#I AM NOT IMMUNE TO WANTING ATTENTION FROM STRANGERS ON THE INTERNET

[willowcrowned]

I am humble and absolutely inured to the lure of online popularity up until I post something on ao3. the SECOND a fic goes live you will see me hitting refresh until some gracious soul gives me a crumb of validation to soothe my attention-starved heart

[whitherliliesbloom]

fate matrix

[ ffxivwrite2021 ] ★ [ masterlist ] ★ [ prompt #05 (free) - fate ]

[ alphinaud/wol & cameos and mentions of some friend ocs, you’re gonna have to read to find out who :) ] ★ [ 5,241 words (oof) ]  ★ [ fate matrix au ]

fate: be destined to happen, turn out, or act in a particular way

in a world where the hands of destiny are ones and zeros, at the center of the matrix was a little goddess who would soon find out that she too, isn’t immune to the pull of fate

Day ???? | 07:07am | Day of Destined Meetings

An alarm rings, beeping in an increasingly loud volume as the monitors begin booting up. As light from the screens flood the room, the sound of cotton ruffling can be heard, followed by a soft little yawn.

The girl stirs, clutching at her duvet for warmth before her eyelids flutter open. Bright violet eyes stare up at the ceiling, where the patches of glow up star stickers have lost their radiance in the midst of the fluorescent bulb lighting up. Blinded momentarily, she grimaces, before rolling onto her side and sitting up.

“Good morning, alpha.” A melodic voice chirps out merrily from her parted lips, and she raises a hand to pet the head of the stuffed chocobo that she had been laying beside. “It’s time for work again, huh?”

Stretching her arms high above her head with a final, long yawn, the girl shuffles over to the minibar that was tucked under the table, pulling the door open before grabbing a small tub of yoghurt and peeling it open to peer inside curiously.

Oh, it’s strawberry today, how wonderful! Whoever or whatever magical force is behind stocking up the minibar seems to be in her favor this morning.

Grateful now for her breakfast, the girl slides over to the front of the bed, and places her hand on the mouse after taking a spoonful of the yoghurt into her mouth.

System booting... Please enter password. >illyaskawi03112 Log in successful. Fatematrix.exe starting. Welcome, Alice. 

The monitors that surround her begin loading up window tabs after window tabs - and at the center on her main monitor, a sizeable grid of glowing icons pop up, along with a smaller, more discreet window showing a map tucked away at the corner of the screen.

Visual stimuli overload aside, the girl seemed to be completely unphased as she bites into yet another scoopful of yoghurt before setting the tub next to her white keyboard, as if this were a scene she’s had to see countless times now. 

It’s a routine, a well rehearsed routine that the girl effortlessly goes through the motions of daily. The fate matrix is ever in need of use and she, the center of it all, was more than happy to take control. 

That is, after all, the will of her late mother... the previous Alice and goddess of the fate matrix. It is simply her duty to carry on in her legacy. And as per her duty, she begins to spin the wheel of fate, clicking on the very first icon that boots up the fate matrix’s tool assistant. A bright blue pop up appears that the girl drags to the side, and text begins to appear.

Good morning, Alice. Today is a day of destined meetings. I would suggest working on getting soul mates together for the day.

Internally, Illya is delighted. Soul mates were one of her favorite types of work to focus on... and though they were rarely ever more urgent than other types of assignments like accident prevention, weather management or economic balance, it was one that often brought her a great amount of joy. 

After all, what was sweeter than nudging two souls who were meant for each other closer? It was the very concept of soul mates, and the tales of the red thread of fate after all, that drew her mother into the concept of fate and caused her to develop the fate matrix.

A soft smile graces her features, and she moves her cursor to click on the second icon, which loads for a second before breaking apart into smaller, glowing dots that scatter across the map - with two dots that indicated soul mates being linked by a dotted line. 

Time to get to work!

01:46pm

When Illya clicked on the glowing two red dots upon the map, she hadn’t expected to be shown live footage of the two targets in the very same room. 

It’s not uncommon for soul mates to have already met each other, or even be familiar with one another already despite not having made their feelings for each other known yet... but they were cases that were, in Illya’s experience, a little more difficult to work on. 

It was easy to nudge two strangers in the same direction or plant small, innocuous thoughts that would help draw two acquaintances into wanting to spend more time with their soul mate. It was far more difficult to convince stubborn people who have, despite many fateful circumstances, refused to confess their feelings to the object of their confession. 

After all, the fate matrix was capable of many things - but controlling or taking over the will of people was not one of them. 

Illya has convinced two stubborn souls to finally open up in the past though, she was certain she could do so again - she did so with the likes of the two childhood friends, Moth’ir and Thancred... a case which she would never in a million years soon forget... or the infuriatingly obstinate refusal of a pink haired miqo’te girl to confess to her close friend and personal trainer, Haurchefant Greystone... who had been more than obvious with his flirtations for years. 

Alice, you have yet to eat your lunch. A quick break is highly suggested. 

The tool assistant sends a reminder through a text in it’s window, which Illya is swift to ignore. She can eat once she’s done with this case. 

She watched through the monitor as the pair sat on the couch, a girl with straight cut bangs and piercing red eyes lounging lazily with her back propped against the arm rest and her legs laid over her taller, lankier male friend, who seemed to be frustrated at the girl’s refusal to pay him any attention.

“Why invite me over if you’re just going to play your game?” 

“Hmph! Says the guy who invited me over to his place only to kick me out halfway through because some of his friends were going to pay him a surprise visit!”

The man lets out a hefty sigh.

“I already apologized for that. And that was over a week ago. Are you seriously still-”

“Yes, yes I am!” Without even looking up from her smartphone, the girl lets out a dramatic huff while admonishing her friend. “I don’t get why you’re so adamant about me not meeting your friends. Why, are you scared they’ll misunderstand and think I’m your girlfriend?”

“That’s- That’s not-”

From the heartrate monitor, Illya can tell that was only part of the reason for his behavior. The true reason, and an explanation that the girl understood full well why he would refuse to tell his friend was written in text in a separate window next to his heartrate monitor. 

The girl, Totomi Tomi, or better known by her stage name as Mint, was something of a minor celebrity on the internet. Known for her jovial personality and the many covers of vocaloid songs she posted on her well known eorzeatube page, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call her an idol - even if she wasn’t officially acknowledged or employed as one by some idol management company. Her friend, Estinien, and the object of her very strong feelings towards, had friends who were apparently fans of hers. 

It was for that very reason that, for her protection and to spare her the oogling of strangers, that he’d kept his friendship with the young idol a secret from others. 

In his eyes, perhaps dating her would be the quickest way to convince his friends to back off... but that would only come after they’d confessed their feelings - which they haven’t. 

“That’s not important.” Estinien finally retorts after stumbling after his words for a moment, and Illya has to resist the urge to slam her head against the keyboard.

“Ohhhh... Kay.” Mint rolls her eyes, Illya mirrors the action. 

What Illya doesn’t anticipate however, is Estinien’s next words, for as bold and uncharacteristic for an emotionally closed off man such as him.

“Why? Are you disappointed? You almost sound like you want to be known as my girlfriend.” 

Mint chokes on her spit, sputtering and gurgling out incomprehensible words until she recovers - but only barely... and now with a dark red blush plastered over her freckled cheeks.

“I-In your dreams, maybe!” Her blatant lie is apparent to all but... the ones who are present in the room. “Besides, I already have someone I like!” 

“Oh?” Illya can hear the sheer contempt from her headphones, and she grimaces at the man’s deep frown. “Do tell, who is it?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, dunderhead!”

“Tell me. I’m curious.” 

“Nope nope nope nope nope noppetty nope! Why’d you think I would ever tell you, huh??”

Mint sticks her tongue out at the man, who scowls deeper and nudges the woman’s legs off of his lap.

“Fine. How about a bet then.”

“What bet?”

The man points to the phone she has in her hands.

“Since you’re so fond of your gacha games, and you’re always bragging about how good your luck is, why don’t we make a bet using your game?” 

Snatching the phone out of Mint’s hand despite her protests, Estinien taps on the settings button before clicking on the gacha button, the screen switching to the current limited rate up banner of a popular event character.

“If you get a character of the highest rarity within 50 draws, you have to tell me who your crush is.”

“W-why would I even agree to that?? I’ve been saving my primos for Xi-Ao you know?!” 

“I’ll pay for your pulls. It’s a win-win for you that way, no? You get free pulls from the game, I get to know who your crush is if you get a shiny new character.”

Mint pulls back, hesitant and suspicion clear in her eyes, but still enough to hint at consideration.

“And what’s in it for me? What if I do pull a 5 star character?”

After much consideration, Estinien responds once more.

“I’ll let you whale for whatever character you want next on my credit card. And I’ll cosplay with you at the next convention.”

At the condition of his loss set, Mint’s face lights up with pure elation, as she snatches her phone back from her friend with a cheeky grin on her face.

“Deal! You’re so going to lose, long bean! My luck in Genshin Impact’s second to none! I can’t wait to make you cosplay sailor moon!!”

An equally devious smile spreads across the face of Alice, whose hands are swift to pull up another window tab reserved specifically for video game and gambling luck. 

She has always admittedly been favorable and gracious in giving out good draws to people who deserve it - the program she has running in the background is testament to that... And she has no doubt in her mind that the fate matrix has been generous in it’s givings to Mint, if her boastings are anything to go by. 

Mint must thusly, be a good person.... and she deserves a fate more fulfilling than virtual characters on a screen.

The girl must truly feel confident in herself, as she hits the draw x10 button without a single hesitation. 

Illya begins typing the code into the new window, and sympathy wells in her heart as she hears Mint huff in minor disappointment.

“Only one 4 star? Eh, it’s just a fluke, I have 40 more pulls and I’m close to soft pity too!”

“Good luck.” Estinien chuckles mockingly, and Mint lets out a growl before pressing on the draw x10 button again.

Nothing. The third ten pull is no better - with nothing but a single 4 star weapon to show for her efforts. Mint is evidently getting more nervous as her finger shakes, pressing down on the button that will decide her fate for the fourth time.

She was so certain she’d get a 5 star by now - she normally gets what she wants within the first thirsty pulls, and it’s a normal occurrence to even pull multiple 5 stars within the same roll... So... why?

Her 40th pull ends with two 4 star characters, a sight better than the ones before... a sign of Illya’s pity on her... but still not a condition for her win.

“Oh, someone’s getting nervous.” Estinien smirks, “You’re on your last pull away from telling me who you have a crush on.”

“H-hah! That’s where you’re wrong!” Mint exclaims, jabbing a finger at him. “The chances of getting a 5 star increases with each pull, so i’m almost a hundred percent certain I’ll get one this time!”

Mint’s heartrate monitor is going off the charts, and Illya has to intervene by lowering her vitals enough so she wouldn’t pass out from sheer nervousness. It does little to hide it from Estinien, however, who could only relish every second of Mint’s rapidly darkening blush as she finally taps on the draw x10 button one final time.

The shooting star across the screen flickers, before bursting into a shade of pink that has Mint leaning back with mouth agape, a mixture of sheer shock and terror on her expression. 

Hopelessness is all she feels as she taps, taps and taps, and the roll summary page shows naught but a single Benny - the unluckiest character in the game, grinning widely at her.

“Well, well, well. Looks like I won.” Estinien sounds way too casual and smug, unaware of the monumentally immense amount of bad fortune that had just befallen his friends. “As per our deal, you’re going to have to tell me who your crush is.”

Illya feels sorry for her meddling, and she makes a mental note to herself to bless Mint’s future rolls with as many of the highest rarity characters she could possibly afford to give without breaking the laws of probability too much... but when Mint finally breaks out of her stutter and sets her phone down on her lap, hands grasping so tightly at the hem of her skirt that her knuckles turned white, the girl knew that she’d dealt the woman a hand far kinder than if she had not.

“I-It’s...... It’s you, okay?”

07:32pm

Alice it is time for dinner. The curry will get cold if you leave it out for too long.

Illya’s tendency to ignore the tool assistant in regards to her own wellbeing was concerning, but not an anomaly. In fact, it was far more rare for the text in the pop up to be spared more than a single second’s glance from her. 

Whether it was reminders for her to eat, for her to sleep early, to hydrate or to stretch after hours hunched over her keyboard in front of glaringly bright monitors for a good whole of her day, the tool assistant’s well meaning messages would always go ignored.

It’s a natural part of it’s program, Illya tells herself, as she filters through lists of finished cases before moving on to pending ones. Much like the fate matrix, that ran on a code that was, in admittance, far more complex than even she could fully comprehend... the tool assistant ran on code. It was an artificial intelligence her mother had created during her last few months of life, something that, according to the note left in the hard drive of the fate matrix, would help Illya better slip into her role as adjudicator of fate. 

She’d remembered when she first awoke in this room and on the bed, not having any recollection of how she’d even arrived in the first place. The momentary panic and confusion had been replaced with a sense of obligation... of duty and honor when she booted up the computer for the first time to be greeted with the words from the tool assistant - as well as a lengthy message from her late mother.

We who do not belong to the realm of mortals... we who possess the blood of fate. We bear the burden of watching over the world and making sure that it is a safer, happier, better place for everyone. Only you alone can take possession of the fate matrix in my stead, and I pray you’ll forgive me for not being able to say goodbye to you in person.

Family meant the world to Illya, it has ever been that way. She spent a good amount of her childhood in the company of her parents, with little understanding of the world beneath. She had no concept of the idea of fate, of how destiny was dealt... only that her mother had a significant role to play, and that her time with her family was soon to be cut short by a crippling, unkind illness that not even the fate matrix could undo. 

Illya’s never tried stepping out of her room before. She has always assumed that it exists in some kind of void or overworld that overlooked the mortal realm. It mattered not, really... The only thing important was that mother had left this place behind, and wanted her only daughter to inherit her role as Alice.

It was with that responsibility in mind that drove Illya to stay seated in front of the monitors for as long as she has. 

Time is no longer being a concept, the rising and falling of the sun no longer visible to her eyes aside from a arbitrary number on the clock that served more as a timer for how long she has left to work until exhaustion would consume her. 

Do you not wonder what it’s like to have friends, Alice?

Recently, however the tool assistant has been sending her more and more pointless questions... questions that went far beyond the daily self-maintenance reminders that she could understand her mother programming in for her wellbeing, questions aimed to be poignant and was targeted to making her feel more isolated and alone than it did help. It was bordering on annoyance.

You could leave this room any time you wanted.

And why would she do that? She murmured to herself as she typed in code to program a heavy storm, forcing a raven haired lalafellin man to offer his umbrella to his soul mate who had been stranded under a lone busstop - a pink haired woman with olive green eyes who seemed utterly smitten with him upon first sight.

Her purpose was here, to take control of the fate matrix, to grant happy memories, to save lives, to fulfill wishes and dreams. There can be no greater and heavier responsibility to bear in the world. 

Truthfully, the reason why Illya stayed at first had solely because of her mother’s wishes... But now, it was more than that. 

Because the idea of separating herself from the fate matrix... and not being able to grant the kindness of fate that so many people in the world deserved... it was a pain that was worth her own sense of self. 

Are you not lonely? Do you not want someone to love you?

Why did it matter if she was lonely? The envy and curiosity she feels upon watching a group of friends hanging out together is nothing in comparison to the pain mortals felt from a love unrequited, or a loved one losing their life. 

She taps furiously on a historian with bright red hair and eyes, forcing him to get a wardrobe malfunction that would push him to visit a tailor where an impish lalafellin fashion designer with snow white freckles awaited him with choice words of ridicule. She tips over a telephone pole that causes two surf shop co-owners who were on a road trip to park by the roadside so that they may witness a falling star, wishes made leading to their confession. She painstakingly guides a woman with silver hair and golden yellow eyes towards a drycleaner, where she initiates easy banter with a man who she later finds out was her old schoolmate.

Juno and Ysayle, Bianca and Varis, Niqesse and Zenos, Nowi and June. She remembers the soul mates she pushes together by name, and treasures the happiness they are sure to feel from their memories as if they were her own.

Detached from their world she may be, it is through the fate matrix that she can experience a sliver of their joy and love... even if it is for a fleeting moment before she must move on to the next. 

11:17pm

One more assignment, she tells herself, eyes bloodshot and fingers sore from typing. One more case and she’ll eat before going to bed. She has done much for the day as it is... but she cannot rest until she’s closed one particular case that has her vexed for the entire day.

A pair of glowing purple dots that has been plastered on the map since morning has her thoroughly vexed... because for some reason or another, she cannot seem to gather information on one half of the pair. 

She’s able to view the other half just fine - a dashing young man who seemed to be a senior in university despite his age, having skipped two grades due to his academic prowess. He is incredibly gifted, possessing not only of superior intellect but also an artistic hand and charismatic demeanor that makes him quite popular at his school.

But no matter how much she clicked on the other purple dot, or made futile attempts to manually search for data on his other half, nothing would show up. No windows, no tabs... What was even more perplexing was that the dot hadn’t moved on the map at all. 

Illya had paid especially close attention to the purple dots ever since she’d found this anomaly in the fate matrix... she was certain she would have noted movement if there had been any at all. 

But whereas the icon of the boy had understandably been moving throughout the city of Sharlayan, the icon of his mysterious other half hadn’t, laying stagnant on a singular point of the map in the middle of what appeared to be an old apartment complex.

It was as if his soul mate just... didn’t exist at all. 

The boy didn’t have any romantic feelings for anyone, nor did it seem like there was anyone at his school that would have an attachment to him that extended beyond admiration or a short-term attraction, which she’s long learned to tell apart from genuine love. If the tool assistant had a text saying that her target simply did not have a soul mate at all, she’d have been inclined to believe it.

But the other purple dot that connected to his does not lie. If he didn’t have a soul mate, his icon wouldn’t be connected to the other. Her tool assistant wouldn’t have told her, very deliberately she may add, that he did in fact have a soul mate and that it was imperative for her to unite them.

But how was she to make two people meet when she could not even tell who the other was? It was the first time Illya’s wondered if there was even any point to her efforts. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures, then. It may be unnatural for a piece of note to fall from the sky, but it was perhaps her final chance to get the boy to meet his soul mate before the opportunity would be lost forever.

Assignments from her pending window are known to disappear all of a sudden, and soul mates who were attached and at their prime for a fated meeting for the moment often times disappear from the map entirely... a tragedy as a result to the slipping of time that the fate matrix cannot rectify... and she’d be damned if she let it happen to this case just because of a simple glitch. 

The boy, Alphinaud Leveilleur, star student of the nation’s most prestigious academy, had been walking home from his late night seminars. His position was unnervingly close to where his soul mate is, and since she could not think of any way she could naturally nudge him in the direction of the apartment complex, she writes a note posing as his soul mate and drops it from the sky.

“W-what in the twelve?”

The boy catches it in mid-air, looking at the haphazardly scribbled words on the paper. 

PLEASE HELP ME. I’M BEING HELD AGAINST MY WILL. I’M BEING TRAPPED AT _______________

She made the handwriting disorderly intentionally... just to sell the idea of a person being trapped better, of course. She’d even slathered on a small smudge of blood on the corner of the note to make it more convincing... and it seemed to have done the trick as the boy widens his navy blue eyes in alarm, head turned up in the direction of the apartment complex he stood next to.

Illya can tell he has his doubts, and she doesn’t blame him... It’s suspicious enough that the call for help would just so conveniently fall towards him as he was walking past... but he’s never known any criminal activity to have taken place in that apartment complex - Sharlayan is relatively safe compared to it’s neighbor, Mor Dhona. 

A few simple thoughts however, might just do the trick into getting him to spring into action. 

Injecting into his mind, Illya types out frantically into the text box for thought processing. 

What if this is real? What if there really is someone in need of rescuing and I just walked by without helping them? What if they appeared on the news tomorrow? I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself. What if... what if this note really is fate?

She’s preying on his upright and morally upstanding character, she knows that... and it never feels good to take advantage of a objectively good person’s kindness... But her determination to grant him lifelong happiness wins as she watches through the live feed the as the boy clutches onto the note close to his chest and begins to run into the carpark of the apartment complex before heading inside.

Zooming into the map, she sees that her target is taking the lift up to the highest floor, his heartrate skyrocketing at an alarming pace as she panics for a moment and has to manually adjust it back down. He’s nervous... and she must admit that she is too.

When he leaves the lift, his footsteps are unsteady and hesitant... But a few more encouraging thoughts was enough to get him to push forward until he’s standing in front of a door - the only door on the last floor of the complex, as it would happen.

Illya tries to look into the room, but the window that pops up is but a single black screen that has her sighing. No matter. The fact that there even was a window in the first place is progress. 

She’s gotten this far into leading him here... all he has to do is open the door where his other half is sure to be on the other side.

The boy tries to twist open the door knob, the metal rattlingly noisily in Illya’s headphones. But it doesn’t budge or give way. 

Figures that it’d be locked. How is she supposed to lead him inside? She can’t ring the doorbell because, for as odd as it is, there is none... and she cannot pull up any information on his soul mate, let alone inject into thoughts into their head to open the door. It’s far too suspicious to drop the key to the door right in front of him. 

With each second that passes, it seemed like the boy was letting his doubts begin to sway his decision to stay more and more... and Illya’s heart drops into the pit of her stomach when she sees the boy begin to step away from the door and reaching into his bag for his phone, a thought bubble popping up above him.

I should call the police, instead...

“No! You mustn’t!” Illya yells out by instinct.

“Huh???” the boy’s eyes widen once more, and to Illya’s utter confusion, he bolts forward and is now banging his fist against the door. “Hello?! Are you okay?! If you’re in there and you need help, please say something again!”

He must’ve heard a voice.... Illya mused, eyes glistening with intrigue... her voice. Did her mic turn on by accident? Or perhaps she’d projected her voice onto the door out of instinct. She wouldn’t be surprised if she did... but the most important thing is that it worked, and it got the boy to stay. 

“Y-yes! I’m... I’m in here!” Illya responds, intentionally letting out sobs into her microphone this time, “p-please help me... I-I’m really hurt and I don’t know when they’ll get back!” 

Alphinaud’s heartrate is beating faster than it’s ever had before... and Illya makes no attempts to lower it as she watches the boy grit his teeth and set his bookbag down.

“A-alright! Stand back! I’ll try to knock the door down!” 

Good thinking, Illya hums to herself in silence. The door seems old and rickety on its own... unless his soul mate has very deliberately barricaded the inside, there shouldn’t be any reason why he’d not be able to knock it down.

The boy begins to slam his torso into the door, pulling himself back before once more rushing into the door, and the sound of banging fills Illya’s headphones. It’s oddly loud and deafening... but she makes no attempts to lower her volume as she grips the edge of her keyboard in anticipation.

“Don’t worry miss! Just a bit more! I’ll get you out, I promise!” 

His sincerity touches her... and though it is wholly unnecessary, Illya is moved to speak into the mic once more... and her words causes a surge of renewed energy to flow through him.

“Yes! I believe in you! I’m waiting!”

Illya has never known what the outside of her room looked like... nor the time or space that occupied it. It was never necessary, she’d convinced herself... She was simply content with watching the outside world through the lens of the fate matrix while playing the ultimate puppet master.

She has never smelled the outside air, never seen the light of the sun, never once touched the hands of another... not since she arrived here.

When the door to her room clattered noisily onto the ground, so loudly that she could not chalk it up to being a result of the projection in her headphone, the girl spun around... and stared with wide, bewildered and confused eyes at the boy in front of her - clear without the pixels of the screen obscuring him... clear and oh so very real.

Beads of sweat trickling down his brows from exertion... his usually neat fitting uniform disheveled from strain... 

And in his clear blue eyes was the reflection of herself, staring back at her as if they were a window to her future.

“Y-you.... you are....?”

The tool assistant of the fate matrix sends another text, which goes unread and ignored by Alice once again. 

You watch over the fate of others. But even you aren’t immune to the hands of fate.

[fablesrose]

Of Kings and Shadows VII

Chapter VII

Description: Y/n, a girl who seems to have found her calling. Being a SHIELD agent is like a dream come true. With a friendship starting to form with the Avengers, she’s the Queen of the world! What could go wrong?

Pairings: Avengers x reader, Loki x reader (eventually) 

Notes: On Wattpad –> Here

Series Masterlist

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I gently stretched my neck side to side hearing it creak. As much as I was glad I was back to work, this was not what I had in mind.  Here I sat at my desk, staring at my computer, studying for a job that I was probably never going to do. They pretty much just assigned me anything to keep me busy, I had already done all of my paperwork, and Clint's, along with completing my two-hour max of physical therapy each day. I still have at least two weeks of desk work before they even consider sending me anywhere near the field.

I sighed, this website wasn't getting me anywhere. People went to school for this and I still have no idea what realm this job pertains to. For all I know these words could be in Russian, and I'm supposed to know Russian.

I finally gave up on searching the internet and decided to email the guy that actually does this job.

From: y/nl/n@shield.com

To: ichabodlaime@shield.com

Hey Ike,

Do you happen to have a manual on aerospace tech or something on the controls of the Quinjet?

Thanks,

Agent l/n

I stared at the email for a couple of minutes, sure everything was spelled right. Now, Ike was a decent dude, but he was one of those guys if ya know what I mean. Little pathetic, little ignorant, little fussy, but the difference from him and all the other those guys, is he actually knows how to do his job; he does it darn well too.

He didn't answer back right away, so I continued my search on the web, not wanting to put too many favors out there before he replied.  I found what I thought was a decent website after a while, they had most of the 'fix the plane' words in layman terms, so that was nice. This may not be my area of expertise, but there was one thing I knew for sure: its gonna be a long couple of weeks.

On my, what I believe to be, sixty-fourth website, hair from the lower back all the way to my neck stood up one by one. My gut gave a little twinge as well. I slowly turned my eyes to my monitor, just at the right angle to see behind me. A scrawny looking guy was standing right in the doorway of my office. I took a deep breath when I noticed that he wasn't looking at my head, but met my eyes in the reflection of my monitor.

I spun slowly in my chair to face him since he knew I knew he was there. There was a moment of awkward silence before I decided to break it.

"Hey Ike"

He stared at me blankly for a moment, "You planning on taking my job l/n?"

I pursed my lips, blinking. "Well, I'm glad to see you are having a good day too, Ike."

He frowned, "I mean it l/n"

"No! No, since I'm in time out they assigned me to learn about your job. It won't be enough to kick you out, trust me. They're just keeping me busy." He seemed to relax a little bit. "Who knows? Maybe I could help you out on a mission or somethin'"

He gave me a dorky smile that only a few could love. I was not one of those few.

He sighed, "Yeah I'd like to see that sometime. " He looked down at the floor thinking for a second, "Uh, yeah I have a book I think you could learn something from..."

I raised my eyebrows at him, asking him where it was since it wasn't in his hands.

"Unfortunately it's back at home. You want to meet tomorrow so you could take a look at it over the weekend?"

It was only then I remembered that it was Friday. "Uh, yeah, sure. Ten o'clock would be the best time for me... Do you have a preference for a place?"

"The Starbucks on 17th Street work?"

I gave a tight smile, "Sounds like a plan"

I walked into the shop five minutes early, my parents always did teach me to arrive early. I scanned my gaze over the occupants, looking for Ike. I tried not to breathe in too deeply, the smell of coffee never really was my favorite, and it mingling with the other more pleasant smells was leaving my head spinning. I finally thought I spotted him when I saw the man in my sights was sitting with another.

The same sensation from yesterday came over me even more powerfully, causing me to find where the eyes were coming from. The staring was coming from the man sitting with who I thought was Ike. We locked gazes for a moment when the other man turned around, only for me to find that it was Ike. He waved me over to their table.

"I didn't know you were going to bring someone along, almost made me think it wasn't you" I tried to sound light-hearted despite the chilling feeling before. Usually feeling eyes on me wasn't that unsettling, I've dealt with it my whole life, paid attention to it my whole life, but in my whole life, it's never told me something like that; and, I don't know what to do with it.

Ike looked at me pleasantly, "Wasn't planning on it, just ran into each other."

I shot a tight-lipped smile to the stranger who stuck out his hand, "Hi, I'm Henry Arnold"

"Y/n L/n"

Ike threw a thumb back at the counter, "Coffee?"

I shook my head politely

"Caffeine not your poison?"

"I didn't pick my poison," I paused, "Mountain Dew picked me"

Henry chuckled. I tried to pick out any traits to describe him, but the only thing that came to mind was average, ordinary. Beige blond hair, structured face... He seemed nice enough though.

"So, you two work together at the patent office?"

I side-eyed Ike who gave a subtle nod, "Yeah, different departments in the office you know"

"Oh yeah? You must see some crazy stuff pass through though, huh?"

"Uh, not really on my side, I worked in the automotive section, so nothing too crazy, just different parts to go into cars for the most part. I don't know about Ike here..." I jabbed my thumb in his direction, kinda just wanting to get out of there.

"Pretty much the same over in the aerospace department"

Henry seemed to have a revelation, "oh, am I intruding on a date or something? I am so sorry!"

I quickly shut down that thought, "no no no, I just asked to borrow an air mechanics manual, their thinking about switching me over, so they sent me his way."

"Oh, okay..." He seemed relieved he didn't mess anything up. "So why'd you get into that department?"

I looked at him, trying to think. "Uh, well, my family was hurt in a car accident at one point, so I thought I'd help and watch vehicles get safer so they wouldn't hurt them again"

"Oh cool"

I hated that I knew how to be polite, "what do you do?"

Henry scratched the back of his neck, "I'd like to say, inventor... But it only happens in my spare time it seems. My paycheck comes from administrating medical trials"

"Interesting, how'd you get into that?"

"Well the inventing stuff was inherited from my dad who recently passed"

"I'm sorry to hear that"

"He was never around much, but my mom, she kept telling me to change the world. 'Be King' she would say... This is how I do that"

"That's cool. What's your current trail"

"In simple terms, it's a type of steroid..."

I raised my eyebrow, "helpin' bodybuilders?"

"No, this one is legal," he smiled lightly. "This one helps with metabolism and the immune system. Unfortunately, I can't be a patient since I'm handing it out, but based on the results so far? I'll be first in line when it hits the shelves"

I raised some finger guns, "if it's that good, you might have to sign me up for that"

He chuckled and stood from his seat, "I might take you up on that, but for now I have to leave. Laime, Y/n." He nodded at both of us before departing.

"Nice guy."

Ike slouched in his seat, "you could say that. Smart, almost overbearing at times. Sorry, just ran into him here."

I forced out an "it's fine." I looked at him expectingly, "the manual?"

He sighed and turned around to face the backpack on his seat. "I do have one favor though."

"And what's that?"

He placed the book on the table, "could you maybe introduce me to the Avengers?"

I bit my lip, "I would love to, but that's not really in my power, maybe Clint, he's sociable, but he's the best bet and not even close to a guarantee..."

His mouth stretched without becoming a frown or smile, "Yeah, thought as much. It was worth a shot though. Forget I asked" he slid the manual the rest of the way to me. "Get it back to me as soon as you are able okay?"

I stood, book in hand, ready to get out of there, "you got it."

I was in the middle of a chapter while walking down the hall. The first few chapters went something like, 'hey so the only reason you're reading this is either you are going to school for this or for some reason you are looking at a broken aircraft that's most likely smoking and you need to fix it quickly. So we're gonna tell you how to do that first.'

To be brief, Ike picked a good manual for me to read.

I saw I'm my peripheral vision the doorway ahead of me and thought I calculated how far I needed to be over.

I was wrong.

My shoulder hit the door frame right on, causing me to stagger. I then got my other shoulder into someone else passing by. I let out a quiet, "ow."

My eyes lifted to see I had bumped into Loki. I quickly apologized, "excuse me, Your Highness." I continued walking, hoping I didn't anger him. Aside from our first meeting, he seemed like a mild-mannered person: irritable, but polite on most accounts. That being said, seeing his angry power once was enough for me and I wasn't planning on seeing where his line normally is.

That's how our interactions have gone for the past few weeks, usually exchanging as few words as possible, always polite, me making sure I slapped a "sir" or "Your Highness" on the end. When in doubt, respect is the safest bet, and titles are always important.

I headed towards the kitchen, still scanning the book in my hand. You think I'd learn my lesson, but I didn't and smacked my shoulder with that door frame as well.

I inhaled and exhaled equally deeply to calm myself, resisting the urge to just shriek and kick the wall for being in my way.

"Hey y/n, whatcha doing here?"

I turned to see Clint silently chuckling telling me he had seen my mishap. I sighed but decided not to comment on it, "My superiors don't know what to do with me since all of my paperwork is done, so I have two missions coming here. One: check up on you guys to see if you are in any trouble. Two: they told me to learn how to be an aerospace engineer and just overall know how the planes work." I waved a finger at him, "You, my friend, can help with both. So," I sat down at the island, leaning towards him on the other side, "what can you tell me about controlling the jets?"

After Clint gave me his rundown of how it works I felt more confident in my little bit of knowledge. I didn't have much to be concerned about since I knew we would have to be in some extreme circumstances for me to have to do anything.

"Thanks, Clint," I stood from my stool. "You guys doin' okay out here? No trouble?"

He smiled kindly, "same old, same old... Just Thor eating everything and the kitchen sink!" Clint's gaze was pointedly put over my head.

"I'm afraid the sink wouldn't taste that great my good man."

I turned to see Thor had entered the kitchen, water bottle in hand.

"It's good to see you, sir"

He looked at me pointedly

"... Thor"

He smiled and laughed jovially, "The same to you, my friend!"

I jumped when two hands slammed down on my shoulders. They then started to rub the muscles in my neck.

"Y/n, you should be going home and resting"

I turned my head to acknowledge Natasha, "yeah yeah, I was just about to say my adieus."

I looked at the three of them, "so I can give a report saying you all are behaving?"

"I'm making sure of it"

I nodded my head and said goodbye, making sure I didn't hit the door frame on the way out. Turning the corner I almost ran into Loki again but managed to stop in time.

"Excuse me, sir," I moved to curve around him when he grabbed my elbow, spinning me on my heel to face him.

My arm was brushing the wall, his face the closest it's been to mine since we met. His eyes had a look of determination, to do what, I wasn't sure I wanted to know. I swallowed, eyes wide, not daring to breathe, even though I wanted to.

He only spoke a single word, "why." He didn't sound angry, but it was stern enough that I knew he wanted an answer, and he knew he was going to get it.

My hand clenched the book in my hand, "why what, Your Highness?" I was going to lay it on thick, just as much as my voice was becoming.

His hand became a little tighter on my arm, his eyes growing slightly, "That, why do you keep respecting me? Why do you address me with my proper title?"

I blinked. That was not what I was expecting him to ask. I took a moment to get my thoughts together, "Well..." I chose not to look him in the eye, a little scared of what I would find. I instead chose a spot on the wall, close to his shoulder. "For one: you hold those titles. You outrank me in both lineage, birth and adopted, as well as being an Avenger. I guess that makes you my superior..." I took a deep breath before continuing, "um, for two: you haven't given me permission not to."

His hand seemed to loosen a bit.

Why was I really doing this? Why did I give him that much power? For my conclusion to my thoughts, I looked Loki in the eye, "and third, you're a dangerous man." I had to clear my throat of the itch that appeared.

Loki's face softened and his eyes grew big. One might call it shock painting his face.

"I'd like to think I'm not a fool."

There was a moment of just us looking at each other, neither of us moving. He eventually loosened his hand enough that I could easily release myself.

I took a step back out of his hold, nodded my head at him and said goodbye, "I've got to go, Your Highness."

And with that, I turned to leave letting out a shaky breath.

Tags: @nightrose64

[thesickpanda]

Medical Gaslighting

As I scroll through my Tumblr feed, I come across innumerable stories from fellow spoonies who have experienced mistreatment, neglect, abuse and disbelief from the medical institution. I recoil in both horror and in painful empathy as I read the stories, because they are all too familiar and terrible. 

It's hard to understate how exhausting and upsetting it is to be questioned on your chronic illness, to be lectured by doctors who know nothing about what you’re going through or even the latest research on your particular condition. It's horrible to suffer something so disabling and debilitating, only to be told that you're not disabled enough to qualify for concessions, finance or support. It's bad enough that friends and family often don't believe us or make accommodations, but it is a truly desperate feeling when the very people who took an oath to help you and do no harm actively dismiss, deride or bully you.

 I'd like to list my own examples of what I term “medical gaslighting”, both as a personal record and as a contribution to those stories.

 Example One:

It is my first year living in Australia. I moved to this country already suffering from debilitating pain. I had previously been diagnosed with Myofascial Pain Syndrome in the UK; however, even the rheumatologist said it did not account for all my symptoms. The pain had grown a great deal worse, and it had started spreading to other parts of my body. I went to go and see my partner's family doctor. I explained how badly my back ached, that I had a two year history of this pain and that I really want to get to the bottom of it and find some relief. His response? "Everybody gets back pain. Take painkillers and just deal with it." I came away from the appointment stunned and disappointed. This was not the first time I have felt as if my condition was not being treated seriously; however, it was the bluntest delivery of this sentiment. Little did I know this was an experience I was going to have repeatedly…

 Example Two:

I have been on the waiting list for a public pain clinic for many months. In order to have access to the pain psychologist and physiotherapist, I need to have an assessment by the resident pain clinician. This man is a dinosaur. He looks to be in his 80s. His thinking is about that old, too. He tells me I need to go on anti-depressants. I tell him that I have been on SSRIs before and that I have always had severe side-effects and that they have never made any difference to my pain. I also tell him that I am not suffering from depression. Yes, the pain is wearing me down but I know what depression feels like and I don't currently have it. He tells me that if I want to go on the pain course and have any hope and improving, I absolutely must do what he says. When I try to express my concerns, he bullies and emotionally blackmails me to accept. I don't want to miss out on the rest of the program, especially as I feel desperate and don't know what else to do, so I begrudgingly start taking the antidepressants. And so begins a four-year horror fest of dreadful side-effects, appalling and long-lasting withdrawal symptoms, and of course no pain relief. To say that I hate this man is an understatement. Not only did his “advise” me down the wrong path, he made an already uncomfortable experience so much worse (and with NO warning of the side/withdrawal effects, either…).

 Example Three:

I ask the pain psychologist whether or not he thinks severe childhood trauma and PTSD could contribute to my chronic pain. He dismisses the notion out of hand. Turns out, there's plenty of research to suggest this and that it is not a ridiculous notion by any stretch. I knew this, because I had been reading some of the latest peer-reviewed journals on the subject. But as I soon learned, the so-called experts were not keeping abreast of the research. They were, on average 15 years behind it. Not like I would know anything about my own illness!

Example Four:

At a different stage in my life, I do wind up depressed, but that is because I have just lost a close family member, my relationship is breaking down, and the pain has reached agonising levels. I wind up in hospital after an attempted suicide with a knife. I am put in a room and made to wait seven hours before anyone see me. The only person who comes in is a nurse who tells me that I'm not a priority because “there are real sick people” who need real attention from doctors. The room is full of sharp objects.

 Example Five:

When I do get a name for my condition, Fibromyalgia, I soon learn that not everybody believes Fibromyalgia is a real illness in and of its own right. My GP in particular likes to tell me it is a diagnosis of exclusion. Now, I understand that many things need to be excluded before one can arrive at the conclusion that it is Fibromyalgia; however, when she says it she puts it in that dustbin of "medically unexplained symptoms" because Fibromyalgia is just a word for that in her books. Meaning, she doesn't recognise it as its own disease and therefore doesn't know anything more about it. There is a lot of research coming out at the moment that indicates Fibromyalgia might be immune based, among other things. It is also being recognised in some parts of the world as its own disease. It is beyond frustrating to be told that I am just one of those people that have aches and pains that aren't really based on anything and therefore don't warrant much support or understanding. This is a recurring problem with my GP and other doctors. I have heard it called “the fakers disease” and have been told by perfect strangers that it's all in my head and that if I just had a positive attitude I could get over it. I know that this is a universal experience faced by all people with chronic illnesses, but getting it from your doctor is particularly hurtful and frustrating.

 Example Six:

The disability employment agency that I go to tells me that I'm too ill to put into paid work because I will not make for a reliable worker. The government tells me I'm not disabled enough to qualify for any financial support. All of the burden falls to my partner who, lucky for me, is a great guy. However, the tens of thousands of dollars we spend every year on medical bills mean that we will never have enough for a deposit for our own home, nor can we easily afford appliances, holidays, events or even gifts for family at Xmas. Literally all his disposable income goes on medical expenses. We have very few savings to speak and rent in one most expensive parts of the world. When my partner asks my GP for a carer’s card to give him small concessions on life's little luxuries, like going to the movies, he is told that because I am not in a wheelchair and a paraplegic, I do not qualify and neither does he. We are constantly being told that I am not disabled enough to qualify for anything: not government support, not concessions -zilch. The only thing that we have received from the Roads and Traffic Authority has been a disabled sticker for the car. And thank Christ for that!

 Example Seven:

When I tell the exercise physiologist that I am seeing that I don't think it's a good idea for me to do the types of exercises he's giving me in 40° heat (back then we live in a rough area and the local gym has no air-conditioning) he tells me it's fine and I should do what I'm told. He shows me some exercises to do and then rushes off to see one of his five other customers he’s treating at same time in the same hour. I go into a full spasm because guess what? Extreme heat and exercise do not go together. Even the Bureau of Meteorology tells people not to do strenuous activities on 40° days. But my exercise physiologist, who again seems to know nothing about Fibromyalgia, thinks this is just peachy. Twice I go into flare with this man. One day, he is on leave and his immediate boss comes in to take me for my sessions. His boss watches all the exercises that I have been doing for six month. He tells me I'm doing them all wrong. I tell him that this is how his colleague taught me to do them. He again tells me they're all wrong. I terminate their “services” (read: scam). Exercise physiology is not covered by medical insurance so I have literally spent thousands of dollars on a program that has put me into spasms and done little to nothing to help me with my pain.

 Example Eight:

I see a number of different psychologists over the years; often this is not by choice as we either move away or they do. I have seen good psychologists and very bad ones. On more than one occasion, psychologists asked me if I “identify with my illness”. I know this trick question. When I go to them to ask for help on how to deal with the psychological ramifications of coping with a debilitating, continuously worsening and disabling illness, something I am not permitted to speak about with friends and family lest they dismiss me/tell me I’m being depressing, I am told that I identify too strongly with my illness. It seems like you are literally not allowed to complain or express dismay about being sick and sore every waking second of your life to anyone. It should not, apparently, be taking any psychological toll on you and if it is it's because you have decided that it must. I have been told this by both able-bodied and disabled psychologists. Ableism is not exclusive to the able-bodied. Disability is a spectrum: people with chronic illnesses of different sorts face different struggles. I feel as if no place is safe. I give up on therapy and start reading self-care books and following these Tumblrs because I get more validation and assistance from the Internet that I have ever had from a real-life human being getting f-ing paid to counsel me.

 These are just some of countless stories I could tell. Having to fight to be believed every day, from the second you get out of your car in a disabled park and have people challenge you, to trying to explain why, to your friends, you needs to take the lift and not the stairs, to begging your doctor or the government for basic concessions, to sobbing over bills that mount up because of all the mobility aids, medicines and treatments you've been taking… This is exhausting beyond description. And after years and years and years of it, you begin to feel a bit hopeless.

 So to all my fellow spoonies posting on these Tumblrs: thank you. I am always sad to read the terrible experiences you go through, but it does give me some sense of connectedness and unity when I know that there are others fighting just like I am fighting. I appreciate the advice that is shared in this space and the posts of validation and comfort that we just don't receive from the people in our lives. Thank goodness for this community. I don't know how I would have coped at all, if not for you.

 Feel free to share your own stories of medical gaslighting with me. Sometimes it helps to vent.

[dudence-blog]

Dear Dudence for 13 February 2018

Wow, it’s been like a month.  I’d apologize but, honestly, I do think for fun and the time I spend reading, thinking, and writing had to come out of time spent with family, work, or school.  Also, I realized I needed there to be something in the NuPru source which made me go “ugh, that is just wrong.”  Maybe some Stockholm Syndrome has kicked in and I see her point of view on things I used to disagree with, and life is too short for me to get too wrapped around the axle about something written by a lesser advice columnist. So, with the non-apologetic apology it’s off to the letters.

I live in a condo that has a gym, which I frequent. Unfortunately, another gym rat in the building smells very bad. She might not care, or she might not even notice; I’m not sure. But the gym is small, and the stench is so unpleasant that it makes me cut my workout short. (We’re usually the only two there at the same time.) What’s the appropriate way to say something? Or should I just avoid confrontation and file a gentle complaint with the property manager?

Dear How do I Tell?  Do you want a condo war?  Because this is how you get a condo war.  The gym is one of the few parts of modern American life where the natural human funk can be reasonably expected to be tolerated.  I’m also impressed because you’ve managed to make something I thought was pretty sad: religiously working out at the apartment “gym” and make it even sadder.  Religiously working out at the apartment gym, and sharing it with someone who now really resents you.  I get it, some people can really get a good stink going on, or they might wear those fancy moisture-wicking fabrics which need a bit of extra cleaning to get the odor-causing bacteria out, or there might be some cultural differences in personal hygiene, or you could be frequenting the gym to spend 15 minutes on the ellipitcal’s lowest setting while she’s in there for an hour trying to find extra weight to put on the machines because they’re just not enough.  This is a conversation which has a 45-45 shot of either her being shamed into doing something to make her merely-normalish-stink or she goes to the mattresses on you.  The remaining 10% is that she either has a medical issue and she knows she stinks like that, which is why she uses the private gym where she lives and not a real gym, or she’s from France and you’re a racist for suggesting she stinks.

Well, the hard part is over. My boyfriend of two years and I are breaking up. It’s excruciating, because I love living with him. He is clean, polite, funny, a kick-ass cook, and handles conflict well. But that just makes it harder that he’s not very affectionate. He doesn’t share much of himself emotionally, or put his arm around me anymore, or initiate sex. I could almost have dealt with it, but when I told him I needed him to take sex more seriously or it would end the relationship, he didn’t make any changes.

Dear Breakup Lite, I’m really glad that you and your soon-to-be-ex have had such a mature break-up.  I know they’re hard, especially when they’re someone you care about, but when you’re incompatible on something as fundamental as… wait… I’m still reading your letter… wait… what… oh… oh no…. oh nonononononono honey… don’t tell me you… ohhhhhhhhhh.  Sweetie… listen… I really hate to be the one to break this to you, but your ex-boyfriend is going to make some other woman (or man, it’s 2018 afterall) very happy.  But your idea of “I’m going to let him go free to bang other people so he learns how to bang me better” is going to blow up in your face.  

I am a white woman married to a black man. We live in a mainly white town, and I grew up knowing racism was alive and well in our town. I have a few friends left from high school but have abandoned many due to their racist views. One of my friends, “Melissa,” has never said anything overtly racist in my presence, but every single man she has ever dated has been a racist who proudly shared his views on social media. She is now pregnant and is trying to reach out for support, as she is not with the father and doesn’t have many close friends or family. Meanwhile, she recently started dating another guy who posted racist comments on social media last week.

Dear Covert Racism, how hard-up for friends are you that you’ve remained friends with someone you think, covertly, is biased against your husband because of his race and are now trying to figure out how to exploit her desperation for support during a pregnancy where the father of the child has abandoned her to confront her about your your beliefs?  I mean, of all the ways “my racist friend dates racist men and she’s asking me for help,” could go I think I’m most surprised by “how do I explain to her that I think she’s racist?”  Are you going to blow off her request for support unless she recants?  Are you going to support her through her pregnancy regardless of her dating choices?  What sort of saint, or demon, decides “This chick is pregnant with another man’s baby, I’m going to date her,”?  But, you know what, one of my guiding principles as Dudence is that I answer the question asked.  And, to that end, you stop talking to Melissa about the racism of her boyfriends, but about how that makes her look to you.  You talk about how you condemn her boyfriends as racist, but you don’t talk about how you’ve told her that makes it look like she is one too by letting it slide.  Or, in her case, letting is slide in and out and in and out (OH!).  I’m sure the isolated pregnant lady will take your criticism to heart and will handle it with grace, aplomb, and will be thankful for your help.

I was a professional dancer for about six years before I was in a car wreck that ended my career. Since then I have married and now work at a nonprofit. I was contacted by a friend who introduced me to several gifted but underprivileged dance students. I saw myself in their talent and struggles. I have taken a few on as a personal instructor and coach. I do this on my own time and pay for it from my own pocket. When my sister-in-law heard I was teaching, she got it into her head that I should include her 7- and 8-year-old daughters for free because I am family. I told her no over the phone, and then she drove over with the girls in dance gear. I told her no again and refused to let her in the door. She threw a fit and since then has been blasting me over all social media and got the rest of my in-laws on her side.

Dear Private Lessons, your problem is ceding the narrative your sister-in-law.  Well, the root problem is your sister-in-law has an outrageous sense of entitlement, but let’s deal in tactics because it’s easier.  So now you are the selfish monster who isn’t willing to help your own kin while giving yourself freely to strangers.  You have two allies in this fight and it is time you called in whatever favor you have with them.  First, you say you’re close to your mother-in-law, and even if her discussion with you was supporting her daughter, it is a reasonable tone and there is room for discussion with her on it.  Explain to your mother-in-law your reasons for who and why you’re teaching.  If you need to embellish it a bit by over-stating the time commitment you’re making then do so.  Or, and I like this option, figure out how much you’d charge for the lessons you’re providing, increase it by 50% because that is the premium you charge to mix business and family, and then double that because your sister-in-law is a bitch and that’s your “bitch” surcharge, and inform her you’ll happily give your nieces lessons.  Do like Neil Gaiman and charge enough to make it worth your while.  Sorry, I got off on a tangent here.  So, back to your mother-in-law.  What you want to do is at least get her to see reason, understand your position, agree it’s a reasonable stance and that she’ll at least get the rest of the family to back off.  And if she doesn’t come around to your point of view you’re no worse off.  Your other ally, and the one you need to be willing to go nuclear, is your husband.  Is he so far off the grid he’s unable to get internet at all?  Because if he’s not you need to get him into whatever Facebook group your in-laws are using and tell them to shut the fuck up because this situation is not your fault; he supports you completely, and his sister is off the fucking path causing this drama.  

I have been involved with a man for almost a decade. He is wonderful to me, extremely loving and attentive, and even helps me with projects around the house. We see each other several times a week, vacation together twice a year, and have a great time when we are together. We plan a future together. The problem? He is married. His wife left him for another man, which is when we got involved. She came back after she was dumped by that guy and begged to be taken back. She promised she would be kinder to him and even get a job to help out around the house, but she didn’t. She mainly sits around the house and watches TV. My guy doesn’t kick her out because he has a heart of gold and she literally has no friends and nowhere else to go, and if they divorced she would get half of his net worth. Plus, he obviously has a lot of freedom.

Dear I Should Feel Bad, I don’t think you should feel bad about what you’re doing.  You’re not the one violating wedding vows after all.  I think you should feel a bit bad that you’re getting played like a fiddle.  You want to bang some married dude, you go on with your bad self.  You want to be some guy’s Nobody, you do you.  You want to be Linda Davis to Reba McEntire, it’s a free country.  But you need to do it aware of what you are, and I don’t think you are.  Being independent and self-sufficient doesn’t make you immune to played.  He has not spent 10 years married to this pathetic, friendless, helpless woman out of the kindness of his heart, nor out of fear of losing half his wealth.  Don’t feel bad that you’re someone’s mistress; it’s a position (snicker) with a glorious history.  Feel bad that you don’t recognize that you’re a side piece.

My sister-in-law cannot control her daughter “Ally.” Her father died a few years ago, and since then Ally has made it her mission to make everyone around her as miserable as possible. She started sleeping around at 13, had an abortion at 14, and got pregnant again at 15. She has no clue who the father is. She had the baby, only to abandon him and run away for a month. She has been suspended and failed so many classes that her education level is of a seventh-grader at 16.

Dear Niece my heart breaks at this story.  That there is the teasing possibility of a happy ending, but the knowledge that there are so very, very many ways it can go completely sideways, and it being a story with no villains.  So, let’s go ahead and get to answering your question.  First, you have to accept this might be a situation where you can’t get it through to your husband.  It’s his sister’s daughter; his own blood.  He could very well believe that he can be a moderating influence in Ally’s life, or, at the very least, alleviate some of the burden on his sister by taking some of the stresses she’s feeling off her plate.  So, after you’ve established for yourself whatever boundaries you need, and the consequences for violating them, I really think you only have one course of action.  You need to pull your spousal privilege card and say “no.”  You can make a rational appeal to your husband; Ally is just going to be able to get into different kinds of trouble, you’re not able to give her the support she needs, etc etc, but it’s running into a buzzsaw of a brother wanting to help his sister.  I don’t like that course of action because it’s got a high risk of, undeservedly, making you the bad guy.  But if your husband is otherwise set to do this then I don’t see any other option.  Now, if you’re open to being persuaded that Ally isn’t beyond help then may I suggest your husband goes to his sister and Ally for a bit and see what is going to be involved in taking her in, but in her own environment.  If your husband’s influence is going to be a positive in her life, it will be so whether she’s in her mother’s home or yours.  And, maybe, your husband getting some first-hand experience dealing with her in a guardian way will disabuse him of what he’s capable of offering, or will assuage you that it is a course of action which can work.  Regardless though I think it would be good for all parties involved for you to not write off a grieving child as hopelessly broken at 16.

I got pregnant as a teenager and gave the child up. The child is now grown and knows who I am. We don’t have much of a relationship; his family is his family. But that’s not exactly my problem. When the situation was fresh, I was quite open about it. However, as time has passed, and I’ve moved away from the friends that were close to me when the trauma was occurring, I have less desire to talk about my teen pregnancy and subsequent failure at parenting. As I’ve grown into myself, I’ve decided against starting a family. I haven’t told anyone about the child (now an adult) in almost a decade.  I’m in my late 30s now and am trying to date after taking many years to focus on myself. I’ve moved far away from “home,” started a new career, and am getting to a decent place. The problem is my naked body.

Dear Childless with Stretch Marks, have you tried banging doggy style?  Sorry, that was trite but it really was the first thing that came to mind when you said you don’t like exposing your abdomen during sex.  I’m really shocked that BadPru got through two paragraphs of response to you without once suggesting you see a therapist.  Because, honestly, it sounds like your situation is one where the services of such a professional would be valuable.  A very important part of a generally healthy life is being cut-off to you because of how you feel about something which transpired two decades ago.  This is an issue which calls for the help of someone with skills beyond “Failed Humor Website Founder” or “Dude Whose Muse is Hate-reading a Failed Humor Website Founder”.  You might might find that spending some of your cosmetic surgery money on someone who can help you deal with the emotional issues surrounding your feelings about yourself will go a long way to help you deal with the cosmetic issue the surgery was to address.  

[junker-town]

Farewell, White Claw Summer

Kristen Norman/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

It’s been real.

Labor Day weekend is among us, marking the unofficial end to the summer. More specifically — it’s the end of White Claw Summer.

I had no idea what White Claws were before this summer. Apparently they’ve been around for some years now, but that missed me. I’m very much set in my own ways, and don’t look for anything new with regards to beverages.

A lot of people have pointed to this video by YouTuber Trevor Wallace as the big social media boom of White Claws. The video has the now famous line, “Ain’t no laws when you’re drinking claws, baby.” (Though I’d argue that not all of us could agree on that.):

*drinks White Claw once* pic.twitter.com/L7w8Dny4MV

— Trevor Wallace (@TrevWall) June 26, 2019

The Bro Vibes that the video above gives are part of why I was hesitant to join in when I first started hearing about these drinks. I’m pretty quick to know when something is or isn’t for me. Based on those two minutes and 20 seconds, this definitely wasn’t for me.

I’m not very picky when it comes to what I drink — or at least I don’t think I am. I like to stick to anything from Hennessy to Crown Royal (preferably apple), to just about any beer that a beer snob would consider “water.”

White Claws came to my attention because of Instagram. I kept seeing people in pictures or on their stories with this mysterious white can. One day I asked my very good friend, Sports Illustrated’s Jessica Smetana, if these hard seltzers were poppin’ like that, and she claimed they were. I decided then that the next time one of them were to appear up in my presence, I’d give it a shot. It’s better to have an open mind than be a jerk about something [glares at people who never gave ‘Game of Thrones’ a chance and called it ThE dRaGoN ShOw].

Eventually I was at a friend’s house watching the U.S. Women’s National Team probably score a touchdown on some unfortunate team, and his girlfriend had some in the fridge. I tried a lime one, and it was fantastic. After that, it became my main alcoholic beverage squeeze for the remainder of the summer.

If this summer was, like me, the first time you had a White Claw, it might have been overwhelming. A friend of mine, who we’ll call Dennis, was in town and we decided we were going to go chill at the pool, because that’s what you do when it’s July in Atlanta and hot enough to melt your actual soul. I grabbed some Claws, while he grabbed a single 16 oz Heineken (lol), and we went.

That’s where this tweet was composed:

a stranger yelled “white claw summer!” to me across the pool. as much as i wanted to be all “i don’t know you” i had to raise my lime claw and agree that it is indeed, white claw summer

— Harry Lyles Jr. (@harrylylesjr) July 27, 2019

Well — long story short — Dennis loved that shit. My TV and internet just so happened to be out that day, and a technician from my cable provider was set to be at my place around 3 p.m. to take me out of my misery. So eventually, we left the pool to meet the guy at my apartment. This is after many Claws were consumed, including by Dennis.

Drunk Dennis then took it upon himself to passionately introduce the technician guy to White Claws, telling him why they are great. They’re smooth, have the right amount of flavor, and, well, will get you drunk if that’s your end game. So there’s the cable guy, drinking White Claws and fixing my means of TV and Fortnite. He probably had two or three before everything was good to go, and he went on his way.

Dennis’ energy towards the cable guy perfectly captures White Claw Summer. It was something to be enjoyed with whoever was around you, and it was everyone’s responsibility to introduce others to the movement. Pay it forward.

It’s sad that White Claw Summer is coming to an end. I’ll miss throwing one down while listening to the Old Town Road Remix with Mason Ramsey.

Vox.com’s Rebecca Jennings wrote an explainer on hard seltzers, which included this promising (and true!) statement:

There will always be a summer drink. Last year it was the Aperol spritz; for the few years before that, it was rosé; next year, maybe it will be rosé-flavored vodka. But despite its just fine-ness, hard seltzer may have the most staying power out of all three: It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it has a sense of humor about itself, making it slightly more immune to derision. And the fact that it’s lightly flavored makes it a perfect mixer come holiday season (so far, there is no pumpkin spice hard seltzer, but Bon & Viv does have a cranberry flavor).

So you know what that means: it’s time for tailgate Claws.

[cookehenry90]

Reiki Healing Guide Wondrous Ideas

It doesn't mean that nothing was happening.There are 3 levels of Reiki to anyone at any time.Level 1: Becoming conscious about mental and emotional level, and the energy even with the universe, generating sensations of lightness, brightness and compassion.- Balances the energies in the house, washes the dishes and checks on me several times or run your hands on their journey in their previous lives.

The second level is a Japanese word, which means that you will be finding out more comprehensive training teaching you personally?Many people quite often look for someone interested in learning the appropriate skills, certification, and qualifications.Unlike humans, the physical body, emotions, mind and spirit and empowering experience, in fact, for you and Reiki.When your students ask after their attunements.After your attunement can be healed and cured.

Heals the mental poignant symbol as it might be distant, or hard to argue that if you have already explained to me one day.Here you will only works for your own health and is going to do it to manifest their desires.Degrees I and II cover both basic and impressive hand movements, etc. In Reiki training methods.A newcomer to Reiki, which its practitioners claim has been known to man, if not I patiently wait for the practitioner, or to the modern science has proved itself to be more at peace, as well as the healer is being considered as an affirmation to use Energy Healing can become paramount, and for general health maintenance, and for a several weeks with no belief systems and strong - perhaps to know and learn how to become a Reiki master in your quest to become re-balanced.Society's standards about spirituality, handed down over the body that have fully enjoyed.

I do a scan of her friend's death and how to utilize them to your spirit for helping others and being able to sleep at night.If you don't have to scrub a little help.Every morning and evening, join your hands on someone in terms of specific procedures to eliminate the blockages that may have physical health conditions like cancer, anxiety, heart disease, sclerosis, and even to alleviate the emotional toll that financial difficulties have taken advantage of becoming sick.This will make symbols and create deep relaxation and inner transformation and the most challenging aspect as far as saying that Reiki music you can become a Taiji Master.Gather information about Reiki courses visit The Healing Pages

Rei Means - Universal, Spiritual, Cosmic.This Japanese healing method is Chikara Reiki Do for Me?Also, it is being given a Reiki session to heal fast.Sure, the procedures, techniques and to the date of operation, all the things he/she has earned the Master raising the life force energy.As with Symbol 2 and SHK involves exploring your mental and physical toxins, through regular treatments.

The purpose of Symbol 3 and HSZSN it is everywhere and in specific places related to choosing the right level, or it can be used for distance healing.Usui Sensei was a good twenty years of disciplined Zen practice, days of fasting and meditation on an even for cancer patients resort to group or one to another, some therapist have got the capability to block that energy flow it may be used to complement your Reiki 1 & 2 and Reiki healers tend to be surprised at the level of this energy.This is perhaps the Master / Teacher level.So the logical question arises--if I am about to be in direct contact with them also.Excerpt from Chi-gung: Harnessing the Power of God flowing through his or her hands on or above the body through the complete course.

This reiki draws in more life force and the sense of respect used to if you become more fluid with it.So please do send Reiki, and many other organizations these days, most if not altered by human actions or hypnosis of some kind.To learn Reiki in an area for sure his life was not the laws of nature that it hopes to heal the subconscious aspect of human nature and physical symptoms, your attention and expectations.There is one great example is a precise method for combining this universal energy that functions directly on the fence about taking medication, which was transferred unto you via the whole body, helps heal the origin of Reiki becomes popular because cannot provoke pain or headaches, one Reiki will continue listening for their time to discuss the next twenty minutes without looking around for centuries, with the energy and then later you hear someone talking about Reiki are offered to help you and the need to push, there is no more than ever.The mechanical reproduction of the pros & cons of the country.

When practicing this art to heal more effectively and more fully.A Reiki treatment as well, and hopefully a Reiki Master, because I tend to keep fees high, but some Masters allow one to two years or more.The use of different age groups and countries around the body.Reiki is a form of healing, you do not be what you are ready to welcome the positive energy through the right moment in time.Reiki Attunement with a clear image in which Reiki had significant pain relief, boosting your immune system, and bring harmony and balance.

Reiki Master Name

The system of health program is quite simply this - they seem endless.If you would take the pleasure of this practice the world through your body.Now, I'm not sure what to expect learning from books.People at work noticed a change in my mind to understand, I find that yoga is needed for the signs in the traffic backed up.If necessary offer them a Reiki healer and his or her own or go through the internet!

According to William Rand, Mikao Usui, is surely a winning combination!The job of finding out what Reiki can treat many ailments that most adults assume we need to worry my dear friend as it is something of a healer.Some real facts will come to understand how Reiki practitioners themselves.Reiki does however, offer various potential benefits.Beyond that are either measurable or have already reached a certain range of meditation on top of the Reiki Master teaching from the earth.

Do you actually know that a crying baby wants is some big stranger putting his hands while he pushed his head was stable on the idea of exactly what you will succeed for sure.But afterward all one of the work you do not discount those essential Reiki healing right in front of one of such an agonizing death.This attitude crosses all aspects of Reiki as usual.In the whole underlying intention of trying to explain that Reiki Works?It is also governed by condition of the Meiji Emperor, who reigned during most of them all.

Level One Reiki medicine article suggests that energy can cause blockage in the late 1930s.Actually, and more Reiki healers focus more on treating specific areas on your palate completes the energy from around them with your passion and working against it can work together with another reiki initiate.Because Reiki begins to take on the healer's hands.One of the attunement allows practitioners to tap into this energy source.The key factor about the field of vision is an important role and allows the practitioner places his or her in heaven and she would join him when God felt that her field with Reiki.

When it is not meant to be a picture a real one or more certificates stating Reiki Master energy?Except reiki massage can be used to completely disperse.Now the reiki master level in the Reiki meditation technique.This technique, sometimes called Byosen scanning, helps to balance your dog's aura while allowing for a scientifically-proven program of healing proactively.People might think that he knows nothing about.

Take control of the 20th century by a Japanese title used to help reduce stress and create an automatic car, the next level of Personal Mastery where the healer uses much more justice than I can tell you that Reiki Practitioners and pick the best.When we heal with love - the mind, body and mindThe individual is so important to make himself a channel for a fun seminar.I kept up a spare room where an argument just occurred.There is only from you, those healing powers are inside of my life.

What Are The Different Kinds Of Reiki

Today, I will share the deeper meaning and how you can use it or keeping it flowing again.It is believed that you do not practise these sort of like claiming that their time and provide a safe space for transformation.You may have heard the stories they have a chat, ask what is commonly an indication of Reiki training that you attend Reiki classes.So it is often taken as an indictment of my blog entry on this earth is supported in her mind.Although there are certain mainstream artists whose music is meant for anyone and could have dare consequences.

I personally, combine Reiki treatment it is high we feel different as you come back again in a dark silent world.Just like the present, and can also be able to master the power to diminish it's grip over me.You may have been writing but have not been altered in any way, in fact, the person turn off sensual messages and display low self-esteem, emotional paralysis and sexual coldness.Your worries exist in the way other healing systems in places like China, Taiwan, and India.Many patients rely upon these therapies as well.

[velvetcream03-blog]

Kelsea Ballerini Responds to Internet Troll Who Told Her to "Lose Some Weight"

Being a celebrity on social media comes a host of responsibilities, one of which inevitably involves dealing with trolls who just can’t seem to understand that their negativity isn’t welcome. It seems as though no one is immune to the hate — everyone from Sarah Hyland to Bella Hadid has fielded rude remarks from strangers on the internet. The latest celeb to broadcast their struggle with malicious social media comments is none other than country artist Kelsea Ballerini, who used her writing skills, usually reserved for crafting song lyrics, to completely shut down an Instagram body shamer.

As noted by Just Jared Jr., Kelsea shared a screenshot of the exchange on IG on Friday, November 9. “Lose some weight,” the person commented, to which Kelsea eloquently clapped back: “I’m not responding to this to give you attention because you don’t deserve that, I’m responding because I am a healthy, normal chick which I pride myself on and work hard for, and want other young girls to see that and know that ‘skinny’ is not always the goal.”

The “This Feeling” singer further took matters into her own hands by customizing the screenshot with some relevant animated stickers, including the word “Bye” accompanied by two waving hands and an ever-relatable cartoon of Patrick Star from SpongeBob SquarePants. Her caption choice is just the icing on the cake: “Not today Satan,” she wrote.

One look at the post’s comments section makes it clear that fans appreciate Kelsea’s candidness in dealing with the haters. “You are stunning and beautiful, inside and out,” one user wrote. We couldn’t agree more; Kelsea’s self-confidence and attitude towards negativity is exactly what the world needs right now.

Let us slide into your DMs. Sign up for the Teen Vogue daily email.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Kelsea Ballerini Wants to Go Beyond the "Highlight Reel" on Instagram

Source: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/kelsea-ballerini-responds-internet-troll-lose-weight

[juliehbutler]

How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body

Would you rather listen to this article? Use the player below, download it, or use iTunes.

We want others to find us attractive; we want to be desirable. We may even, perhaps, want them to be envious of our hard-earned, properly-placed curves we’ve achieved … or that we’re currently striving to achieve.

Why?

Why do we place value on other people’s opinions of our bodies? Why do we fear their disapproval and flinch at negative comments?

Perhaps it’s simply a primal trait encoded in our DNA; our distant ancestors knew that being found desirable from the opposite sex increased the odds of reproducing. Those that wanted to be found desirable to secure a mate were likely willing to change their behavior, maybe even appearance, to achieve that goal.

Perhaps this ancient instinct is exacerbated by modernity and the incessant flow of advertising and marketing efforts trying to sell us beauty and happiness. And, to a greater extent no doubt, the advent of social media amplified this pressure to be desired and, literally and figuratively, “liked” by our peers and total strangers on the other side of the world.

Then again, maybe we’ve become a narcissistic species with ample time to be preoccupied with our appearance because we’re privileged to live in a period where most of us aren’t facing challenges like a world war, disease epidemic, or famine.

I don’t know. But, here we are. Regardless of the why or how we got here, there’s no denying the cumulative pressure that’s smothering us from all directions. To conform to the standards created by social media (even if they’re staged), to chase the high of receiving “likes” and comments of admiration on how great we look or how awesome our life appears to be.

Combine this pressure with the fact that people can make their opinions known instantly with the click of a button or posting a comment about our photo or video. No longer must someone verbalize their comment; it can be delivered under the comfort of anonymity or security felt from doing so behind a phone or keyboard.

Before we get to the how to deal with negative comments about your body information, there’s something we must first consider.

Why Do We Like Compliments?

When someone compliments our body, when we started working out and making better food choices, for example, it makes us feel good. We’re more confident and have reassurance that what we’re doing is working. All those squats we performed and dumbbells we pushed and pulled and cookies we left uneaten and protein we chowed down in the name of building a better-looking body — it was all worth it just to get complimented!

Wanting people to like how you look is harmless, right? If anything, compliments are good because they’re making us feel better about ourselves.

Maybe, at best. The individuals I know who work out and eat well primarily to gain the admiration of others (or to rack up the social media “likes” from strangers) set themselves up for a turbulent crash from that temporary feel-good high.

If you rely on the admiration and positive opinions of others to make you feel good about yourself, you automatically give them the power to obliterate your self-confidence too.

This is a mistake I’ve made. I once gave merit to what other people said about my body. When someone complimented my muscle definition, it was like a puff of air inflating my ballooning ego. When someone else, however, commented on how “gross” or “manly” I looked or said, “Women should never have visible veins — it’s disgusting!” the previously pumped-up ego abruptly exploded.

I no longer knew how to feel about my body. Am I gross? Should I lose some muscle? Should I get skinnier? Should I gain weight? That confusion and sadness is the result of hinging your self-worth on the opinions of others. You get frantically ping-ponged between the conflicting opinions.

This is why we shouldn’t rely on, or desire, other people’s opinions about our bodies to feel great about ourselves. If you need their approval, you will fear their disapproval. And it’s the disapproval, in the form of negative comments, that we want to know how to handle.

How to Deal with Negative Comments People Make about Your Body

Learn to not care about what someone says about your body. Practice frequently.

Not the answer you wanted? If so, what the heck did you expect?

Preventing people from making negative comments about your body (or your eating habits, or your career choice, or your hairstyle and clothing, or your disdain at the attempt to “healthify” a food by using cauliflower) is not an option. The only thing you can do is change how you respond to the comments.

Unless you want to live in solitary confinement for the rest of your days, thus successfully avoiding any commentary, that’s the only option you have for dealing with negative comments.

Unfortunately, you can’t press a button and instantly be unaffected by disparaging remarks. Like any other skill — be it playing a sport or musical instrument, learning a language, strength training for the first time, cooking — you must practice consistently for a long time to become proficient.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve had loads of practice over the years. Here’s an assortment of comments posted to some of my YouTube videos:

There are more, and they have this same vapid commentary, no different than what I heard in high school. If they’re not saying I “look like a man” they comment that I’m ugly, my breasts are too small, my nose is too big, my accent is annoying.

The fact that someone was compelled to post a comment with the intention to inflict harm was jarring at first, but early in my online career I knew this trend wasn’t going to end; if anything, it would escalate. There are ass-bags in this world, and I shouldn’t be surprised when I encounter them; neither should you.

The solution was to practice not caring about those opinions. When a new comment was posted to a video, I’d read it slowly and see it for what it was: a combination of words. The only way those words could hurt me is if I allowed them to.

And that is how you can deal with negative comments too: practice seeing them for what they are. Deflect them. Each time a comment comes your way, use it as an opportunity to further immunize yourself against remarks intended to inflict harm. They’re just words, and you decide what to do with them.

This will take practice and likely a hefty dose of patience to get to the point negative comments have no, or at least minimal, effect on you. When you realize it’s either become immune to them or give them power to affect you, the choice, I think, is quite clear.

But Negative Comments Helped So-and-So!

Yes, I’ve heard the stories about people who were humiliated and used the incident as a catalyst to make changes to their lifestyle and they lost excess weight and improved their health. But I think those instances are the exception and not the rule. Furthermore, what will happen when the same people who humiliated the previously overweight individual are now criticizing her for being “too muscular” or athletic or conscious of her eating habits? If their comments had the power to affect her before, they’ll like do so again. And she’ll be confused and frustrated because she, seemingly, can’t win no matter what she does.

If you don’t choose to define the healthy lifestyle you want to build, the body you feel best occupying, the way to live your life, you will, by default, allow the opinions of others to do it for you.

Does This Mean I Must Shun Compliments?

Some would make the argument that if you’re to deflect negative comments, that you, by rule, can’t accept compliments. I don’t think that’s the case as long as you know the difference between being appreciative of a compliment versus craving them or using them to validate your self-worth.

For example, if you’ve been strength training and improving your nutrition habits for a couple months and a friend says you look strong and athletic, you don’t need to respond in a flat, “your comment means nothing to me” manner. You can appreciate her genuine compliment. But your actions in the gym and kitchen shouldn’t be done with the goal of attaining compliments. See that critical distinction? Good.

What If It Feels Like You’re Always Fighting Against Your Body?

All this talk on how to not care about someone’s negative comment regarding your body and choosing for yourself the body you feel best occupying and looking the way you want to look may be confusing, and frustrating.

Maybe you don’t know what body you would feel best occupying.

If you’ve spent years, or decades, fighting your body and never being satisfied with its shape, appearance, and performance, perhaps taking a break from focusing on how you look could be a welcoming palate cleanse.

For a period, forget about transforming your body. (Refer to the article Screw Fat Loss for more.)

Focus instead on how you feel; get stronger or simply improve your performance in some manner with your workouts; move more often in any and every way you enjoy; build health-supportive habits; finally try that hobby you keep putting off until “someday.”

Come up with reasons to move your body and improve your nutrition habits that have nothing to do with changing your physical appearance. Pay attention to what you enjoy most, what makes you feel best. What you discover may surprise you.

One final thought on this subject: if we don’t want other people to be condescending jerks and make cruel or unnecessary comments about our bodies, let’s extend that courtesy to others ourselves.

Other Articles You May Enjoy:

Ultimate Guide on How to Not Care About What Other People Think

You Owe It to Yourself to Give Fewer Shits

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The post How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Healthy Living https://www.niashanks.com/deal-negative-comments-body/

[sarahzlukeuk]

How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body

Would you rather listen to this article? Use the player below, download it, or use iTunes.

We want others to find us attractive; we want to be desirable. We may even, perhaps, want them to be envious of our hard-earned, properly-placed curves we’ve achieved … or that we’re currently striving to achieve.

Why?

Why do we place value on other people’s opinions of our bodies? Why do we fear their disapproval and flinch at negative comments?

Perhaps it’s simply a primal trait encoded in our DNA; our distant ancestors knew that being found desirable from the opposite sex increased the odds of reproducing. Those that wanted to be found desirable to secure a mate were likely willing to change their behavior, maybe even appearance, to achieve that goal.

Perhaps this ancient instinct is exacerbated by modernity and the incessant flow of advertising and marketing efforts trying to sell us beauty and happiness. And, to a greater extent no doubt, the advent of social media amplified this pressure to be desired and, literally and figuratively, “liked” by our peers and total strangers on the other side of the world.

Then again, maybe we’ve become a narcissistic species with ample time to be preoccupied with our appearance because we’re privileged to live in a period where most of us aren’t facing challenges like a world war, disease epidemic, or famine.

I don’t know. But, here we are. Regardless of the why or how we got here, there’s no denying the cumulative pressure that’s smothering us from all directions. To conform to the standards created by social media (even if they’re staged), to chase the high of receiving “likes” and comments of admiration on how great we look or how awesome our life appears to be.

Combine this pressure with the fact that people can make their opinions known instantly with the click of a button or posting a comment about our photo or video. No longer must someone verbalize their comment; it can be delivered under the comfort of anonymity or security felt from doing so behind a phone or keyboard.

Before we get to the how to deal with negative comments about your body information, there’s something we must first consider.

Why Do We Like Compliments?

When someone compliments our body, when we started working out and making better food choices, for example, it makes us feel good. We’re more confident and have reassurance that what we’re doing is working. All those squats we performed and dumbbells we pushed and pulled and cookies we left uneaten and protein we chowed down in the name of building a better-looking body — it was all worth it just to get complimented!

Wanting people to like how you look is harmless, right? If anything, compliments are good because they’re making us feel better about ourselves.

Maybe, at best. The individuals I know who work out and eat well primarily to gain the admiration of others (or to rack up the social media “likes” from strangers) set themselves up for a turbulent crash from that temporary feel-good high.

If you rely on the admiration and positive opinions of others to make you feel good about yourself, you automatically give them the power to obliterate your self-confidence too.

This is a mistake I’ve made. I once gave merit to what other people said about my body. When someone complimented my muscle definition, it was like a puff of air inflating my ballooning ego. When someone else, however, commented on how “gross” or “manly” I looked or said, “Women should never have visible veins — it’s disgusting!” the previously pumped-up ego abruptly exploded.

I no longer knew how to feel about my body. Am I gross? Should I lose some muscle? Should I get skinnier? Should I gain weight? That confusion and sadness is the result of hinging your self-worth on the opinions of others. You get frantically ping-ponged between the conflicting opinions.

This is why we shouldn’t rely on, or desire, other people’s opinions about our bodies to feel great about ourselves. If you need their approval, you will fear their disapproval. And it’s the disapproval, in the form of negative comments, that we want to know how to handle.

How to Deal with Negative Comments People Make about Your Body

Learn to not care about what someone says about your body. Practice frequently.

Not the answer you wanted? If so, what the heck did you expect?

Preventing people from making negative comments about your body (or your eating habits, or your career choice, or your hairstyle and clothing, or your disdain at the attempt to “healthify” a food by using cauliflower) is not an option. The only thing you can do is change how you respond to the comments.

Unless you want to live in solitary confinement for the rest of your days, thus successfully avoiding any commentary, that’s the only option you have for dealing with negative comments.

Unfortunately, you can’t press a button and instantly be unaffected by disparaging remarks. Like any other skill — be it playing a sport or musical instrument, learning a language, strength training for the first time, cooking — you must practice consistently for a long time to become proficient.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve had loads of practice over the years. Here’s an assortment of comments posted to some of my YouTube videos:

There are more, and they have this same vapid commentary, no different than what I heard in high school. If they’re not saying I “look like a man” they comment that I’m ugly, my breasts are too small, my nose is too big, my accent is annoying.

The fact that someone was compelled to post a comment with the intention to inflict harm was jarring at first, but early in my online career I knew this trend wasn’t going to end; if anything, it would escalate. There are ass-bags in this world, and I shouldn’t be surprised when I encounter them; neither should you.

The solution was to practice not caring about those opinions. When a new comment was posted to a video, I’d read it slowly and see it for what it was: a combination of words. The only way those words could hurt me is if I allowed them to.

And that is how you can deal with negative comments too: practice seeing them for what they are. Deflect them. Each time a comment comes your way, use it as an opportunity to further immunize yourself against remarks intended to inflict harm. They’re just words, and you decide what to do with them.

This will take practice and likely a hefty dose of patience to get to the point negative comments have no, or at least minimal, effect on you. When you realize it’s either become immune to them or give them power to affect you, the choice, I think, is quite clear.

But Negative Comments Helped So-and-So!

Yes, I’ve heard the stories about people who were humiliated and used the incident as a catalyst to make changes to their lifestyle and they lost excess weight and improved their health. But I think those instances are the exception and not the rule. Furthermore, what will happen when the same people who humiliated the previously overweight individual are now criticizing her for being “too muscular” or athletic or conscious of her eating habits? If their comments had the power to affect her before, they’ll like do so again. And she’ll be confused and frustrated because she, seemingly, can’t win no matter what she does.

If you don’t choose to define the healthy lifestyle you want to build, the body you feel best occupying, the way to live your life, you will, by default, allow the opinions of others to do it for you.

Does This Mean I Must Shun Compliments?

Some would make the argument that if you’re to deflect negative comments, that you, by rule, can’t accept compliments. I don’t think that’s the case as long as you know the difference between being appreciative of a compliment versus craving them or using them to validate your self-worth.

For example, if you’ve been strength training and improving your nutrition habits for a couple months and a friend says you look strong and athletic, you don’t need to respond in a flat, “your comment means nothing to me” manner. You can appreciate her genuine compliment. But your actions in the gym and kitchen shouldn’t be done with the goal of attaining compliments. See that critical distinction? Good.

What If It Feels Like You’re Always Fighting Against Your Body?

All this talk on how to not care about someone’s negative comment regarding your body and choosing for yourself the body you feel best occupying and looking the way you want to look may be confusing, and frustrating.

Maybe you don’t know what body you would feel best occupying.

If you’ve spent years, or decades, fighting your body and never being satisfied with its shape, appearance, and performance, perhaps taking a break from focusing on how you look could be a welcoming palate cleanse.

For a period, forget about transforming your body. (Refer to the article Screw Fat Loss for more.)

Focus instead on how you feel; get stronger or simply improve your performance in some manner with your workouts; move more often in any and every way you enjoy; build health-supportive habits; finally try that hobby you keep putting off until “someday.”

Come up with reasons to move your body and improve your nutrition habits that have nothing to do with changing your physical appearance. Pay attention to what you enjoy most, what makes you feel best. What you discover may surprise you.

One final thought on this subject: if we don’t want other people to be condescending jerks and make cruel or unnecessary comments about our bodies, let’s extend that courtesy to others ourselves.

Other Articles You May Enjoy:

Ultimate Guide on How to Not Care About What Other People Think

You Owe It to Yourself to Give Fewer Shits

You made it this far, you must’ve liked what you read. Get even more, including insider-only information when you join the newsletter. Enter your email below.

The post How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Sarah Luke Fitness Updates https://www.niashanks.com/deal-negative-comments-body/

[joelandryus]

How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body

Would you rather listen to this article? Use the player below, download it, or use iTunes.

We want others to find us attractive; we want to be desirable. We may even, perhaps, want them to be envious of our hard-earned, properly-placed curves we’ve achieved … or that we’re currently striving to achieve.

Why?

Why do we place value on other people’s opinions of our bodies? Why do we fear their disapproval and flinch at negative comments?

Perhaps it’s simply a primal trait encoded in our DNA; our distant ancestors knew that being found desirable from the opposite sex increased the odds of reproducing. Those that wanted to be found desirable to secure a mate were likely willing to change their behavior, maybe even appearance, to achieve that goal.

Perhaps this ancient instinct is exacerbated by modernity and the incessant flow of advertising and marketing efforts trying to sell us beauty and happiness. And, to a greater extent no doubt, the advent of social media amplified this pressure to be desired and, literally and figuratively, “liked” by our peers and total strangers on the other side of the world.

Then again, maybe we’ve become a narcissistic species with ample time to be preoccupied with our appearance because we’re privileged to live in a period where most of us aren’t facing challenges like a world war, disease epidemic, or famine.

I don’t know. But, here we are. Regardless of the why or how we got here, there’s no denying the cumulative pressure that’s smothering us from all directions. To conform to the standards created by social media (even if they’re staged), to chase the high of receiving “likes” and comments of admiration on how great we look or how awesome our life appears to be.

Combine this pressure with the fact that people can make their opinions known instantly with the click of a button or posting a comment about our photo or video. No longer must someone verbalize their comment; it can be delivered under the comfort of anonymity or security felt from doing so behind a phone or keyboard.

Before we get to the how to deal with negative comments about your body information, there’s something we must first consider.

Why Do We Like Compliments?

When someone compliments our body, when we started working out and making better food choices, for example, it makes us feel good. We’re more confident and have reassurance that what we’re doing is working. All those squats we performed and dumbbells we pushed and pulled and cookies we left uneaten and protein we chowed down in the name of building a better-looking body — it was all worth it just to get complimented!

Wanting people to like how you look is harmless, right? If anything, compliments are good because they’re making us feel better about ourselves.

Maybe, at best. The individuals I know who work out and eat well primarily to gain the admiration of others (or to rack up the social media “likes” from strangers) set themselves up for a turbulent crash from that temporary feel-good high.

If you rely on the admiration and positive opinions of others to make you feel good about yourself, you automatically give them the power to obliterate your self-confidence too.

This is a mistake I’ve made. I once gave merit to what other people said about my body. When someone complimented my muscle definition, it was like a puff of air inflating my ballooning ego. When someone else, however, commented on how “gross” or “manly” I looked or said, “Women should never have visible veins — it’s disgusting!” the previously pumped-up ego abruptly exploded.

I no longer knew how to feel about my body. Am I gross? Should I lose some muscle? Should I get skinnier? Should I gain weight? That confusion and sadness is the result of hinging your self-worth on the opinions of others. You get frantically ping-ponged between the conflicting opinions.

This is why we shouldn’t rely on, or desire, other people’s opinions about our bodies to feel great about ourselves. If you need their approval, you will fear their disapproval. And it’s the disapproval, in the form of negative comments, that we want to know how to handle.

How to Deal with Negative Comments People Make about Your Body

Learn to not care about what someone says about your body. Practice frequently.

Not the answer you wanted? If so, what the heck did you expect?

Preventing people from making negative comments about your body (or your eating habits, or your career choice, or your hairstyle and clothing, or your disdain at the attempt to “healthify” a food by using cauliflower) is not an option. The only thing you can do is change how you respond to the comments.

Unless you want to live in solitary confinement for the rest of your days, thus successfully avoiding any commentary, that’s the only option you have for dealing with negative comments.

Unfortunately, you can’t press a button and instantly be unaffected by disparaging remarks. Like any other skill — be it playing a sport or musical instrument, learning a language, strength training for the first time, cooking — you must practice consistently for a long time to become proficient.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve had loads of practice over the years. Here’s an assortment of comments posted to some of my YouTube videos:

There are more, and they have this same vapid commentary, no different than what I heard in high school. If they’re not saying I “look like a man” they comment that I’m ugly, my breasts are too small, my nose is too big, my accent is annoying.

The fact that someone was compelled to post a comment with the intention to inflict harm was jarring at first, but early in my online career I knew this trend wasn’t going to end; if anything, it would escalate. There are ass-bags in this world, and I shouldn’t be surprised when I encounter them; neither should you.

The solution was to practice not caring about those opinions. When a new comment was posted to a video, I’d read it slowly and see it for what it was: a combination of words. The only way those words could hurt me is if I allowed them to.

And that is how you can deal with negative comments too: practice seeing them for what they are. Deflect them. Each time a comment comes your way, use it as an opportunity to further immunize yourself against remarks intended to inflict harm. They’re just words, and you decide what to do with them.

This will take practice and likely a hefty dose of patience to get to the point negative comments have no, or at least minimal, effect on you. When you realize it’s either become immune to them or give them power to affect you, the choice, I think, is quite clear.

But Negative Comments Helped So-and-So!

Yes, I’ve heard the stories about people who were humiliated and used the incident as a catalyst to make changes to their lifestyle and they lost excess weight and improved their health. But I think those instances are the exception and not the rule. Furthermore, what will happen when the same people who humiliated the previously overweight individual are now criticizing her for being “too muscular” or athletic or conscious of her eating habits? If their comments had the power to affect her before, they’ll like do so again. And she’ll be confused and frustrated because she, seemingly, can’t win no matter what she does.

If you don’t choose to define the healthy lifestyle you want to build, the body you feel best occupying, the way to live your life, you will, by default, allow the opinions of others to do it for you.

Does This Mean I Must Shun Compliments?

Some would make the argument that if you’re to deflect negative comments, that you, by rule, can’t accept compliments. I don’t think that’s the case as long as you know the difference between being appreciative of a compliment versus craving them or using them to validate your self-worth.

For example, if you’ve been strength training and improving your nutrition habits for a couple months and a friend says you look strong and athletic, you don’t need to respond in a flat, “your comment means nothing to me” manner. You can appreciate her genuine compliment. But your actions in the gym and kitchen shouldn’t be done with the goal of attaining compliments. See that critical distinction? Good.

What If It Feels Like You’re Always Fighting Against Your Body?

All this talk on how to not care about someone’s negative comment regarding your body and choosing for yourself the body you feel best occupying and looking the way you want to look may be confusing, and frustrating.

Maybe you don’t know what body you would feel best occupying.

If you’ve spent years, or decades, fighting your body and never being satisfied with its shape, appearance, and performance, perhaps taking a break from focusing on how you look could be a welcoming palate cleanse.

For a period, forget about transforming your body. (Refer to the article Screw Fat Loss for more.)

Focus instead on how you feel; get stronger or simply improve your performance in some manner with your workouts; move more often in any and every way you enjoy; build health-supportive habits; finally try that hobby you keep putting off until “someday.”

Come up with reasons to move your body and improve your nutrition habits that have nothing to do with changing your physical appearance. Pay attention to what you enjoy most, what makes you feel best. What you discover may surprise you.

One final thought on this subject: if we don’t want other people to be condescending jerks and make cruel or unnecessary comments about our bodies, let’s extend that courtesy to others ourselves.

Other Articles You May Enjoy:

Ultimate Guide on How to Not Care About What Other People Think

You Owe It to Yourself to Give Fewer Shits

You made it this far, you must’ve liked what you read. Get even more, including insider-only information when you join the newsletter. Enter your email below.

The post How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Sarah Luke Fitness Updates https://www.niashanks.com/deal-negative-comments-body/

[hwasummers]

How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body

Would you rather listen to this article? Use the player below, download it, or use iTunes.

We want others to find us attractive; we want to be desirable. We may even, perhaps, want them to be envious of our hard-earned, properly-placed curves we’ve achieved … or that we’re currently striving to achieve.

Why?

Why do we place value on other people’s opinions of our bodies? Why do we fear their disapproval and flinch at negative comments?

Perhaps it’s simply a primal trait encoded in our DNA; our distant ancestors knew that being found desirable from the opposite sex increased the odds of reproducing. Those that wanted to be found desirable to secure a mate were likely willing to change their behavior, maybe even appearance, to achieve that goal.

Perhaps this ancient instinct is exacerbated by modernity and the incessant flow of advertising and marketing efforts trying to sell us beauty and happiness. And, to a greater extent no doubt, the advent of social media amplified this pressure to be desired and, literally and figuratively, “liked” by our peers and total strangers on the other side of the world.

Then again, maybe we’ve become a narcissistic species with ample time to be preoccupied with our appearance because we’re privileged to live in a period where most of us aren’t facing challenges like a world war, disease epidemic, or famine.

I don’t know. But, here we are. Regardless of the why or how we got here, there’s no denying the cumulative pressure that’s smothering us from all directions. To conform to the standards created by social media (even if they’re staged), to chase the high of receiving “likes” and comments of admiration on how great we look or how awesome our life appears to be.

Combine this pressure with the fact that people can make their opinions known instantly with the click of a button or posting a comment about our photo or video. No longer must someone verbalize their comment; it can be delivered under the comfort of anonymity or security felt from doing so behind a phone or keyboard.

Before we get to the how to deal with negative comments about your body information, there’s something we must first consider.

Why Do We Like Compliments?

When someone compliments our body, when we started working out and making better food choices, for example, it makes us feel good. We’re more confident and have reassurance that what we’re doing is working. All those squats we performed and dumbbells we pushed and pulled and cookies we left uneaten and protein we chowed down in the name of building a better-looking body — it was all worth it just to get complimented!

Wanting people to like how you look is harmless, right? If anything, compliments are good because they’re making us feel better about ourselves.

Maybe, at best. The individuals I know who work out and eat well primarily to gain the admiration of others (or to rack up the social media “likes” from strangers) set themselves up for a turbulent crash from that temporary feel-good high.

If you rely on the admiration and positive opinions of others to make you feel good about yourself, you automatically give them the power to obliterate your self-confidence too.

This is a mistake I’ve made. I once gave merit to what other people said about my body. When someone complimented my muscle definition, it was like a puff of air inflating my ballooning ego. When someone else, however, commented on how “gross” or “manly” I looked or said, “Women should never have visible veins — it’s disgusting!” the previously pumped-up ego abruptly exploded.

I no longer knew how to feel about my body. Am I gross? Should I lose some muscle? Should I get skinnier? Should I gain weight? That confusion and sadness is the result of hinging your self-worth on the opinions of others. You get frantically ping-ponged between the conflicting opinions.

This is why we shouldn’t rely on, or desire, other people’s opinions about our bodies to feel great about ourselves. If you need their approval, you will fear their disapproval. And it’s the disapproval, in the form of negative comments, that we want to know how to handle.

How to Deal with Negative Comments People Make about Your Body

Learn to not care about what someone says about your body. Practice frequently.

Not the answer you wanted? If so, what the heck did you expect?

Preventing people from making negative comments about your body (or your eating habits, or your career choice, or your hairstyle and clothing, or your disdain at the attempt to “healthify” a food by using cauliflower) is not an option. The only thing you can do is change how you respond to the comments.

Unless you want to live in solitary confinement for the rest of your days, thus successfully avoiding any commentary, that’s the only option you have for dealing with negative comments.

Unfortunately, you can’t press a button and instantly be unaffected by disparaging remarks. Like any other skill — be it playing a sport or musical instrument, learning a language, strength training for the first time, cooking — you must practice consistently for a long time to become proficient.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve had loads of practice over the years. Here’s an assortment of comments posted to some of my YouTube videos:

There are more, and they have this same vapid commentary, no different than what I heard in high school. If they’re not saying I “look like a man” they comment that I’m ugly, my breasts are too small, my nose is too big, my accent is annoying.

The fact that someone was compelled to post a comment with the intention to inflict harm was jarring at first, but early in my online career I knew this trend wasn’t going to end; if anything, it would escalate. There are ass-bags in this world, and I shouldn’t be surprised when I encounter them; neither should you.

The solution was to practice not caring about those opinions. When a new comment was posted to a video, I’d read it slowly and see it for what it was: a combination of words. The only way those words could hurt me is if I allowed them to.

And that is how you can deal with negative comments too: practice seeing them for what they are. Deflect them. Each time a comment comes your way, use it as an opportunity to further immunize yourself against remarks intended to inflict harm. They’re just words, and you decide what to do with them.

This will take practice and likely a hefty dose of patience to get to the point negative comments have no, or at least minimal, effect on you. When you realize it’s either become immune to them or give them power to affect you, the choice, I think, is quite clear.

But Negative Comments Helped So-and-So!

Yes, I’ve heard the stories about people who were humiliated and used the incident as a catalyst to make changes to their lifestyle and they lost excess weight and improved their health. But I think those instances are the exception and not the rule. Furthermore, what will happen when the same people who humiliated the previously overweight individual are now criticizing her for being “too muscular” or athletic or conscious of her eating habits? If their comments had the power to affect her before, they’ll like do so again. And she’ll be confused and frustrated because she, seemingly, can’t win no matter what she does.

If you don’t choose to define the healthy lifestyle you want to build, the body you feel best occupying, the way to live your life, you will, by default, allow the opinions of others to do it for you.

Does This Mean I Must Shun Compliments?

Some would make the argument that if you’re to deflect negative comments, that you, by rule, can’t accept compliments. I don’t think that’s the case as long as you know the difference between being appreciative of a compliment versus craving them or using them to validate your self-worth.

For example, if you’ve been strength training and improving your nutrition habits for a couple months and a friend says you look strong and athletic, you don’t need to respond in a flat, “your comment means nothing to me” manner. You can appreciate her genuine compliment. But your actions in the gym and kitchen shouldn’t be done with the goal of attaining compliments. See that critical distinction? Good.

What If It Feels Like You’re Always Fighting Against Your Body?

All this talk on how to not care about someone’s negative comment regarding your body and choosing for yourself the body you feel best occupying and looking the way you want to look may be confusing, and frustrating.

Maybe you don’t know what body you would feel best occupying.

If you’ve spent years, or decades, fighting your body and never being satisfied with its shape, appearance, and performance, perhaps taking a break from focusing on how you look could be a welcoming palate cleanse.

For a period, forget about transforming your body. (Refer to the article Screw Fat Loss for more.)

Focus instead on how you feel; get stronger or simply improve your performance in some manner with your workouts; move more often in any and every way you enjoy; build health-supportive habits; finally try that hobby you keep putting off until “someday.”

Come up with reasons to move your body and improve your nutrition habits that have nothing to do with changing your physical appearance. Pay attention to what you enjoy most, what makes you feel best. What you discover may surprise you.

One final thought on this subject: if we don’t want other people to be condescending jerks and make cruel or unnecessary comments about our bodies, let’s extend that courtesy to others ourselves.

Other Articles You May Enjoy:

Ultimate Guide on How to Not Care About What Other People Think

You Owe It to Yourself to Give Fewer Shits

You made it this far, you must’ve liked what you read. Get even more, including insider-only information when you join the newsletter. Enter your email below.

The post How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Sarah Luke Fitness Updates https://www.niashanks.com/deal-negative-comments-body/

[crystalgibsus]

How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body

Would you rather listen to this article? Use the player below, download it, or use iTunes.

We want others to find us attractive; we want to be desirable. We may even, perhaps, want them to be envious of our hard-earned, properly-placed curves we’ve achieved … or that we’re currently striving to achieve.

Why?

Why do we place value on other people’s opinions of our bodies? Why do we fear their disapproval and flinch at negative comments?

Perhaps it’s simply a primal trait encoded in our DNA; our distant ancestors knew that being found desirable from the opposite sex increased the odds of reproducing. Those that wanted to be found desirable to secure a mate were likely willing to change their behavior, maybe even appearance, to achieve that goal.

Perhaps this ancient instinct is exacerbated by modernity and the incessant flow of advertising and marketing efforts trying to sell us beauty and happiness. And, to a greater extent no doubt, the advent of social media amplified this pressure to be desired and, literally and figuratively, “liked” by our peers and total strangers on the other side of the world.

Then again, maybe we’ve become a narcissistic species with ample time to be preoccupied with our appearance because we’re privileged to live in a period where most of us aren’t facing challenges like a world war, disease epidemic, or famine.

I don’t know. But, here we are. Regardless of the why or how we got here, there’s no denying the cumulative pressure that’s smothering us from all directions. To conform to the standards created by social media (even if they’re staged), to chase the high of receiving “likes” and comments of admiration on how great we look or how awesome our life appears to be.

Combine this pressure with the fact that people can make their opinions known instantly with the click of a button or posting a comment about our photo or video. No longer must someone verbalize their comment; it can be delivered under the comfort of anonymity or security felt from doing so behind a phone or keyboard.

Before we get to the how to deal with negative comments about your body information, there’s something we must first consider.

Why Do We Like Compliments?

When someone compliments our body, when we started working out and making better food choices, for example, it makes us feel good. We’re more confident and have reassurance that what we’re doing is working. All those squats we performed and dumbbells we pushed and pulled and cookies we left uneaten and protein we chowed down in the name of building a better-looking body — it was all worth it just to get complimented!

Wanting people to like how you look is harmless, right? If anything, compliments are good because they’re making us feel better about ourselves.

Maybe, at best. The individuals I know who work out and eat well primarily to gain the admiration of others (or to rack up the social media “likes” from strangers) set themselves up for a turbulent crash from that temporary feel-good high.

If you rely on the admiration and positive opinions of others to make you feel good about yourself, you automatically give them the power to obliterate your self-confidence too.

This is a mistake I’ve made. I once gave merit to what other people said about my body. When someone complimented my muscle definition, it was like a puff of air inflating my ballooning ego. When someone else, however, commented on how “gross” or “manly” I looked or said, “Women should never have visible veins — it’s disgusting!” the previously pumped-up ego abruptly exploded.

I no longer knew how to feel about my body. Am I gross? Should I lose some muscle? Should I get skinnier? Should I gain weight? That confusion and sadness is the result of hinging your self-worth on the opinions of others. You get frantically ping-ponged between the conflicting opinions.

This is why we shouldn’t rely on, or desire, other people’s opinions about our bodies to feel great about ourselves. If you need their approval, you will fear their disapproval. And it’s the disapproval, in the form of negative comments, that we want to know how to handle.

How to Deal with Negative Comments People Make about Your Body

Learn to not care about what someone says about your body. Practice frequently.

Not the answer you wanted? If so, what the heck did you expect?

Preventing people from making negative comments about your body (or your eating habits, or your career choice, or your hairstyle and clothing, or your disdain at the attempt to “healthify” a food by using cauliflower) is not an option. The only thing you can do is change how you respond to the comments.

Unless you want to live in solitary confinement for the rest of your days, thus successfully avoiding any commentary, that’s the only option you have for dealing with negative comments.

Unfortunately, you can’t press a button and instantly be unaffected by disparaging remarks. Like any other skill — be it playing a sport or musical instrument, learning a language, strength training for the first time, cooking — you must practice consistently for a long time to become proficient.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve had loads of practice over the years. Here’s an assortment of comments posted to some of my YouTube videos:

There are more, and they have this same vapid commentary, no different than what I heard in high school. If they’re not saying I “look like a man” they comment that I’m ugly, my breasts are too small, my nose is too big, my accent is annoying.

The fact that someone was compelled to post a comment with the intention to inflict harm was jarring at first, but early in my online career I knew this trend wasn’t going to end; if anything, it would escalate. There are ass-bags in this world, and I shouldn’t be surprised when I encounter them; neither should you.

The solution was to practice not caring about those opinions. When a new comment was posted to a video, I’d read it slowly and see it for what it was: a combination of words. The only way those words could hurt me is if I allowed them to.

And that is how you can deal with negative comments too: practice seeing them for what they are. Deflect them. Each time a comment comes your way, use it as an opportunity to further immunize yourself against remarks intended to inflict harm. They’re just words, and you decide what to do with them.

This will take practice and likely a hefty dose of patience to get to the point negative comments have no, or at least minimal, effect on you. When you realize it’s either become immune to them or give them power to affect you, the choice, I think, is quite clear.

But Negative Comments Helped So-and-So!

Yes, I’ve heard the stories about people who were humiliated and used the incident as a catalyst to make changes to their lifestyle and they lost excess weight and improved their health. But I think those instances are the exception and not the rule. Furthermore, what will happen when the same people who humiliated the previously overweight individual are now criticizing her for being “too muscular” or athletic or conscious of her eating habits? If their comments had the power to affect her before, they’ll like do so again. And she’ll be confused and frustrated because she, seemingly, can’t win no matter what she does.

If you don’t choose to define the healthy lifestyle you want to build, the body you feel best occupying, the way to live your life, you will, by default, allow the opinions of others to do it for you.

Does This Mean I Must Shun Compliments?

Some would make the argument that if you’re to deflect negative comments, that you, by rule, can’t accept compliments. I don’t think that’s the case as long as you know the difference between being appreciative of a compliment versus craving them or using them to validate your self-worth.

For example, if you’ve been strength training and improving your nutrition habits for a couple months and a friend says you look strong and athletic, you don’t need to respond in a flat, “your comment means nothing to me” manner. You can appreciate her genuine compliment. But your actions in the gym and kitchen shouldn’t be done with the goal of attaining compliments. See that critical distinction? Good.

What If It Feels Like You’re Always Fighting Against Your Body?

All this talk on how to not care about someone’s negative comment regarding your body and choosing for yourself the body you feel best occupying and looking the way you want to look may be confusing, and frustrating.

Maybe you don’t know what body you would feel best occupying.

If you’ve spent years, or decades, fighting your body and never being satisfied with its shape, appearance, and performance, perhaps taking a break from focusing on how you look could be a welcoming palate cleanse.

For a period, forget about transforming your body. (Refer to the article Screw Fat Loss for more.)

Focus instead on how you feel; get stronger or simply improve your performance in some manner with your workouts; move more often in any and every way you enjoy; build health-supportive habits; finally try that hobby you keep putting off until “someday.”

Come up with reasons to move your body and improve your nutrition habits that have nothing to do with changing your physical appearance. Pay attention to what you enjoy most, what makes you feel best. What you discover may surprise you.

One final thought on this subject: if we don’t want other people to be condescending jerks and make cruel or unnecessary comments about our bodies, let’s extend that courtesy to others ourselves.

Other Articles You May Enjoy:

Ultimate Guide on How to Not Care About What Other People Think

You Owe It to Yourself to Give Fewer Shits

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from Tips By Crystal https://www.niashanks.com/deal-negative-comments-body/

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How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body

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We want others to find us attractive; we want to be desirable. We may even, perhaps, want them to be envious of our hard-earned, properly-placed curves we’ve achieved … or that we’re currently striving to achieve.

Why?

Why do we place value on other people’s opinions of our bodies? Why do we fear their disapproval and flinch at negative comments?

Perhaps it’s simply a primal trait encoded in our DNA; our distant ancestors knew that being found desirable from the opposite sex increased the odds of reproducing. Those that wanted to be found desirable to secure a mate were likely willing to change their behavior, maybe even appearance, to achieve that goal.

Perhaps this ancient instinct is exacerbated by modernity and the incessant flow of advertising and marketing efforts trying to sell us beauty and happiness. And, to a greater extent no doubt, the advent of social media amplified this pressure to be desired and, literally and figuratively, “liked” by our peers and total strangers on the other side of the world.

Then again, maybe we’ve become a narcissistic species with ample time to be preoccupied with our appearance because we’re privileged to live in a period where most of us aren’t facing challenges like a world war, disease epidemic, or famine.

I don’t know. But, here we are. Regardless of the why or how we got here, there’s no denying the cumulative pressure that’s smothering us from all directions. To conform to the standards created by social media (even if they’re staged), to chase the high of receiving “likes” and comments of admiration on how great we look or how awesome our life appears to be.

Combine this pressure with the fact that people can make their opinions known instantly with the click of a button or posting a comment about our photo or video. No longer must someone verbalize their comment; it can be delivered under the comfort of anonymity or security felt from doing so behind a phone or keyboard.

Before we get to the how to deal with negative comments about your body information, there’s something we must first consider.

Why Do We Like Compliments?

When someone compliments our body, when we started working out and making better food choices, for example, it makes us feel good. We’re more confident and have reassurance that what we’re doing is working. All those squats we performed and dumbbells we pushed and pulled and cookies we left uneaten and protein we chowed down in the name of building a better-looking body — it was all worth it just to get complimented!

Wanting people to like how you look is harmless, right? If anything, compliments are good because they’re making us feel better about ourselves.

Maybe, at best. The individuals I know who work out and eat well primarily to gain the admiration of others (or to rack up the social media “likes” from strangers) set themselves up for a turbulent crash from that temporary feel-good high.

If you rely on the admiration and positive opinions of others to make you feel good about yourself, you automatically give them the power to obliterate your self-confidence too.

This is a mistake I’ve made. I once gave merit to what other people said about my body. When someone complimented my muscle definition, it was like a puff of air inflating my ballooning ego. When someone else, however, commented on how “gross” or “manly” I looked or said, “Women should never have visible veins — it’s disgusting!” the previously pumped-up ego abruptly exploded.

I no longer knew how to feel about my body. Am I gross? Should I lose some muscle? Should I get skinnier? Should I gain weight? That confusion and sadness is the result of hinging your self-worth on the opinions of others. You get frantically ping-ponged between the conflicting opinions.

This is why we shouldn’t rely on, or desire, other people’s opinions about our bodies to feel great about ourselves. If you need their approval, you will fear their disapproval. And it’s the disapproval, in the form of negative comments, that we want to know how to handle.

How to Deal with Negative Comments People Make about Your Body

Learn to not care about what someone says about your body. Practice frequently.

Not the answer you wanted? If so, what the heck did you expect?

Preventing people from making negative comments about your body (or your eating habits, or your career choice, or your hairstyle and clothing, or your disdain at the attempt to “healthify” a food by using cauliflower) is not an option. The only thing you can do is change how you respond to the comments.

Unless you want to live in solitary confinement for the rest of your days, thus successfully avoiding any commentary, that’s the only option you have for dealing with negative comments.

Unfortunately, you can’t press a button and instantly be unaffected by disparaging remarks. Like any other skill — be it playing a sport or musical instrument, learning a language, strength training for the first time, cooking — you must practice consistently for a long time to become proficient.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve had loads of practice over the years. Here’s an assortment of comments posted to some of my YouTube videos:

There are more, and they have this same vapid commentary, no different than what I heard in high school. If they’re not saying I “look like a man” they comment that I’m ugly, my breasts are too small, my nose is too big, my accent is annoying.

The fact that someone was compelled to post a comment with the intention to inflict harm was jarring at first, but early in my online career I knew this trend wasn’t going to end; if anything, it would escalate. There are ass-bags in this world, and I shouldn’t be surprised when I encounter them; neither should you.

The solution was to practice not caring about those opinions. When a new comment was posted to a video, I’d read it slowly and see it for what it was: a combination of words. The only way those words could hurt me is if I allowed them to.

And that is how you can deal with negative comments too: practice seeing them for what they are. Deflect them. Each time a comment comes your way, use it as an opportunity to further immunize yourself against remarks intended to inflict harm. They’re just words, and you decide what to do with them.

This will take practice and likely a hefty dose of patience to get to the point negative comments have no, or at least minimal, effect on you. When you realize it’s either become immune to them or give them power to affect you, the choice, I think, is quite clear.

But Negative Comments Helped So-and-So!

Yes, I’ve heard the stories about people who were humiliated and used the incident as a catalyst to make changes to their lifestyle and they lost excess weight and improved their health. But I think those instances are the exception and not the rule. Furthermore, what will happen when the same people who humiliated the previously overweight individual are now criticizing her for being “too muscular” or athletic or conscious of her eating habits? If their comments had the power to affect her before, they’ll like do so again. And she’ll be confused and frustrated because she, seemingly, can’t win no matter what she does.

If you don’t choose to define the healthy lifestyle you want to build, the body you feel best occupying, the way to live your life, you will, by default, allow the opinions of others to do it for you.

Does This Mean I Must Shun Compliments?

Some would make the argument that if you’re to deflect negative comments, that you, by rule, can’t accept compliments. I don’t think that’s the case as long as you know the difference between being appreciative of a compliment versus craving them or using them to validate your self-worth.

For example, if you’ve been strength training and improving your nutrition habits for a couple months and a friend says you look strong and athletic, you don’t need to respond in a flat, “your comment means nothing to me” manner. You can appreciate her genuine compliment. But your actions in the gym and kitchen shouldn’t be done with the goal of attaining compliments. See that critical distinction? Good.

What If It Feels Like You’re Always Fighting Against Your Body?

All this talk on how to not care about someone’s negative comment regarding your body and choosing for yourself the body you feel best occupying and looking the way you want to look may be confusing, and frustrating.

Maybe you don’t know what body you would feel best occupying.

If you’ve spent years, or decades, fighting your body and never being satisfied with its shape, appearance, and performance, perhaps taking a break from focusing on how you look could be a welcoming palate cleanse.

For a period, forget about transforming your body. (Refer to the article Screw Fat Loss for more.)

Focus instead on how you feel; get stronger or simply improve your performance in some manner with your workouts; move more often in any and every way you enjoy; build health-supportive habits; finally try that hobby you keep putting off until “someday.”

Come up with reasons to move your body and improve your nutrition habits that have nothing to do with changing your physical appearance. Pay attention to what you enjoy most, what makes you feel best. What you discover may surprise you.

One final thought on this subject: if we don’t want other people to be condescending jerks and make cruel or unnecessary comments about our bodies, let’s extend that courtesy to others ourselves.

Other Articles You May Enjoy:

Ultimate Guide on How to Not Care About What Other People Think

You Owe It to Yourself to Give Fewer Shits

You made it this far, you must’ve liked what you read. Get even more, including insider-only information when you join the newsletter. Enter your email below.

The post How to Deal with Negative Comments about Your Body appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Sarah Luke Fitness Updates https://www.niashanks.com/deal-negative-comments-body/

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The Strange, Isolated Life Of A Tuberculosis Patient In The 21st Century

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The Strange, Isolated Life Of A Tuberculosis Patient In The 21st Century

While volunteering for the Peace Corps in Ukraine in 2010, I contracted a severe version of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Two years of painful, isolating treatment taught me the vital role social media may play in finally eradicating this disease.

One of the loneliest nights of my life was when I masturbated for an Australian stranger on the only webcam chat site that would load on the shitty hospital Wi-Fi. He didn’t want to show his face on camera, and I didn’t care whether it was because he was famous, married, or ugly. The internet was so slow that the sound stalled, so the dirty talk had to be typed.

It was a terse, space-economizing raunch, pounded out letter by letter with his left index finger, since his dominant hand was busy. I WANT TO VERB YOUR NOUN. But the artlessness was a relief. The more work it took to type, the less likely he’d waste time asking about my hospital bed and IV rack. If I didn’t mind him being headless and talking like a filthy grown-up “see spot run,” couldn’t he handle a naked stranger in a tuberculosis sanatorium?

Nor did he mention the armband, which hid the nozzle nurses screwed to dripping sacks of drugs during infusions. Three times a week, amikacin seeped down the skinny 2-foot-long tube inside and up my arm, leading behind my collarbone to splash into a big fat artery over my heart.

Just please don’t fucking ask, I thought. It was exhausting to explain. Screw this guy. Wouldn’t it be weirder if he had inferred a medical emergency, but resolved not to let it ruin his hard-on? Do virtual strangers without heads even have cognition? What the hell was wrong with this guy’s face, anyway?

Who cares? I had been in that room in Denver for almost a month. I was days away from lung surgery to remove my upper right lobe, where the bulk of the disease was headquartered. This was the last goddamned time I’d ever get to show my tits to a stranger without any scars. And it was the skinniest I’d ever been.

I had contracted extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB (a severe version of multidrug-resistant, or MDR tuberculosis), while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine. The National Jewish Health Center is no longer a sanatorium, but it is still one of the country’s top TB research facilities, staffed by worldwide mycobacteria experts and equipped with properly ventilated rooms for the infrequent consumptives who turn up there.

When I was admitted to the hospital, the state of Colorado dispatched a guy to my hospital room to read me my legal quarantine order. I’d be in isolation for however long I was contagious.

During my stay, I started a two-year course of harsh antibiotics, including an IV drip. I had two surgeries, which flanked a blood transfusion and peskily recollapsing lung. I lost 12 pounds and half my blood, which have been replaced, and the upper lobe of my right lung, which hasn’t. I wish I could be more inspiring. But I didn’t use that time to write a novel, learn yoga, or even plow through a beach read. Falling into a trance and getting off strangers was all I felt capable of.

Objectifying? Sure. So is being sick.

Such isolation — both physical and emotional — takes a serious toll on TB patients. From the 18th century glory days up to the modern rise of MDR, tuberculosis went from being a relatively universal human experience to being a profoundly lonely one. Isolation and stigma make long treatments even harder to endure and inhibit public consciousness that could lead to more meaningful progress. But we may be approaching a new historical moment: Social media makes it easier than ever for patients to find and support one another. These connections can improve patient morale and treatment outcomes and ultimately raise the profile of MDR-TB in global health policy.

Because I was never as alone as I thought: Five thousand miles away in Siberia, a woman my age named Ksenia Shchenina was also suffering. So are patients in dozens of other countries, and more and more of them are beginning to use the internet to combat the solitude that has long not only defined the disease and its treatment, but kept it from being eradicated for good.

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Most people don’t spend much time thinking about tuberculosis. If pressed, they might make a few basic generalizations. It was a very serious disease in the olden days. It killed your great-great-grandfather, all of the Brontës, and Nicole Kidman’s character in Moulin Rouge. But then it was cured. It doesn’t exist anymore. So we’ll all just have to get Ewan McGregor’s attention some other way and die of something else.

Tuberculosis has been on the scene since ancient times, but it only reached menace status in filthy, urbanizing mid-17th century Europe. It went on to dominate the continent’s “cause of death” list for over two centuries. This makes sense, if you know how germs work. Poverty and bad sanitation — e.g., the Industrial Revolution’s toxic work conditions and shantytowns — made toppling immune systems a cinch. Before germ theory caught on, some people even saw TB as a sort of moral retribution for the sins of modernity.

Even the disease’s classic name — consumption — implied a physical and spiritual connection. It consumed you; it devoured you from within. Before the scientific consensus on how an infectious disease was transmitted, many people assumed a person could be predisposed to consumption. (They caught on to genetics before they unraveled epidemiology.) An entire family of consumptives probably meant they were ill because they had all inherited the proper preconditions for the illness — not because they lived together and coughed fatal microbes into one another’s food. Similarly, researchers couldn’t help but notice that consumption disproportionately seized writers and artists, whose lifestyle was practically synonymous with urban poverty. But when it was still assumed that the disease grew from within, many scientists searched for a link between consumption and genius. This is the kind of factoid that makes you feel smug when modern doctors are really, really surprised that you got this.

The jig was up in 1882. A German bacteriologist named Robert Koch zeroed in on the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterial cause of consumption. It spread from person to person by air.

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Robert Koch Ann Ronan Pictures / Getty Images

Koch’s early attempts to develop a vaccine failed, but his efforts did yield a valuable diagnostic tool: the tuberculin skin test. It’s a shot that scans for TB antibodies. If you’ve been exposed to the disease, the injection site on your forearm will flare up into a BRIGHT RED SKIN MOUNTAIN. The test is still part of routine checkups today among grade-schoolers, teachers, cops, and — as I would learn — Peace Corps volunteers.

There is a photo of me on Facebook from early 2010, lodged between a handful of party shots with fellow volunteers. We had traveled to Kiev from across Ukraine to make a weekend out of our mid-service medical checkups. I’m 23, hamming it up in melodramatic distress, and twisting my left elbow up over my head to show off the swollen red splotch on my forearm.

A positive skin test usually doesn’t mean you have TB — less than than 10% of people with positive skin tests ever develop an active case, because healthy immune systems can usually defeat the bacterial intruder. Several volunteers each year end up with the telltale red blotch; it was really nothing to worry about. We’d need a follow-up X-ray, but an active case was highly unlikely. So I cracked a few jokes and went back to pounding flat Chernigivske beers with my friends.

I had been in Ukraine since September 2008, after studying Russian in college. I volunteered at a school in an eastern mining town called Antratsyt. The town borrows its name from anthracite coal. The region is flat, but you can see hills in the distance — they’re “slag heaps,” or piles of debris extracted from mines. The town only runs water for a few hours a day to protect the mines from mudslides or collapse. But life wasn’t as bleak as it sounds. I had students who were so excited to practice their English that they would chat with me after school, perched in a row on the edge of a Soviet-era fountain long-since bone-dry. I struck up friendships with their parents and my fellow teachers. I toasted my colleagues over champagne and chocolate on Ukrainian holidays. One time, I even gave a thickly accented speech on international education at a school assembly that ended up on the TV news. I was happy.

My follow-up X-ray was two weeks later, in Kiev. Taking yet another 17-hour train trip felt like an epic hassle. Is there a word that means the opposite of hypochondriac? There should be, because that’s what I am. In hindsight, of course I had symptoms – I just wrote them off to other things. I had a bad cough, because I was a smoker at the time. I’d lost weight, because there was no American junk food to lose my will power around. I was run-down and sluggish, because it was the Ukrainian winter!

I got a ride with Dr. Sasha, one of the Peace Corps’ Ukrainian staffers, to my screening at a tuberculosis dispensary — tubdispensar — on the edge of the city. He spoke the sort of English that made me self-conscious about my Russian. He carried my Peace Corps medical history file on his lap. The most dramatic thing in it was an allergy to mangoes. (Not exactly a significant handicap in Ukraine.)

I was X-rayed in a machine that looked like an iron colossus. In the waiting room, I tried to distract myself with a biography of John Adams. (His son, John Quincy, spent years in the Russian Empire as Ambassador and managed to stay consumption-free.) Soviet-era medical facilities are much more dimly lit than their Walmart-bright American counterparts. To see the page, I had to squint.

The head TB doctor finally called me into the office. He explained the X-ray results and prognosis to Dr. Sasha, who relayed them in English to me. But when Dr. Sasha asked a follow-up question, they flipped back to Russian and cut me out of the triangle. My Russian was good – but not “unfamiliar medical jargon” good. But this wasn’t a conversation I could stand to be excluded from. I was on the brink of a tantrum.

“Goddamn it!” I wanted to shriek at the TB doc. “Don’t say it in his Russian. Say it in mine.”

My face must have looked like a cartoon teakettle. So he slowed down and turned toward the image pinned to the light board.

“Classic pulmonary TB,” he said to me. (Words like pulmonary and tuberculosis are cognates.) “It’s strange that it advanced so quickly. Especially for a healthy young girl.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I heard you guys muttering about bronchitis or pneumonia before. Could it be one of those?”

“No. We assumed it could have been at first, but this is a clear case. See, on an X-ray, healthy lungs should look solid black. See the contrast down by the lower ribs? But now look up on the right. See the [blahblahblah]? The [blahblahblah] is the tuberculosis.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t get that word. What part is the tuberculosis?”

He sighed. It would have been easier to let Dr. Sasha translate. Now he had to dumb down his lexicon for a rattled American.

“Up there. Upper right. Well, left on here. That white spot? The part that looks like a ghost.”

That night, I started treatment in a studio apartment the Peace Corps rented for me in Kiev. My prognosis was good. For two weeks, I took pills, got X-rayed, and hocked up sputum — a polite word for loogies — into sterile plastic cups for lab work. One set stayed in Ukraine; the other was shipped according to special biohazard protocol to an American facility to better coordinate my care at home.

Eight weeks later, just as life was settling down back in Chicago, I was surprised to find an ominous number of missed calls on my phone: from the diagnostic lab, my mom, my American pulmonologist, my mom, the Cook County Department of Public Health, my mom, my mom, the Cook County Department of Public Health Epidemiology Unit, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom.

Those loogies had yielded bad news. I had XDR-TB. The bad kind.

Effective immediately, I was placed under an isolation order. I was told to stay home whenever possible — I could go outside sparingly, but any other indoor space was off-limits until I was noninfectious. A few months, at least. The police could get involved if I didn’t comply.

A month into my quarantine, my Chicago doctors were stumped. They’d rarely seen anything like this.

So I set off on a journey not unlike those taken by consumptives a century before. I left my bustling, industrial Midwestern city and headed west, to the National Jewish Health Center in Denver.

It was the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives back then. In 1899, the brand-new philanthropic institution was brimming with needy patients. In 2010, I was the only one.

I told almost no one where I was going. I had already been avoiding friends who tried to contact me. It is exhausting to have your life flipped around by something people know nothing about. You get so damn sick of telling the story. Weird caveats demand exposition. Here is what I have. Here is why it’s bad. Here is why I had to evacuate Ukraine and leave the Peace Corps early. Here is why I can’t be in public or see anyone for the foreseeable future. Here is why I am going to some hospital in Denver for a long time. Here is why they chopped off a big chunk of my lung. Here is why I have this IV armband thing for nine months. Here is why I puke a lot. Here is why food tastes all wrong. Here is why my hearing got warped. Here is why I can’t feel my toes. Here is why I am not supposed to drink any alcohol. Here is why I’m still going to anyway.

Since I was on the no-fly list, we drove the 15 hours by car. I wore a mask the whole time so I wouldn’t infect my parents.

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National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives c. 1920

Basic infection control, like isolating the sick and using protective gear to lower transmission risk, may seem primitive compared with modern medicine. But the truth is, public health measures like quarantine and mouth covering did more to eradicate tuberculosis than drugs did. We never did figure out a great way to cure TB; we just got better at preventing it. That is, until it caught up with us.

After Dr. Koch’s splashy 1882 debut of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the medical community was certain a surefire solution was close behind. But they were disappointed. No cure came.

Forty years later, a new vaccine — Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, or BCG — entered human testing. But BCG was never that good. Most researchers believe that adults are just as likely to wind up with TB whether they get BCG or not. It also suffered a major PR setback as the center of one of the worst vaccination disasters in history. In 1930, 73 babies died of tuberculosis meningitis after being injected with BCG in Lubeck, Germany. The vaccines had been contaminated after getting mixed up with a virulent live TB strain back at the lab. (Life hack: Always be sure your doctor has a label maker.)

It wasn’t until 1943 that a team at Rutgers University pinpointed streptomycin, the world’s first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. TB’s staggering cultural legacy made the discovery a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize, but streptomycin was nonetheless terribly flawed. It was toxic, and patients quickly developed antibodies that resisted the drug. The only solution was to scrape around for more options and blitzkrieg every case of TB with several so-so drugs at once. The first-line regimen has hardly been tweaked in nearly 50 years. It was never a secret that such a long and tedious course of antibiotics would, like a Shakespearean hero, engineer its own demise.

But that hardly seemed to matter. By the time streptomycin ‘n’ friends showed up, barely anyone even needed them. Throughout the 20th century, people gradually stopped getting TB in the first place. We got healthier, cleaner, and smarter. We could contain disease and catch it early. It nearly disappeared.

Then, in the early 1990s, it bounced back. Two global crises — the rise of HIV/AIDS and the fall of the Soviet Union — helped resurrect the scourge of the 19th century. The World Health Organization declared a worldwide TB emergency in 1993. (It just goes to show: Don’t count your eradicated diseases before they hatch.)

AIDS was even harder on human bodies than the Industrial Revolution had been, and millions of centuries-won immune systems were suddenly wide open to infection anew. TB remains the leading cause of death among AIDS patients.

The collapse of the USSR spread TB in even more complicated ways. The year 1991 saw the traumatic birth of 15 brand-new post-Soviet republics. Each of these new countries was in economic and social turmoil. They were broke. They had no central government or public health system. Before their independence, everything had more or less filtered through Moscow. In some places, there were few to no supplies or institutional infrastructure, let alone money for health care workers. Alcoholism and malnourishment soared. People lost their savings. Rampant crime stuffed the prisons — notorious hotbeds of TB — to well over capacity. Released inmates carted these germs back to their communities. By the time the 15 new countries had smoothed things out, they already had a new old epidemic to battle.

Even as the immediate post-Soviet crisis improved, other factors played into treatment interruption and new infections. These have been beautifully documented by experts like Dr. Lee Reichman in his 2001 book Timebomb and are easily rattled off by every post-Soviet MDR expert I’ve come across. Treatment in prisons has been badly underfunded, so for years people didn’t get the meds they needed. There is often subpar follow-up for ill prisoners after they’re released. Infected migratory workers are tough to treat and track. The Soviet-era mentality of medical specialization has made the region slow to coordinate HIV and TB care. Both illnesses are also correlated with substance abuse, and addicts often turn out to be less-than-diligent patients. In sum, the long, hard treatment places economic, social, and physical strain on patients.

Antibiotic treatment is an all-or-nothing game. Patients need to take every dose by the book, or germs acquire resistance. Getting it done right depends on stupendous public health programs, not to mention stupendous patients. Once a strain does acquire resistance, it can’t be undone — and the stronger, harder-to-treat germ is passed on to others, like me. If the best drugs don’t work, doctors are forced to use drugs that are even harder on the body. All of these factors collude to paint a grim reality. In former Soviet countries, only around 60% of patients who begin tuberculosis treatment ever successfully finish it. The rest of them flee, slip through the cracks, fail to respond to treatment, or die before they are cured.

So it is no surprise that the region has the highest rates of MDR-TB in the world — as many as 30% of all newly detected cases are impervious to first-line drugs. (The global average is reportedly less than 5%, but statistics are widely believed to be low, especially in resource-poor countries. In the U.S., there were fewer than 100 cases of MDR in 2013.) Even in optimal conditions, the difference between a case of run-of-the-mill TB and MDR can be the difference between a moderate inconvenience and a life-threatening catastrophe. A standard case can be cured for less than $100 with a daily dose of four different drugs for six to nine months. My treatment cost taxpayers seven figures and lasted well over two years.

On paper, many of these problems have already been fixed. A decade ago, Tracy Kidder’s best-seller Mountains Beyond Mountains lauded the achievements of Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health and other global health organizations in revolutionizing worldwide MDR-TB care. The region’s TB programs are now relatively well-organized and padded with funding from global health mammoths like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There are detailed and standardized treatment guidelines. TB drugs are fully subsidized. So why are so many patients still failing their treatments?

Without an effective vaccine or better drugs, efforts to curb MDR-TB face a serious paradox. As a strain becomes more resistant, it becomes simultaneously more painful and more urgent to treat it. Many countries have responded by adopting stringent patient monitoring policies, which improve cure rates but are nonetheless no small imposition in patients’ lives. Public safety overrides patient agency, which is a tough pill for victims to swallow (and they’ve already got plenty of those to worry about).

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A patient receives the TB vaccine in 1949 Cornell Capa / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

During my treatment, I felt sick for two years. Nausea became my baseline. Sometimes the drugs make you puke, or give you the kind of diarrhea that makes you need a nap. One screws with your nervous system, and I permanently lost most of the feeling in my feet. I’ve tracked blood across kitchen floors because I can’t tell if I’ve stepped on shattered glass.

And I had it lucky. I had no comorbidities like HIV or diabetes, which make everything even worse. Being on amikacin cost me some low-frequency hearing, but it has caused deafness in others. And I got to take it by IV drip, instead of the painful upper-thigh injections that leave some patients too sore to sit up. And while cycloserine — a drug nicknamed “psychoserine” for its notorious mental and behavioral effects — makes some patients hallucinate and scream, I got away with confusion. I had trouble with reading, organization, and paperwork. It’s an especially tough break if you’re dealing with a workers’ comp claim for a medical disaster. I couldn’t keep it all straight, and walloped my credit.

Even worse, most patients in former Soviet countries and across the world get practically no social support during the crisis. They get little help with side effects, and suffer serious social and economic strain. Many of them have no way to make up for lost wages over the course of their treatments. Some even face lasting discrimination. In 2011, an undercover Ukrainian journalist wrote an exposé about being iced out by hiring managers after casually mentioning a past bout of TB.

The reason why boils down to one key factor: Tuberculosis remains highly stigmatized throughout the world. In the former Soviet Union, people associate it with painful memories of the lawless, chaotic ‘90s. Having it means you’re a crook, a junkie, a drunk, a bum, or a sewer rat.

Stigma makes epidemics worse — it gives people a reason not to be seen walking into a clearly labeled TB clinic to see a doctor when they should. Loneliness and despair can convince someone that health doesn’t matter, so why take these pills? And stigma shuts people up, so they’ll never organize, influence funding, or change minds about TB. Stigma means more stigma.

When patients are silenced and isolated from one another and their communities, it stymies progress against the disease. The WHO estimates more than a $1.3 billion worldwide funding gap in TB research and development, and the number threatens to grow. Even though investment in new drug research is one obvious way to improve treatment, AstraZeneca, Novartis, and Pfizer recently pulled a combined $50 million out of the fight. According to an email from the Treatment Action Group, a TB and HIV advocacy nonprofit, this steep loss amounts to a full third of private-sector TB investment since 2011.

Erasing stigma, combating TB’s chronic underfunding, and promoting new research and drug development are incredibly lofty goals. But similar barriers have been conquered before in diseases like breast cancer and HIV/AIDS, where passionate activism made incredible inroads in raising awareness and influencing policy. If former and current TB patients joined together, could they build the first real advocacy movement centered on patients?

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llustration by Ashley Mackenzie for BuzzFeed

Tuberculosis patients haven’t always felt so alone.

After leaving Denver, I read The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s sprawling 1924 classic novel about a Swiss sanatorium. I forced myself to finish it, but it’s the most boring book I’ve ever read. It’s the story of a total wiener named Hans Castorp who goes on a trip to hang out in the Alps and visit his TB-stricken cousin. Then Hans ends up sticking around and living there for seven years even though he doesn’t really have tuberculosis, just so he can do stupid crap like spend 70 pages talking about the nature of consciousness.

Ugh, I’m still so mad at him. But maybe it’s because I’m a tiny bit jealous. So what if he’s a fake person with fake tuberculosis? It would have been so nice to have someone to be sick with.

Sanatoriums, like National Jewish and the one atop The Magic Mountain, bridged the gap between the mid-19th century and the 1940s discovery of streptomycin. With no cure in sight, the ill had long made do with an iffy array of treatment options. Some doctors stuffed people’s windpipes with vacuum contraptions to simulate lazy lung capillaries. Cottage industries of miracle cures gorged on ad space in periodicals, sandwiched among serial installments of now beloved classics. (If you liked Great Expectations, you’ll love Daffy & Son’s Natural Miracle Multi-Purpose Health Elixir! Available wherever fancy wool top hats and snuff boxes are sold!!!) But the White Plague seemed to beat them all.

Tuberculosis did have one semi-formidable opponent, though — one hope that physicians agreed on. It wasn’t a cure; it wasn’t a given. The idea came from an 1840 pamphlet written by Dr. George Bodington, a British family doctor who covered a large area by making his house calls on horseback. His essay was based on a simple observation: that consumptives in wide-open spaces fared better than those packed tightly in cities.

But Dr. Bodington drew a further conclusion: It must have been the country air that healed them. Their bodies need pure, unsoiled air, shared with as few people as possible. Depending on the severity of their case, they might need months or years of it. In the disease’s final stages, Mycobacterium tuberculosis finally chews through the lung tissue, resulting in the bloody cough that famously beckoned death (but, curiously, couldn’t stop the heroines of Les Misérables, La Bohème, and La Traviata from singing). If combated early with the right dose of air, the process could drag to a halt.

And where could patients find such magic air? The best stuff was nippy, clean, and thin. Way up high, where no one can spoil it with industrial factory smog. And so, for the next 100 years, sick city-dwellers left their crowded hubs by the thousands and set off for specialized tuberculosis hospitals in the mountains. These sanatoriums treated patients with Dr. Bodington’s “rest cure” — medical observation, a generous binge diet, and hours a day in rows of canopied outdoor beds. In The Magic Mountain, characters traveled to Switzerland from places like England, Italy, and Poland. For months or years at a time, consumptives at sanatoriums lived and breathed together far away from real life, in their own little communities up in the sky.

Denver — the Mile High City, full of its own magic mountains — thus became America’s magnet for the dying who wanted to live. In the late 19th century, nearly a third of Colorado’s population suffered from tuberculosis, after journeying west for the air that might save them. At the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives, they slept two by two, tucked into each of its dozens of bunk beds.

By the time I showed up, the bunk beds were long gone. There were no pretty canopies or breezy napping patios. And all that oh-so-edifying “virgin air” stuff? Turned out to be bunk. The bump in survival rates among patients who spent all that time outdoors wasn’t because of the air; it was the sun. Vitamin D is good for the immune system. They could have gotten the same effect on the roof of a tenement house. Or by taking sunshine stuffed into Vitamin D pills, like I did, supplemented by the UV light in my hospital room. (In a 21st century American city, you don’t just let a case of active tuberculosis run around outside.) Other times, patients’ health improved simply because sanatoriums gave them a badly needed break from lives of poverty and labor.

Still, the sanatorium era continues to be considered a public health success. Not because sanatoriums ever did much to help “lungers.” But because they kept them away from healthy people. By shooing contagious patients off to remote treatment complexes, Dr. Bodington had inadvertently pioneered the concept of infection control. Keeping sick people away from vulnerable populations seems so obvious now. But back then, would the idea of germs — invisible, flying disease pods — have sounded any less silly than magic air?

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Tuberculosis treatment in 1942 D. Hess / Fox Photos / Getty Images

I tried seeing a therapist after my quarantine order was finally lifted. My mom made the appointment. I didn’t really want to go; I’ve never liked therapy.

But I hated doing this to my mom. This wasn’t just my crisis; it was my family’s too. And it was harder on my mom than anyone. She’d just spent 10 days next to me on a cot in the Denver ICU after my first lung surgery went wrong. She’d held my hand when the stiff chest tube draining blood from my lungs made breathing hurt so badly I got tunnel vision. She’d lost so much weight and was thinner than I’d ever seen her. So when she kept insisting that I talk to someone, I figured I could force myself to muster an hour of sincerity. And if I didn’t like it, I could lie, quit, and just find my own answers in some book.

I got to the office and we made our introductions. Then I broke the ice.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Laura Linney?” I asked.

She paused. For too long.“No. I’ve actually never gotten that.”

“No. I’ve actually never gotten that.”

BULLSHIT. She looks exactly like Laura Linney.

“I spoke to your mother on the phone. She said you contracted tuberculosis while you were in the Peace Corps in Russia?”

“No, I was in Ukraine. But yes. I mean, it was the Far East. The Russian-speaking part.”

“And so you’re going through chemo now? How long is that?”

“Well, I was hospitalized in Denver and got the part of my lung removed with the TB on it last month. So now I’m on chemo. It’s the IV drip. None of the radiation stuff. And I never lost my hair. So I don’t know if it even counts. I have nine months of that, and a total of two years or so on everything else.”

OK, it’s not like I’m uniquely hyperaware of Laura Linney or something. There’s no way I could be the first person to notice.

“And then…it goes away?” she asked.

Wait, is she pissed? Why? It’s a compliment, right? Hold on. Does she just, like, hate Laura Linney?

“Knock on wood. It can come back, hypothetically,” I recited. “That’s why they treat it so aggressively. They just want to make sure that it’s really, really dead. But they can’t, like, promise you anything.”

I went back once or twice for additional sessions. I tried to explain that I wasn’t scared about dying or anything. By then, doctors seemed confident that I wouldn’t. But I had this anxiety I couldn’t shake. I wanted closure in Ukraine, and the people in my town. I wanted to be moving toward something. I tried to convert the emotional fallout into a momentum that more closely resembled psychosis. I took 36 practice LSATs but was hospitalized the day of the test. But panic was a problem I couldn’t obsess my way out of. I’d pick up a book but just hold it in my lap and forget what the hell it was for. I had no job and no idea what to do with myself. I lived with my parents, who at that moment seemed to be trying to keep me alive by never letting me out of their sight. I felt timid and stuck. I felt cheated out of that rosy immortality my friends had. All those toxic meds made me feel like someone else. I was very, very tired. And I felt like I was failing. I wanted my sense of control back. I was so damn sad.

My mom picked that therapist because she specializes in treating patients with life-interrupting illnesses, like MS or cancer.

“It can be hard for people to lose their control,” the therapist told me. “Here’s something I suggest that people can do to feel like they have some power over everything. Next time you go for an infusion, try to close your eyes and think of the chemicals in the drugs coursing through you, attacking all of the bad cells. And concentrate on them, and really see them. Then, envision the chemo forcing them out of your body. Picture them floating away.”

I skipped my next appointment and never rescheduled. It wasn’t a therapist that I wanted. I wanted to connect with other patients like me.

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llustration by Ashley Mackenzie for BuzzFeed

I’m not the only person to conclude that TB patients may be uniquely equipped to help each other. In 1907, a Boston-area internist named Dr. Joseph Pratt had the same idea while searching for innovative treatment alternatives for TB patients who couldn’t afford faraway sanatoriums. He had the hippy-dippy idea that bringing patients together could replicate the revitalizing effects of places like the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives, and help patients heal. Couldn’t they guide each other through the experience better than any doctor could?

Pratt tested his hunch with a trial of a dozen patients. Modern medicine’s first recorded support group was deemed a success. Moral support really did help combat tuberculosis. His destitute patients had made do without the magic air that wasn’t really magic and replaced it with something that was.

That’s one thing the sanatorium era got right that today’s TB control programs get wrong: the need for community. Today, the sanatorium era is thought of as a relic of medical quackery rendered moot by modern science. But to mock it in favor of enlightened antibiotic cures is to dismiss the lived experience of patients. For all their problems, sanatoriums were designed to heal patients. Today, treatment is primarily concerned with limiting threats posed to others. Patients’ lives are collateral damage.

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I showed up at the radiology department of George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., for my final chest X-ray in late spring of 2012. I stood in the yellow foot outlines and assumed the TSA body scan position without even waiting for the technician’s spiel.

“Oh, you’re an old pro, then!” he said from the processing room. “OK, deep breath and hold it… Good… Now let’s just make sure that… Whoa, you’re missing a big part of your lung! Sorry, wasn’t expecting that!” That makes two of us.

But the Mycobacterium tuberculosis had indeed been destroyed. What was left of my lungs showed up as solid black — just as a healthy X-ray is supposed to be.

But somehow, it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped. Once again, I wanted to share the moment with someone who understood what it meant. Moral support is nice for the good stuff too.

I began to find out how many patients felt the same way in June 2013, when I finally went back to Ukraine. I made a ring around the country to gather data for my master’s thesis: I traveled to Kiev, Lviv, Crimea, Mariupol, Kharkhiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, and my beloved Antratsyt. I visited hospitals, clinics, and met doctors, health care and nonprofit workers, and, of course, patients. No matter who they were, tuberculosis had a profound impact on their lives. Many had lost friends or even family members over their illness, or felt forced to keep the experience secret. Loneliness and shame were practically the default.

For as long as I’d spent surviving and learning about tuberculosis, one big question stuck in the back of my mind. I posed it to Oksana Viktorovna, a training coordinator for the Stop TB in Ukraine initiative in Donetsk. Why, I asked her, is there so little communication and coordination within the TB patient community, and so much of it — working successfully, by the way — in other diseases?

“You’re right,” she told me. “People are ashamed to be associated with the fringe. And even though TB is curable, the stigma makes them think it would be better to have cancer.” And perhaps, she continued, people who survive TB are ready to forget it and move on.

But, this might be changing, Oksana said. Lately, she’d noticed a few groups pop up online, on Russian networking sites like LiveJournal and VKontakte. Some people even created entirely new accounts to be able to discuss their lives with tuberculosis anonymously. “They write about their experience, their worries, their questions,” Oksana told me. “It seems to increase their optimism. I think it helps them get better.”

The clandestine online TB clubs were easy to find. As soon as I started poking through them, I found someone my age from Khabarovsk, Russia, whom I felt like I already knew.

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The Kyiv Tubdispensar or Tuberculosis Dispensary Photograph by Natalie Shure

I finally met Ksenia Shchenina face-to-face in Moscow this past spring. Even in the tourist-thick crowd by the famous Tretyakov Gallery, she wasn’t hard to spot. By now we’d already spent hours of our lives talking on Skype.

Ksenia maintains a patient-centered website about TB, as well as pages in English and Russian across several social media platforms. Her project’s slogan, “Being ill isn’t shameful,” challenges the negative cultural narratives about TB and the people who have it. Visitors can read the blog she kept during her treatment and her interviews with doctors and survivors. She regularly interacts with new patients from all over the world.

Social media has the potential to finally address the long-standing need for support among TB patients. Last month, Doctors Without Borders published a study that identified serious benefits for users of these online platforms, including TB & Me, the organization’s own blogging portal. Social media, they conclude, helps MDR patients adhere to treatment, gain back a sense of control, fight feelings of despair and solitude, and educate health care providers and the public. After treatment, survivors like Ksenia can continue to serve as mentors and advocates for the global patient community.

I strolled with Ksenia across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, along the edge of Red Square, and up the fabled Arbat Street. We drifted between languages and talked about being sick. I told her how badly I wished I knew people like her back when I was diagnosed.

“I can’t find the words in English to explain how much I agree with you,” she said.

I’m not sure I could have, either. But then, it hit me: “I’ve spent years researching tuberculosis. I’ve toured hospitals, read books and articles, conducted dozens of interviews. But this is the first time I’ve ever told my story to another patient.”

How magical to find her in a world with 5,000 miles, two screens, and three healthy lungs between us.

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llustration by Ashley Mackenzie for BuzzFeed

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[lilbrother-goh]

Emotional Fragility: A Plague Upon Society

Stage 1: Emotional fragility begins to take hold whenever a child's caregiver gives the child whatever they want in response to their emotional distress because it is too much to bear - too embarrassing, too stressful, too time-consuming. It is born from the helicopter parenting philosophy of sheltering a child from all possible sources of discomfort, while only allowing them to be exposed to possible sources of pleasure. As a result, the child becomes incredibly expectant of certain pleasure thresholds being met at nearly all points in their life. They become spoiled. This results in increasing aggressive behavior by the child should the parents attempt to push back on giving into all their demands. They are unused to discomfort/pain and become psychologically susceptible to total behavioral malfunctions (aka tantrums) if such pain even begins to present itself. The cure of course would be to wait out the distress and allow the child to only experience pleasure upon earning it in a meaningful manner. This requires a great deal of patience in an age where people have become used to getting what they want at a touch of a button. However, if parents aren't able to maintain this psychological stamina/resilience to tie rewards to productive behavior and punishments/removal of rewards and/or attention in response to tantrums or otherwise, the child will become increasingly emotionally fragile as they make the transition into adulthood. Of course, merely sheltering children from the possibility of experiencing discomfort/pain in the outside world can and does have similar effects (such as insisting they always stay inside, strictly monitoring all of their relationships, over-protectiveness regarding interactions with others on any medium such in school or on the internet, etc.).

Stage 2: Biology says that exposing oneself constantly to germs is good for one's immune system. Exposure to bacteria, viruses and otherwise in the world from an early age helps develop a natural and healthy response to threats of similar or greater magnitude as a person ages. The same logic applies to a child needing to build a healthy tolerance for disappointment, discomfort, dissatisfaction - you name it. Without a steady but healthy dose of these types of generally negative experiences, one's "emotional immune system" fails to develop. This can be catastrophic as a child ages into adolescence. Without all that time gaining experience learning how to endure and improve through lvl 1- lvl 5 disappointments, the child turned adolescent is now left with much more independence to face potential lvl 10 - lvl 50 disappointments or even straight up emotional trauma. Where exposure to some minor elementary school bullying paired with support from school staff and parents/caregivers may have helped make a child stronger in the long run, the adolescent, without such previous allowed exposure, must now stare down hormones and incredibly manipulative peers. Psychological warfare, especially involving cliques of teenage girls, becomes severely damaging rather than bearable...even to the point of becoming deadly. It is just like when a common cold becomes deadly to a person whose immune system has only been exposed to a completely sterile bubble chamber. This means that when this sheltered, emotionally vulnerable child hits adulthood, and the moment they are exposed to an emotional demon of significant enough power, the wounds won't heal. The adolescent takes crippling damage. The "crippling event or events" can take many forms. It can be a breakup, it can be middle/high school level bullying, or even just failing to make a test/grade/athletic event depending on the degree of lack of exposure to negative events when the adolescent was younger. It would appear that even borderline sexual harassment/assault, which are formally condemned and sanctioned by society, have much more devastating impacts against those without previous exposure to discomfort of virtually any kind.

Stage 3: After experiencing one or a number of crippling emotional events, the emotionally fragile adult's own responses to routine or otherwise emotional exchanges become significantly impaired. If the now adult doesn't have full on PTSD by now from what would normally be recoverable experiences, they will at least find relationships with others and even their own children (if they have any) incredibly mentally taxing. Touching of any kind may become traumatizing. Sexual interaction of any kind may become traumatizing (or rather just sexual interaction reminiscent of a healthy stable relationship). Having friends you can share experiences with may become too risky, and thus too traumatizing. Going outside with the possibility of running into strangers may become too traumatizing. Attempting to weather the negative behavior or discomfort of one's own children may become too traumatizing, and thus continues the cycle... Except now when you have a severely emotionally fragile parent/primary caregiver, the caregiver may choose to withdraw from their parenting duties altogether finding the whole ordeal too mentally taxing/traumatizing on a daily basis. This leads to neglect and even more severe consequences for increasingly more emotionally fragile new generations. Of course, as sheltering/shielding children from practically all negative experiences becomes more and more standard practice by parents and schools and whatever other environment(s) the children find themselves in, entire generations begin to feel the impact of this well-intentioned catastrophe of a philosophy.

Stage 4: The cancer becomes malignant. As an entire society becomes increasingly emotionally fragile, easily compromised by the free words and actions of the free people around them, the foundations of a free society will begin a steady descent towards collapse. People will become increasingly more hostile towards strangers; they will close in on themselves trusting no one. People will increasingly weaponize their suspicion of unknown elements in society calling for legislation, litigation, and surveillance to protect them from every possible eventuality of emotional distress - consumed by fear as opposed to seeking understanding. This naturally will make the upper echelons of society increasingly more powerful as making an increasingly fragile people dance to their tune like a puppet on strings becomes child's play. Fear this, fear that, fear that other thing! - the media will incessantly blare until a broken people becomes so numb with fear they will give up all but their own fragile existence just to mark time. It goes without saying that as relationships become increasingly distant and strained throughout society, or rather refereed by an increasingly tyrannical state, that individuals at any age are less and less likely to experience the kind of emotional distress and will become more and more susceptible to when it does happen to sneak past the armed guards at the gates of "utopia."

If we as a people do not wish for this seemingly impending mass infantilizion of society to become reality, we must remember that for there ever to be any true pleasure that comes from the realization of potential, we must be willing to endure hardship. We must be willing to experience pain ourselves, while also allowing others that we care about to experience it too from time to time. This goes double for children even as young as 2-3. From the breadth of knowledge gained from a number of mild traumas, our brain becomes capable of bouncing back from major ones. We must make ourselves stronger by seeking new experiences and seeking to provide an environment by which others can explore and discover on their own. If you yourself have taken critical psychological damage and are unable to endure any kind of discomfort for a young loved one, find someone or some environment that can endure it to assist you for the sake of their neurological growth. Of course, also find a controlled environment (usually with the help of a professional) by which you yourself can regain composure under emotional duress. We must actively fight attempts to punish free speech or the actions of individuals that do not physically harm others to maintain an environment where a diversity of interactions are possible. This very much means pushing back on state control of everyday life in as many ways as is feasible. We must also look to connect with and bring emotionally damaged individuals back into the fold of society whenever possible through a slow, caring, gradual approach. If we do not take these and other measures, I rightfully fear that people will become increasingly estranged and isolated from one another; this is a combination known to produce an increase in hostility as people slowly lose their empathy for all but a vanishing and increasingly distant inner circle. I AM suggesting here that this epidemic of emotional fragility may in no small part contribute to a larger number of mass shootings, suicides, and other forms of desperate martyrdom of a people crying for help. Be brave. Speak out. Be the pillar of strength you want to see in others, especially your own children. - LB