My 20s were spent in a horrible relationship that was like a frog in boiling water. I didn’t realize how terrible I was being treated until I got out of it and I’m still dealing with the fallout and the trauma, but I’m fucking free! And in the midst of all that I had undiagnosed endometriosis that the doctors kept dismissing and I also had undiagnosed ADHD.

In my 30s I got out of that relationship, got diagnosed with ADHD, and found a doctor who took my endo symptoms seriously and did surgery (all the best things in the world to her, she saved my sanity and my life).

My 30s are not easy, but my 20s were a cage and my 30s is doing what I want and feeling healthier doing it!

I actually miss having to clean the mouse’s ball. It was oddly therapeutic.

I’m a woman in my mid 30s. I work 48 hours a week, attend school in person, train jiu jitsu, and deal with all the normal life shit that comes with living alone and having to keep my home clean and my cats and I alive and fed. I also do all that while suffering from migraines and having ADHD.

Am I tired? Fucking yes. Am I managing? Also yes.

My life is so much better in my 30s than in my 20s. If any young woman is out there reading this, your 30s is not the threshold to decrepit haghood, it is fine.

Also, I don’t drink energy drinks, or consume large amounts of caffeine. I also don’t drink alcohol. I just eat moderately healthy, stay away from most fast food, and try to exercise every day, even if it’s just going for a 30 minute walk because I’m too tired or too busy to do anything else.

I’m dead serious, I genuinely don’t think I even speak 169 sentences a day and I work with people.

You think the CEO is doing it? If he isn’t than an employee of the business is doing it. The “company” isn’t some monster that works on its own, it needs employees to carry out its work.

Basically zero effort, except we need to get a bunch of low paid employees in on this conspiracy and send them out to throw shit on the roads and count on them to never get disgruntled and tell anyone or tell their spouses who might tell a family member who might tell a friend who might post about it on social media after they get a flat tire.

Find a different conspiracy, this one’s shit.

Except a lot of tire companies have add-ons you can buy for extra money per tire (it’s not even that much if I’m remembering correctly) where they’ll replace the tire for free if you get a flat within a specified amount of time, unless it’s something like you stuck a knife in your sidewall.

So this wouldn’t benefit them at all.

This is long and rather rambling and I have no idea if it makes any sense at all…

I grew up in a home where I was isolated from almost everyone outside my family (it was normal to go days or weeks without leaving my house as a child) and had an abusive parent. I have actual (not self diagnosed) PTSD from it.

I escaped my family to marry too young into what I thought was a good relationship but ended up being to a manipulative person who could be good to me but who treated me poorly most of the time, dismissed my feelings, and gaslighted me until I genuinely thought I was losing my mind (the actual form of gaslighting, not the reddit version). That relationship went on way too long.

I escaped that and had to start over with a few hundred dollars in my bank account in my 30s. Right as I was getting my feet under me Trump 2.0 happened and I got swept up in the negativity and panic.

I felt like I had to be glued to the news all the time to avoid being complacent. I felt like if I wasn’t aware of everything going on I was abusing my privilege to not be aware of things that weren’t affecting me.

My mental health was already destroyed from all the bad things that happened to me and this shit sent me far deeper into the spiral and prevented me from ever getting out.

So I stopped.

I don’t ever want to be complacent, I don’t ever want to stop standing up for what is right, but feeling so crushed by the world that I can’t even get out of bed on my days off isn’t helping anyone.

I only scan local news websites now and whatever global news pops up on Lemmy, but I rarely click on it. I occasionally pop over to propublica because I think their work is excellent.

I started making an effort to have more real conversations with people around me, and not doom and gloom conversations, but conversations like “what hobbies do you have?” and questions about who they are as people and what life experiences they are. I’ve even told a few people “my life has been rough and I never really got to have hobbies and now I’m trying to find things I like, what are your favorite things to do?” It’s led to some really good conversations and some people in the real world really do suck but a lot are really cool people!

My mental health has improved so much. I obviously am less aware of what’s going on in the world because I’m not dialed in constantly to the news headlines, but I don’t feel any more complacent and I still feel completely ready to stand up and defend what I believe is right. I’m still going to go vote in every election, but I don’t need to overwhelm my mind with things I can’t control to the point that I’m useless to step in when there is something I can control.

It does feel like I’m doomed and that one day I’ll end up jobless and homeless, but you know what? Fuck it. I’ll go down swinging. I have a job and an adorable little apartment and all of that is so fragile and I could lose it so quickly but right now it’s still mine and every time I go to bed I’m filled with gratitude that I have a home and food in my fridge and I am doing this myself. I can only control what I can control.

Today I went for a walk near my home and found a turtle. I also found a bumble bee crawling around in the road and I picked it up and moved it before it could get run over and got to take a moment to enjoy the fuzzy little bee crawling up my arm. Enjoy the little moments. Stop and breathe and smell the flowers. Log off and go literally touch grass.

It’s ok to take a break. You need to come first, because if you don’t find your own oxygen mask you’ll suffocate before you can put on anyone else’s. And don’t forget to be grateful for what you do have and maybe some day you’ll have all the things you lack.

I’ll be honest, I’m playing on story mode because I hate the slog of combat being so insanely difficult in most video games and I hate having to grind to level up in early games. As my one coworker so excellently put it, “if I want to punish myself I’ll pick up overtime”. I’m very sad that I can’t sneak around shooting everyone in the back like in Skyrim but I am enjoying the mechanics of Tainted Grail and I love the world and the lore and the whole idea of the Wyrdness and the fact that nighttime and daytime are actually different is delightful.

I’ll have to look at Dread Delusion, I’ve never heard of it.

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. It was on my wishlist for awhile, but some of the negative reviews had me thinking it wasn’t something I would enjoy. Then I kept seeing comments that it was a good game to play if you like Skyrim. I disagree with that, it’s not so much Skyrim vibes than as if Oblivion and Elden Ring had a baby that was into weird creepy shit and obsessed with the Knights of the Round table.

It’s cool AF and I was absolutely obsessed from the very beginning. I am glad I waited a bit to play it because there’s 3rd person mode now and I don’t think it initially shipped with 3rd person mode. I get insanely sick playing a lot of 1st person games. Some games I’m fine with and other games I’m puking my guts out and going to bed within 15 minutes of booting up the game, so having 3rd person mode (even if it’s officially unsupported and a little glitchy) means I can play for hours and actually enjoy the game.

I have YouTube premium because of the music and videos, but they keep raising the price. unfortunately I have had playlists on there for years that have hundreds of songs - some fairly obscure - and it’s the thought of trying to recreate them all from scratch that’s kept me there.

Does anyone know if there’s a tool that can export my playlists into a streaming service that’s more artist friendly?

The sad truth in this world is that apart from your close friends, your partners and your parents (if you’re lucky) nobody cares too much about you in general.

I’ve learned that if I open my mouth and admit I’m struggling or a little depressed, the relationship ends very quickly. Even if you aren’t noticeably depressed, it doesn’t affect them at all and they only know it because you admitted to it, it’s like they think it’s contagious. Now, no matter what it’s big happy smile and I AM ABSOLUTELY GREAT LIFE IS GOOD HOW ARE YOU? My therapist is the only person I will ever tell when I’m having a rough time and even then sometimes it’s really hard to admit it and not keep pretending everything is good.

I knew someone who got picked for jury duty on a trial that lasted over a month in federal court over 2 hours from where he lived.

He ended up having to take out loans to cover his travel expenses on top of his normal living expenses. He got paid something like $7/day for the entire trial and his job only gave 5 days of PTO for the whole year and didn’t pay for jury duty like a lot of businesses do, so after the first week he had no income.

My experience as a neurodivergent woman was that as a girl growing up I was very much ostracized from other girls and was mocked and bullied cause I was a little weirdo, but I could usually find a couple boys who were a year or three older than me who would treat me kindly and include me in their games. They didn’t treat me quite like an equal but more like a sister they needed to take care of and it was always a safe place for me.

As an adult I’ve found dynamics are different and I still struggle making friends and relating to people because I never got to have friends as a kid, but I can definitely walk into a group of women and not be bullied and generally can make myself feel included with some social effort.

Right there with you. May the stars find us both a better path before the end comes.

The Midas automotive repair company had (has) the slogan “Trust the Midas touch” which definitely is a play on words using the myth. There used to be commercials where they would sing it at the end when I was a kid.

I’ve noticed that it feels like a very large proportion of Gen Z and young millennials vape like their lives depend on it. They can’t go anywhere without a vape in hand and they’re sucking on it every minute or so. I’m curious if the demographic that would be heavy drinkers is now just heavy vapers instead.

We really have failed our men and our boys. I consider myself a feminist and I can argue about the shitty things that men do to women with the rest of them, but what almost always gets left out of the argument is that men were raised to be this way since they were boys. Society, do better. Stop raising girls to be accountable while giving boys a pass. Let your boys (and girls!) be rough and tough but teach them tenderness, compassion, and that emotions are healthy.

Teach your boys to become men like Aragorn.

I want to switch to Linux so badly. I’ve been meaning to do it for years. But all I do on my PC is game. I don’t use it for anything else except storing music files. When I turn it on, I’m trying to escape from life. I don’t want to tweak shit, I don’t want to troubleshoot, and I don’t want to have to look anything up or get a home degree in computer science to figure out how to run my computer. I just want to load my games and play and not have to fiddle with compatibility or making it work. I’m still on Windows 10 and I keep it disconnected from the Internet unless I’m playing a game that needs a connection or I’m backing up my saves. So far it works for me and I don’t know what I’ll do when that stops. Eventually I’ll probably switch my laptop to Linux and maybe if that goes well I’ll get brave and do my PC.

I think it’s social conditioning and lack of mental health resources. Girls are strongly socially conditioned to “play nice” and get along at all costs, which tends to lead to more rules following. Boys are often socialized to suppress their emotions while at the same time are allowed to act out and encouraged to be tough and macho. The bad boy act is romanticized and violence is at best tolerated and at worst idolized.

So you have men who never learned how to deal with their feelings who also are used to having a physical, often violent outlet because that’s the only acceptable thing they know.