i am nobody

31. Sapphic queer. She/they. Vegan. Cat mumma. Tumblr user since 2010. Australian.

[barbarashershey]

rebecca mader and laura benanti in starved (2005).

[phantomrose96]

YOU 🫵 can amass a friend group of childless people in their 30s as long as you pull from these 3 demographics

Queer freaks from the internet

Highly-educated weird women

Gamer men who became adjusted and compassionate in their 20s but still are not comfortable recognizing this in themselves so they’re putting off dating in order to play the horse girl gacha game

[cherrykha]

i just wanna stay in bed forever. sleeping feels easier than being awake

[maykitz]

i hope they never stop using floppy disk icons to indicate saving your file. doesn't matter how obsolete they are it's like honouring someone with a portrait on your currency

[its-funnytwittertweets]

[catchymemes]

[janetfraiser]

so I’m filling out pediatrician intake forms for my newborn son and I get to the demographic section and I was already chuckling about putting a marital status…

yes hello my 3 day old son responds to only Old English, thank you

[abstractmodule]

[kisxmesoft]

[adamtotscomix]

😇😈

[tjalexandernyc]

My mom accidentally joined a grieving support group (long story, she's not grieving tho) and she's missing it this week while visiting me and she's VERY concerned that Lorraine, who very kindly offered to bring a baked good like mom usually would, will NOT bring the correct kind of dessert, she says citrus tarts aren't "griefy" enough

[tjalexandernyc]

ok so the way my mom accidentally joined a grieving support group when she's not grieving is this:

She's Catholic and has two churches. One is her Real Church but it's far from her house and tbh all the nice priests have died and the new priests are either lackluster or extremely conservative so sometimes she goes to the Other Church which is closer and more liberal but which she won't join permanently because she doesn't want to "cede the territory" of her Real Church to the conservatives (this is all backstory for flavor don't worry about it). Other Church once announced they were looking for volunteers for, like, a grief squad? Basically if someone was having a funeral but no one showed up to attend, the church would call in the squad and they'd mourn for the dead person and pray (which is important for Catholics because we believe you need that oomph to actually get to Heaven, don't worry about it). Anyway mom thought that was a nice concept so the next time she went back to Real Church she asked the head usher if they wanted to put together a similar squad there. The usher was like, oh we have one of those! It's every Wednesday night, you should join.

The miscommunication: the usher didn't understand the purpose of the squad mom was describing, just heard "grieving and mourning" and went to the next closest thing. Because my mom showed up to the Wednesday meeting and discovered a group of widows and widowers who are there to, like, discuss their own losses?

Why didn't my mom just leave when she realized the mistake? Great question. She had baked a cake (chocolate) thinking that would be appreciated (apparently funerals without real mourners are very short and boring) and she didn't want it to go to waste.

She stayed in the support group!! And has been attending! For a full YEAR.

She explained to the group leader that she isn't a widow and doesn't have anyone to grieve but all they said was "well everyone's lost somebody. Or will." So now my mom goes to the weekly meeting with her baked goods because she 1) doesn't want to be rude and leave the group and 2) apparently grieving people are the Most happy to get cookies so she gets to practice all these bonkers recipes shes wanted to try.

In mom's opinion the best kinds of dessert for grief is chocolate and caramel, or any kind of crunchy candy confection. Lemon and cream is "not mournful enough." She's absolutely wild I love her

[iguanodonwildman]

(Tags via @cemeterything)

[i-just-like-commenting]

Text: decoupling pregnancy from femininity means accurate and more inclusive language and treatment, but it also allows cis women to refuse motherhood without refusing womanhood, which is great for feminism and terrifying for misogyny.

–THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS. As a sterile cis woman who doesn’t want to have children anyway I feel this is every ounce of my being. “Define woman” types tend to do so in a way that excludes me too, so I got to stand with my trans sisters.

[chirpasaurus]

Your periodic reminder that “divine feminine” this “magic womb” that is just patriarchy in gauze and glitter. REJECT THE BOX even when it has a makeover.

[nb-nightwing-deactivated2022111]

they posted a full version lol it’s mr Stacy’s dad for me

[the-fallen-blue]

[roselalonde]

conversations with my sisters cat

[glorianas]

[lenfanttterrible]

[thatkindoffeminist]

[kiwinning]

[sensoryoverloadistry]

The Grad Student Shuffle- Christ Fleming

[throesofincreasingwonder]

[moonemojii]

*friends car is locked*

Friend: stop pulling the handle

Me:

[takkezooi-deactivated20200726]

The disorted version is a million times funnier than the original one… i’m wheezing

[transhuman-priestess]

Periodic reminder that you should never trust a chiropractor with your body under any circumstances

[transhuman-priestess]

Chiropracty is a quack medicine in the extreme. It was invented by a guy in the 19th century who said a ghost taught it to him. It claims it can fix cirrhosis by cracking your spine. Chiropractors are one of the biggest groups keeping anti-vaccine fraud alive. Oh, and they can kill you doing a “routine adjustment”

Like I won’t go so far as to say “Ban chiropractors” because doing so would definitely backfire, but you should literally never ever under any circumstances seek their assistance for any health problem at all.

[transhuman-priestess]

Since this is getting a few notes I may as well attempt to head off one of the inevitable objections that’ll show up if this gets far enough.

“If Chiropractic* doesn’t work, why does insurance cover it?”

Well, it’s very simple you see, insurance hates paying for things, and chiropractors are cheap as fuck.

Let’s say you injure your back scrubbing a toilet or something. You go to a real doctor, a good doctor who doesn’t blow you off. That doctor may tell you to take some Motrin and call them if it doesn’t get better, but they also might prescribe you a stronger anti-inflammatory, or a muscle relaxer. Your insurance has to pay out for the visit and the medicine.

Let’s say they do that and two weeks later your back still hurts. Your doctor orders an MRI. Your insurance now has to pay for an MRI, which can be a couple thousand dollars, well more than the premium you’ve paid this month, which means they’ve lost money on you.

So you’re lucky and the MRI comes back that you’re okay but you need physical therapy. That’s another couple grand that your insurance has to pay out.

But maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe the MRI comes back and you have a herniated disc. You’re gonna need surgery and physical therapy, and now you’ve not only cost them more than your premiums bring in in a year, you’ve hit your annual maximum which means they have to pay everything from now on. They aren’t happy.

So let’s start back at the beginning. You injure your back, you instead go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor doesn’t have a decade of medical training, they have a certificate from a for-profit college that says they’re a chiropractor. They charge your insurance for an office visit, crack your back a bit, and send you on your merry way.

You might feel better for a while, because the placebo effect is more powerful than you think. But even if you do feel better, there’s still the chance that you’ve got damage. You may still need physical therapy, you may still have a herniated disc.

But if you keep going back to that chiropractor, they’re never gonna tell you that, and even if they do, it’ll be after 2-3 sessions, so 6-8 weeks at a minimum, during which time you’re putting more wear and tear on that injury, and eventually, you have to go to a real doctor.

But here’s where the magic happens. See, you injured your back in December. Now it’s February. Because your insurance put off sending you to a real doctor for two months, some actuary gets a big fat bonus for “reducing costs” in quarter 4. Meanwhile, your real doctor orders an MRI that shows that the damage is, in fact, much worse than it probably was to begin with. And there’s some evidence of injuries after the fact from the chiropractor. Oh, and by the way, there’s a chance you’re gonna be in pain for the rest of your life even with surgery.

But hey, your insurance managed to post a profit in Q4.

* “Chiropractic” is the “official” term for whatever the hell it is chiropractors do. I don’t respect it enough to use it unless I’m mocking someone who’s defending it.

[transhuman-priestess]

Alright you guys can have this one back but I swear to god if anyone mentions a fucking podcast on it I’m committing arson.

[narrativerehearsal]

This goes double if you have any kind of joint hyper mobility or ehlers danlos etc.

Pretty sure @thebibliosphere mentioned getting fucked up by a chiropractor, and I don't have ehlers danlos but I am hypermobile. I went to a very well trained osteopath (theoretically better than chiropractors and, at least in the UK, more regulated but still use some of the same techniques) for a few years and while I would feel better after each appointment, nothing ever really got better and I now look back at the way he handled my neck (which was way, way less extreme than chiropractic work but again, still on the same kind of track) and cringe.

What did help me was finding a physio who specialised in hypermobility and who actually checked my strength and range of motion to figure out where my stability was the worst and give me stabilising exercises. My bad joints are always going to need work but at least with a decent physio I have a hope of strengthening them and reducing pain and damage rather than getting easy temporary relief and making things worse in the long run.

If nothing else convinces you, the fact that every single chiropractor on youtube listens to clients listing off wildly different issues and then does the exact same few adjustments on them no matter what should be a red flag.

[thebibliosphere]

I was, yeah. I did chiropractic care for years because it’s what my previous MD recommended and it was covered by my insurance. And it worked great for me, because, as it turned out, I had actual misalignments from my joints being out of the sockets from undiagnosed Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. They were literally popping my joints back into place and relieving a significant amount of my pain in the process.

It turns out the whole “your spine is out of alignment” thing is very convincing when your spine is literally out of alignment due to a subluxated tailbone, hip, shoulder, etc etc.

And then, again on a recommendation from an MD doctor for my chronic migraines, I got my neck adjusted, very gently I might add, and I ended up having to get an emergency MRI for a possible brain bleed because something in my neck tore.

Thankfully it wasn't a brain bleed and I wasn't about to die.

Unfortunately, they’d torn every inch of soft tissue on the right side of my neck from my upper trap muscles all the way around the right side of my skull. I could barely hold my head up for weeks. Everything was agony.

Its been several years and I’m still dealing with the damage.

The spinal specialist I saw during recovery was very adamant about never letting anyone touch your neck like that, no matter how gentle they are. He told me the majority of his patients used to come from motoring accidents, and now a good solid chunk of them were from people being irreparably harmed by chiropractors. From torn ligaments to strokes, he’d seen it all. All because chiro is cheaper than physical therapy.

When I was finally diagnosed with EDS and started getting proper help, the horror that went through every EDS-aware physical therapist when I told them the chiropractor story was palpable. One straight up told me I should be paralyzed.

And then we started working on stabilizing my joints and muscles so that they don’t dislocate/subluxate as much because while the chiro might have been putting my joints back in without knowing it, they weren’t actually doing anything to address the root cause or stabilize the area.

It was just a weekly stop-gap measure that was inadvertently helping my immediate pain but ultimately lengthening my long term recovery.

I SHOULD have been recommend physical therapy from the start, even before we knew I had EDS, but because chiropractic care is cheaper, that’s what my insurance agreed to cover.

And now my head sits at a slight angle from scar tissue at the base of my skull and sometimes my fingers feel a little numb.

Don’t let people adjust your neck. You might fucking die.

[rosalarian]

My partner was considering going to a chiropractor until I told him about internal decapitation and that immediately and forever dissuaded him from the idea. (Internal decapitation is when your skull is disconnected from your spine, leaving only muscles and skin to keep your head connected to your body.)