My mum and I had a shared period calendar when I was a young teen and still getting used to tracking my cycle, she hung the calendar and pen in the bathroom to model how I could track my cycle in a diary as I got older.

We invented a key/symbol system so the calendar wasn’t intrusive for my brother and father to see, and one of the symbols we used for the luteal phase was a sort of hourglass ⏳, it was originally my mums poor doodle/sketch of a panty liner to indicate “you might spot a bit this week” but it looked like an hourglass so I joked that symbol meant I’m “just waiting for the storm to arrive”.

It was the perfect symbol for me, because when people ask about the tattoo, and I don’t want to go into the real reason I say “it’s a visual reminder” and if they ask more I can say “it’s an hourglass, because there’s only a little time LEFT, it’s on my left hand - I get my lefts and rights mixed up. Plus it reminds me to put my watch back on after I get dressed, so it helps remind me of a lot of different things”

Yuuuup, I ended up getting a tattoo on my wrist that is essentially a personal period joke.

At one stage it was crucial for my survival, it was a kind of grounding token to snap me out of hormonal suicidal insanity when my PMS was at its worst. Something I’d see that would bluntly remind me “it’s not you, it’s your hormones, you don’t actually want this”

When I say the urge came and went zero to sixty back to zero in 30 seconds flat, sometimes that was an understatement. I really struggled because in addition to suicidal ideation during PMS, I had undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, which often gets worse with PMS thanks to the way oestrogen and progesterone play off each other.

Guess who’s got major impulsively issues. Guess what two symptoms really shouldn’t be combined.

I have zero desire to kill myself.

But my hormones seemed desperate to try and make me do it every month, especially as a teen.

It didn’t help that I had endometriosis and at 17 developed a uterine prolapse, on top of a rectal prolapse I’d had since I was 12. I was in agony when I was on my period, so sometimes the desire to make the pain stop overlapped with the suicidal ideation. That sucked. Hard to reason your way out of physical pain.

I’ve had a hysterectomy (from 17-24 my uterus just kept trying to make its own escape anyway despite attempts to sew it in place) and no longer suffer menstrual dysphoria because it turns out that was gender dysphoria not true PMDD. But I still get suicidal ideation as part of PMS, fortunately my ADHD is much better managed so now my tattoo is less a suicide detterant and just a reminder that I still have ovaries (sometimes I genuinely forget, and it takes me a few days to work out why I’m bloated and irritable and why I’m anxious about my sore boobs)

I fear his mental state may not grant him the capacity for such self awareness, even in prison.

Schools, town halls, community centres, some libraries, some council buildings, certain community spaces like scout halls, basketball stadiums, rotary clubs etc.

Old churches that are now public halls are also opened as voting stations, and some actual churches while not open for voting due to conflicts of interest, do establish rapid housing programs so people can get legal addresses for electrotal enrolments in time for voting, and others will be open as census sites for homeless folk to record themselves on census night. I grew up in bum fuck nowhere and on election day if the weather was tolerance AEC would set up an open polling station on the local football oval just to move through the register faster than what the tiny local school could handle.

Since covid lock downs, eastern states especially have enhanced their postal and early voting processes.

For about 2 weeks before elections (local, state, federal) for the most part you can just walk into any of the above buildings, in litteraly any suburb town or city that’s participating in the election, and cast your vote.

If you do your research on best venues and times, you can knock out your vote in 10 minutes flat. No queue.

Some people are eligible for postal votes too, you can request the ballot be mailed to you, or pick one up from the post office and cast your vote without leaving your home block.

But we’re far from competent. While I love our preferential voting system, it’s not well understood by the public, our LGA’s are still subject to gerrymandering, and there are large swaths of our community that are legally prohibited from voting for various reasons that I personally feel is an unethical antidemocratic policy. There are also huge groups of indigenous peoples who do not have accessible electoral education, trustworthy polling processes, and are disenfranchised from the electrotal process, with little government support or funding for culturally appropriate programs for engagement. Despite our preferential voting, we have essentially devolved to a two party system with neither major party really being any better, do we want the party of bigots, or the party of other bigots?

For his sake I hope so.

But for humanities sake I want him to go to jail, get the same treatment as any other prisoner, and not suffer.

Because if I get to live in a fantasy world where he’s in jail, I also want a world where the prison system is for rehabilitation and safe containment, not punishment and suffering.

As someone chronically Ill, I feel this so hard.

Every minute that I’m not at work I’m dedicating to making sure I’m likely to be well enough for work tomorrow.

I don’t do anything after work without asking “how will this impact my health tomorrow?” and that includes things like not being able to sweep my own floor because I know I need to sweep at work and the nerve damage in my arms won’t let me sweep twice in one day without keeping me up all night in pain, and if I don’t get enough sleep, I’ll get a migraine and won’t be able to physically see anything.

Most of my days off are spent in agony trying to restore myself and desperately trying to reset my house and home life so I can keep up with work, without overdoing it on Sunday and making myself sick for Monday.

So yeah, on the one day a month where I wake up for work and I don’t throw up or almost shit myself, and my heart rate is doing what it’s supposed to do, and I can see and hear and feel my feet… The temptation to “call in healthy”, so I can actually have a day off to enjoy myself for the first time in over a month is really hard to ignore.

I actually did that this week because Wednesday was my birthday, I went to work, it was a “bad workable day” (vs a “good workable day” or a “bad unworkable day”) and Thursday I woke up feeling really good, I only had a 2 hour shift and it was just admin so I took my first sick day in 6 months and used it to do all my linens and towel laundry. It felt like a proper day off because I was healthy enough to get stuff done for myself, without being in pain or having to stop to run to the bathroom or let my heart calm down, or give up on folding because I can’t feel my arms.

I can’t do that every time I want or even need to though. My bank account is really good at forcing me to go to work, healthy, half dead, or heaving. Chronic illness is expensive, and some days trying to keep up with work feels like it costs my health more than not working. but sadly not working is not an option for me, because I’m capable of work, so I must. (and continue to push my gov for universal basic income)

For context as to how working while disabled messes you up. I got hit by a truck on the way to work last year, I got to the office and used their first aid kit to patch myself up. Booked a doctors appointment, told my boss I’d be leaving early, then kept working until my appointment.

My boss was fine with this, and then someone on reddit posted a photo of the crash and my boss saw, they realised when I said “I was hit by a truck” what I meant was “I was hit by a truck”

When asked how I was feeling, and reporting “no different to usual” my boss sent me to the ER because they thought I had a concussion and was acting confused. ER checked me out, dislocated shoulder and wrist, soft tissue damage here and there, but otherwise nothing major or serious or nothing I don’t already deal with on a daily basis. I went back to finish my shift and my boss asked what I was doing working after I’d been hit by a truck.

I feel exactly the same level of pain today as I do every other day. If I take today off because this level of pain is apparently unworkable, it’s a slippery slope, eventually I’m going to have to come back to work despite being in this exact same level of pain. This is my baseline, now I can truly compare it to being hit by a truck.

I used to be on a pension, I wanted to work because I wanted purpose in the neo-liberal hell scape of my society. but my mental health was too shot because of this deep rooted idea that I deserved rest just for being in any level of pain that was out of the ordinary, and subconsciously I would talk myself out of doing anything because I deeply believed I shouldn’t have to.

But I don’t have that luxury, my ordinary will always be “hit by a truck” level, so right now I either learn how to consistently work through it, or drop dead broke and homeless.

In Australia Google maps has issues with routing cyclists on 80km busy truck transit roads that have no bike lanes, footpaths or shoulders. You’ll regularly get stuck behind lost uber eats cyclists whose map took them through a motor vehicle only underpass.

The other day google maps decided to reroute me from a quiet, wide street with no bike lane that was otherwise perfectly safe, and tried to send me through a nightsoil alley, down a heritage stock run that was paved with cobblestones and crossed over a storm drain 4 times in a zig zag.

Yeah, “safer” because there’s no cars I guess, but not suitable for bikes at all.

Get tired? No, get a sense of sorrow in professional failure and apathy when someone’s level of ability is fundamentally misaligned to the class.m, hell yes.

I’m an adult educator, so while not a fitness instructor, I teach adults life skills, including health and nutrition.

We aren’t paid to be individual tutors, but the fact is that some learners need one on one training, or additional time, or a slower pace, or a totally customised syllabus and resource package for their needs.

There’s nothing tiring about this.

But there’s also nothing we can do. You learn quickly in this job to say “I recommend a more entry level class, or starting with a some home learning” or you burn out trying to juggle 25 different levels of need in a class of 25.

I have galactorrhea, pumping rooms aren’t a natural maternal family matter, for me, it’s a medical procedure.

Privacy is a lactating person’s choice, and right. public feeding is a choice that I agree needs to be destigmatised. Personally I’m not comfortable with public pumping, because I see my breast milk as medical not nutritional, so I choose privacy for myself.

It’s also difficult, it’s stressful, it’s uncomfortable. Having comfort, focus, peace and quiet, it’s important.

I don’t even have a uterus, so getting my leaky chest out in public is even further from being socially acceptable. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had mastitis because I have not been able to expell in a timely manner. Partly that was because I was embarrassed by my condition and didn’t stand up for myself and my need for access to a pumping room at work, and part of it was because my employers didn’t understand my need for a private room, they pointed out that it’s never been a problem for mothers in our office to whip a tit out when baby was hungry, and/or that my need was different because the reason I I had breast milk at all was different.

No one gets to expect me to be comfortable with nudity. My breast milk, my choice if I have privacy or not.

I used to do it in the bathroom because I didn’t have anywhere else, but that was a gamble, do I let myself get an infection because I’m letting my ducts clog, or do I risk an infection by pumping milk in the toilets.

Send the email, then call me to say “hey I sent you an email that I really need you to read and respond to urgently, I’ll let you go so you can focus while reading, talk later”

For one of my 3 jobs, I don’t have regular work hours, I’m employed just 5 hours a week, on call, for IT support for a little non for profit.

My contract, my email signature, my numerous discussions with the team all state “if you require a response within the same business day, please phone me to alert me to the issue”

I check my email once a day, I don’t have time to be checking it several times a day when I’m only paid for 5 hours work, I need to conserve those hours for maintenance and support I’m not about wasting anybody’s time.

So if someone happens to email me after I’ve already checked my inbox for that day, I won’t see it until tomorrow. Hence, phone me, I want to work, I just need a way to alert myself that work is available for me, a text message will also suffice.

I realise this is asking someone to change the way they operate to make my job easier. But the number of times I check my email at 1pm, and there’s zero tickets, so I turn off my computer because I’m not going to sit and watch an empty inbox for my free time.

Then the next day I check my email and I have 20 emails all from the same person from about 3-5pm all saying “hey I have an issue” “hey following up this is kind of urgent” “hey, are you even checking your emails?”…no obviously I’m not, it would have saved you so much effort to send 1 text after 1 email as I requested than to send 20 emails, and I would have actually gotten the text in time.

Also half the time the issue needs to be fixed with a phone call anyway because it’s something simple like “Microsoft Word is missing”… because the program was unpinned from the taskbar and the staff member just needs help remembering the start menu exists. Most of my support resolutions are the equivalent of describing the buttons on the TV remote to your grandmother over the phone. (lots of older, less tech literate folk working in NFP sector)

Accessibility.

We will never get rid of the analogue clocks from our school, we’re an adult education and alternative model highschool qualifications centre.

We primarily teach adults with no to low English, adults and teens with disabilities, and adults and teens refered via corrections services.

There is a significant level of illiteracy within numeracy, and for some of our students, it’s not a failing of the education system, it’s just a fact of life given their specific circumstances (eg, acquired brain injuries are common among our students)

Some students can learn to tell time on an analogue clock even if they didn’t know before.

But even my students who will never in their life be able to fully and independently remember and recall their numbers can tell the time with an analogue clock.

I tell my students “we will take lunch at 12pm, so if you look at the clock and the arms look like this /imitates a clock/ we will go to lunch”

And now I avoid 40 questions of “when’s lunch?” because you don’t need to tell time to see time with an analogue clock, they can physically watch the hands move, getting closer to the shape they recognise as lunch time.

And my other students can just read the time, from the clock, and not feel infantalised by having a disability friendly task clock like they’ve done at other centres I work at - they’ve had a digital clock for students who can tell time, and a task clock as the accessible clock. But a well designed face on an analogue clock can do both.

I myself have time blindness due to a neurological/CRD issue, so analogue clocks, and analogue timers are an accessibility tool for me as well, as the teacher.

When I was 8, my 4 year old brother, 40 year old father, and 35 year old uncle whom I lived with all went to get screened for autism after my brother’s pre-school recommended it.

3/4 of us walked out with autism diagnoses.

I was given the official psychiatric assessment that I had “learned and developed autistic traits and mannerisms due to growing up in a household with no neurotypical influence” and the advice was that I would grow out of it once I made enough “normal” friends at school.

My brother started occupational therapy and other programs, and at each one, the practitioner would recommend to my dad that I join too to “help her brother feel safe and comfortable” and I would litteraly participate in the Autism therapy programs with my autistic brother.

Over my years at school, I picked up official diagnoses for dyscalculia and dyspraxia and that explained a few of the struggles I was having. The autism OT I was already doing covered support for my learning disabilities so nothing except the paperwork changed.

And sure enough, I made neurotypical friends at school, and a lot of the autistic-like traits I exhibited as a kid were no longer apparent in my behaviour.

I had a lot of mental health issues as a teenager and young adult. But what millennial isn’t depressed and anxious? I was growing up with 3 autistic men as a teenage girl, I rationalised that my dysfunctional emotional state was justified by my life circumstances. I was a dramatic teen.

Hearing and visual impairment, and other physical health issues with muscle tone, and struggles to heal due to poor proprioception that got worse in my 30s somehow lead to a re-assesment for autism as an adult.

Big fucking suprise. I’m autistic. Always have been.

Sometimes health professionals don’t get the full picture. They’re human.

My presentation is drastically different from my male family members, and I was parentified by my fathers autism from a young age - I remember being as young as 10 and my dad saw my ability to blend and socialise, he’d send me into stores or get me to make phone calls for him if he was having anxiety over it. This was not something that was discussed at the time of my first assessment.

My special interest was, and still is, anthropology. I maintain that loving the study of humanity and human culture means I’ve been able to intellectualise my way through social situations that neurotypicals feel their way through on instinct. I suspect I’ve done this from a young age, and that this further muddied the waters for that psychiatrist who assessed me when I was 12.

If I’d gotten reassessed in my later teens, or early 20s, I’m certain the result of the assessment would have been different then to, even with the same psychiatrist. You get 4 hours with a perfect stranger,just on some random day, and they’re supposed to make an assessment on your entire life?

We trusted their assessment, which is why I fumbled through life for 20+ years under the assumption I could learn my way out of feeling autistic.

Trust your healthcare professionals, but remember that they’re human, and second opinions are important, especially if you’re struggling with the treatment plan, or lack thereof, from the first doctor.

I completely agree with that perspective.

Personally I would add to this that for individuals who are unable to mask, and who’s struggle to mask is so to speak, “visible” to others, while they are still subjected to all of the ableiem that comes with being neurodivergent, it’s almost like their inability to mask becomes a punchline for neurotypicals. I think some NTs use the joke as a way of trying to relieve the pressure to mask thinking they’re being accommodating, while still addressing the disabled elephant in the room. The end result is that the person’s lack of masking capacity is mistakenly correlated to their entire set of abilities - people assume they’re incapable of everything. It’s pretty dehumanising and infantalizing, and puts so many limitations on the opportunities available for folk who can’t mask.

And on the other side of that coin, people who have the ability to mask really well are expected to do it flawlessly 24/7, and failing to do so isn’t a sign that having ADHD can be disabling, no, for people who can mask, not masking 24/7 is apparently a moral failing. Which is not the kind of social expectation you want on someone who’s condition predisposes them to anxiety inducing perfectionism, and leads to this expectation also being internalised.

Which occurs for both types of people - internalising the expectations. if society treats you as useless, you start to feel useless, until you fall into a pit. if society expects you to always be performing at 110%, you begin to feel like a failure if you output anything less than 109% until you burn out and fall in the same pit.

(because I don’t think neurotypical people realise that masking is operating at >100%, it’s an additional request on our mind and body, it’s an additional labour, it’s not sustainable long term. There really is the misconception that we can choose to turn it on and off at no personal cost to us.)

No but you do say “I’m diabetic” which uses diabetes as sort of identity within the sentence structure.

Similarly “I’m a cancer survivor” and “I’m a cancer patient” are ways someone with cancer could structure a sentence to give weight to the way cancer and the experiences of cancer fundamentally change this person’s personality and identity.

While “I am ADHD” isn’t perfect, it’s a very new use of language to try and create an identity form, and it will continue to evolve and sound more natural.

Personally I still find myself saying “I’m autistic and I have ADHD” in most situations, but if I know I won’t have to explain the term too much, I do prefer “I’m AuDHD”, because it’s an identity first phrase, and it feels as natural as “I’m autistic” or “I’m diabetic”.

But the difference grammatically between “I’m autistic” and “I’m ADHD” is minimal, yet I agree one sounds fine and the other just sounds stupid. And other than exposure, I can’t place my finger on why.

At the end of the day, alcoholism, depression, and obesity, they are unhealthy states of being.

They are not something people choose, and while there are treatments, it’s not something everyone can control.

That doesn’t mean we should simply accept this state of being. People living with depression deserve better, people living with alcoholism deserve better than for us to say “it’s out of their control, they can’t help it, so we shouldn’t judge, let them be” when what they need is better support and better treatment options.

Likewise, obese people deserve better than “eat less, move more, fatty!” but they also deserve more than “all bodies are beautiful, just let us be”

I say this as someone who was a fat kid, and a fat teen, and a fat adult. I had a BMI of 50 for a most of my life. In my mid 30s, I got it down to 28, and still going.

So I say all of this is as someone else who was fat, obese, and morbidly obese. Obesity should be viewed the same way we view depression and anxiety, though depression and anxiety also need some better PR.

Being obese may not not always be a choice, but the the ultimate end goal of how we view obesity as a state of being is to find ways we can all manage our weight. Because obesity is not healthy, for those who can’t easily control their weight, life sucks, they are patients in need of treatment, not morally failing people, but also not “perfect plus sized activists who are healthy at every size”

Because while bodies and sizes vary and we can do healthy things at every size. Obesity is inherently unhealthy. Obviously being bullied won’t solve anything, but neither will society politely ignoring how hard it is to live a full life while suffering from obesity.

Being black isn’t an inherent health issue. It genuinely is just a different state of being. 99% of problems unique to black people are social issues, not medical issues… So the comparison between obesity and substance abuse issues is more helpful than trying to compare being obese to being BIPOC.

That’s alright, there will only be a handful of gen alpha even eligible to vote in a 2029 election, since they were born 2010-not even born yet

Yup, thyroid, adrenals, and gonads have been checked, both with blood work and untrasound.

I have dysautonomia due to a brain stem herniation, and temperature regulation is effected by that, but it’s just been so weird that the way this symptom effects me was decades of not feeling the cold, then suddenly now I’m not feeling the heat.

I know which one I’d choose if I got to pick… and it’s the one where I don’t need to go to a wound nurse for frost nip in February.

I was a year round shorts guy, genuinely didn’t feel the cold. Last year I suddenly became a year round thermal stockings, skivee, thermal gloves, jumper and woollen pants guy.

I can’t get warm. It’s like I’m catching up on 30+ years of never feeling the cold by feeling the cold all the time.

I never really understood at what point a language evolves enough to be an entirely new language.

Old English feels so far removed from even middle English, let alone modern English.

We have “new” and “old” to differentiate them, but with how many Latin words alone entered English between Old English and Modern English, It’s something I’ve never found a comprehensive answer to.

I guess, what is it about proto-indo European that we acknowledge as a distinct language from the hundreds of thousands of languages that evolved from it, other than time scale and global impact.

Some people think cilantro tastes awful, and I don’t understand those people on that point either.

You don’t understand that some people have a genetic mutation that causes their taste buds to be more sensitive to the flavour compounds in cilantro, including Aldehyde?

What is hard to understand?

Aldehydes are a flavour compound in cilantro that in small doses gives a fresh, light and vibrant taste. Aldehydes are also present in the soap making process, various other cleaning agents, as well as being released by certain insects.

If you taste a lot of these specific Aldehydes, you will taste soap. But cilantro doesn’t contain enough Aldehyde for most people to notice any fowl tastes.

That is, unless you are an X-man with mutant taste buds.

Their taste buds pick up on the Aldehydes, and therefore cilantrotastes like soapy stink bugs.

It doesn’t mean I don’t accept them for who they are.

[…]

looks gross.

You don’t get to claim you accept people for who they are, then call them or aspects of their appearance “gross”.

If you truly believed that people can have preferences we don’t agree with, then you would keep your mouth shut when you see a piercing you don’t like, but that clearly they like having.

Accepting people starts with learning that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.