#social postures

[afro-elf]

you can ignore this!

[pleastrop]

one thing I can actually thank my chronic pain for is that it really helped with my social anxiety, like I just HAD to go to so many appointments and see so many different people that I started getting good at it, and it gave me the confidence to be social in other aspects of my life too, and while I'm still dealing with it, it got A LOT better, it did what years and years of therapy and specialist after specialist couldn't, let's go exposure therapy I guess!!

[chamerionwrites]

Fewer posts about how nobody on this hellsite has any reading comprehension and more posts about how many grown adults who apparently subscribe to the Middle School Bully Model of Coolness (making fun of people is the height of wit and also in-group bonding) willfully misread posts for the sake of making a snappy mocking quip in response to some fantastical strawman version of what OP actually said

[spencerrscardigans]

Doctors often tell patients, often chronically ill patients to stay off the social media that talks about their illnesses and to not look stuff up, and i can understand why this may be problematic but they also aren’t taking into consideration the positives and good things that can also occur from this.

POTS and other chronic illnesses are having a higher social media presence, and because of this it’s created quite a big stigma surrounding it, and people often think that these illnesses are just becoming a trend, but they don’t understand how helpful the representation is for so many people.

I do often see people in the comment section of these videos who will have one or two traits and immediately panic thinking they have these things and i can understand how that part isn’t great, but in some cases it actually is these posts online that help people get diagnoses and learn more about themselves.

I would not have been diagnosed with POTS and getting treatment if it weren’t for social media, and my doctors don’t know much about POTS so most of the tips and advice and treatment methods that i’ve found have been from social media, and i would not be where i am without it.

I struggled with dysautonomia for my entire life, and it had been established by my one doctor who actually knew about these conditions but he retired and the new doctors i was switched too don’t know much about my health conditions, so getting diagnoses and treatment has been a very slow process.

My dysautonomia is believed to have turned into POTS in early 2021 when i was 14 after i got covid, and for over a year i was struggling with debilitating symptoms and had no idea why. I was just starting high school, and i was getting sicker and sicker and it was causing quite the divide socially.

I had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and because of it i had already been limited in my physical activity, so i was just told that my POTS symptoms were because i was out of shape.

I tried to push myself to fix this, which only ended up making me feel worse. Sometime along the road of me trying to get more active, i got a fitbit.

I started using my watch to monitor my steps and sleep, and i noticed that my heart rate would shoot up to the 150s-170s when i was simply standing still, so i sat down, and my heart rate immediately dropped to the low 100s.

I thought that this may be a glitch with my watch, but was still concerned as i was aware that my heart rate should not get that high from just standing still, so i started googling. As a result of my search, the name Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome came up. I did some reading, and noticed that a lot of the signs were pointing to me, especially with the already established dysautonomia.

I had already dealt with a lot of doctors telling me that i was just paranoid and a hypochondriac, and i knew that watches sometimes glitched or didn’t work correctly, so i went to my pharmacy and got a pulse ox, and did the same standing test and it did the exact same thing as my watch.

I took pictures of my heart rate and started recording it on the charts that my watch had, and brought it to my next doctors appointment, explained my symptoms and then mentioned that i had heard of the condition POTS, and that it seemed pretty similar to what i was going through. My doctor had my do a short standing test in the office, and i had a 70bpm increase in my heart rate.

My doctor agreed that it definitely looked like POTS and she said that i met the criteria for a diagnosis, but she said she didn’t know very much about the condition and had only briefly heard about it, so she referred me to a cardiologist in another city as that was the closest specialist to me, but they denied the referral and said that they weren’t taking patients with POTS, and they gave her a information sheet and gave her some tests to do to rule out anything else.

The tests came back, and again it all pointed to POTS, but my doctor was scarcely familiar with the condition, and wasn’t comfortable giving me an official diagnosis, so she gave me an informal diagnosis. When it came to treatments, she also wasn’t familiar with anything besides telling me to drink more water, exercise, and increase my sodium intake, and the only medication she was familiar to treat it with was propranolol, so she prescribed that, but it unfortunately didn’t help much, so i wasn’t left with much help or advice.

The things my doctor recommended weren’t enough, and because i didn’t have an official diagnosis or really any information at all from my doctors it was hard to get accommodations with school, and i wasn’t sure what else to do, so i did what doctors recommend against and went to google and social media.

It was then where i found so many people like me who i could finally relate to, and found so much information about my condition and tips and tricks to help manage it.

Because i finally knew more about how to manage my POTS, i started trying out more things and in the last year i have learnt more than i had in years of going to doctors, and i also finally had a community where i felt less alone.

I was able to advocate for myself, and two years later, this february i finally got in to see a cardiologist and now have a proper diagnosis, and he was able to provide some more insight and treatment options for me and i’m finally starting to notice some improvement and have a hopeful plan for the future.

In cases like these, social media representation of chronic illnesses is not always bad, and can in my opinion, actually save lives. If i had not had access to these communities and help, i genuinely can say that i would not be where i am at today, and i am forever grateful for the communities that have been created.

[drumlincountry]

My stance on the murderbot #hotbot or #notbot debate is:

Murderbot in a crisis situation: HOT

Murderbot in a social situation: *secretes defensive slime*

[peanutbutterex]

Leave it to Yuri from ddlc to make me feel seen again…

[biollyante]

if you put on a mask to be loved, they will love the mask, not you

if you put on a mask to be loved, the mask will drain you

if you put on a mask to be loved, the mask will ingrain itself into your identity forever, becoming part of you

if you don't put on a mask to be loved, would nobody love you?

[overwhelmed-frog]

as soon as I’m able to speak to other human beings without turning bright red, sweating literal buckets, and getting heart palpitations it’s over for you bitches

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

again, if your political philosophy is to not participate because you will remain good and pure (and therefore righteous!) until The Great Revolution happens, you don't have a political strategy. You have a religion.

But even if you do ascribe to this religious view of the political sphere, in the US, the grand revolution is not fucking happening this election cycle. Try again next time. We have 185 days until election day. are you gonna organize and deploy a revolution before then? no?? then join the adults in the room for just a little while. yes, the system sucks. no, you are not gonna solve that by doing nothing.

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

like i think a major problem in the way that racial politics are applied to global affairs is that people elsewhere are treated as mere stand-ins for american minorities. you just take the same framework you use to talk about race in america and copy and paste elsewhere. but the way we talk about race in america is often divorced from class and colonialism (colonialism is often frankly unmentioned when talking about the experiences of black americans specifically), so it is automatically disingenuous to then use this framework for nigerian students in ukraine

[ereh-emanresu-tresni]

.

[smeetlinglord]

I've grown to stop giving too many fucks away to schmucks on the internet, but not enough outside of it, face-to-face. This is not to say I have undeveloped, poorly developed or even less-than-well developed social navigation skills; instead I mean that I am good, but I want to be really good, perhaps even great with people.

[kraniumet]

"cultural analysis" youtubers read something that isn't a medium/vouge/vox op-ed as research challange

[the-physicality]

also: i didn't like the jerseys

[summoning-potema]

smoke out ur farmhands friends

[swordsofsaturn]

no joke just saw someone i know share an indigenous artist's "always was always will be" post on their insta story and then immediately afterward shared that they're at the gabba watching the cricket..... where there's protests happening right outside 😭 are you fucking clueless