A Wealth Of Ailments previously DancingPieces

Ace/Bi with ADHD, chronic illness, and anxiety. Mostly posting random things with some focus on disability and LGBTQIA changed name from DancingPieces on 8/26/25

[awealthofailments]

Just changed my name from DancingPieces to AWealthOfAilments!!! Sorry to all my mutuals who will likely be very confused!

[storyweavingspider]

Heartwarming! Man pissing on subway stairs genders you correctly, mortified he was doing that in front of a woman

[storyweavingspider]

He was doing it while on the phone and said “so long as there ain’t a woman around it’s fine” then turned around, saw me, and went “oh shit!” And started apologizing

[bananonbinary]

tony's chocolonely mildly pisses me off every time i eat it. like yeah i get it ur doing a whole symbolism thing about unfairness and whatever, but its actually SO DIFFICULT to eat fucking. gerrymandered chocolate. your symbolism is ruining my chocolate experience.

who approved this.

[bananonbinary]

like. ur already more expensive. i understand this. i am willing to pay more money to have slave-free delicious chocolate. why must you punish me further by making it a goddamn puzzle to break a piece off.

[closet-keys]

Tony's Chocolonely does not ensure a living wage for cocoa workers in West Africa (see 2020 report by Voice Network).

Food Empowerment Project maintains an updated list of chocolate brands they recommend based on the following standards:

transparency about the country of origin for cocoa

if sourced from Western Africa, the workers must own the companies/be in charge of the profits from their labor (this standard is because child labor and slavery have been widely documented for decades in this area)

if sourced from Brazil, the workers must own the company and/or be in charge of the profits from their labor, or the company must be going above and beyond to support the workers and their families (this standard is because "child labor and slavery only recently have been documented in cocoa in Brazil" and they are "giving Brazilian companies that are trying to address the issue by supporting the workers and their families the benefit of the doubt.")

this isn't perfect, obviously, but it is much more grounded in the rights of workers than the various certifications (e.g. Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, etc.) you'll see on product packaging

[aloofraven]

I think it should be noted that the Food Empowerment Project specifically only lists companies making "at least one vegan chocolate product" and that they only ask about the companies' vegan chocolates specifically. Their list is not an exhaustive resource for every type of chocolate.

[Source: "Understanding Our Chocolate List" from their website]

Before I found that link I was curious as to why I didn't see any Norwegian manufacturers on their list(which makes sense now, as their chocolates are almost exclusively milk chocolate) and looked up where our companies source their chocolate from and found Nidar gets theirs from the Rainforest Alliance and Freia from Cocoa Life, both of which have been under scrutiny for not preventing child labour and not paying farmers a living wage among other things. So it appears Norwegian chocolate is out of the ethical picture.

[roninnozlo]

I stated this in the comments of the post already, but it’d probably be better to add it as a reblog, so it’s more visible and doesn’t need to be restated by anyone else in the future.

So, Tony’s allied with Barry Callebut to get its cocoa. Barry Callebut is one of the biggest chocolate companies in the world, and it is unethical, obviously. This led to Tony’s revealing in February 2022 that 1701 child laborers were in their supply chain. Barry Callebut had over 21K at the time. Both of those numbers have risen, and Tony’s has outright admitted they don’t give a fuck about child labor laws when asked about it, content to let children to continue farming their cocoa instead of actually doing the activism they claim to do. (business-humanrights.org, feb 6 2022)

About a week ago, Tony’s joined Barry, Nestle and Ferrero in pushing against the reinstatement of important EUDR deforestation legislations. Under that regulation that they pushed against, they would’ve had to be more transparent about their supply chains for their more key ingredients - So Tony’s is lobbying against the exact thing they claim to stand for. (confectioneryproduction.com, mar 18, 2026)

Won’t restate @closet-keys’s addition, of course. That’d just be redundant and maybe annoying since, yknow, it’s already been said.

If you wanna find a better chocolate brand it’s really damn easy. There’s lists on slavefreechocolate.org of both the ethical and unethical companies. Both lists can be found here:

Below is a list of chocolate companies that only use ethically grown cocoa.  Find out how you can tell if the chocolate you are ea

And it doesn’t have the vegan product restriction the other list has, which solves @aloofraven’s issue.

[bewitchedbewilderedandbefuddled]

I think we as a fandom don’t talk enough about how utterly TERRIFYING the initiative is from the demons perspective:

Like one day ur all hunky dory and chilling and the next there’s a blinding electrical pain, and you wake up in a white cell with scars on you that you don’t remember the cause of.

Can you imagine the demons that were cut open and sewed back together to study their anatomy.

Starving for days and days until a little baggie of food falls, and you gamble whether to keep starving or drink and blackout, wake up with new holes, if you wake up at all.

They took Spikes ability to kill, from a vampires perspective that’s not just annoying or upsetting, it’s like ripping out someone’s teeth or fingers and telling them to eat. You’re no longer in control of your own decisions, of your own safety- that’s nightmare shit and I wish we explored this more in the show.

[greatmolassesflood]

i can't be the only one who's just straight-up ... bored with women hating themselves. my mom keeps lamenting to me how upset she is about her gray hair. my friend stares at her laugh lines every day in agony. my sister loses sleep over the horrible unbearable thought of looking fat. and every time these women i love open up to me, i can't help but think ... then stop staring at yourself? stop drowning yourself, narcissus, and just fucking live your life instead of sitting in front of a mirror obeying cosmetic corporations' lies. just stop it. this is getting ridiculous. you're too smart to be falling for this bullshit. "oh no but these men who hate women told me that if i'm ugly i'm worthless!" girl if you actually believe that then good luck. but i am getting worse at being supportive of people whose nonsense worldviews keep them trapped in pain. stop looking at yourself start fucking living i am pleading you deserve to be happy and it is stupid that you disagree

[vanityschild-deactivated2026031]

Someone in the comments said "you really said just stop being insecure" and yes :) make an effort to stop spiralling about your looks, challenge insecure thoughts and stop doing things that lead to you feeling insecure.

[whisperingthings]

I always come back to this: Do your insecurities match your morals?

Do you truly believe that having belly fat makes people disgusting? That the media should have final say on how you feel about yourself? If you don't believe it and there is a mismatch between your moral beliefs and your gut reaction to your appearance...

Then yeah. Stop being insecure. It's work but it's worth it.

[freshgratednutmeg]

Promoting @sarkywoman 's tags as that's a perfectly distilled mantra:

I am not the exception to my beliefs

[aromanticsky]

[ID: tags: #love this last addition #I am not the exception to my beliefs. /end ID]

[shamebats]

Imo the best type of system for children to grow up in would be one that assumes the birth parents/primary guardians won't do shit and takes care of every aspect of childcare that's essential for their wellbeing and development, collectively.

[shamebats]

But I'm just a guy who only learned how to brush his teeth properly and got glasses as a child because we had both a dentist and a doctor come to school on a regular basis. The dentist would have us all stand in a circle with our little toothbrushes and show us how to brush and correct our technique. The doctors would give us general health assessments and then have the teachers contact our patents and essentially peer pressure them into getting us any health intervention we needed. My parents only reluctantly got me glasses because they knew the teachers would judge them if they kept seeing me sit in the very front row and still squint to see the chalkboard. So I'm biased.

[shamebats]

The only times I ever remember seeing a dentist or doctor as a child was at school. I'm quite healthy physically and I'm very grateful for all the care I got from the various professionals who cared about my well-being and development more than my actual parents did.

We had free healthcare including dental, mind you, my parents just couldn't be bothered. When my brother, as a teenager, asked our mother if she could take him to his orthodontist appointments (which he'd already arranged for on his own) she basically told him she didn't feel like it and he had to take the bus.

If I could improve anything about that system, I'd take it even further and make it so kids could see a doctor and get meds, treatments, therapy, tests, disability aids etc. without having to rely on their parents as well. I shouldn't have had to put up with being bullied and guilt-tripped about the family finances and the time investment needed to take me to the optometrist every time I needed new glasses.

[shamebats]

Some parents would not take care of their children even if they were given all the time and the resources. Mine are a great example of that — my mother stopped working and became a homemaker when I was in kindergarten, my father worked from the garage and was also always home. They had a car and our village even had a bus that would come once or twice an hour that would take you to the next two bigger cities.

Did that, plus the free healthcare, translate into them actually parenting and caring for us properly? It did not. They only ever did any of that reluctantly when not doing it would make them look bad, and most of the time they did a shitty job because they could never resist the urge to boost their egos by means of bullying literal children.

So I have to wonder: what did they actually contribute to our upbringing? Like they didn't teach us shit and mostly they just endangered our mental and physical health — but hey, at least they gave me cPTSD! That took some work too.

[anarchistmemedistro]

see also family abolition, and youth liberation .

[applefae]

A knee-jerk response to neglectful parenting I see a lot is “people should have to get licenses and take rigorous tests to PROVE that they should be ALLOWED to have kids” which is eugenics. That’s just the starting line for eugenics.

We are at a point in humanity where there is no meaningful reason why we shouldn’t be structuring our societies around wellbeing for all instead of wellbeing for the “deserving”.

Assume some parents will fail. Build social infrastructure that is designed to support failed kids rather than punish would-be parents.

[disabled-bug]

Idk what person with chronic illness needs to hear this, but you can do things to make your responsibilities nicer for yourself. You can get an ice cream after a blood draw. You can sit down for tv time after an injection. You can pick out the bandaids that have cartoon characters on them instead of the plain ones. Being an adult doesn’t stop you from benefiting from encouragement. Go for whatever fits with your routine/abilities/budget and makes life a little better. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down etc etc

[weltenwellen]

Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

[biracy]

[Text ID: I am afraid to own a Body— / I am afraid to own a Soul— / Profound— precarious Property— / Possession, not optional— End ID]

[nepofledgling]

one of the guys in the kitchen at work got called irritating and replied “I am not irritating. You just find me irritating. There are many people who love me.” I think we should all adopt his attitude

[knifearo]

aroace nonbinary people you are everything to me. shout out to the bitches who just said "nah i'm not doing any of that"

[draconym]

The eye doctor is the most fun doctor you can go to. They never steal your blood. They never make you get naked and put on a paper dress. They're just like, "Can you see these letters? It's fine if you can't, we can fix that." And they don't even spell anything.

[draconym]

[orcboxer]

Every time I go they put me in a chair and they say look into this machine there's a hot air balloon or a farmhouse in there and I do and I'm like you're right I see it and they're like yeah keep admiring that hot air balloon or farmhouse and I do and I'm like this shit's quaint as fuck and then do you know what happens next they attack me they jumpscare me with air directly into my eyeballs and i fall out the chair and they say sorryyyy but they're NOT they wanted this to happen they KNEW about the jumpscare well now I'm wise to it now I know better when I go in and they say look at this bodacious hot air balloon I'm like NO WAY DUDE that balloon wishes me harm have at thee and I attack them and push them on the ground and spit on them

[lastoneout]

also sometimes you go and they have you put your face up to this big box full of little lights and they give you a clicker and ask you to stare at the dot in the center and click when you see a light in your peripheral vision and you're like I have ADHD I can't do this and they say you'll be fine and then they COVER UP one of your eyes and you're like this is 9000% harder now and I keep having to blink and they go "yeah okay now click-y click-y bitch" and you try your fucking best internally screaming the entire time and it feels like it takes 700 years and then you go home and have a migraine for the rest of the day

don't even get me started on the flashbang device

[gaphic]

my optometrist has never once shot air in my eye and when he checks my peripheral vision it takes 3 seconds maybe 4 max. I think maybe you guys are being tortured by perverts

[lastoneout]

I know what test you're talking about, the one I do is an advanced test that checks your entire visual field, the peripheral test they do that's fast is a simpler version that they do with their hands, but it's the same basic principle. The puff of air thing tests the pressure inside your eye tho and it's a little odd to me they haven't done that for you, I've had to do that at every eye exam I've had since I got glasses at age seven, doesn't matter the city or state, they always do it.

But yeah if there's anything even a little complicated going on past "you need glasses" the eye doctor goes from fun to being tortured by perverts extremely quickly.

[xanthofile]

Fun fact: my dad, who was phobic of needles and therefore NEVER went to the doctor in his adult life except for the time he got appendicitis in his 30s, went to get new glasses bc he broke his in his 50s, and found out he 1. had a denegerative eye disease, 2. his blood pressure was so high they sent him to the ER, AND 3. he has diabetes and his glucose was so high he should have been in a coma.

To this day, he's like....all I wanted was new glasses.

Also: I have only gotten the pressure test through a puff of air in the past decade. Previously it was always having to be dilated with drops (I've had glasses since 2002). IHS always wants to dilate my eyes but I have to drive 40 minutes to the clinic so, nope. I do have to say I prefer the puff test bc those drops burn like a motherfucker and I tend to waste half the dose bc I "am the fastest blinker" most of the techs have met.

[lastoneout]

That's incredible also they do the drops AND the puff of air to me 😭😭😭 but I have fucked up eyes so maybe that's it.

[thoodleoo]

extremely funny when students get really into some harmless "vintage" activity to the point of absurdity. right now it's hacky sack, which is not something i ever thought i would see my students playing en masse. and yet here they are organizing competitive hacky sack teams. taking over any space they can to kick a hacky sack around. i had to chase a group to morning assembly today because they were busy playing hacky sack. just saw one of my students sending an email that said "stop adding randos to our team they're the worst sackers." 2026 year of the hacky sack ig

[thoodleoo]

apparently stores are running out of hacky sacks. their voracity for hacky sack is outpacing the supply chain. beautiful hacky sack world

[escuerzoresucitado]

[findingfeather]

I absolutely fucking hate this. Gold star, no notes.

[sashasienna]

[washingtoncapitalsbara]

[First ID: A red and white pill on a white background. Top text: "This is a placebo meme for humor calibration purposes." Bottom text: "It has no inherent effect but studies have shown it to be as effective as regular memes in a certain perfect of the population."]

[Second ID: Same image as the first, except both captions have been covered with black, and the new bottom text (white against the black background) reads, "Ceci n'est pas un mème."]

[thedreamthieves]

i think one of the worst things the left wing internet ever did was push the idea that oppression is basically a virtue, and being oppressed is a sign of your morality. it has made it like…impossible for some of you to hold the idea that most people are privileged in some ways and oppressed in others. AND a lot of you seem to have it in your mind that terrible people cannot be oppressed, and that oppressed people cannot do terrible things, which is a dangerous rhetoric to hold imo.

[ishimarukiyotaka]

The sign many left wingers have subconsciously accepted moving right on covid and embraced lowering public health standards is when people seem to think “masks should be mandatory in healthcare settings /airplanes “ is somehow a radical position to take in an ongoing pandemic

[jupiterroxx]

its so fucking weird because "masks in healthcare" should be the default all of the time. Doctors and nurses are literally employed to go from sick person to sick person, treating immunocompromised people especially often.

It should have been mandatory BEFORE covid

[urie]

the thing is like men and men really cant be friends because the sex part does always get in the way like thats true. and i mean that like im actually dead serious about that

[urie]

like have you ever seen two straight men attempt to be friends with each other but the gay sex they arent having is literally preventing them from the transformative healing power of friendship. this is real

[urie]

i dont even mean this in a "they want to fuck each other" way (although many of them do and will never know it) i mean that like the fact that gay sex is even hypothetically possible between them makes it loom over their friendship like it genuinely haunts them that they could be having it. gay sex is the elephant in the room every time they attempt to be emotionally vulnerable with one another, every time they let a hug linger too long. they cannot address its existence and so there is always something in their way, preventing true connection. and that something is the gay sex. that they are not having. the elephant of gay sex

[concerningwolves]

that "I consent" "I consent" "I don't consent! (isn't there someone you forgot to ask?)" meme, but with me, any plan ever, and my chronic health issues