[larkandkatydid]

One thing I’ve become a real extremist about is little girl’s clothing and hair styles because if your kid can’t get her hair wet, hang upside down, climb over a fence or run full out in the outfit/hair she is currently wearing then why not? And the answer better be both extremely fucking good and describe something temporary.

[poodletrain]

Hope you don't mind a story that also made me extremist about this issue.

Took my friends daughter (2.5yrs) to the park. Dressed her in practical clothing that's ok to get stained, brought an extra change of clothing. She sat in the mud at the water bank and played with rocks and mud. A little girl came over, couldn't be more than 3yrs. She was looking longingly at my friend's daughter. She has her hair in a perfect style and she's wearing a pretty dress with white socks and dressy shoes. The parents say "Sweetie don't go into the mud, you'll get your dress dirty" and pull her away, while giving me a judgmental look as they see the kid in my charge covered in mud and throwing rocks into the water. It felt really weird, like we saw eachother as aliens with completely different ideas on how to raise children. When my friends daughter was done playing, changed her into clean clothing and went back home. She had a lot of fun at the park and a day full of nature and play. The other little girl kept her dress clean.

[maybeasunflower]

There's a Tumblr post about someone finding out that "girls" toddler clothes are more restrictive than "boys" toddler clothes to the point that it made it harder for them to crawl, at a stage where they were learning to crawl.

[impulsivelycontentious]

I made one about how my toddler child couldn't climb in girl's TODDLER PANTS.

We are not a house who cares much about gendering a baby's clothes. It's a BABY. It doesn't care. So we'd take the kid to yard sales and let them pick out whatever baby clothes caught their fancy and would fit. Some were 'boy' and some were 'girl'. Kiddo loved floral prints because they're a baby (yeah my kid has always picked their own clothes).

Anyway, my kid LOVED TO CLIMB. Sometimes.

It was weird. Sometimes they were all over the sofa and the playground equipment and MY LEGS and sometimes they just. Weren't. Couldn't figure out what was going on.

Until I caught them trying to climb on rhe sofa in one of their pretty flowered pants.

They COULDN'T LIFT THEIR LEGS PROPERLY. And gave up, and did something else.

So I tested this out and... Yeah. The kid COULDN'T climb in ANY of their girl pants. Any. Put them in boy clothes and suddenly the kid is on everything again.

We stopped buying girl pants completely until they were old enough to test them and my kid is a TEENAGER now and i still make them lift their legs individually and jump if it's a girl fit.

YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO MEAN TO DO IT.

Whoever designed these clothes literally did not care if the baby could MOVE. But only if girl.

[withallmylove-ab]

On This the 100th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic, We Reconsider the Buoyancy of the Human Heart

By Laura Lamb Brown-Lavolie from Alight: Best-Loved Poems from the 2013 Women of the World Poetry Slam. What’s wrong? Titanic asked me this

“What’s wrong? Titanic asked me this morning, when she found me lying on the ocean floor with all my suitcases strewn open.

Oh, I dunno, I moaned. I was looking through National Geographic and saw some pictures of you, and thought I might come have a chat. You looked great, by the way, in the pictures.

Me? No. Titanic smiled. If anything I seem to have become a Picasso. And I have a beard.

It was true; she looked more like a collage of a ship. Strangely two-dimensional, in a crater of her own making: French doors, boilers, railings every which way. And she did have a bit of a beard-rust icicles hanging in red strands from her iron engines.

Sitting up in my own little crater, I sort-of blushed.

To be honest, I told Titanic, My honey’s leaving town soon and I’m afraid it’s gonna wreck me, so I dove down here.

Well come on in, Titanic said, but I’m not sure I’ve got what you’re looking for.

So in I climbed, through a window between two rust stalactites, and began to pace her great promenade. (Which should have been awesome, by the way — walking by the ghosts of all those waving handkerchiefs — except that I was in that feeling-sorry-for-yourself state where every hallway is the hallway of your own wretched mind, every ghost your own ghost, so I didn’t take a good look around.)

When I got to the Turkish baths, I sat on the edge of a barnacled tub and watched weird crabs scrabble at my feet.

I was hoping you’d teach me how to sink, I said. You who have spent a century underwater with 1500 skeletons in your chest.

I don’t know, said Titanic, I’m kind of a wreck.

Exactly! I said, Me too! I’m here to apprentice myself to wreckage. I’m here to apprentice myself to you! Great bearded lady, gargantuan ark, you floating hotel. With enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone I’ve ever loved.

My heart has an iceberg with its name on it, I told Titanic, so I need your advice. Tell me, did you see the iceberg coming?

I did, Titanic said.

And you sailed right into it?

It was love, Titanic said.

And the band just kept playing? And the captain stayed at the wheel? What did it feel like to swallow seawater? Tell me, Titanic, how did it feel?

It felt like a hole in my side and then it felt like plummeting face first into the ice-cold ocean.

She’s a straight talker, the Titanic.

Alright, I said. Now let’s talk about rust. When my love leaves, I’m planning to weep stalactites from my chin. I will wear my sadness in long strands. Like you, I will be bearded by it.

Then I made a terrible noise. Eeeeeeeeeeeerkkkkkkkkkk! I’ve been practicing the sound of wrenching metal, I told her, from when my love leaves.

But you aren’t made of metal. Titanic said to me.

I’m a writer, I said, I can be made of anything.

Well then, be a writer. She said.

Be a writer? I paused, anemones between my toes. Okay. When my love leaves. I will start with SOS. I will Morse code odes as the whole world goes vertical. I will write nosedives as my torso splits in two.

And the next day I will write the stunned headlines, and the next day I will write the obituaries, and the next day I will write furious accusations, and the next day I will write lawsuits, and the next day I will write confessions of wrongdoing, and the next day I will write pardons, but I won’t really mean it, and the next day I will write sonnets, but they won’t fit the schema, and the next day I will write pleas, please, please come back. The next day I will write epitaphs, navigation maps, warnings for future generations about the hubris of human love. I will write quotas and queries and quizzes, I will write nonsense, I will write nonsense, I will write nonsense all the way down and no diving teams will find me, no robot arms will retrieve me in pieces, never will I be reassembled in plain air. No, I will remain whole, two miles down, with my suitcases strewn open, and in 100 years I will still be writing about this feeling, though my heart be a Picasso, though my heart be bearded at the bottom of the sea.

The Titanic let me cry for a while, my sobs echoing off her moldy mosaics.

Then she said: Girl, you’re too young for a beard like this. You’re never gonna get some if you rust over now.

I sniffled a little and scratched my name into the green slime of the tub.

The trouble with you humans is that you are so concerned with staying afloat. Go ahead, be gouged open by love. Gulp that saltwater, sink beneath the waves. You’re not a boat, you can go under and come up again, with those big old lungs of yours, those hard kicking legs.

And your heart, she said, that gargantuan ark, that floating hotel. Call it Unsinkable, though it is sinkable. Embark, embark.

There are enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone you’ll ever love.

That’s what the Titanic told me this morning, me, lying next to her on the ocean floor.

There are enough ballrooms in you.”

[nudityandnerdery]

Sub-Radio, the band that did Stacy's Dad, coming out with another banger for Pride.

[damndorothea]

i saw this somewhere else but reply / tag what you did today so everyone can see that we all did something different today

[evilscientist3]

the thing about fruit flies is that in the abstract, they live peaceful and irreproachable lives nibbling on overripe fruit and its attending microbes, but practically speaking they awaken some sort of primordial rage within me. Get off my bananas you little fucks

[abundantchewtoys]

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

"only a poor artisan blames his tools" is such bullshit, in almost every imaginable line of work the quality of the tools you have access to plays a massive role in the quality of the end product, sometimes in excess of the role played by individual skill! For example, some people have to code in javascript

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

Clip of Lucy Dacus on the Las Culturistas podcast.

[traegorn]

I went to my first pride when I was sixteen.

I didn't come out to anyone until my early thirties, and I didn't fully come out publicly until I was thirty-seven.

[anxietyproblem]

[stjohnstarling]

I’m not sure how many people realize that there’s a way in which hurt/comfort is actually very kinky, because at its core you’ve got this emotional power exchange fantasy where one character is vulnerable and helpless and the other takes care of them. In the case of stories involving grievous injuries, where someone is bedridden for a long time, you often end up with two characters in a 24/7 total power exchange relationship without a safeword. It just doesn’t involve as many whips and dog collars.

[ardebatis]

Can I?? Like burrow into your brain like an amoeba? I need to feed on more of this

[mumblingsage]

This reminds me of a blogger who covered femdom romance and erotica novels, who once remarked on a non-femdom series where "the portrayal of sex has an emotional intensity and purpose which is reminiscent of BDSM. The sex is vanilla, but the feelings are rather sadomasochism."

Hurt/comfort may be vanilla or entirely nonsexual, but the feelings can get very sadomasochism! Or D/s. Or other elements of kink.

[hbmmaster]

usa: united states of america

usb: universal serial bus

usc: university of southern california

usd: united states dollar

use: now this one's just a normal verb

[1percentcharge]

I’m an omnivore but a hot take of mine (albeit not a hill I will die on) is that it was counterproductive to turn vegetarian/vegan into strict identities and shame anyone vegetarian-adjacent who eats meat once in a while as weak-willed or a hypocrite. I think someone who has a pork dumpling every now and then still exhibits discipline and has more in common with a vegetarian than someone who eats steak and bacon every day and turning reducing meat into an all-or-nothing thing just discourages people

[eskewcity]

People will be like “oh I love gay podcast characters” but won’t even listen to the ROOTS (welcome to nightvale)

[eskewcity]

nothing like hearing this on the very first episode of the show and knowing shit was about to go down

[eskewcity]

there’s something about reading the tags on this post that really gets to me because so many people are talking about how this podcast was their first exposure to a gay character that wasn’t played off as a joke and instead how powerful it was to see Cecil completely unshakable in his immediate love for Carlos. some people even talked about how they used to listen to this with their parents and how their parents actually became more understanding for their own coming out because of it. I know it’s a podcast that most of us listened to when we were 13 and haven’t caught up to in years and but it’s really refreshing to see how much that representation meant to people then and still now :)

[evilkitten3]

it was also one of the first times i’d seen a jewish character whose jewishness was only used as a joke in explicitly jewish contexts. like not that “hey i don’t worship christmas trees” or “haha circumcision” or something.

the joke is never “haha cecil’s jewish” the jokes were an ancient chant being similar to one he learned in torah school and his mom covering up all the mirrors even though, as far as we know, no one had actually died yet.

he’s explicitly gay and jewish and neither of those things are ever mocked.

[cancerously]

Oh hey, I have something to add to this. So when I was in college I majored in a cross of sociology and media studies, which effectly lead me to studying fandom, identity, and how what we love defines us. I started in 2011 so you can imagine when Night Vale was getting big I was smack in the middle of the everything, and as a fan I was approaching it through the lens of my thesis and studies.

I ended up doing an entire final on this and including it within my work, but the long story short on this one is that Night Vale does particularly, specifically well because Cecil’s queerness is the most mundane part of the show. In the first 2-3 episodes, we are introduced to: - A floating sentient glow cloud - 5 headed multicolored dragon running for mayor - The weather report is music for no apparent reason - A portal that hocks dinosaurs into the school gym, a “minor inconvenience” - That our MC is gay Now out of those five, Cecil being gay is the only thing that exists in the real world, and therefore automatically becomes the most relatable. Effectively, the usage of the fantastical as mundane makes our fantastical, to the story, mundane. The key aspect of Night Vale is that sensationalizing the queers would actively make the story worse. And it set such a good fucking precedent for queer people in fantasy, horror, just about anything- the queerness becomes the relatable aspect, and it was Night Vale. So y’know. Yeah, go back and give it a listen, now that it’s coming up on 10 years old. And think about how far we’ve come.

[rockergiirl]

samsung have announced they're releasing a smart toaster featuring an onboard AI chatbot

[rockergiirl]

samsung released blog post regarding their new smart toaster and complaints from customers

We hear you are all disappointed with the AI capabilities of our new smart toaster, and rest assured we hear your complaints. However, we are confident people will grow to love their new smart toaster AI companion, and will regard them as a bright cheerful addition to their day. If you find its constant requests for you to always eat toast, we suggest adopting a more toaster-friendly diet.

[rockergiirl]

yes removing the speaker will void the warranty

[default-cube]

i thought this was a joke since a toaster is just about the most ridiculous thing to add a chatbot to, but no, it's real

[andietries]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I'm not the only one thinking about Unauthorized Bread, right?

[improvrich]

Derin! you GOTTA stop getting me to read hauntingly realistic dystopian writings.

Well... They at least give hope/have hope filled endings/stories.

And I do really enjoy them so much that I stay up to all hours reading...

What I'm trying to say is

Thanks 👍🙏

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I'm sorry but this describes about 20% of scifi and it's the best 20%.

[snailchimera]

I got to the end of this post, followed the link, read Unauthorized Bread, enjoyed it tremendously, came back, and reblogged, completely forgetting that the first half was a joke about a Samsung AI toaster that led into a rickroll.

Which isn't exactly a problem, but just to be clear, I am reblogging this mostly for the short story.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I also only reblogged the rickroll because it was a prime excuse to share the short story, so.

[deservedgrace]

I fear I keep falling into the trap of "if I can do it it clearly doesn't take any skill/talent and is therefore no longer impressive" and I don't think that mindset is beneficial for me (feels bad), people at a similar skill level as me (feel like their skills and efforts aren't impressive), people at a higher skill level (diminishes the work they've put in to be at this level) and people that struggle with it (if it's not a skill that takes work they "shouldn't be struggling")

[draconym]

90s movies: Psychopharmacology is as good as a lobotomy. If you take pills to treat your mental illness it will literally murder your imaginary friends and you will become a boring, lotus-eating conformist drone.

Me after taking my meds: drives the scenic route home to see if there are any geese on the pond and does a little dance in line at the grocery store and comes home to throw everything​ in my fridge into a stew pot because I can finally taste food again while singing songs at my birds in which I replace all the instances of "she" with "Cheese" and doing a Dolly Parton impression on the phone to my sister

[draconym]

"What were you like before taking the meds tho"

Two weeks ago I was posting about eating cake frosting for dinner.

[comradesepsis]

I feel like it's worth mentioning that being on The Wrong Meds can indeed do the 90s movie thing to you.

Like, if you go on meds and that happens, it's not because whatever's going on with you is jut Too Severe or that you're doomed or only people with Other Illnesses get to have meds that make them feel actually good and you have to settle for "miserable but somehow so hollow I no longer care about the misery" and be grateful you're no longer actively suicidal or whatever.

If that shit happens to you, tell your fucking doctor. And if your doctor doesn't take you seriously, or acts like That's Just How Being On Meds Is, ditch them! Find a new doctor!! Because that is NOT how being on meds is supposed to work! That means the meds are not working correctly!!

[draconym]

Reblogging to agree and say that what was happening to me was (and to an extent still is) severe and was the result of manifold health problems and has taken the better part of a year to effectively treat. I did not expect medication to be this effective. But it is. So if you think that you are untreatable, get a second opinion.

[roach-works]

there is a single pill i can take to immediately live a day as the best version of myself-- not a superhero, not a perfect genius, but a good dude who can read and write and do the dishes. im optimistic and coherent and can plan for the future. i write novels and walk the dog and remember to shower and brush my teeth.

if i don't take this pill i spend the day as a dirty, inept husk, a sad sack of well-meaning but futile intentions just sapient enough to be dimly aware of everything im unable to be.

this pill is incredibly difficult to obtain a steady monthly supply of because when normal people take it they have a little more fun at parties.

[postapocalypticcottagecore]

Counterpoint: At least if I spend the remainder of my natural life as a dirty, inept husk, a sad sack of well-meaning but futile intentions just sapient enough to be dimly aware of everything I'm unable to be... at least I'll know I'm me, not a fake version of myself created by medication. Nor do I have to worry about regressing if I run out, the repeat prescription doesn't come in time etc.

Not dissing OP's choice to take advantage of the meds, but they're not for me.

[draconym]

Hey, so, this is kind of the attitude that made me afraid to take meds that I really benefit from: the idea that who you are on medication is somehow "not really you."

The person I was when I was very depressed did not feel like the real me. That was a version of me that was very ill. The "real me" is the me that is able to dance at stoplights and make art and enjoy food and laugh at jokes. And for now, I need pharmaceutical help to get back there.

The assistance that medication provides doesn't make me any less The Real Me than wearing glasses or taking painkillers. Depression is a physical illness. If you try medication and you don't like the way it makes you feel, then it's not a good medication for you. But you do get to choose, and I'm glad I have the opportunity to choose to actually be myself again.

[ashlgcostumes]

Kill the idea that suffering is somehow authentic and worthy, and take the fucking drugs. I lost years of my life to this kind of thinking and I have nothing to show for it other than a handful of embarrassing memories and a house full of clutter I don’t want or need. There’s at least five regularly used different classes of antidepressants! And about four more specifically for anxiety! They’re all acting on your brain in different ways and you will have different reactions to each of them! Don’t give up and accept misery because you’ve mistakenly believed the misery is your real personality!

[dramatic-dolphin]

After I'd been on antidepressants for a while I slowly started doing things like singing silly little made up songs, doing a pirouette in the kitchen while making myself tea, or admiring the sunlight coming through the window. The first time I actually realized what I was doing, I nearly started crying because these are the things I used to do when I was 10. Before depression.

I almost convinced myself the "real me" was the one depression created for years and years, and I almost forgot what it was like before it. The medications didn't create a fake me, it literally gave me the Real Me back, when I thought I lost it forever.

[lyricwritesprose]

Here's the thing about those nineties movies: they were made by people who came of age in the seventies.

The seventies had a much more limited menu of psychiatric drugs, many of which were harsh as hell. The antipsychotics were notorious for causing tardive dyskinesia, to the point where "weird twitchy body language," became an indicator of "crazy" in our movies—that's not because they were confusing schizophrenia with something like Tourette's (although precious few writers bother to find out much about Tourette's), it's because for a bunch of people, their ability to manage psychotic episodes was dependent on drugs that would give them lifelong tics if the dosage was the slightest bit too high, or sometimes if it wasn't.

What it also had—what I saw slowly changing during my lifetime—is the idea of a doctor as an authority figure rather than the doctor as an expert whom you consult for their specialized knowledge.

Listen, though. Listen, I was a kid in the eighties, and I had multiple health problems even before third grade, starting with multi-strep-infection festivals of pain every winter (this was eventually traced to a large sinus cyst, but not actually fixed until my twenties). You have that many strep infections, they give you antibiotics, that's just the way of things.

When I take antibiotics, often enough, all it does for me is give me a rash. I remember my mother taking me off the Pink Goop Of Yecchhh (this was when I was too young for pills) and bringing me back in to the doctor to inform them that I was reacting to penicillin. And I remember the doctor absolutely browbeating her about trying to diagnose me with something without medical backup, about taking me off the medication before I'd gotten an appointment, and finally grudgingly offering to try another antibiotic instead.

(As it happens, I also react to all penicillin drugs, even the ones they thought I wouldn't, and all sulfa drugs, even the ones they thought I wouldn't, and the only safe one that they commonly prescribed was erythromycin, which I despised, as the stomach friendly versions were not there yet. But. That's not the point, or not the point exactly.)

When I had my kids, one of 'em ended up with a very familiar little bumpy rash while being treated for an infection, and I went in to the pediatrician prepared to fight for my life, because I remembered how hard this was. And the pediatrician nodded, and said, "Your instincts are good, this looks like penicillin reaction to me. We've got some alternatives…"

Because doctors, although they can still be overbearing and arrogant, cannot take completely for granted that they are the ones in charge.

Which makes an enormous different in psychiatric treatment especially. Because there's a ton of nuance. You can go in and say, "Look, I can tell this is working at raising my mood but I'm also jittering out of my skin, can we find a relative drug or just chop the pills in half?" Or you can say, "I mean it's fine on one level but I don't feel like myself, can we try a different thing?"

When a doctor is an authority figure who tells you what to do, who decides when you are sufficiently fixed and what you look like (and feel like) when you are yourself, you cannot trust psychiatric medication.

When you have both the legal and social ability to say, "Nope, this ain't right, find me a different one," it's a different proposition.

[chthonicrose]

Yeah, getting properly medicated for anxiety and depression and everything else physically and mentally wrong with me made me basically a different person.

And it didn't feel like being forced into an unfamiliar mold, turned into someone I was never meant to be. It felt like having layers of weights and shackles and masks stripped off so I could finally see and feel the person I was supposed to be the entire time. Discovering that medicated for anxiety I'm an extrovert, not an introvert, didn't feel like medication had forcibly turned me into another person. It felt like a revelation. Suddenly I understood why my mother talks to strangers at the grocery store. I'm more like her than I was. I'm more like me than I was.

Maybe your problems are less severe. Maybe you aren't nearly housebound with physical and mental health problems, with anxiety so bad you've developed agoraphobia and are starving because you can barely force yourself to leave your room once a day to eat and go to the bathroom. Maybe medication doesn't turn you from a miserable lump that lies in bed and has mental breakdowns and feels guilty for imposing on their friends and basically nothing else, into a person who can hold down a job and feed themself and live on their own and make art and laugh and take the bus without spending the entire time petrified with terror of the other passengers.

But medication is fucking important. Having the option is important. Not being talked out of it is important. My dad tried to tell me he'd read online that people went off antidepressants after six months, and I told him maybe people with temporary situational depression, but not me with lifelong intractable depression.

If I wasn't on medication I'd be dead.

Better living through chemicals.

[spacelazarwolf]

i think if we’re going to have conversations about consent we should talk about how consenting to something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a good experience, and having a bad experience doesn’t necessarily mean someone violated your consent. this can apply to a lot of situations but the two i’m thinking of right now are sex and transition.

you’re getting it on with someone. you enthusiastically consent to having sex with them. afterward, you feel a little weird about it. maybe even distressed. maybe they did something you didn’t enjoy and in the moment you just didn’t say anything. maybe you just realized after the fact that you were not in a good headspace for sex and now your mental health is declining. that doesn’t inherently mean the person you had sex with violated your consent. sometimes it just means you need to take a break from sex or work on communicating your needs or boundaries better during sex.

and with transition, i feel like this is something that gets consistently overlooked but like. there will never be zero detransitioners. there will always be people who decide that actually transition wasn’t right for them. they could have had the best most thorough doctors in the world who did everything by the book and got full informed consent at every step. and some people are still going to decide they don’t like the changes and wish they hadn’t transitioned. that doesn’t mean that the doctors violated their consent, and that doesn’t mean that transition shouldn’t be available to anyone. it just means that we need to have more resources available for folks who detransition.

regret does not automatically mean someone did something wrong. regret is simply one possible result of having bodily autonomy, and i think we need to get more comfortable with that.

[northstareclipse]

Springing off of my addiction post once more, I am also skeptical at best of 12-step programs, because their framework has just never remotely aligned with my actual experience.

The substance I was addicted to was heroin. While I was actively addicted, it absolutely came before everything else. My life shrank around it. I kept using despite very real, very obvious negative consequences. If you’re looking for something that fits the “compulsion + harm + loss of control” model, that was it.

But what’s always sat strangely with me is what happened when that context changed.

Once my abusive relationship ended and I was no longer in an environment where it was readily available, it was shockingly easy to stop. I’m not saying it was physically comfortable. My body was pretty pissed off for a while. But psychologically, it just didn’t have the same hold anymore. I wasn’t spending my days white-knuckling cravings or constantly thinking about it. It dropped out of my life in a way that, according to the 12-step model, is not really supposed to happen.

And that’s where my issue with that framework starts.

Because 12-step ideology tends to assume that if you have ever had that kind of relationship with one substance, it reveals something fundamental and permanent about you. That you now have a generalized “addictive nature” that will attach itself to other substances or behaviors if you’re not constantly managing it. That you are, in some essential way, always on the verge of transferring that pattern onto something else.

And that just hasn’t been true for me.

I was a near-daily cannabis user for years. When it started consistently making me feel physically uncomfortable instead of good, I stopped. No drawn-out battle, no existential crisis, just “this isn’t giving me what I liked about it anymore” and I moved on.

I drink occasionally, in social or celebratory contexts, and I genuinely find alcohol kind of boring outside of that. It doesn’t have much pull for me.

I tried gambling once, got annoyed at how tedious and overstimulating it felt, and left the casino in under an hour. I have not felt remotely compelled to revisit that experience.

I use the internet a lot, and I play a handful of video games, but I can also go on a camping trip with no signal and be completely fine, unless you want to try and find something pathological about nature photography, in which case you can blow it out your ass. If anything, I generally enjoy the change of pace. There’s no sense of panic or withdrawal or “I need to get back to my computer/consoles immediately.”

So when I hear the idea that addiction is this broad, transferable trait that will latch onto anything with quick reward or low friction, I just don’t see it reflected in my own life.

What does make sense, looking back, is context.

When I was using heroin, I was in an abusive relationship. My environment was unstable, stressful, and honestly pretty bleak. The substance didn’t just exist in a vacuum. It fit into a specific set of conditions where it functioned as relief, escape, and regulation.

When those conditions changed, the behavior changed with them.

That doesn’t mean there was no dependency. There obviously was. It doesn’t mean there were no consequences. There very much were. My grades suffered. I dropped out of college. I lost my apartment because staying out of withdrawal and numbing out from the abuse felt more important than paying rent.

But it does suggest that what we call “addiction” might not always be this permanent, identity-level trait that needs to be managed forever. Sometimes it looks a lot more like a relationship between a person, a substance, and a specific environment.

When that’s the case, then a framework that assumes universality - “if this happened once, it will always be waiting to happen again, with anything” - is going to miss a lot of variation.

I’m not saying 12-step programs can’t help people. Clearly they can, or they likely wouldn’t exist in the way they do. But I do think they’re often treated as the model of addiction rather than a model that fits some people and not others, and when your experience doesn’t match that model, many people who swear by them will assume that you are misunderstanding yourself, in denial, or “not taking it seriously enough.” This paternalistic attitude only serves to make me even more skeptical of the framework.

For me, what mattered wasn’t declaring myself permanently “addictive” or treating every pleasurable behavior as a potential threat.

What mattered was getting out of the environment where that pattern made sense in the first place.

Rat Park, people. Stop forgetting about Rat Park.

[hug-your-face]

“addiction” might not always be this permanent, identity-level trait... Sometimes it looks a lot more like a relationship between a person, a substance, and a specific environment.

I have helped change more individual behavior by changing the environment around them than I have by working on their behavior.