turns out ADHD brains just don’t handle processing all that noise well. If I understand it correctly it’s because we need to process everything at the same level instead of some things being easy to leave on autopilot. Might not be your case but it sounded familiar so, that’s my two bits.

I did that yesterday, didn’t fix it. I was able to got the update from Newpipe directly today but my Boo had it three days ago, he said he got it from GitHub? No idea how to do that but maybe worth a looksy.

Well my sisters and I don’t have that kind of equipment, so no.

… Am… Am I understanding correctly that your mother told you and you brother , regularly, to eat dick shaped vegetables so you could grow a long shlong?

I’m surprised no one has mentioned The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild The new game, legend of Zelda tears of the Kingdom, is good but it doesn’t give me the same happy fuzzies that breath of the wild does. Stardew valley is another happy simple game. If you’re looking for the challenge tingles, dark souls is always fun. XD

Ah, see, I think a world in anarchy would be ideal. Not in the hyperbolic common use sense where anarchy means the purge and chaos and zero government that most media portray it to be, but the actual definition of anarchy, a world without hierarchy. A world where no person, group, or government has the right to use violence or the threat thereof to coerce anyone into doing anything against their will.

There are so very many ways these ideals could be debated and edge cases brought up. So many people, with much more detailed and complete knowledge than I, have written many books on the subject. I don’t have the answers to it all. Mostly I don’t think people require a State, which is to say a sovereign government that has the authority to enforce a system of rules over the people living inside it’s jurisdiction, to live in peaceful coexistence.

Police are definitely necessary if the goal is to uphold the laws of the state. I just don’t think we need a state and, by extension, I don’t think we need the police that enforce it’s laws.

I’m aware I’m an idealist, I just can’t bring myself to aim for a worse world because what I want seems too hard to get. A perfect world can’t exist but I’ll be damned if I don’t try anyway.

Anywho, I’ll relinquish the soap box now, thanks for listening and being open to hearing my point of view.

Reforming a police force still implies the existence of a militarized group of people whose job is to uphold the power of the state at the expense of the people. Law enforcement’s job is to enforce laws, right? Laws are the will of the state, and enforcement is making people obey those laws with the threat or act of violence. That is what a police force is.

That’s why people, why I, don’t think reforming police is the answer, because by definition police are the violent arm of the state.

Abolishing the state’s monopoly on “lawful” violence is, in my view, the only way to reduce institutional abuse of power against marginalized groups. Having people whose job it is to de-escalate heated situations, deal with unsafe conditions, and direct people away from harm is a necessary job, but that doesn’t require violence. That doesn’t require “Police”.

I do think there are people who join the police with the intent of doing good, helping people, and keeping people from harm. I just think that should be a separate and distinct job from enforcing the law.

PS I love your username. X)