Oh man, buddy, I’m so sorry for your loss. Those must have been hugely impactful to grieve. How are you doing?

Same!

Can I just take this opportunity to vent, I’m so annoyed. My grandsons school closed due to the asbestos kinetic sand thing, you know how they informed everyone, and blindly expected every one to see it, exactly as it was released. I violently hate the fact schools and official places use Facebook for community noticeboards and communication tools. I appreciate your efforts.

Eta, my grandson is in my care, he’s asd lvl 3 and of course I turned up to take him to school, why couldn’t they just email or text. They can text you if you’re late dropping off etc.

Murderer guys face, tho, lol. He looks like he’s started seeing the furniture coming to life.

Thanks. I didn’t think it up, I read it somewhere, I have absolutely no idea where, any more, but it always stuck with me.

Learning that When you’re in an abusive relationship they purposefully sever your connection with self. They make huge demands around their emotions, whilst putting you in a position to abandon your needs and emotions, entirely, which severs your sense of self and disconnects you from your own emotions. Without those connections, you flounder, severely. I then worked on unstitching all the brain washing, and then, trying to recognize the negative dialogue as their narrative, not mine. I worked on rebuilding my sense of self and self worth, and reconnecting with my emotions, listening to them and soothing them, putting myself first, as if I were a dear friend or looking after myself as I would my own child. Exampling how to treat yourself, teaches kids how they should be treated and treat themselves as adults. I read everything I could, to learn about abuse and how it works, because once you understand how they perform their tricks, they don’t work on you, they lose their power entirely. Worked on why I cared what others think of me, and why I was abandoning myself for these imagined others, opinions, and not living by my own opinions and beliefs. I had this belief that others opinions were somehow more valid than mine, which is not true. Asking why, and expecting a real answer with valid facts, from all those “one rule for me another for thee” rules abusers put in your head, helped me to see, and dispel a lot of the abuse and brain washing. Because those “rules” never stack up. They’re not transferable, they usually only applied to me, why was I only deserving of dirt, why did I believe that, I wouldn’t treat anyone else like that, why did I feel like it was right to treat myself like all I deserved was dirt. I was told every day of my life I was worthless and not good enough and I don’t try hard enough and I was a burden (burden isn’t quite the right word I’m looking for, burden implies they were doing things for me, which was never the case, I was told I wasn’t deserving of even basic pleasantries, I was treated as an abomination. Looking back now I can see the levels of cruelty you have to have as a person to do that to someone else, and I can clearly see they’re twisted cruel people who have no ability to define things, opinions don’t define things, opinions are only relevant to the head they live in. I read somewhere that if someone has the opinion that they don’t like peanut butter, we don’t all stop eating just because one person doesn’t like it, why do we believe it about ourselves. And it helped me immensely.

I want to live in your world.

I was ghosted twice, by two separate employers. Does that count as being fired? I worked for a conference center (wait staff) I ran the Cafe, full cold buffet breakfast, as well as being the barista and there was a chef for any hot breakfast meals ordered, including room service deliveries for a hotel above that was super long, the building is listed at about 5000m2. The Cafe was almost in the middle. In a warehouse type structure. They originally said I would take over running the Cafe, me and the chef, for 3 months while someone went on holiday, 6 months later I still hadn’t heard anything and it was such a hard task I asked to stop doing it and just do the conferences. They ghosted me.

Second was about 15 years later, catering service I worked for, shonky af, oh have I got stories from there!! Covid hit, everything stopped, they asked me back for one job, they had my friend working slave labor for them while they pocketed the government covid payments and expected her (a single mum) to do twice the work she did before, with no breaks, she tried to tell them she had kids she couldn’t do as much as they were asking, they ignored her and demanded she work every day, doing the catering for whatever functions they had (exhausting) and then all the dishes from the functions too (usually other employees do that job) she went until she burnt out and her kids needed her, she told them she couldn’t work, they acted like she left rhem in the lurch and how dare she, and I was friends with her she they cut her off, stole her jacket, and ghosted me because we had become close friends. Scorched earth. They ended up begging for employees not long after that and no one would work for them. Horrible horrible people.

I imagine it can be hard to scroll past someone saying something very off the wall. When you read someone’s comment it’s hard not to feel like they’re talking directly to you, and if you don’t align with what they’re saying, especially if you’re far from it, it can be hard to resist correcting them or giving them your opinion, when I catch myself doing this, I try to reframe it to ask a question, rather than dump opposing facts.

But there’s another perspective I try really hard to keep in mind, if I were sitting at a table with a group of people and someone was loudly saying those things to me in person, I wouldn’t engage. I’d move to a quieter spot and ask the people I do like at the table to come for a chat there, or I’d acknowledge their feelings (but not the topic) and move to a different conversation topic.

But I feel like I need more practice at doing this when it’s in a text form of socializing, as this is.

I notice some amazing people on here, whom I aspire to learn from, that handle conflicting opinions with grace, and inclusion.

And I understand the dehumanisation that text conversations, present, it can be easy to imagine a hostility that may not be behind the comment. We’re all filling in the blanks of the personality behind the commenter. I worked a checkout for a good decade, so I’m very familiar with positions that can become dehumanised. Especially seeing as that seemed to be throughout a time when a huge bulk of people felt like they were only going to get righted the situation they believed had wronged them, by yelling or getting massively agro at the poor checkout chick who was gunna set that right wrong, because fk corporations, I enjoyed giving as much free stuff away as possible, any excuse, within the rules I could muster.

I absolutely understand tensions being high, currently, with world events being what they are. And there’s so much propaganda trying to brain wash us into being an army for their cause, and it’s all rage baity. So there’s even more rage and tension built up. I get it.

I really feel for people who can’t, and haven’t been helped to learn how to help and sooth their emotions, and then those emotions fester into all consuming things. And they find a cause to funnel that emotion into. Without really addressing that emotion, therefore not actual helping, processing or soothing that emotion.

See, we feel a feeling first, and then we ascribe a meaning, after. Except those two parts of the brain don’t actually communicate. The emotional brain is essentially non verbal, and the thinking brain, is verbal, but obviously it doesn’t do emotions. So you have this thinking guy in your head trying to tell you what emotions mean, except that guy is not an expert and knows nothing about them.

Your emotional brain is essentially a, very detailed messenger system for checking the temperature of the room. If shit feels off, it sends an alarm. Your emotions are a message to you that the shower temperature is too hot. It’s not really about that argument you had with your sibling last fortnight.

And to top it off, your emotional brain is non verbal, so all that ranting that you do, thinking that you solve the anger (or whatever emotion) you feel isn’t! It’s actually making it worse.

Your emotional brain is super primal, and very simplistic. All it wants is to know you took your hand out of the broiling hot shower water, and now your safe, and it’s message worked. It feels the environment and let’s you know if that’s vibing good stuff or danger. Sometime all you gotta do is change environment, or do a couple of jumping jacks, to help that emotional brain know, dangers gone. If you sit in the same spot and stress, your brain can even learn, that’s a stressful spot to sit, every time we sit here, bam, gotta be bad, and spits up those same feelings, even if it’s about nothing, just habit.

It also believes anything you tell it, because it’s listening to vibes. So even if shits fkd, right now, you have to keep telling yourself, everything is OK, you are safe and a capable bad ass, who has handled all the shit life threw so far, so you absolutely got this. Time to shine.

Your emotions are a message for you, and you alone. And if you expect others to sooth your emotions, all the time, you tell yourself that you don’t trust yourself to be capable of helping yourself process emotions. Obviously, we also need connection, so at the same time, it’s not at all about doing it alone. But it’s more about feeling safe to sit in emotions, rather than, fixing them. The way forward is sometimes the way back, sit in the emotion. Don’t try and put it out like it’s a fire, or distract it with shiny things. Just be, and listen, feel. Sometimes you need to sit with someone and not feel like you have to create a false front. Just sit and feel, for a bit.

If you’re getting stuck in emotions for elongated periods of time, there’s people who spend multiple years at school learning how to try and show you all the tips and tricks we’ve learned so far. Have a chat with one (or two if you don’t vibe with numerous uno) of them.

It’s literally all about emotional regulation. The mean people, haven’t been able to process their emotions, have never been taught how, their parents didn’t know, themselves, to tell them. And they’re being bombarded with proverbial tornadoes from all sides. And there’s so much rage baity propaganda, all designed to fuel and feed off that.

Yea, but there’s more to it than that. Thyroid causes issues that cause weight to pack on, no matter what your caloric intake is, menopause causing low estrogen causes weight gain because the visceral fat around your organs, the type you can’t exercise off, makes a kinda knock off estrogen, so your body packs on weight, to try and make estrogen there. You could eat one meal a day, all healthy and still put weight on. And there’s so many more health conditions that cause weight gain. Just Genetics, even. The calories in vs calories out theory has been debunked as a singular cause. Sure, if you have no underlying health issues and you watch what you eat, focus on fibre, legumes, vegetables etc, exercise the right amount, you will lose weight, but, if you are able to do that, you are probably already thin. People who are overweight, overwhelmingly have other conditions causing issues, too.

I’ve heard similar, that your body wants to keep the “norm” whatever that is. And it makes sense that any extreme weight loss, would seem, to your body, that there is a famine or something is wrong and then reset the balance back to what it was, as soon as it can.

You’re better off asking them questions. “what makes a person eat someone else’s pet?” or do simple definitions of what they say, as if you’re trying to understand. “so white people deserve to travel and others don’t?” (that’s a stupid example, but all of the talking points boil down to these types of statements). Apparently getting them to debate facts doesn’t work, getting them to question what they’re blindly believing, does, but I haven’t put it to practice. I want to go and get a refresher on critical thinking, so I can more easily break down, the way to properly ascertain if, what is being sold to you is truth or propaganda, and then make it into a question / statement and rather than addressing any topic, add a where did that come from, who sold you that, who profits from that, kinda thing, but I want a better statement / question than that. My parents are really similar, I have to avoid a lot of topics, I’m the black sheep of the family, I’ve always been much more earth conscious than them, it’s gotten so much worse lately. It’s the news they’re being fed. They believe it, wholeheartedly. It’s how they’ve always known what’s happening. And it’s why they’re panic buying out tiktok, currently, they (those creating the propaganda and distributing it) can’t have a narrative out there that doesn’t align with their agenda.

Thanks, lovely.

I dunno about you, but I had that as a left over from reddit, damn they’re unnecessarily harsh over there.

That’s so cool! I’m not at all into guns, but I love seeing other people’s expertise and the before and after of trashed to treasure, would be amazing to see.

Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking, too. You redirect the behavior somewhere safe while still fulfilling the essential need.

Is “terrorist” their new code word for “I don’t like this”

The assholes bought everything up, including the law and politicians. They rigged the game so no one else can climb the same ladder they did. But, also, death throes look like this. They positioned themselves so that the entire populous of the earth can’t sustain life, unless they don’t. That imbalance is about to be corrected. It’s gunna get a little bit worse before it gets better though, hang on.

I’m on the path to better systems than this, but as I’m too time poor, I gotta go with apps, and I just thought you might like to know I had as many songs in my Spotify Playlists and ported them over to Qobuz in seconds, if you want something quick for now. Qobuz talks you through it.

Or you’re Australian and you go yeah, nah, or nah, yeah, depending on the situation, of course.