Check-In Thread: How are you doing, comrade?
Check-In Thread: How are you doing, comrade?
Heya! That time again! For the new folks, this thread is a space to tell us about something fun and cool you have going on, vent about something, or find an ear that you may need. Hope you've been well!
Remember, you are loved 
For my own part, while my attention span continues to get worse and worse, im still powering through Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and trying to keep warm. Pretty nasty out where I'm at, and won't get better for another week or so. No leads on the job hunt, but I did start looking into nonprofit stuff and got a few apps out, so thats kind of exciting in and of itself. Partner stayed with me for a few days last week, and am arranging a date with someone I've been seeing around in local leftist/queer/gaming circles. And by date I mean "come watch movies with the pup and I cause we're poor." Or maybe we'll shoot some free pool at a spot by me, who knows.
Lastly - ayyyyy two months without alcohol! I seemed to have swapped it out with a caffeine addiction though, but oh well. More coffee, anyone?
Hope you're doing well, friends!
Feeling daily like I could come down sick, must be the weather. Got dinner yesterday, felt good to eat a hearty meal after surviving on pizza for a while.
Glad you're eating better, and hope you don't get sick!
Had a real sudden blizzard in my city, which is way scarier when you work with houseless people. The emergency winter shelters are open but we're struggling to get enough people to run them, and I've been doing a lot of street outreach in the snow.
But in a way I'm happier to be worrying about my local community than about global politics or personal problems. I can cry about that stuff later.
Glad you're doing good work!
For someone with covid, holding up surprisingly well. Still got a few more days of this shit, unfortunately. Started a "book club" with exactly one friend where we're reading through (all? maybe? hopefully?) of the Chunka Luta Network's "required reading" list, but this covid brain fog is making reading anything really hard. Hopefully I can get my brain to internalize words before thursday
It's actually been a pretty shitty and frustrating week. Me and my sister (only family member I'm really close to) have both been dealing with our parents acting fucking toxic as hell. She's unemployed, despite having an engineering degree from a pretty good school. I'm underemployed, trying to go back to school but I'm worried now the thing I'm trying to study isn't going to be as safe as a bet as I thought and I'm debating if I want to waste another 2-3 years on another dud degree. We're both in our early 30s and struggling to have stable lives, which sucks cuz she really wants to start a family with her BF and I really want more freedom and autonomy to travel. Both of us currently kinda live with our parents, well more specifically we both rent properties our parents own that they only live in occasionally but we usually have to ourselves. They're renting to us at a slight lose, but they act like this is a massive act of charity despite the fact they could never get a regular tenant who'd be chill with them crashing in the guest room every other weekend. Both of us are greeting pretty doomer about our job prospects, I'm fed up with the service industry and think I'd legit rather go crust punk than keep doing this, but I'm a little old for train hopping now. My sister is a bit bougier than me so she's struggling with the prospect of going back to being a barista after a decade of (barely) middle class income.
I'm very tired and fed up and honestly it's been making me cranky and I've been lashing out at people which I don't like.
I'm sorry comrade. Hoping things look up soon. Been out of work for 4 months myself, so you aren't alone
I nearly sliced my thumb off today with a razor sharp santoku knife. That was fun. Never try to stop a knife from sliding off the counter onto the floor. Just get the fuck out of its way.
Idk i really wanna kill myself still and always have, even as a little kid.
The world is better with you in it, comrade. If you ever need an ear, just holler!
There's a political crisis in my country and I'm still in my department (state) because our leftist presence is really only effective here. Hoping the comrades out there can bring about a change but not expecting much with how liberal most of it is.
In the meantime, I've found a love of making sandwiches.
Good luck on the political project! What kinda sandwiches you been making?
CUBANS
Fien...
Glad to hear it
Treatment resistant depression. I've been seeing a therapist and shrink for years while being on a rotation of psychiatric drug cocktails and still feel very anhedonic and listless. Thinking of dropping the current therapist and finding another.
On the bright side, apparently some work on a PR I made for an open source project turned out to be useful to the project's maintainers.
Good luck with the therapy! Hope you find something that works! Congrats on the project!
Unsolicited advice but...
Whenever I hear treatment resistant depression and it's someone who has been through the system for a long time and they've played antidepressant roulette so many times that the doctors just kinda shrug instead of having ideas for where to go next with treatment, I always encourage people to consider stuff that's somewhat off the beaten path.
Adult ADHD is typically where hyperactive traits from childhood, if they existed much at all, tend to turn into inattentive traits. Not always and not 100% but I'll spare you my idle hypothesising about why that might be. The important thing in this is that ADHD and especially the inattentive traits can often resemble TRD.
For very complicated reasons, autism can also end up resembling TRD especially in adults.
This next part is armchair expert stuff but I have a suspicion that the overlap between TRD and catatonia is much higher than is recognised in mainstream psychiatry and I'm staking this claim on the fact that the symptoms and most effective treatments for both have a major overlap.
I also think that it's worth starting from a clean slate with regards to symptoms and mapping out what they are in an objective fashion while withholding interpretation to try and identify if there's any outlying symptoms that are indicative of an underlying condition which has gotten swept up into the TRD diagnosis or a condition which has gone completely unexamined. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's really common for long-haulers to just attribute symptoms to TRD immediately without a critical assessment of whether this is accurate, and often this is something that is imparted to the person by the attitude of experts who treat them. Sometimes going over things with a fresh perspective can yield new options for treatment or symptom management that haven't been considered yet. Sometimes the "small" symptoms that you just deal with or ignore can actually be more central to the condition(s) than you realise and because you're so busy trying to manage the "big" stuff (or perhaps it's better to think of this as downstream symptoms), you never find the opportunity to examine the "small" symptoms or to treat them which can sometimes be the key to achieving better outcomes. Sometimes you have the interplay of more than one condition simultaneously which introduces complexity in terms of diagnosis, treatment, and management that does not exist for a solitary condition.
This is even more important when you start bringing in physical symptoms too, as mental health generally gets treated as its own discrete matter rather than looking at things in a (ugh) holistic sense. Not like crystals and chakras holistic sense though. You get what I mean.
Is it possible that you've got TRD due to the luck of the draw - a shit childhood, unfavourable living conditions, your particular neurochemical makeup, stuff to do with brain physiology like your particular development or taking a knock to the head at some point that has just turned out badly due to misfortune? This kind of thing is absolutely a possibility.
But I'd urge you not to let doctors just write you off and consign you to the too-hard basket and especially not to take that on board yourself. Even if you've exhausted all your treatment options, which is actually rarely the case in reality, this can indicate that the model of treatment itself is wrong and not that you're truly at a dead end.
I'm going to talk personally here as an analogy. I'm asthmatic. I'm also unfit because my mental health has been absolute garbage in the past couple of years in particular so it's been a matter of survival taking precedence over my physical fitness. Sucks, but that's life.
Imagine if I looked at being unfit through the lens of asthma - superficially the symptoms line up and you could make a decent case for why it's asthma. But imagine if I was operating under the idea that what I was experiencing was all just a case of poorly managed asthma or severe asthma. Maybe the argument for why this is right is convincing because, at least some of the time, my symptoms respond to asthma medication. But maybe I start avoiding exercise because I'm worried about it aggravating my asthma symptoms or triggering an asthma attack - by operating under a false paradigm or an inaccurate application of the paradigm (Yes, I'm asthmatic but no, that doesn't mean that every time I'm out of breath that therefore it's asthma) you can conceal what's really going on or you might even follow treatment/symptom management which aggravates the underlying cause (e.g. experiencing breathlessness -> avoid exercise -> become more unfit -> experience being breathless more often).
Am I telling you that your diagnosis is incorrect or that how you're treating it is actually making the symptoms worse? Fuck no - I don't know the first thing about your situation.
Am I telling you that your symptoms—all of your symptoms—are valid and deserve to be treated with the highest levels of respect, consideration, and care and that you're allowed to think about your condition as being "treatment-unexplored depression", and that it's better to give up hope for the diagnosis being accurate than it is to give up hope that the condition itself is treatable and that there might be options for better symptom management? Fuck yes, absolutely.
Now that you mention it, I've been thinking I might have undiagnosed autism. I imagine that is having an effect.
Year has started with a flu followed by a gout attack and my throat hasn't really healed and I ran out of vyvanse and it's been really fucking hot (which probably triggered the gout attack), but other than that it's actually been pretty good overall.
Huh, are you me? Experiencing almost exactly the same thing. Got the flu or covid around the turn of the new year, and was sick for an entire week. Then right as I was starting to get better, my ankle randomly flared up without any prior injury. Been stuck in bed for like 2 weeks now. Hope you feel better, comrade.
Feel better soon!
On the mend
Talked with my partner last night and we've decided to start a podcast. I'm an Extremely Online theory-brain and she's a burnt-out former activist, and we both know lots of people in media and activism/organization.
That's awesome! Good luck!
Kinda terrible. I have a tyrant for a manager and am being put on a project that seems guaranteed to fail. I'm really starting to hate my job and I'm thinking about looking elsewhere once my one year anniversary hits. Since graduating college I've lived in 5 different places and have been laid off twice. Getting real tired of this shit and just want to have some kind of work stability and a manageable level of job stress.
Hope you find something soon
Thanks!
Twiddling my thumbs waiting for feedback on my big book draft. I sent out the final section to a few people I know and their responses have all been really positive but they are not strangers and so I worry they won't be able to read it objectively, even if they try.
Still in a weird purgatory of having done a lot of work on it but having very little "proof" that it's good enough for publishing. The idea of my book being on a shelf still feels like a fantasy, but my good feedback so far has at least been from pretty serious readers.
Good luck! Hope it goes well! Whats the book about, if that isn't too much to publicly share?
Nah it's cool, I can share. The work right now is cutting down on its emotional significance for me so that I can read criticism and not feel insulted or incompetent.
Without dropping too long a paragraph I feel comfortable calling it "speculative mythology." I tried imagining a people and then tried imagining the pop culture stories they would share with each other. But because I am a nerd I wanted to toss some cool bug facts in there too and wound up with a people whose social structure was very antlike without getting too specific (living in colonies, exclusive reproductive from a queen, castes, etc).
I've been having panic attacks all weekend and I'm really over it.
that fuckin sucks comrade, i'm sorry
I'm sorry comrade, how are you now? Hope things calm down
In a queer space, I met a lesbian lady who lives in Pakistan and works for the Department of School Education.
For like two seconds I thought this was cool, but she started talking about how "the tribals" in Punjab are all "dangerous" and "keep their girls from going to school", and how the Department delivers USAID textbooks, uniforms, so on. Smelt really bad to me, like this is an imperialist thing right? USAID textbooks were also what the Taliban used in Afghanistan for radicalisation, right?
Worthy to note, I just asked her about what she does and how it gets done, I did not unhinge my jaw and spew forth a DOG OF THE USAMERICAN EMPIRE rant, because you know what they say about No Investigation. I do have something like a filter. It was kind of surreal to be sniffing out western propaganda in realtime while talking with this queer woman from Pakistan though. Plus, it was kind of irritating to have libs chime in all UR DOING A SERVICE FOR UR COUNTRY on something that fucking reeks of pinkwashing & homonationalism.
Your thoughts please, thread.
Hope you get an answer! I'm not informed enough to have any response at this moment, but maybe make this its own thread?
Perhaps I shall!
Edit: I did
Quite truly awful lately. A few days ago I just stopped sleeping well at all, so where I immediately can't function if I don't get 8 hours sleep for a single night, I've now had 4-5 nights of 4-5 hours. I am a zombie.
I'm not sure why, but it suspect it's due to the high stress from my workplace making absolutely dogshit awful changes that will make my job significantly worse indefinitely, my car failing so I need a new one, my loan renewal date coming up, and trying to plan out like 900 things that need planning. I can't handle the stress of like one of those things, never mind all of them.
Eh, neutral. Been switching between depressed and fine. Currently on fine, with terrible weather conditions slightly reducing my hours and compelling me to stay indoors and relax a little. Getting some reading in.
Just saw May December. Pretty good!
I'll look it up!
It sucks that the things that used to keep be well, or at least better, are mostly beyond my reach and have been for a long time now.
It sucks that the overwhelming majority of advice for this might as well be cooking lessons for people who are starving or investment courses for people living below the poverty line; better management of a situation doesn't address it when there's a fundamental shortfall and often the shortfall itself is what puts the opportunity for better management out of reach.
I'm tired. I'm tired of being tired.
I'm doing good but cold brrrrr
Deep on my garden grindset, at least until the ground froze. I've been doing a ton of research on veganic gardening while i'm trapped inside. I'm motivated to find a job, looking every week but haven't found the perfect one to swap to yet. My job is fine, i just feel like it's lowkey misogynist and not what i want to be doing for the rest of my life so i can ride it out until i find a better one.
I want the world to change so much yet there are so many fighting that. It hurts at times, but it feels empowering when you realize that despite that, you can actually do a lot as one person. Maybe i can't change the world, but i can make it more pleasant for those around me in a limited capacity. And maybe that's fine. Maybe if everyone did that, we'd be okay. If nothing else i can do is offer solidarity to someone to needs it, at least i'll have done something.
I feel the same. I was put here to help others, regardless of how big or small that is. Hell, it's half the reason I make these threads. Hope you can find something that satisfies you soon!
my stupid car is shitting its guts out and i'm starting to think i need a better way to make money. and the fact that it's cold as balls doesn't help. also the guy at the gas station accused me of trying to shoplift a drink even though i'm in there all the time and i've never stolen a single thing there and he just kept doubling down for no reason just cuz i look like a piece of shit.
Hope things look up for you soon! Sorry about the car, thats always some expensive shit
I'm having some communication issues with a comrade at the moment that are really piquing my anxieties and some old trauma wounds. I need to suck it up and talk to them I guess.
other than that, I'm doing miraculously well.
Glad you're largely doing well! Good luck with the talk!
thank you, I love your account name btw, very enjoyable mental image whenever i've seen it pop up.
Great job cutting out the booze btw, and good luck with the job hunting, it can feel really crushing at times... I sent out 80 applications last year to proper orgs, big businesses etc, and ended up getting a job in a shitkicking but stable job through a friend (at least it's nice though!)
better than before. legit like 2 days after joining the kapital book club my friend's mom died so we've been caught up with that but things are starting to settle somewhat now, so hopefully i can catch up 🙏
Hope they're hanging in there!
slowly but surely!
