Sansa is looking majestic, my husband is looking impish. You would too, if you were holding a massive puppy. Speaking of massive puppies, I did the Can I Pet Your Dog? podcast (I come in around minute 22)! I had a really fun time, and you should listen!
Anil being great:
You have to think about what these people are saying when they scrutinize me, or every other brown person, in an airport security line. They’re clearly saying: I think you would kill me, and you, and all the people on this plane, including the children. Now, they never quite have the temerity to say it out loud. Instead, they just exchange that meaningful nod with the TSA agent, hoping to get me pulled out for a secondary screening.
And honestly, I’m pretty good-natured about it. I fly at least once a month, and they’re all round trips, so let’s call it maybe 26 flights a year—one every other week. Now imagine, if every other week a stranger said, “I think you intend to kill children.” Could you laugh it off three times in a row? Four? Eight? Because if you have the extraordinary patience to be able to ignore it, or laugh along, or quietly acquiesce to letting strangers indicate to your face that they think you’re secretly a duplicitous, lying, child murderer in waiting, then you’ll just be asked to do it again on your next flight.
The ADHD diagnosis gender gap (gender-related under-diagnosis is rampant in MANY conditions, especially spectrum-linked stuff):
Unlike boys, many of whom show hyperactivity, girls’ symptoms veer more toward inattentiveness and disorganization. Girls tend to develop ADHD later than boys. They frequently mask it in an attempt to conform to society’s expectation that they be on the ball and organized. And while some ADHD symptoms can become less intense for boys after they pass through puberty, for many girls, it gets worse.
I am a disgusting sleeper. I know this despite the impossibility of ever witnessing myself sleep. I know I am a disgusting sleeper because I often wake up in a veritable Hoover Dam of saliva on my pillow. I know I am a disgusting sleeper because my sister has taken pictures of me while I’ve slept (a personal favorite is one of me in a blue bikini splayed on a bed. I’m indulging in a post-lunch snooze, mouth agog. She titled it “partied 2 hard” and snapchatted it to fifty people.)
I know I am a disgusting sleeper because I’ve witnessed the angelic slumber of my female friends who are able, in their somnolent state, to remain almost rigidly still. Most of them look beautiful, as if crystallized mid-swoon, their lips slightly parted, their hair mussed but untangled. If I were to place a feather underneath their noses, their breaths would hardly disturb a bristle. The other night, after consuming several glasses of red wine, I collapsed into bed of my best friend. I sensed the weight of her body as she gingerly inserted herself next to me in the double mattress. The inky wash of drunk-sleep descended and I awoke to register her absence in the bed. She had fled to the living room couch. “I was snoring egregiously, wasn’t I?” I winced and, in the gentle and benevolent way in which women lie to each other, she shrugged and said she was a light sleeper.
this cat’s best friends are three huskies (there is no way to prepare yourself for these pictures)
I am going to watch the hell out of this documentary, and I feel bad about it:
“Weiner” has become a source of heightened anxiety for Ms. Abedin and the Clinton campaign. She and her husband have repeatedly pleaded with filmmakers to see the movie, but have not been allowed to do so, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversations who could discuss the sensitivities around the film only without attribution, as the project has been kept under tight control. A spokesman for the filmmakers denied this and said they would have shown the couple the film had they asked.
Ms. Abedin and a spokesman for the Clinton campaign declined to comment.
In Padua, Italy, this weekend, a woman (whose name has been kept private) showed up at her local fire station asking for help, according to Italian newspaper Il Matino di Padova. She was wearing a chastity belt, she calmly explained, and recently lost the key. Would those firefighters be so kind as to remove it?
What happens if you have a really popular blog and then you don’t want to do it anymore? (I never read home decor blogs bc they make me feel like I live under a bridge.)
By the time John came down to lunch, comments were pouring in; most were unkind: “Honestly, 5 posts a week isn’t that much for readers to expect …” wrote one. “You make big bucks from this blog (I have no problem at all with that) and IT’S YOUR JOB.” Others defended the Petersiks’ time and talents. The post ultimately got just under 2,000 comments.
That weekend, after the kids were in bed and the laundry room was finally done, they started talking about putting a match to this thing they loved so much. Sherry was ready to quit right then, but John wasn’t convinced. The YHL brand was their primary income. “I wanted us both to calm down. And I wanted to know what our next move would be.” They both made lists of old freelance clients from their days in advertising who might take them back. It felt terrifyingly uncertain, but also, liberating. In a perfect metaphor for the moment, John’s laptop promptly died.
Do not forget to pre-order the Dad Magazine book! TARPS!
I am kind of offended that this fake person has not tried to friend me? I am a real journalist! (I am not.)
A Facebook user pretending to be a Politico reporter has befriended dozens of journalists, prompting suspicion about the account owner’s motivation.
Cameron Crowe’s old Rolling Stone cover story on the Eagles (a partial inspiration for Almost Famous) is unbelievably long, but also fun:
“Servants is the answer!” Frey shouts, as if suddenly enlightened. “We should call up Abbey Rents and find someone to live for us.” He pauses a moment, then turns serious. “You know that adage, ‘For every dream come true, there’s a curse’? One of those curses is just a lifestyle . . . it’s going on all the time. When I take a look at the last year, between On the Border and this album, what have I done? Worked my ass off. You know, we went on the road, got crazy, got drunk, got high, had girls, played music and made money. If you don’t watch it, that can become your whole life.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a letter to a newspaper and it’s great (unsurprisingly):
Instead of parroting the meaningless rants of a flock of Right-Winged Loonybirds infesting the refuge, why doesn’t The Oregonian talk to the people who live there?
Please don’t:
*
Dear commenter: Na, we’re grand thanks.
I love the way he’s making such an effort to be fake-complimentary. He’s such a Great GUY, you know, it’s just that Logick (™) means he can never support the freedom to bodily integrity and autonomy. It’s just not Logickal (™), you know? But you’re all such Great Gals, all the same!!!
please make Logick a brand and sell merch to white dudes
kinda like that trash chocolate company those two brothers had
Step 2: profit
Step 3: laugh
Step 4: Donate a percentage of profits to Planned Parenthood
“Alas”?!?!? HATE HIM.
Rosie the cat!!
THAT CAT THINKS SHE IS A PULLER DOG
i like when she wears a little bandana
The picture where the three of them are wearing matching bandanas is the one that caused cuteness overload for me. I also think it’s adorable that they’re all clearly looking in the same exact direction, like they’re on the same wavelength.
Nicole was right, I was completely unprepared for those pictures. I am undone.
I seriously can’t breathe, those pictures are perfect.
Her face looks permanently bewildered and amazed at her own life and it is just perfect.
I have a friend with a permanently surprised cat. Never fails to make me laugh.
WE ARE DOGS AND WE LIKE CATS
DON’T JUDGE US
I got to the pic of her in the fluffy husky hat and didn’t know what to do. SO CUTE. CUTE WEARING CUTE.
when she’s in the costumes and the bike basket!! World’s chillest cat. I wonder if this is the cat in yesterday’s Dear Prudence column, on the way to a rave.
I really want to see pictures of rave cat with its little ear protectors on.
God, I have been following Rosie since almost the beginning, as I unashamedly subscribe to Buzzfeed’s “This Week in Cats.” She’s the cutest, and the pups are too.The video of her in the car “panting” with the huskies gets me every goddamn time!
hehe, the Stitch costume. I get it.
The gif, though! When one of the huskies is wearing glasses and the cat’s having none of it. None of it! Offended that her friend had changed, frankly.
MY SQUEALS SHALL PIERCE THE HEAVENS!
I saw this yesterday, but no day is complete without a tiny fluffy cat hanging out with her husky pack.
Expounding on why you can’t be pro-choice in the comment section would be such a drag, but a full essay would be *fantastic*!
Yes, so thoughtful, very full of thoughts.
YOU GUYS YOU GUYS YOU GUYS THERE IS WONDER WOMAN FOOTAGE OMG OMG OMG
also I have been having Feelings about that ADD article. This bit?
Littman works with, and has studied, the impact of ADHD on high-IQ men and women, many of whom spent years masking their symptoms with their high abilities. As she tries to target if ADHD is the issue, she asks whether they are “constantly in a state of being overwhelmed and frantic about coping with day-to-day basic things?” Most burst into tears. “These are the people least likely to be acknowledged and because of the shame of feeling smart, they don’t feel they are entitled to help.”
Basically put my in tears at my desk. No one ever told me this before.
Ugh yes, the constantly feeling overwhelmed and like your not on top of everything
(and never will be!). ADD doesn’t mean you’re incapable of functioning, it just often means like you’re not functioning at your best (or at least feel like your not) and your only surviving by luck of being smart.
For me, anyway, there was always something kind of fun about surviving by being smart. It warded off the negative self-esteem of “I can’t do basic tasks reliably” by letting me get away with a “I’m too smart for that stuff” nonsense. THIS IS NOT PRODUCTIVE.
It also indulges a feeling of “I don’t have to work very hard” which turns into “I shouldn’t have to work very hard” which eventually turns you into Jeff Winger, 40 years old and failing community college Spanish.
Oh brother.
I literally left school because I felt I was smarter than the teachers and there was no point in me being there. I am not kidding.
ADD + Intelligence + a little bit of confidence is an amazing recipe for an asshole I think. (At least it was for me)
Definitely. At best, it makes you (me) totally insufferable. Especially when the ADHD makes you forget where you learned something, so you can smugly pontificate about something to the damn person who gave you that point.
My only mercy is a desperate need for the approval of authority figures, so even when I figured I was smarted than my teachers, I wanted them to like me and tell me how smart I was.
Oh god, I relate to that last paragraph more than I am comfortable admitting.
I think I just had the same kind of reaction at my desk. I was smart and painfully introverted, so in elementary school when teachers would bring up my attention issues to my parents, it was always framed in an easy-to-dismiss way–I’m just a daydreamer, I need to focus sometimes, etc, but I was doing well in school and was too quiet to be a disruption, so nobody thought much of it. So nobody thought to do anything.
And by the time I had a therapist tell my parents she thought I might seriously have ADHD when I was in high school, they thought she must be mistaken, because I was doing pretty well in school and wasn’t particularly disruptive. I just needed to learn how not to be so disorganized and forgetful all the time.
But I think it just really really clicked that maybe I came across as mildly scattered because I was smart enough to make up for some of the gap, when really? I can probably be way more of a mess than gets noticed, I think.
Yeees, this is all very familiar
YES YES YES YES YES YES
*high fives*
It’s like- because you’re “smart” according to school and people, you just figure that you’ve tricked everyone because YOU know you can’t possibly be that smart because you’re failing at normal life tasks and you don’t know why. The past four years (when it’s really gotten out of control), it’s felt like I’ve had a stranger running my own mind that I don’t recognize or understand.
Yuuuup. Also: I was the weird kid who kind of likes tests because they forced me to focus. And it feels great to actually be able to focus for two hours! And then of course you start berating yourself for not being able to do that outside of test conditions…
Ugh yes! I liked the test environment, but lacked the ability to create that environment for myself.
SAME, aced everything, had Ivy test scores and community college GPA
See I had trouble with turning up to school to actually learn the things before the test, also there was a lot of project work that I got 0’s in because I never finished anything. But in the quiet distraction free exam hall I could churn out an essay in under an hour (of a 3 hour exam).
I did very well in the rote learning subjects (like history and geography) because I could just read the book and get it and spit it back out in the test; I completely failed languages and maths because a huge part of how it was taught was practicing in class (where i never was)
It did however mange to average B’s in my junior cert (Irish GCSE’S, around age 15) despite not having been in school for about 4 months before the exams because I could turn up and knock out an exam like nobody’s business.
You can develop a really good memory, at least in the sense of “recall information when asked” rather than “remember to do the thing.”
I kind of imagine it like how pre-literate societies had these extensive oral traditions, all committed to memory because they had to hone that skill without the shortcut of writing it down.
Near-perfect SAT score, somehow misspelled my own name on the test?
Exams were great! Three hours to get out everything I know as fast as possible. Brilliant!
Assignments requiring sustained focus and smaller amounts of work over a longer time period were not great. Which led to procrastination. Which led to pulling all-nighters because that’s the closest I could get to creating my own exam conditions. Which led to ‘no this is fine, I can do anything in one night so it doesn’t matter if I walk around with a permanent low grade anxiety about all the things I’m not doing and feel sick to my stomach whenever I look at my desk’.
Goddamn I wish people were writing articles like this when I was still in uni.
Uh. Your second paragraph is frighteningly familiar to how I lurched my way through high school and college.
Yes, exactly. I’m getting more and more confident that my imposter syndrome is directly correlated to my ADD.
It is the WORST for that. Because it feels like you’ve been darting across a tightrope saved only by your own cleverness, which is rapidly being outstripped by your laziness.
And then, of course, if anything goes wrong, it’s “I’m a lazy jerk who doesn’t work as hard as everyone else”
And staring at peers going HOW. HOW DO YOU DO THIS.
Mine is directly related to autism, which gifted me with executive dysfunction very much like ADD, and I’d never thought that so clearly and succinctly before. Thank you.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes- this is it exactly.
Yep, this is pretty much my story. I didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD until I was 29 and working as a lawyer.
When I told my dad about it, his response was, “but you’re so smart!”
OH GOD, going to law school has legitimately made me think that maybe I have adult add? Like, I killed it through undergrad, and high school too, but that’s because I was in a relatively creative major and have a killer memory.
Law school so far has been… “Excellent legal analysis. Great closing argument. Formatted paper entirely wrong. No that’s not how a reverter works. Appalling bluebooking.” :-/. All my employers have loved me so far, but my GPA is not what it could be due to struggle with detail work and I’m legit wondering if I’m ADD.
Yeah, if you’ve got it, I think legal work will draw it out. Because one day, you might be the crusty old genius who mutters a few flawless arguments in a court room, but to get there, you need to do twenty years of cite-checking on your own.
Seconded on legal work drawing it out. It’s not really the bluebooking though–that’s what paralegals are for! (And nobody–zero people in my experience–care about the finer points of BB style as long as you can tell where the cited info came from). Actually being a lawyer, assuming your practice heads in the right direction, can be an extremely creative field–brainstorming, spitballing, creative work-arounds and problem-solving, etc. are the name of the game in many cases. I’ve been practicing for 5 years and it’s my total inability to manage competing simultaneous client needs that has made me i) realize my diagnosis; ii) confirm same; and iii) seek help.
Same reaction. But I’m wondering if my feelings are due to ADHD or the fact that my life is legitimately overwhelming right now.
Honestly, why not both? My life is legit overwhelming right now, but I’m still realizing how out of control a lot of things are (my house looks like a hoarder’s because I can’t focus to clean) because of brain junk. This whole thread has me wondering about seeking a diagnosis to be honest…
Not too long ago I had a big breakdown in front of my psychiatrist because I felt like she wasn’t getting just how incompetent I am. “No, you don’t understand, I mean that I’m a grown-ass adult who’s been formally reprimanded because I can’t get to work on time. I mean I have missed flights because I got confused about which day I was supposed to leave. I mean I can’t drive a freaking car because if I notice somebody walking a dog on the side of the road I’ll start to veer into the next lane.” And she was finally like “STOP IT, I talk to smart, employed people all day every day who have these same problems and more. You are not the one freak who is struggling to do basic tasks. You just don’t know who else is struggling, because they only talk about it in their psychiatrist’s office like you are right now.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because for some reason it never occurred to me that other people could feel the same way. It’s such an intense and buried shame that I never, ever want anyone else to see, so I tend to assume that it’s something only I can feel.
CAN I JOIN THE CRYING AT MY DESK CROWD. Over that specific phrase. I literally am going to spend the next couple days trying to figure out a way to get to a mental health professional to see if I can get diagnosed and help me build structure into my life, because I feel like a flailing beached seal without outside help.
I’ve been the smart, friendly girl who’s known as a good “problem-solver” because I have SO MUCH experience getting into crazy/weird problems, and having to get myself out of them. Nothing will change the look on my professor’s face as he peered at me, and asked, “so how do we always end up here?” (i.e.: with me forgetting simple, routine tasks,) and having no response but tears.
Also my diet is crap, and I know that contributes to it, I’m about to start taking Omega-3 oil? Has anyone had luck with lifestyle change/diet?
I’m afraid I can’t tell you how well taking Omega-3 helps, because I always forget to take it. Ha. Ha. Ha. Headdesk.
that actually makes me feel a lot better. *hugs*
I’m delurking after many months of reading The Toast because between the article and your comment, I am now teary-eyed.
Brief explanation of my experience with ADHD: I’m 33, a mother of two young boys, and a senior in an undergraduate engineering program. In the Fall of 2014, I transferred from a community college to an academically demanding 4 year school; it was then that my life began to unravel. Between my motherly duties, basic adulting, and the much harder/fast paced classes at my new school, I was falling apart and failing at everything. My inability to cope led to the most profound suicidal feelings I had ever experienced in a lifetime of being chronically depressed and anxious. Why couldn’t I just clean my house, remember appointments, and study? The feelings of worthlessness I’d had since middle school grew and grew until I was convinced that since I was so lazy and unmotivated, my family would be better off without me.
At a friend’s insistence, I sought help from one of the mental health professionals on campus. My wonderful counselor actually listened to me (a first, in my experience) and after a few sessions, gently suggested that I get evaluated for ADHD. But my insurance wouldn’t cover it and I struggled for months to find a place that would do it for an amount of money that I could afford to pay. I finally did last summer and got on medication almost immediately.
It changed my life. It’s not that every day is perfect; I still have days in which I don’t get much done and sometimes I struggle to study for classes that aren’t terribly interesting. But most days I can accomplish the things I set out to do, and school has become so much easier now that I’m able to pay attention during class. There were a ton of psychological problems I incurred as a result of being smart and unsuccessful, having well-meaning parents and teachers telling me that I wasn’t living up to my potential and feeling like I’m the only person I know that cannot get their life under control, but I am slowly overcoming those issues and building my self-esteem.
It’s not that I’m glad there are other Toasties that have had similar experiences with undiagnosed ADHD — I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But I am so touched and inspired that many of my favorite commenters, people whose wit and kindness I regularly admire (from a safe distance, haha), have known this pain and still manage to be amazing individuals. I will add this knowledge to my arsenal of things to think about when I’m feeling low, when I forget that it’s just a quirk of my brain and not a fundamental character flaw. Thanks, everyone.
well now I’m crying reading this comment. thank YOU. So glad you’re feeling better. <3
Between this article and the one I read yesterday about double-depression masquerading as burnout I feel naked, flayed raw, and displayed in public. Too many feels, none of them good.
We read the symptoms out to my mum once and she was cry-laughing at how accurate it was. But…she grew up in the 50’s, in a working class family. I’m sure if she was a child now, in a middle class family, and with her symptoms, there would have been specialists involved and her life would probably have been really different.
IDK if I have it too, there’s things I Just Cannot Do Well (reading papers, conferences. oh god, conferences. after an hour I feel like I’m being pelted with information and I’m holding too much already and just stooooop), but, y’know, I have my systems, I get by ok. As long as my life isn’t too stressful, and I don’t have too many responsibilities, everything is fine.
This is such a raw subject for me. My daughter was diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago. Before she was diagnosed, we knew something wasn’t going “right” for her at school. Her preschool and kindergarten teachers had mentioned their concerns about her attention issues. But by first grade she had anxiety and behavior issues and her teacher told us she could not possibly have ADHD because 1) she was able to complete her schoolwork, 2) her executive functioning was “above average” and 2) she had a competitive attitude about her academic performance. In hindsight I can’t believe I didn’t push back on this harder, every single thing you read about ADHD in girls says it’s totally bullshit. But she’s in a private school that prides itself on its attention to kids as individuals and we knew several kids with attention issues (ALL BOYS) who had received nothing but support and nurturing, so I assumed they knew what they were doing.
To my everlasting shame, we waited two years to take her to a therapist. Two years during which she was constantly shamed by well-intentioned teachers who refused to believe she was anything other than annoyingly poorly behaved and too lazy to learn better coping skills because she wasn’t a physically hyperactive kid or a “class clown” type attention-diverter (seriously, that’s pretty much what they said, it’s making my eye twitch remembering it). It took the therapist one session to figure out what was going on, but that diagnosis (and a year with an amazing teacher who helped her get her confidence back) changed her life and her experience of school. We realized she was working 400% harder than any of the other kids to get things done and anxious from being hyper-vigilant because she was terrified to miss key instructions or transitions. God, my heart still just breaks over and over thinking of her in class during those two years.
The TL;DR takeaway: If you are struggling with attention issues, find a decent therapist and don’t let anyone tell you it can’t be ADHD because you’re too smart or because too _____, (fill in the blank with some social conditioning trait that affects women differently from men)
Oh dang, reading this and the other ADD thread and relating to a lot of the comments is really making me wonder if I have some amount of mild ADD.
Some of the symptoms don’t fit me at all, like I don’t think I’m more forgetful than the average person. However I am highly averse to any situations or projects in which I will have to think hard for an extended period and if given projects like this I procrastinate frequently. I have a tough time motivating myself to do anything that will be hard or boring. I don’t tend to set goals even when they would improve my life, because that sounds like hard work and hard work is boring. In social situations I get bored with just sitting there talking, so if there is a snack table I tend to over-eat in order to have additional stimulus. I sometimes have difficulty focusing on other people when they are talking. I am not hugely fidgety but I am a terrible face-picker which is maybe my own version of fidgeting? I can’t *just* watch TV, I have to be playing Candy Crush or checking Facebook at the same time because doing one thing isn’t stimulating enough.
The story that I’ve always told myself is that I don’t want to do these things because I am very, very lazy even though I’m quite smart. The thought that some of this could be not my fault and be a problem with my brain is kind of overwhelming me right now.
As someone who was diagnosed with ADD last year (age 29)? I could’ve written this post. I’m not 100% convinced I didn’t write this post and forget about it. If I could make a recommendation, try reading Women with ADHD by Sari Solden. I didn’t match everything in there, but damn, what I did match, I matched hard.
I am so – ugh. I am not that much of a mess (when I’m not depressed; when I am depressed I am that much of a mess and then some) but I identify with huge parts of this? But when my therapist did an assessment that suggested I might be a little ADHD she said “nah” and so I don’t feel like I could possibly raise the issue again.
I honestly don’t know how much of this might just be that smart kids actively learn fewer coping skills than average kids. (I’m at work so I can’t dig out the siderea post right now, but she has an excellent lengthy LJ post about how gifted & talented programs basically tell smart kids that if they can’t do it on their own they aren’t really smart, are they, while everywhere else we trumpet collaborative learning and small class sizes as beneficial for everyone.) I mean, I know I never learned how to manage my time until I was working full-time, because I didn’t *need* to study for tests, just doing the reading and going to class was enough for me.
Every time I read one of those ADD-in-adult-women articles I recognize so much of myself. At the same time: I function reasonably well (getting 90% of a day’s work done between 4 and 7 pm), and I don’t really want to be on Adderall or similar meds, so what good would a diagnosis do, really?
I know, I know…
On a brighter note: I love any and all pictures of animals of different species being friends, and that cat, with its perpetually surprised expression, is adorable.
It doesn’t have to be about medication; Routines and structure also help with ADD and if you know you have tendencies that way then you can plan ahead and structure your life in ways to help it, and it helps to have an explanation for sometimes erratic/unproductive behaviour beyond ‘I’m lazy’
I’ve found that having ADD has forced me to be super organised, in ways I don’t even notice, to counter-act it; but also I know to factor in ‘lazy-time’ when I’m planning things so that at least I don’t fuck things up if I have a bad day and if I have a good day then I’m early with what ever it is!
I get comments about how disciplined I seem to be! Especially since I tend to work with rewards and punishments (“I can only have a glass of wine tonight if I finish this first”/”I can’t watch this tv show unless I’m exercising while watching it”) and then actually stick to those. But what they don’t see, I think, is that I NEED that discipline to get stuff done at all.
Me too, I’m essentially a project manager and I love it because I like organizing; but I’m much better at organizing work things than my own actual life.
I also try to work to rewards, but I’m usually not very disciplined about it. I do things like say to myself ‘OK you have to do X Y Z before you eat dinner’ and after I’ve done X I think well thats enough, reward now!)
If you’re comfortable and happy with your routines, and confident that you understand the workings of your mind, I don’t think there’s any reason to seek out a diagnosis other than curiosity. But sometimes satisfying that itch to know is really nice!
I feel kind of the same way about getting a diagnostic work-up for ASD.
A ton of my relatives (including my mom) are on the autism spectrum, and I suspect I’m probably on the mild end myself. But I’m functioning just fine and am generally happy with life, so the only real reason to do it would be curiosity.
I had similar feelings. I ultimately came down on the side of formal diagnosis for me so I’d have it if I decided to try grad school again (first time was…rough, and I could badly have used some accommodations). I already knew I’m on the spectrum and was making changes to make things easier. The official diagnosis was just a confirmation. I also got it for free, from my state’s official clinic. I don’t know how that calculus would’ve worked out otherwise.
For me it isn’t 100% about work–although my currently-untreated ADD and new job have combined to put me into a constant anxiety attack–it’s about other things in my life, like that fact that when I’m not getting treatment I literally don’t see what a pile the house is becoming until my husband starts getting resentful; I can’t keep track of how much money is in my checking account so I’m constantly out of money; it’s impossible for me to wind down at night unless I’ve spent a couple of hours working out or, alternately, a couple or more hours drinking (when I’m untreated, I drink A LOT more)… etc.
I am counting the minutes right now until I’m tapered down off my current med and can start treating the ADD again. It is seriously, seriously a game-changer for me.
I am lucky I guess in that a) I probably have a milder case and b) I’ve developed all kinds of routines to deal with it. Habitica’s been really great, actually – not just to get things done but also to drink less, which otherwise becomes a crutch. I’m glad that I’ve never been super spendy (I guess my grandmother’s penny-pinching is a strong genetic influence), so at least on that side the effect on my life is not too heavy.
What mostly worries me is the obsessive side of it. I’ll re-load and re-load internet pages even if I know there’s nothing new. My mind just jumps from one thing to another incessantly, and once I’ve thought about something I can’t not check it or react to it. And what really trips me up is that I’m in a job where you have to be pretty precise and I can’t stop making careless errors. My last evaluation was basically my boss being baffled about why I sometimes knock it out of the park but also sometimes do a really sub-par job, and I didn’t really dare to tell him that it just depends on how long I managed to focus that day.
The last bit is what I noticed the biggest change with this first week on medication. I could be doing a task, see I have an email and just wait to finish what I was doing before looking at it. I could think of something to tweet or text and wait until later to do it because I could remember it and I wasn’t immediately focused on doing it. I could spend an hour doing my work before feeling like I HAD to go check my emails. And that was on a very, very low dose. It’s incredible.
This whole thread is seriously making me consider going to the doctor after all. Knowing me, it’ll be a few months before I actually do that, but what you’re describing sounds fantastic.
I really think you should. I was also hesitant to start the meds because stigma,but my psychiatrist is really kind and explained that it’s just like wearing glasses- you can kind of see without them,but you do better with them on.
I’ve been close to tears this whole week imagining what grad school could have been if I’d known earlier. I’m just grateful to have had it caught at all, really
Are you comfortable saying what medication/dosage you’re on? I want to compare notes.
Well, I’m just beginning with the meds, and I’m on my way to talk about my first week with them with my psychiatrist, but she had me trying gradually larger doses of Adderall. My best focus came at 15mg, but the side effects were close to unbearable, so I think I’ll have to start at 10 mg.
Ah, OK. I started at 10mg of Adderall (extended release), then went to 20mg and now seem to have settled at 25mg.
I’m always vaguely unsettled when it seems like I build up a tolerance and then raise the dose. It kind of feels like something that could go on forever.
Yeah, that’s the unfortunate side of the way our brains work, especially with stimulants (I’m a neuroscientist). But I’ve heard of people getting up to 60 mg of Adderall, or switching to another med and it being fine. I’m looking forward to getting the extended release and not having to remember to take pills twice a day…
Me too! I’ve already been considering this (got a referral from my GP months ago, which I haven’t done anything with), but the recent Toast ADD threads are helping give a little more impetus. Maybe this month…
I really appreciate all the Toast discussion on this, plus the Captain Awkward thread a year or so ago that lead me to the Atlantic article and the first thought that this might be me.
Wow. This is me. I can’t concentrate when I know I have an unread email/text message/IM. I’m constantly thinking of things I have to do and then forgetting them the next instant–I have to plan everything way in advance so that I have time to remember and forget the same thing a couple times before I get around to doing it. I…have some things to think about.
That’s me to a T. I mentioned it in an offhand comment to my therapist a month ago and she asked if I had ever been screened for ADHD. Wham bam, a month later, here I am. It runs really strongly in my family, but we all assumed that I was just a messy person, because I’ve always done well in school and made it to grad school and everything. What no one knows is how much effort I have to put into remembering a simple meeting with my adviser or to respond to an email. I had to do it immediately or I’d completely forget.
Can I ask–do you drive? I find driving stressful because it requires sustained concentration. I especially have trouble with extended highway driving because there aren’t any mini-breaks at stop lights and stop signs. I always thought I just lacked stamina, but now I’m wondering if it’s something common with ADHD.
I do drive. I never thought I had much of an issue with it (I mean, I loathe driving in LA but so does everyone), but once I started taking the medicine I realized how often I’d pick up my phone and look at it while driving. I get distracted much less while driving now so it feels much safer.
Hmmn, I have the opposite problem! I can do extended freeway driving no problem because there’s less to focus on – you don’t have to worry about pedestrians or cars backing out of driveways or all the thousand things that it’s hard for me to process all at once.
Yeah, but the less-to-focus-on lulls me into a false sense of security, so I’m more likely to zone out and miss that traffic is bunching up ahead of me or there’s a slow person in my lane and I should start slowing down now.
Autism, not ADD, but similar executive function problems and YES. I can do it okay and I’m a pretty good driver now, but it’s mentally exhausting way more than most people seem to find it.
oooooooo hm.
HABITICA. Yes. Saves my life on the daily. Re the drinking – what’s the wording of the task/habit you use? I just haven’t found the right script of words that clicks with me effectively.
Mine now is a Monday-only daily with two checkmarks. The goal is to not drink at least 2 days a week. Not drinking at all is really something I strive for – I think it’d take an awful lot of self-discipline, and I mean, it’s a crutch because it works quite well as a coping method and I don’t want to deprive myself of that. But 2 days of not drinking a week means that it doesn’t become too routine or standard.
The other thing is quantity, of course, but that’s no longer that much of a problem (outside of social situations). I can totally have just one beer or two glasses of wine. But I guess you could take care of that with a standard daily (something like: drank <2 units).
Very cool. Thank you. I’ll try that method. Right now I have “drink less wine than you did yesterday” as a habit with a plus/minus. I’m not getting murdered, but I could probably do better.
I HATE MAKING CARELESS ERRORS AT WORK SO MUCH. It is the bane of my entire existence. Hours of research and writing and revising and I still manage to miss a double period and a sentence with a missing word lost between edits.
I got chewed out at work a while back for not getting a project in on deadline– the thing is, I had worked really hard on this document and I was done with it on the day it was needed, and then I attached it to an email and somehow just let it sit in my drafts folder for 3 days. What the fuck!
Yeah seriously I just got an “I’m disappointed” talk about that. I’m so good at catching other people’s spelling errors but literally cannot see my own. I’ve been doing this since I was little but now it’s having serious ramifications. This is my first full time office job and a lot of these things I thought were just how I was adjusting to the environment but now I don’t know.
I was always corrected on it on papers, and stuff, but I blew those notes off because they’d still give me an A, if the rest of my work was fine.
Sooo true. And that also explains why I did so much better in english than in math-related subjects where a silly addition error really does affect the outcome.
And I think that has led me to never really address this issue. I’ve known it’s a problem forever but have always kind of filed it under “Everyone Makes Mistakes Sometime” without acknowledging that it’s a real problem.
Definitely checking Habitica out, pronto. I’m a little less responsive to my *own* rewards system, and that usually ends in me pointlessly stonewalling MY OWN SELF, while I go “okay we’ll sit here until this is done” and I go “sure, fine, great, hope you’re ready for a pointless all-nighter?”
But I’m hopeful that structures can help? Because under true deadline pressure I am amazingly productive.
(oh god, I FEEL YOU on the careless errors. I have an element of that to my job that HOPEFULLY is ironed out now, but my poor boss’s reaction to my unexplainable on and offness nearly gave me ulcers for a long time.)
If you join Habitica, look for the Toastrons! guild. There isn’t much chatter there, but it’s a good group.
I just started using Habitica a few weeks ago, and it already feels like it has changed my life. Most successful New Year’s resolution ever, although I’m still worried it’s going to stop being effective at some point. It just helps me focus on the things that I’ve actually decided are important because I keep referring back to it to see if it’ll give me another cute little animal for getting them done.
I’m another person reading all of these and thinking I maybe should talk to my provider about getting diagnosed and maybe medicated. I’m doing pretty well on my own, partly because if I do have ADHD (which I am pretty positive I do…) I have a relatively mild case, and partly because I’ve been able to create structures and incentives to manage it. Like, I only work half time at my desk job because that is all the energy I have for concentration in a week. And I prioritize getting enough sleep, and eating enough protein and not too much sugar, because that helps me concentrate. And Habitica, and Trello, and strict rules that everything goes on Google Calendar or is written down on my phone immediately.
But I still have days when I don’t get ANYTHING done, and I feel so hopeless and guilty when that happens. And like I can’t get ahead on my personal projects, since none of those have deadlines or accountability. My wife thinks I should think about medication, and now I am thinking maybe I should try it. Hmm.
My mind just jumps from one thing to another incessantly, and once I’ve thought about something I can’t not check it or react to it.
Yes, this.
Habitica! I didn’t know about this, but grad school anxiety has recently caused me to regress to obsessively playing the Sims and projecting all my organization hopes and dreams onto them. Now I can do the same to a fictionalized me! Is there a guide anywhere for what prompts to use for academic goals?
How do you tell if you have some kind of treatable disorder or are just lazy, unmotivated by your current environment, and/or susceptible to the lures of the internet? My therapist (last year, I’ve since stopped going) never suggested ADHD as a possibility, even though I spent every session in tears about my inability to complete assignments.
What mostly worries me is the obsessive side of it. I’ll re-load and re-load internet pages even if I know there’s nothing new. My mind just jumps from one thing to another incessantly, and once I’ve thought about something I can’t not check it or react to it.
It me. It me it me it me. Had a thought and can’t help but it look it up even though I’m driving? Yep. Know that if I think of something I have to check it then and there because if I wait, I will have forgotten about it 5 minutes later? Yep. Spend half my work day chasing down some random thing that popped into my head? Yep.
Treatment helped A LOT.
I’m in a similar boat but as I get older I feel like it’s dragging on me more, or, limiting my career advancement because imagine what I could do if I were productive from 9-4 as well! (Obviously my imagination is painting a picture of an unstoppable Wonderwoman, smart and prolific and with perfectly coiffed hair). But I’m also worried about medication. My plan is to see what happens just with ADD counseling. Well, I made that plan earlier in the summer and have yet to do anything about it. But that’s a step!
I feel the same way–I’m fairly productive in the right settings, but I definitely relate to a lot of what the articles say, and when I have a lot to do, I hit breakdown stage a lot faster than my friends.
What I wonder is, how do you go about even bringing this up with a health professional? “I read this article online, and I think it’s me; run some tests?”
I don’t want to be that person who thinks everything on WebMD is them, but I would like to know what my mental health is like at this point.
Honestly, same. But at the same time it’s also “well I’ve been running on all cylinders for a long time, how do I know if my inabiility to focus is from possible-ADHD or just burnout and depression making a vicious cycle?”
That’s…. actually kind of what I did, initially. It had never occurred to me that I might have ADD, I was 22-ish, an article caught my eye and it mentioned certain behaviors as possible indicators, including nail-biting and/or picking at cuticles. I was able to stop biting my nails after high school but I’d never been able to break the cuticle-picking, to the point where my fingers were usually bleeding. That got me thinking, and I took an online assessment and came back “high probability” and then I took it to my GP and had meds that day.
I took care of the nail biting thing by keeping them short at all times – it wasn’t nervous, I just really can’t stand them not being short. My thing now is trying to pull out stray chin hairs with my fingers. I think I should probably start keeping tweezers at work, but it’s so satisfying when you finally get the sucker!
Yeah, I can’t do long nails at all (how do people type when they’re super long I DON’T GET IT) and have ALSO mainly transferred that to chin hairs, wut
I know it’s a long shot, but would you happen to remember what assessment you took?
WEIRDLY yes, I remember it well enough to re-identify it. I am 99% confident it was this checklist and this self-test.
Thank you!
And here I am picking at my cuticles as I read this thread…and remembering how I did that through every class I ever took….
With the nail biting/picking as a symptom, would hair pulling come under that?
My understanding of it is that toe-tapping, pencil-tapping and pen-clicking, nail-biting–that kind of tiny, physical, compulsive action that you’re almost completely unaware of doing until someone points it out to you, any of those can be symptoms/indicators, BUT they can also be symptoms/indicators of other things, so it’s a good idea to discuss with a professional that can look at a larger picture.
shit I read this and immediately noticed myself tapping my feet.
I recognised myself too much here
I went to the dr because I was super depressed and overwhelmed. The doctor was like hmmmm I’m sending you to the ADD specialist because this doesn’t sound like depression exactly. Then I was in denial until after my appointment with the specialist.
Maybe it’s too easy to rewrite my history after being diagnosed to point my finger at ADD for every failure. And I’m finally getting to a place where I like my life and mostly like myself. But had I been diagnosed when I first started showing symptoms that impacted my learning, or even later in high school, my life would’ve been better and my self-esteem might have stayed out of the toilet. Maybe could’ve avoided a detour into self-harming. Taken less than 10 yrs to finish my B.A. Broken up with that asshole after 6 months instead of 4 yrs.
I read stuff online and then went to my therapist with a long document where I had written down examples of all the stuff that resonated with me. (More to keep me from freaking out about making things up than to ‘prove’ myself to my therapist.) She couldn’t give me drugs or a referral for assessment, but she gave me the validation (and a handy letter outlining the discussion we’d had) I needed to talk to my GP, who then referred me onto a psychiatrist. (GPs can’t prescribe ADD meds in Australia.) I went to the psych, he gave me a couple of diagnostic tools and asked me questions about myself and my life, concurred with the opinions of my therapist and GP and started talking to me about the different ways to approach it. It was a longish process, but worth it.
I read that article and the “Atlantic” article and am torn between “IT ME” and “You mean the years of un/underemployment, the bad grades and incompletes, the messy rooms of which I was so ashamed, the bit where I became the Designated Patient to my family, the relationships that fizzled out because I had the letter written or the present wrapped and then *just* *couldn’t* find the person’s address/get to the post office/find her phone number and call and say ‘Hey, I’ve been thinking of you’- all that DIDN’T HAVE TO HAPPEN?”
Pretty much this. Treated at 29, so much happier now, but damn, what would uni have been like if I found it at 17 instead.
I read the ADHD article a few days ago and a lot of it is true and its great that its getting noticed; it particularly got me with the line about women wondering what they could have been if they’d known about their condition and been supported (I was diagnosed at about 16 after two years of sever issues around school, but I’d pretty much already given up on education at that point anyway so I never went back to school. If they’d known when I was 7 that I wasn’t just an asshole my life could have been very different and I could have done a lot more academically; I originally wanted to do medicine, but I found the school system too unbearable to even be able to stick it out until college)
However I didn’t related to the supposed self esteem issues about not being able to ‘conform to societies expectations of women’ and I feel like their focus on it was a bit too gendered. Like I struggled because I was failing with societies expectations of being a human and I was also literally failing at being a functioning person (at least within the rigid system I was stuck in). Self esteem about being a ‘good girl’ had nothing to do with it.
I think that hits differently for everyone. Personally, it’s not a direct self-esteem hit so much as a quiet and irrational belief that I’ve been doing everything wrong.
I totally agree it hits everyone different; and there are self esteem issues around being ‘useless’. I totally get that, I have a constant feeling like I’m missing my basics and always playing catch up ( as if I’d never had someone actually teach me to drive, I’m just constantly picking it up as I go and figuring thing out from context and good guesses, while driving at 100 on a motorway.)
I don’t know what my point is really, just that reading that article it really jumped out at me how much they were leaning on self esteem issues and how that’s bad ‘because we can’t have women with low self esteem!’. Like there’s a million other results of having undiagnosed ADD, like poverty and unemployment (which runs in my family along with ADD) and interpersonal issues/bad relationships; I feel like the women who have ADD but have managed to still be high achievers are the affluent (probably white) women who had good parents and a decent school system and so managed to achieve in spite of it, but what about the poor girls growing up with a mother who also suffers (unnoticed) with ADD so that just getting out the door to school every morning at a decent time is an all out battle. And what about the women who flunked out of school because they couldn’t tolerate the environment and are now fighting their way through the benefits system, which is hard enough at the best of times but becomes an all encompassing issue with unmanaged ADD? (These are all issues I’ve experienced or witnessed)
Oh hell yes re: benefits Especially if they’re benefits you got because of your ADD. I’m lucky in that I’m not terrible with most paperwork deadlines, but did I remember to call the day before for the discounted taxi? For several months… generally not.
I think it depends on the personal experience. I literally got diagnosed with ADHD a week ago and I relate HARD to the self-esteem issues. It’s not that I feel like I’m failing to be a “good girl”- I feel like I’m failing at being an adult human being who can do things like laundry and not have her room turn into a pile of clothing and books and wrappers everywhere. I’ve genuinely spent 27 years assuming I’m just a gross person who can’t take care of her life and somehow convinced everyone that I’m just barely smart enough to get where I am and will never make it any farther.
Only tangentially related and probably speaking from a place of privilege, but: hiring someone to clean our house has been life changing. I felt such guilt about the house being dusty and messy, because it kept confronting me with what I perceived as my failure to be an adult. Now it’s still pretty messy, but at least it’s clean.
I would honestly like to do this but I’m too ashamed to let anyone see how bad things are. Do you have any suggestions for grappling with those feelings and pushing through, in order to hire someone? My partner and I need the outside help to be honest.
The first time was definitely tough: it took a lot of saying “she’s seen worse. She must’ve seen worse” to myself like a mantra, and I found myself making excuses to her (“we’ve just been really busy lately…”). After that, though, it’s just the average dirt that collects in a week, and knowing she’s coming actually sometimes helps me with that final push to clean up some of the mess, because she can clean a lot more thoroughly if there aren’t piles of stuff everywhere.
Maybe you could hire separate people to help with an initial super-big clean, and then regular maintenance cleaning? Then you wouldn’t have to regularly see the person who knows how bad it was… just a thought.
Also if it’s possible for you, you could devote a weekend to getting it up to a non-embarrassing level, and then get regular help without anyone else ever knowing how bad it got. Have you see Unfuck Your Habitat? I think it’s a tumblr (I am old, I don’t get tumblr) and there’s also a iphone ap… totally non-judgemental, and very very helpful, especially on very messy spaces people are really embarrassed about.
YES. I am old friends with the founder of UfYH and she makes a serious effort to consider neuroatypical challenges when it comes to cleaning–depression and ADHD are two of the big ones. The app is $2 and totally worth it.
there’s an APP? also bless your friend, I have thought of UfYH every time I face my disaster of an apartment, and go “it just takes 20 mins in each area. Just 20 mins. You can do this.”
There are many things in the comments today that I’m relating to in a big way but this is towards the top. A couple of weeks ago my dude kindly offered to help me organize my room, which was horrifying (in that I thought I was keeping the chaos in acceptable check, but maybe not). If you are wondering, there is a female Oscar the Grouch (who lives in a trash can for the non-Sesame Street watchers) and her name is Grundgetta and that has been how I’ve been referring to myself lately.
Well if it makes you feel any better I was diagnosed when I was in 4th grade, I think? And I still went on to leave a path of chaos, anxiety, and squandered opportunities in my wake.
Hmm, I think it definitely depends on the person/their background, but there are also elements of being a grownup, especially emotional labor like remembering birthdays, sending cards, etc., that are very gendered. And so kind of on top of generally feeling like a failure of an adult, someone could also feel like a failure of a woman, wife, and/or mother. I’ve definitely felt a bit of this after getting married, despite a husband who does more than his fair share of emotional labor. Society as a whole judges a woman for a messy house WAY more than a man.
Hm, it might be a generational thing, too? bc the ‘low self-esteem/societal expectations of women’ thing is my mother to a T- as I said last week, she was diagnosed at 58, but in the years I was growing up there was a lot of “I’m a failure of a mother and wife” stewing in her brain, whenever she didn’t get the laundry done, or didn’t have dinner ready for us, or whenever she compared herself to the other women around her – “so-and-so keeps her house so clean, why am I just not as good”
Even if I do ever marry and have kids, I don’t think I would feel nearly the same amount of pressure to run a picture-perfect household.
This is true; it probably is very generational and cultural. I was never told to stop fidgeting because ‘good girls don’t fidget’ I was told to stop it because people found it annoying (or my mum thought I needed to pee)
I remember a lot of stuff about having a clean house with my mum, it was a constant struggle (and the house would get really bad and then she’d spend an entire day cleaning), and she never wanted people to see the house etc
Personally I’ve just embraced that I’m a pretty lazy person when it comes to the house and I just try and keep it relativity tidy, IDGAF about dusting and clean skirting boards.
That line got me too. I don’t think my high school teachers have ever had a bigger disappointment than me, because they all taught me at the level where I could get through on natural brains, and I know they expected a lot and then… nothing. Mediocre results at higher levels, no university. They must just wonder what the hell went wrong.
That YHL article is kind of horrifying. The Internet can be such a scary place and the money and attention can be so quietly seductive that it would be hard to go into it with eyes wide open six or seven years ago. But it’s a treadmill, right? I have a measly niche niche niche blog, and I comment on the Toast and a couple other sites, and sometimes I feel that keeping up with the Internet and twitter and IG and Facebook is already too much by itself and want to step back. I can’t imagine the cycle when you’re the face of a major lifestyle blog. Do you lose your self, a bit? And people are so vicious–I cannot imagine that.
I remember reading one YHL post on some little home improvement, I think they were putting a gate on their deck or something, and the comments were full of incredible personal attacks about how they’re terrible parents. Because they didn’t have a gate on their deck before. But also because the gate railing looked like a kid could get their head stuck in it, and something about did they want their children to smash their fingers, and what good was a gate without a lock, and literally on and on and on. I’m not a parent but even I know that must have been crushing. This is why I don’t blog. I will make my mistakes in private and share my triumphs with friends and toasties only.
I was an avid YHL reader and I used to wonder to myself all the time about how they could keep going and going and going with the projects PLUS the posts on top. I was not surprised at all when they announced they were stepping back!!
Right! I thrifted some amazing dining chairs that were totally dirty & one seat was broken, but all in all a great find–I had the intention of taking a “before” photo. NOPE. Slipped my mind. I could never be a blogger–I admire that dedication.
I used to be a big YHL reader, and I’m simultaneously disappointed they ended the blog and happy that they get to just live their lives now. Now that I’m getting close to buying a house, I’m even more interested in these kinds of blogs, but it’s hard to find exactly what I’m looking for. I want to read something well done, obviously, but they can’t be so popular that they burn out or become entirely sponsored content, but if they’re not popular at all, it’s unlikely you’ll even come across it/they won’t quit blogging. Does there even exist a perfect amount of internet popularity?
Do you know A Beautiful Mess? I don’t like every idea they have, but all in all, it’s quite enjoyable.
It’s amazing how entitled readers can be. I follow what you’d think was a completely unobjectionable tumblr, Househunting, which browses real estate websites for appealing house images. It’s been eyeopening to read the hate mail and threats she gets, which she’s been sharing.
Just because you want it, doesn’t mean people OWE you free entertainment on your terms. Very much the “dark side of the Internet.”
I’ve actually considered unfollowing Househunting on tumblr because so much of her posts are now devoted to responding to hate mail. People ruin everything.
If you get Tumblr Savior for your browser, you may be able to block those posts from showing up on your dash–especially if she uses a specific tag for them. Savior lets you know when it’s blocked a post and why so you can choose to show it if you want. It’s totally cleaned my dash up because I’m in mutual follow with lots of lovely people but I just don’t give a damn about Marvel movies and seem to be the only one of my tumblr crowd who feels that way. I blocked every character name and acronym I could think of and now i’m blessedly mostly free.
I did that for Star Wars and suddenly my dash was empty >.<
well except for the people who would just reblog the ENORMOUSLY LONG photosets with no caption/tag for Savior to pick up on
I use the post-shrinker New-Xkit add-on which I set to 400px tall (about half my screen size) so at least there’s that.
(tag your posts, tumblr!)
I, too, don’t care about Marvel. There are so few of us on tumblr.
Not Link Roundup related, but … Toasts, I went to Planned Parenthood for an IUD yesterday, six months after the birth of my second child, and was told that my uterus is … too big. The NP stuck a metal rod up my vagina, hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, asked me how many pregnancies had I had, again?, LEFT THE ROOM with the speculum still inserted, brought back another NP, and then proceeded to tell me that my uterus was “oversounding”, I’d have a 50/50 chance of keeping the IUD in, and did I want to get the implant instead?
Well, I got the implant, but I felt like I was kind of rushed into it and, of course, now I’m googling all the terrible side effects people have had with it. Does anyone have a good experience to relate? Useful info: I had the Mirena before pregnancy #2 and had no noticeable side effects and generally don’t seem to overreact to hormonal birth control.
I’d . . . call and complain. That’s not good care, and someone should take the time to talk you through this and let you know what your other choices are.
The implant is awesome, I stopped having periods almost completely and it didn’t hurt and I completely forgot it was there apart from that I didn’t get pregnant. A++, would highly recommend.
I am so, so sorry you had that experience. Regarding the implant, I am actually getting one in March based on the positive experiences of women that I know. So, it might be good! I hope it works out well for you.
Thanks! I mean, it wasn’t the worst experience I’ve ever had at the doctor, unfortunately, and I do have extra patience for PP. But still. The speculum.
I had the sort of opposite experience. They couldn’t get the sounding thingy into my uterus at all. I spent about 40 minutes feeling them try, including using these pincers to grab hold of my cervix to keep it still. It was desperately unfun, and a huge waste of time since it was not successful. So, I got the implant and really like it. I’ve had it for almost exactly 2 years now. I had spotting for a few months, then nothing for about a year. Now I’m getting intermittent light periods. Bit unpredictable, but I will take it any day over full periods and/or unwanted pregnancy.
OH GOD 40 minutes? I would have gotten up and left.
I am on my third implant (so it’s been 7 years now) and it is the absolute number one best birth control I have ever been on, and I’ve tried a bunch. I recommend it literally every time anyone brings up birth control methods around me.
Zero fussing with prescription refills, less painful insertion with an easier recovery, and you can always tell exactly where it is just by poking at it, if (like me) you are one of those people who fixates on those IUD horror stories of it puncturing something or being accidentally expelled. I also used to have awful cramps (like, prescription drugs, go-home-from-work-early cramps) and they are now GONE.
This is excellent feedback, thank you!
I LOVED the implant. The Mirena is currently making my hair fall out. I’m sorry the doctors rushed you into a decision.
Oh whoa. I seem to be shedding a lot myself lately.
From what I’ve seen online, the hair loss stops and reverses when the thing is removed. I like being not-pregnant for now (and am worried about the implant since I’m overweight now), so I’m cranking up the biotin.
Interesting! Thanks! Did your skin get shitty with the Mirena? I have also heard biotin is great for thinning hair, but that it can do a number on acne prone skin (which I have in a lot of, since Mirena)
Oh, interesting! I also have acne-prone skin; hopefully the biotin doesn’t do anything awful. My skin has gotten much worse on the Mirena, which is frustrating.
Truth. I’m taking spriolactone now and it is a life saver
Thank you for this thread! I’m due to get my Paraguard removed in the spring and had been thinking of switching to Mirena so knowing about these potential side effects is really helpful.
If you have struggled with shitty skin in the past, might be worth chatting to your doc about a game plan!
I think my hair-shedding issue is the Mirena as well but my hair doesn’t seem noticeable thinner at all? I just see more of it in the shower, so now I’m convinced my hair is somehow infinite in supply, like an everlasting gobstopper.
Hair wizard! For me I was in that boat for probably a year? It’s been two years now and it is noticeably thinner at this point. (Biotin is supposed to help, though—apparently it reverses once the Mirena’s out.)
Mirena totally made my hair fall out. It made me put on weight, made me really sleepy, and pretty grumpy.
Because I’ve never found any kind of hormonal birth control that doesn’t make me loopy, we’re talking about vasectomy or tube tying now.
My husband got the snip, ama
How long did it take him to heal? Were there complications?
He says after two days he could get off the couch and move okay, after six days he flew across the country and felt pretty much back to normal. Occasional twinges of pain for two or three months, but they were very brief and stopped eventually. No complications, but he was very diligent about after care!
He tells everyone about it, and says it was the best choice.
I LOVE THE IMPLANT, it’s my new favorite birth control! The side effect lists are scary, but they haven’t represented my experience at all.
I’m on year 2 with Mirena, and I have absolutely no regrets. Cons: it hurt getting it put in, and I got 2-week long periods for about 4 months right afterwards. Pros: After the getting-my-period-for-4-months (off and on) experience, I have gotten ZERO periods. No bleeding whatsoever. The peace of mind about not getting pregnant is great. It never hurts or does anything weird. So all in all, it’s been a good trade-off for me. Good luck!! 🙂
re: leaving the room with speculum… eeehhhhhh… no, not my preference for this and I’d go so far as to say not a best practice either, preference would be to tell my medical assistant to grab Other Person but if I don’t have an MA, it would be passingly tempting to not ruin my sterile field and positioning and so on (possibly the whole kit? ugh, in a cost-conscious place like PP that is some $500 down the drain) in order to get some confirmation on measurements. Have I never seen anyone do something like this ever? wellllllll…
But yes, definitely not recommended to place an IUD if you’ve got a uterine cavity size over measurements, if I recall off the top of my head over 9cm. The next question (do you go for a follow-up appointment?) would be do you need to do anything to follow-up on that? Probably depending on how oversized we’re talking.
And sorry that you felt rushed, a private GYN place would probably indeed make you come back for one follow-up appointment to discuss it and another to actually do the procedure – PP generally takes the “we figure you want birth control NOW, not 6-10 weeks from now” approach which I always preferred. Taking multiple days off work / finding care for kids and so on only upped that likelihood that one of those follow-ups was going to have a positive pregnancy test.
Now, I love the implant so much. No issues with insertion! No partners whining about the strings! This is my third, next is due 2017. One day of spotting maybe every 6 weeks or so. Don’t assume every terrible weird side effect you can find on the internet is going to happen to you. Reading about 10 people in the entirety of the internet who had Super Weird Response sounds like EVERYONE HAS WEIRD RESPONSE – you have to remember for every ‘oh my god I hate it it ruined my life’ online reaction, there are easily 1000 women who either like it or maybe it didn’t work out for one or another relatively benign reasons (bleeding, bleeding being the main one – a month or more of bleeding is not uncommon with either Mirena or Nexplanon – if it is really bothersome ask for something, they are lots of ways to make it manageable) but didn’t have their lives ruined or feel any need to post about it on the internet because it was not a big deal.
Wow, I really appreciate this response! (Sorry for the long delay in responding… my whole family has been sick, yuck.) It definitely gives me some perspective. I’ve spent the last year or so going to a very patient-conscious CNM practice, so I’m used to having a bit more, er, frills. And, indeed, I DID want birth control then rather than later, so I’m glad they were able to do the implant right away.
And, of course, I did come home and make a donation, since I 100% support PP no matter what.
Very delayed response to join the chorus that I have and love the implant, and had a similar experience – I wanted to go get an IUD but discovered instead that I have a birth defect that means I have a septum running the full length of my vagina & uterus so, short of some pretty invasive surgery, an IUD wasn’t an option. I’ve had the implant for over 2 years and have a pretty irregular & unpredictable period, which I don’t mind given the extraordinarily low failure rate.
Dogs with light blue eyes: a little bit creepy?
A little creepy but in a super compelling way that I just can’t look away.
Staring into my soul. Adorably (and a little creepily).
this! I love my dog’s creepy blue peepers. 🙂
I think it the creep factor has more to do with the shade of eyes than that they’re in a dog. See Cillian Murphy.
Yes, this is true. My dad actually has eyes like that and i don’t really approve.
I know a dog with weird light golden brown eyes that perfectly match her coat colour and a black tongue. She’s a bit unsettling to look at.
THANK YOU DISGUSTING SLEEPER ARTICLE.
This is primarily the reason I hate morning sex, because I feel like a goblin when I wake up and shockingly that never gets me in the mood.
Droolers unite!
In college, one of my roommates told me that I don’t really snore, but I do have a tendency get into a weird position, stay there a while, make one loud HHNNAKKKK, then flop into a different position.
I also drool.
You described that so perfectly and I can see it so perfectly and I haven’t stopped laughing for 5 minutes. HHNNAKKKK! Flop! Oh my, here it goes again.
I never used to drool, but I started wearing this thing because of my hideous snoring so now I do: https://www.theraventsnoring.com/ I am disgusting.
Ugh I have a night guard for my jaw clenching so I like…glue myself into it with my drool?
??
If my Fitbit could talk, it would ask what the fuck is the MATTER with me when I’m asleep. And the drooling. Christ. My mouth was so wide open the other night my lip fell asleep from the way it was mashed into my pillow. Hot stuff.
I’m actually getting a bit weepy reading it. Me being a gross sleeper was a running joke while I grew up (I thankfully don’t snore, but I do sprawl out and sleep with my mouth wide open, also apparently I was a kicker as a kid). My mum has pictures of me asleep that she likes to laugh at.
I honestly have anxiety about falling asleep in public places (Its happened, I slept through an entire party on the couch one time, or in the van with a bunch of class mates, who then took pictures) because THEN PEOPLE WILL SEE ME SLEEPING.
Apparently when I sleep in a bed with someone these days I curl up into a tiny ball and don’t move. And I know that I tend to wake up before I roll over (gently) so I don’t disturb them. I completely related to lying awake beside someone because you don’t want to disturb them.
I also drool when I nap. I’M SUPER SEXY GUYS.
Yes! My partner and I have given up sharing a bed. We’re both light sleepers and he rolls around a lot and I’m a Disgusting Sleeper (so glad to have an official term). It’s considered pretty weird not to share a bed, but we are both so much happier to sleep well.
My parents don’t share a bed! I feel like people who know this (my husband, close friends, etc) think it’s sad, but my mom is such a light sleeper (I have terrible memories of sharing beds with her on vacations!) that I’m pretty sure it has saved their marriage.
I don’t think it’s weird, I think it’s amazing! If we had room in our apartment I would seriously consider it. Different schedules, restless sleeping, etc means neither of us sleeps well.
There’s a quiet but real movement of non-bed-sharers. Like, it’s always been there, but people don’t discuss it. Couples who don’t share a bed are kind of like people who do/not wear undies with yoga pants. It’s just actually how the other half lives while the rest are shocked.
That’s good to hear, because everytime I tell people we don’t share a bed, I get surprised looks and “Don’t you miss each other?” type of comments. I feel like people get a strong message that if they don’t share a bed, there must be something wrong with their relationship.
Also, I like the idea of a quiet movement of non-bed-sharers: a quiet, well-rested movement.
My partner has suggested we get separate beds, but I get nervous that it’ll suck too much intimacy out of our relationship (I know that this is crazy). We do have a very good blow-up mattress that fills quickly for nights when one of us is keeping the other up.
I drool like a MANIAC, and my septum has deviated so I snore now too. I’m wondering if getting my septum fixed will fix both issues (since I will be able to breathe thru my nose more easily?) or just the snoring… but either way I need to get myself to a new doctor asap.
Bill Bryson said (apropos of falling asleep on a train) that some people should just be discreetly covered with a sheet when fall asleep, as he woke up with his mouth gaping open and drool collecting in his beard.
I’m down for this plan!
One time I fell asleep on a plane and woke up with my mouth hanging open, drooling on a stranger’s shoulder. I didn’t know what to say and then fell asleep again before I could figure it out.
When I woke up he had switched seats.
My husband has a whole collection of videos in which I snore, drool, grind my teeth, and make these weird alien clicking noises with my tongue. I kind of like the alien clicking noises? I like to think they might be useful someday in frightening predators.
I have drooled on many partners many times. And also on myself. Blarh.
I rarely snore, but I’m always super embarrassed when I do because I cannot stand snoring from bed-mates. It invariably keeps me up and fills me with irrational rage. So if I snore I’m just being a hypocrite.
I am a member of Team Disgusting Sleepers! I have a deviated septum and a dust mite allergy so I frequently get real congested while I’m sleeping, which results in loud snoring, drooling, and waking up looking like garbage with bags under my eyes and etc. I also tend to get kinda sweaty and I like to sprawl out.
Needless to say I’m not that excited about sleeping next to another person! Cuddling is nice for like 5 minutes and then I’m like “OK stop touching me you, are too hot and I can’t stand you breathing on my face.” And when sleeping next to someone I get hyper-aware about my snoring and thus am not able to sleep deeply, so I get no rest. I’m here for separate bedrooms, or at least separate beds!
“In the past I tried to mitigate my propensity to be a disgusting sleeper by simply…not sleeping. Third dates were particularly fraught. When a man slept over, I would skim the surface of unconsciousness and purposefully wake myself when I sensed the hint of snore approaching. I would pantomime unturbulent sleep. I would labor under hours of wide-eyed wakeful silence and emerge, in the morning, bleary-eyed, wholly unprepared to face a day at the office, let alone an onerous commute on the 3 train. This is a senseless way to live. But such was my commitment to not being disgusting.”
This article hit me SO HARD. I am also not conventionally attractive in many ways, and snoring was just one more way in which I failed as a woman. One of the ways in which I dealt besides not sleeping was just not dating people I liked. The first time I slept over with my husband he casually told me I snored the next day while we were out and about and I…burst into tears. It was unexpected but I really really liked him and I figured well…this will never last if we can’t sleep in the same bed. He was shocked at my chagrin. I don’t think guys have it nearly as hard when it comes to the need to be picturesque in all ways always, awake and asleep.
Lucky for me, I either snore less now since quitting smoking 8 years ago, or he’s gotten used to it. I always cringe, though, when women (it just really seems like it’s always women) write angry comments online about their awful husbands who snore all the time. It’s not their fault for snoring!
Who is the cutest puppy-pupper ever?!?!? (Besides mine) Sansaaaaaa! You are! Scritch Scritch scritches tummy…
Ok, I’m good now.
This ADHD post is so timely! Toasts, I need help/advice. I was gonna wait for the open thread, but since it’s tangentially related…
My beloved and perfect and best fiance is having serious issues concentrating at work. She just can’t get up the energy to do things. We assumed it was lingering effects of a serious depressive episode, but her depression seems to be coming under control and she’s still having trouble getting back on the horse. She was trying to convince me that it’s hopeless because she’s “just lazy” (BOO BRAIN WEASELS AND LOW SELF ESTEEM, BOO) because she’s always had difficulty concentrating. I made an offhand comment about ADHD and she mentioned it to her psychiatrist, but the psych said to test for it she’d need to talk to a neurologist, and insurance may not cover it, and also the psych thinks she doesn’t have it. But we’ve had trouble with this psych not really seeming to listen to or hear her concerns before and I’m just not sure…maybe I’m just hoping for a way to help her at all.
So toasties who’ve had first or second hand experience with this, is it worth trying to find a doctor to test her for it? I would do as much of the doctor searching and phone calls etc as I can, but it would still be more stuff for her to do and I don’t want to waste her spoons. Thoughts?
Yes. Yes, it absolutely is. My dad and brother both have ADHD. My dad got diagnosed late in life and it was a game-changer for him; he had developed all these elaborate coping mechanisms and he was a successful attorney, but he still had issues turning things in on time, constant procrastination, paying attention to anything for any length of time…getting on the meds saved his career. My brother is unquestionably the smartest person in our family, by like a factor of ten, but when he cycles off the meds, he will happily spend 14 hours a day reading fanfic and eating three pizzas while his place spirals into a horrorshow. When he’s on the meds, he’s can hold down a life and write novels in his free time. I know some people are skeptical about ADHD drugs, and I will admit that the calibration for both my dad and brother were painful (when they were figuring out what they needed and at what doses), but those medications were lifesavers for my family.
I’m no help with the doctors/medical side of things, apart from sympathy; I’m going through it at the moment and its just so exhausting and takes so much brain power (I’m not even doing anything about it, I’m just constantly thinking ‘I need to call this doctor’ or ‘I need to look up another counselling service’
However, even with out the doctors and medication; there are little things you can start to implement (although it is much harder without the medication giving you the ability to back it up); ADD people have all kinds of coping mechanisms, I’m huge into routine (down to I always do things in the same order and put things back in the same place), so adding little bits of it in can be beneficial (Like I’m going to sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop and then check my work email first and reply to at least two before I check my FB), and then there’s the Pomodoro method for when you really need to get work done, there’ll be better explanations of it online, but it basically embraces your nature to jump from one thing to another and builds in little reward breaks (I don’t do the full pomodoro method, there’s no way I could work for 30 minutes straight without a break, but I like the principal of ‘work for X amount of time then X time for reward’ I usually do about 15-20 minutes, then a 5 minute FB break. On a really bad day I’ll make myself reply to one email, or write two sentences, then back to FB for a few minutes, or read one article from the LR, then back to work for two sentences and so on)
I haven’t heard “I need to talk to a neurologist” about an ADHD diagnosis. The test I got for it was pretty much a checklist. It’s not a brain scan or anything.
And it’s not like the treatment is surgery. It’s cognitive behavioral stuff and/or low doses of common medication. If it’s useless or counterproductive, you stop.
I wonder if the psychiatrist thinks she’s going to sell her adderall to some teenagers?
For what its worth, neurologists do use checklists and questionnaires — unfortunately, brain scans can’t actually be used as a diagnostic tool yet (except for physical abnormalities). Neurologists can diagnose and treat ADD/ADHD. It might just be a situation where the psychiatrist doesn’t feel comfortable making the diagnosis based on his/her expertise.
That said, it definitely sounds like this psychiatrist may not be a good fit for several reasons.
Worth it, totally. My daughter was diagnosed relatively early (8 or 9, and she’s 16 now), and while we’ve cycled through a few therapists, getting her pediatrician on board was the best thing we could have done. It took some trial and error for the meds, but for right now we seem to have struck a good balance.
Hi, I shared my story down thread. Please have your fiancé see a different psychiatrist. If she can find one that specializes in adult ADHD, that would be perfect as they would have seen adult women with her diagnosis. Getting treatment was the Best Thing I’ve done in the last decade.
100% yes. I was diagnosed by a psychologist and a psychiatrist. There’s absolutely no reason she should have to be a neurologist and that is a bad psychiatrist.
It sounds like it could be worthwhile!
General fatigue could be any number of things, though– it might also be worth going to a primary care doctor and getting lab work done to check for anemia, etc.
I have mixed feelings.
First, your partner’s psychiatrist is… not right. My adult ADHD diagnosis came from a psychiatrist, and it’s typically conceived of as a behavioral disorder rather than a neurological one.
Second, my ADHD is comorbid with depression (MDD) and anxiety (GAD), and it was very difficult for me to find medication for ADHD that didn’t exacerbate one of the other issues.(Because ADHD drugs are stimulants that act on your central nervous system, nervousness, irritability, trouble sleeping, etc. are really common side effects.)
After about eight very uncomfortable months, I ended up on a low dose of Adderall XR, which I took 3-4 days a week for about a year. But that didn’t help nearly as much as finding a very good therapist (LMHC) did; she was able to help me find tools to handle time and task management, and we also worked on some cognitive-behavioral stuff for dealing with the anxiety.
So I’d emphasize that aspect first. If your partner decides also to seek an ADHD diagnosis, it’ll be a good adjunct–and it’ll also make a big difference in the frustrating phase where her her medication is being calibrated.
(Hopefully this makes sense and is useful… it’s not something I’m accustomed to talking about, so apologies if it came out rough.)
To add another story, my younger brother has ADD, some learning disabilities, and pretty severe depression, but getting treatment for the ADD – in his case, some meds, but more tools to help him stay on top of things – helped with the depression a lot. Because when he couldn’t focus in school or needed seven hours every night to do his homework or just couldn’t remember when he had to be in class, all of that felt to him like evidence that he was worthless. Treating the ADD has helped reduce the number of depressive episodes significantly.
Definitely try to talk to another psych. Even if your fiance doesn’t have ADHD, it sounds like that psychiatrist is not a good match for her. You’d think that the people who choose psychiatry as a specialty would be more likely to be empathetic and to be good listeners and less likely to be dismissive know-it-alls, but you would be wrong.
It’s weird that the psychiatrist recommended a neurologist, but I did end up seeing a neuropsychologist for my diagnosis, and actually, if you can swing it, I do recommend that. I needed to because I was about to be kicked out of grad school, and the diagnosis was going to allow me to go on medical leave instead of being terminated, so I wanted it as official as possible. Also, doctors who serve student populations can be reluctant to prescribe stimulant meds, because they’re so often abused on college campuses, so having a whole day of testing and an official report and writeup about my diagnosis helped me find someone who would actually *treat* my ADHD once it got diagnosed.
Also, neuropsychologists are the people they send kids to for diagnosis of all sorts of learning difficulties, and getting that kind of general screening can be useful regardless of whether it leads to an official diagnosis. It doesn’t hurt and may in fact help her to get a better sense of how her brain works and what her relative strengths/weaknesses are.
LeGuin using the words “scofflaws,” “bullyboys,” and “Loonybirds” pleases me deeply and I hope I never do anything that provokes her to insult me.
Y’all, I’ve met so many amazing ADHD ladies here after the Open Thread on Friday and formed a support system after just a WEEK with the diagnosis, so can we just all take a minute to appreciate how incredible and awesome everyone here is?
Yeah, its been amazing for me to be able to talk to other women with it. I’ve never really met other people with ADD, especially women and people who were diagnosed as adults and so understand the real struggles of trying to adult while ADDing.
So yeah, thanks y’all
It’s been such a help! It is so great.
The Toast is an amazing community in so many ways, and today I’m even more grateful for it than usual.
The Toast comments are such a great place. Reading through the comments this morning, I am finally thinking about seeing a professional about possible ADHD diagnosis and/or at least developing some helpful attention strategies, instead of just continuing to feel terrible about myself for not being able to handle the grad school workload effectively. I am glad you’ve found good support here, as well! <3
Thinking about that as well. My mom, brother, and sister were all diagnosed 20 years ago and I always thought I was the one that missed it. Now I am just thinking that I was a later bloomer, because the being a competent and together adult thing has not been going so well lately. Especially post baby #2 who is 2.5 years old and I still have that frazzled dealing with a newborn feeling most days.
Definitely see someone, at the very least just to have someone to talk to. After almost six years, I am a firm believer in the idea that basically every grad student should see a therapist at LEAST every six months. You may or may not have ADHD (plenty of people struggle with the workload who don’t have it), but I find it to be such a relief to have somewhere to go and talk about it all with someone who cares solely about my health and well-being rather than my publications or grants or anything else.
When I’m Queen of the World, free therapy visits will be part of the universal healthcare, with people getting twice yearly visits the same way they get twice yearly dental visits, and whatever amount of follow-up visits are necessary. (Hah, if only we could really have that level of mental health care)
I’m also thinking about that, too many of the comments are ones that I feel like I have a lot in common with.
Hi, adult woman here finally diagnosed (and medicated for) ADHD in my 30s. It took my purchasing and reading several books on ADHD in women and making a detailed chart paired with an essay before a psychiatrist agreed to try medication. Before this, I was unable to keep a job for more than 6 months, which, understandably, affected the quality of my life. I was one of those over-educated (masters), underemployed “fuckups” who just couldn’t get her shit together. A year and a half into treatment and I’m gainfully employed at an adult job, with adult responsibilities and I’m killing it. Still working on the extremely low self esteem fallout of feeling like an incompetent shit for nigh on three decades, but I’m getting there.
I’m relating so hard with you: diagnosed by an ADHD/ADD specialist in my 40’s after I read a newspaper article that described me to a tee; an underemployed “fuckup” who squandered a prestigious scholarship and gallery opportunities after Art School because I totally lost my shit after graduating and been adrift ever since; and finally, ALL the self esteem issues.
Medication has been very helpful for me, too (lithium) but I’d like to combine it with CBT. One day at a time! And thank you for sharing your story!!!!!!
Do you remember any of the books you read if they were good and helpful?
I read Women with Attention Deficit Disorder by Sari Solden and it was great. I gave it to my mum, and a few days later she called me back saying ‘oh. oh, this is you isn’t it?’
Hi, the best book I read was Women with Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life by Sari Solden. My chart and essay was based on a Q&A that’s in the book. I hope this brings you closer to peace.
Did anyone else watch Sarah Palin’s speech last night, endorsing Trump? I think my mouth was hanging open, and I asked my husband several times, “Do you think she is drunk?”
“He’s got the guts to wear the issues that need to be spoken about and debate on his sleeve, where the rest of some of these establishment candidates, they just wanted to duck and hide. They didn’t want to talk about these issues until he brought ’em up. In fact, they’ve been wearing a, this, political correctness kind of like a suicide vest.”
If Donald Trump is a human comments section, Sarah Palin is human AutoCorrect.
THIS. This is perfect.
I will forever hate McCain(‘s campaign staff) for dragging her out of obscurity. And I hate our news media for continuing to force us to listen to whatever garbage she has to say. Who gives a fuck what Sarah Palin’s opinion is???
Hopefully no-one, because it’s not like you’re going to find out what it is from listening to her talk.
Her opinion is the noise a balloon makes when you let the air out slowly. That little whiny noise. That’s it.
Trump, in contrast, is the flabby fart noise that comes from letting the air out so quickly the balloon flies around the room.
Exactly! If it weren’t for McCain I would still be blissfully unaware of that awful woman’s existence. Dear God, just imagine what I could do with those brain cells that are now permanently and involuntarily engaged with (and ruined by) Knowing Things About Sarah Palin.
I saw bits and pieces on Rachel Maddow, but I’m reading the transcript now and have to share some particularly odd bits:
” And he has, he’s spent his life with the workin’ man and he tells us, Joe six packs, he said, ‘You know, I’ve worked very, very hard and I’ve succeeded. Hugely, I’ve succeeded,’ he says.
And he says, ‘I want you to succeed, too.’
And that is refreshing, because, he, as he builds things, he builds big things, things that touch the sky. ”
It sounds like a kid trying to write a book. “Have you succeeded, sir?” “Yes–hugely I’ve succeeded,” he said.
And then this gem:
“And you’re ready to stop the race-baiting and the division based on color and zip code, to unify around the right issues. The issues important to me, or I wouldn’t be endorsing him, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, strict constitutionality. Those things that are unifying values and their time-tested truths involved. These are unifying values from big cities and tiny towns, from big mountain states and the Big Apple, to the big, beautiful heartland that’s in between.”
Uh, what? First, I thought Trump was pro-choice. Second, what?
Trump is a racist East-Coast-liberal, which makes this endorsement nothing more to me than a confirmation of Palin’s hypocrisy in literally everything.
“Trump’s candidacy. It has exposed not just that tragic the ramifications of that betrayal of the transformation of our country, but too, he has exposed the complicity on both sides of the aisle that has enabled it, OK?”
OK . . . ?
” And he has, he’s spent his life with the workin’ man and he tells us, Joe six packs, he said,…
Uggghhhh. “Joe six pack” is just the perfect encapsulation of the republican party’s insultingly out-of-touch pretensions to care about the working class.
I can’t stop laughing about this today because I kept making stupid jokes about a Trump nomination with Palin as VP nominee like six months ago and NOW IT’S FEASIBLE and I wholeheartedly regret my jokes.
More like: “He’s more of an asshole in the open (which I love!), where the rest of these candidates are just better at hiding it. They didn’t want to reveal their assholishness because he did. In fact, they’ve been wearing this attempt to be decent human beings like an invisibility cloak.”
Seriously, though. Go back to Alaska, Sarah. Maybe you can try sending smoke signals to Putin.
BEST Palin burn I’ve ever read was from Barbra Bush, Queen Bee of Country Club Conservatism: “I sat next to her once. Thought she was beautiful. And she’s very happy in Alaska, and I hope she’ll stay there.”
YES GOOD.
Between that and her comments on Jeb, I’m convinced Barbara Bush is a Texan Lucille Bluth.
Someone on Twitter said “How can she still sound like this? Write it down! Read a prompter!”
Maybe, in a not-so-shocking twist, she can’t read…
I am…… I mean, she’s terrible and her politics and ideas are terrible, but her lack of ability to form coherent sentences seems to go beyond just trying to shoehorn in as many buzzwords as possible and maybe might not be like, a character defect as much as something she can’t help? And I feel bad for making fun of her for it? I know I’m skirting armchair diagnosing here, but I also want to make sure I’m not taking cheap shots at someone with a disability?
Oh, she’s been delivering crazy word salads for years, this is nothing new. I’m more amazed she delivered a coherent speech back at the 2008 Republican convention, which introduced her to the nation. Maybe that was the only time she used a prompter.
I heard a bit this morning where she said “squirmish,” and a late-night comedian cracked that “that’s when squirrels go to war.”
It’s too bad she’s the one who said it, because a squirmish sounds ADORABLE. “The kittens got in a squirmish over who was going to play with the new toy”
Lol, I see no reason not to seize the new word from her. We’ll take it better places.
*quietly jots down ‘Squirmish’ into her personal lexicon*
My mother adores Palin and despises Trump so I can’t imagine what she thought of this. I’m a little afraid to ask. I hope it changes her opinion of Palin and not Trump.
My Most Republican Friend told me tonight that Palin’s endorsement sent her & her Even More Republican Husband into a quandary about the election, because it was so bad that they can’t even fool themselves into thinking that a vote for Trump wouldn’t be ridiculous.
Of all the many reasons I miss the late great Molly Ivins, one of the strongest is that we never got to hear her take on Sarah Palin. I’m sure it would have been legendary.
This is what happens when someone’s idea of a speech has devolved to 100% dogwhistles. One of the keys to understanding Palin is that she doesn’t do one iota more work than she absolutely has to, and she found out a while ago that her audience consists of people who not only have a lot of easy-to-reach buttons to push, but actually kind of like it when she does. Lack of overall coherency doesn’t matter, nor does blatant hypocrisy (so therefore the thing about Obama using a teleprompter–an old right-wing dig that everyone else abandoned literally years ago–while she’s reading off her notes). The people who will listen to her will just tell you that it’s because she’s “authentic”, and not note the difference between how she speaks in public and the composition of her Facebook posts, which are clearly the work of a different person.
Aaand, another awesome Rachel Monroe piece- this one is about a dude who ran a coffee shop in the real world and was a pick up artist blogger online, and when people found out his real-world life imploded: http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/01/jared-rutledge-pi…
I viscerally recoiled at his Twitter tagline.
Ugh, what a disgusting little worm.
Oh man, this dude is the embodiment of that “traits to look out for” watchlist that Toasties have been compiling. Named his business after Waking Life? Philosophy major who tells his friends they’re going to hell? COFFEE PEDANT?!
That anger-counselor guy seems no great shakes either:
“Trey Crispin is 45, with a graying man-bun and a gentle manner. He’s also the size of a fullback. Back when he was a professional snowboarder, he regularly snapped his boards in half with the force of his moves. Later, he learned how to control his own strength through the practice of t’ai chi. Having worked on his own anger issues for years, he says he is precisely attuned to other people’s aggression and sensitive to when it seems misplaced.”
Ecstatic-dance and a Pandora station of ragas.
Also, I don’t really think the aggression here is “misplaced” and this dude’s idea that, in order to be a loving and welcoming community, women have to accept the apology AND accept the guy who egregiously abused their trust is just retrograde BS.
ALSO Waking Life was intensely boring.
I was prepared to be in favour of that guy, because if anyone is supposed to pick up the pieces of a disgusting MRA implosion, it should definitely be a bloke. But I couldn’t believe that nobody said, “Hey, part of a sincere apology is recognising that the people you’re apologising to may say, “Nope, fuck off.”” If you think an apology is a magic switch that people have to accept, you may not be ready to leave kindergarten yet.
(Disclaimer, I still remember being totally hurt and upset when a friend didn’t accept my apologise for being kind of a cow when I was seventeen, so maybe “kindergarten” is a little harsh, but still, if you’re setting yourself up as Mr Mediator, that seems like a key lesson to impart.)
At least he yelled at them about how they were being shitty men.
However “he says he is precisely attuned to other people’s aggression and sensitive to when it seems misplaced”
Oh is THAT the problem here.
Ugh. So much grossness.
The best/worst part is how he’s spouting all the therapized speak in the beginning but then by the end it’s all, “I’m still planning to fuck around and marry a 24 or 25 year old when I’m 38 because: hotness.”
Magic hotness that sticks when you put a ring on it, though! That’s a pretty amazing loophole.
Well he MIGHT marry a 50 year old CFO.
If you’re not young you best be wealthy or you will never catch the manchild prize.
But there’s scientific evidence! He can show you the study!
I was honestly kind of rooting for the guy to actually turn his life around – I think Monroe was too – and then he’s all like, “Nope, still want to marry a 25 year old when I’m 38. Derek Jeter gets to, why not me? But no, I’m better now because I’d also be okay with a sufficiently beautiful older professional woman dominating me, that’s kind of hot too. (Please note I’m framing this potential future marriage entirely in terms of the kinds of sex we’ll have.)” UGH FIX YOUR ISSUES GROSS-ASS JARED
I had no idea who Derek Jeter was and had to Google him. And now I have to ask… why is a baseball player your idol, geeky dude? o.O
And it’s so textbook Red Pill to complain about some other guy’s choices/advances being accepted when yours isn’t and it’s just so not fair of women to respond differently to different men. He hasn’t really given up any of his bullshit, I don’t think, he’s just trying to “game” social acceptance the way he was trying to game sexual acceptance.
Ooooooh my god. I do like, though, that all his exes formed a lady support coven.
Holy shit. This is so good. I’m never dating again. Ban all men.
Both of these guys were just so completely un-self aware in their “apologies.” I mean, the balls it takes to complain, after you treated a lot of women as though they were less than human and only existed to be sexual objects for you, that “Nobody reached out to us to say, ‘What do you need to heal, to be better men?’” Jesus fucking christ. People like this really are completely incapable of understanding that the world does not revolve around them.
I have a terrible case of hypochondria when it comes to mental illness. I know I have depression and anxiety. My dad jokes that I must have aspergers. My sister was diagnosed with ADHD.
but is there a way to test for everything? I don’t know, I probably don’t have anything besides what I’ve been diagnosed with but I really want to blame my weirdness on brain chemicals rather than me just being weird.
Honestly, my ADHD diagnosis came from a conversation and a checklist. I don’t know if there’s anything more conclusive, but if your brain works like a person with ADHD, you are a person with ADHD in any meaningful sense. Especially if the treatments are effective for you.
Besides, as far as I can tell, it’s weird to be neurotypical.
I mean, there generally isn’t a blood test where they can just take a sample and call you back in a week. But there are diagnostic criteria that a trained professional can walk through with you, and give you a good idea if you may have a particular condition (and how severe it is). They may also have some good treatment options, if you’re experiencing particular symptoms or difficulties.
The number of people I know who have (e.g.) Aspergers AND depression is fairly astronomical– you can certainly have more than one at a time!
Yes! There is a way. You want to see a psychologist or neuropsychologist who specializes in neurodevelopmental disorders for a comprehensive evaluation, which will include taking your history as well as psych testing. Psychologists are often better able to work out complicated diagnostic issues than the other mental health fields because of their training in, & access to, psychological tests. Diagnosis can, & in many cases should, be mor than filling out a couple checklists.
The sad truth is that depression/anxiety and untreated ADHD are often comorbid (not sure on the spectrum side of things) so it’s not always easy to suss out what is causing what. I was diagnosed with ADHD via a computer test and some sessions with a psychologist. Talking to someone can’t hurt- all that can happen is that you learn more about yourself.
This is a bit belated, but if it helps any: some depression symptoms resemble ADD. My asperger’s/depression/anxiety sometimes has strong resemblance to ADD, but it’s not the full thing. (This is according to my therapist when we were sounding out different diagnoses to help us find the right therapy course.)
Mine, too. It can look a lot like ADD, but that’s actually depression, for me (autistic, prone to anxiety and depression).
In light of the ADHD link, here’s a good read if anyone is interested in a politicized take on chronic mental and physical illnesses and their intersection with other forms of marginalization:
http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/si…
Beautiful … thank you.
>often wake up in a veritable Hoover Dam of saliva on my pillow.
*ahem* I believe you’ll find that you make a veritable Lake Mead
Mine does get bigger when I drink lots of mead.
Well, if she eats a lot of Portland cement and sand…
You guys, I know this isn’t Open Thread yet, but I can’t wait to until then to tell you all that I just received an email from Cosmo about “5 Best Positions For Pegging!”
WELL???
how lucky we are to be alive right now!
Um, I’m guessing this is not about how to tight-roll your pants?
That deleted comment reminds me of an email I once got in response to a news article I wrote that must have had something tangentially to do with abortion, or public opinion on abortion, or something. A Man ™ wrote in with some thoughts I can’t now remember, and then added that he was a unique specimen, as he was pro-life AND non-religious, and would I like to know more? I decided I would not like to know more.
“Would you like to know more?”
“Thank you, but it is very difficult for me to imagine caring about that.”
The only reply that could possibly do would be:
‘You are not a unique specimen’
“You, a man, have found a way to justify wanting to control my decisions without the use of a God? DO TELL. Or wait, no. Don’t really care.”
— is what I wanted to say but did not because I was being professional.
(Not related to the links, sorry)
You guys – I have been watching Luther this past week, and I’m not OK with season 3. You can’t just tell me via Wikipedia that my favourite character will appear until season 4 and then kill him off! That’s just not fair!
So after that, my enthusiasm for season 4 was basically non-existent, and then I made the additional mistake of reading up on Alice’s role in season 4, and now I have basically no interest in watching these two episodes.
Thoughts? Should I just stop watching, or are the next two episodes still worth a try?
S4 so far is pretty boring; the killer is kind of interesting but the whole Luther/Alice plot is super damp
I guess I won’t watch it right now; if some day I have the urgent need to see season 4, I’ll watch it, but for now I’ll pretend there is no season 4.
Aw, I really liked the Luther/Alice dynamic because it was super fucked up and weird. I missed her a lot in S3 — there just wasn’t the same chaotic spark without her (and also that character who died was one of my favorites as well, so that was fun).
I thought they did a good job of invoking her presence in S4 without her there and the mystery was gripping enough. I’m easy to please though: just Luther being slightly amoral, wearin’ coats.
I watched Luther years ago, before the two-episode addendum. I never finished S3, only ever watching the first two eps of it.
That was probably a good call! Alice reappears in episode four, but this seems kind of stilted to me. And apart from that, it’s also not so great (mostly because of said character’s death).
I liked it, but mostly because I just like watching Idris wear coats.
That coat he has is made of magic I think.
Friends, my baby gave me a cold and then I took cold medicine, and I have forgotten what I was supposed to be doing like five times in the last hour.
yes this.
I … feel like that most days?
(Not days when I’m teaching, thankfully. But any day when I’m just sat at my desk.)
Seriously, cold medicine should only be taken when you can commit to being unconscious for the rest of the day.
why are they even allowed to sell it
This is why I do not understand people who come to work sick. Like… how is it even possible to get anything done?
So, my current busywork/doll-making has collided with my non-stop Hamilton fangirling. My husband is a little unsure about my emotional stability right now, but, frankly, that’s not really anything new.
Oh my god, that is precious.
His hair turned out sooooo good. 🙂 I despaired of finding a good analog for the hair, and uncovered this boucle that had been in an abandoned corner of my stash for five years and it worked so perfectly.
The boucle is PERFECT. I love him
That is adorable! <3 (Tiny pic is so tiny though)
75×75 is smaller than I think it is every time. Link to larger image.
Yep, so cute! You’re talented! Husband’s just don’t get our obsessions sometimes.
I’m always glad to see articles about under-diagnosis and similar medical issues affecting women.
One of my particular interests is possible under-diagnosis of autism in women. My (layperson’s, non-scientific) feeling is that it’s often missed in women, because (a) the signs can present somewhat differently than in men, and (b) we’re often better at covering it up. (Possibly because of some neurological advantages in language, etc., compared to men, or just because it’s so socially ingrained that women MUST pay more attention to social or emotional cues).
A lot of the current research in autism (e.g., Dr. Baron-Cohen’s) seems predicated on the idea that it’s overwhelmingly more common in men, but I’m not convinced that’s actually the case.
A ton of women in my family are on the autism spectrum (mostly on the milder end), including my mother and a number of her cousins. (Many of them didn’t get a diagnosis until they were aged 40 and up). I also suspect a lot of the older generation in our family (e.g., my grandmother and some of her siblings) probably were as well, but were never formally diagnosed. Mostly, the women in our family who are on the spectrum are “high functioning” (married, with kids and jobs, etc.), and a lot of them are in fields like STEM and library science that involve heavy systematizing. Would love to see further research on this topic.
Baron-Cohen’s “eye-test”, where you have to identify what emotions people are feeling from their eyes, includes pictures of bored-looking, heavily made-up women who are things like, “flirtatious” and “aroused”. I have NO IDEA how he gets to be taken seriously, but it’s kind of like the simplest demonstration ever of Why There Should Be More Non-Cis-Male Scientists.
I just tried doing one of those eye tests online, and you’re 100% right– all of the female ones look like bored models from perfume ads. (And the test choices for the “mood” of the female subjects all seem to center around whether she finds you attractive or not…)
http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/
One of my friends is doing an MSc on this very topic. I’ll see if she’s got anything online on this for you! Her hypothesis, like yours [ETA: as I read it], is that young girls are more likely to be socialised to “pass” and so evade diagnosis – which is, already, skewed towards the Baron-Cohen view that it’s less likely in girls.
Sounds really interesting, thanks!!
A lot of Baron-Cohen’s theories about “male” and “female” brains seem (IMO, anyway) to ignore cultural context and how girls are socialized.
There was an article in the guardian, I think? (I saw it linked on Cracked, so idek) that pointed out that girls’ autism can look completely different from boys’, both from socialization expectations and from hormonal influences. It was about a special girls-only school in England, but it didn’t really go into what the differences are. It was kind of comforting to read, though?
(I didn’t get an Official Diagnosis when I was 8 because I had girl-type and not boy-type asperger’s, and also it was 1992 and it wasn’t really on the radar yet. I still don’t have an official one yet, but everything lines up, and the diagnosis i DID get when I was 8 reads like a girl-with-asperger’s Dx, so.)
ETA: I really wanted to find this for you, but I didn’t read it on my work computer, and I was afraid I’d forget, so I left a vague kind-of-awful comment just in case I did forget.
The story was at the Telegraph, and I was annoyed because the headline “What is it like to be a girl with autism?” but then doesn’t actually talk much about the symptoms and so on. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/health/what-is-i… It’s mostly about the school, and how the girls collaboratively wrote a book titled “M for Autism”. Still a comforting read, in that it reassured me that I’m not imagining my history and so on.
Thanks very much! That link was quite interesting.
Getting an official diagnosis was a MASSIVE thing for my mother, who was about 40 at the time. (This was in the early 90s).
My mom has some of the “classic” Aspergers behaviors (e.g., being very routine-bound, eating the same thing every day, developing obsessive interests and reading every book on a particular subject, etc.), but she also comes across to most people as being very friendly and sociable. She didn’t fit in the “male” autism mold, and she didn’t figure it out until she started reading Temple Grandin’s books and seeing a more observant psychologist.
I think it would have made a huge difference in her life if she had known as a kid, because she had a very hard time growing up and quite a few bouts of depression. Just having an explanation for being “different” (and meeting similar people) has made her a lot happier.
Yeah, it only got on my radar because my stepmom was like “what the hell is wrong with Keri” to her therapist, who said “maybe she’s on the spectrum? W, X, Y, and Z are all fairly typical symptoms”. But I was already 19, 20 years old at the time, and then everyone said “no, no, don’t call yourself autistic, you’ll ruin your life and any future prospects! and insurance won’t pay for any medical bills ever again”
Your last paragraph is pretty much how it is for me. If we’d had a solid Dx when I was a kid, if my parents weren’t pre-occupied with my brother’s needs… It’s great to know now, and be able to explain why I behave the way I do, but there are so many what ifs and if onlys.
(Also, I identified painfully with this bit of the article:
“in essence it’s copying and pasting someone else’s behaviour and trying to make it your own, but without understanding where that comes from.”)
haha, yes, so much.
i’ve done what i now understand are really weird (or, at least, socially awkward) things because of that. this realization hasn’t exactly helped my anxiety problems much, to be honest.
My lab is part of at least one major study currently looking at ASD in girls (though I wish there was more work being done on adult women — and men). I think your feelings on why it is underdiagnosed are right on! It’s hard to say the extent to which ASD is actually more common in men vs. more commonly diagnosed, since ASD is a spectrum and diagnosis is based on symptoms, not any sort of inherent genetic or neural difference.
That sounds like a fascinating field to work in!
I agree that the diagnosis component is very tricky, especially if girls are doing well in school and don’t outwardly appear to be having any problems. Social problems (like trouble fitting in, bullying, etc.) don’t always come to adults’ attention.
In my own family, the women on the spectrum are mostly on the “high functioning” end and have done very well academically. (Though one of my mother’s cousins has more serious impairments and can’t live on her own). To all outward appearances, they’ve had very “normal” lives. Some of them (like my mother) did pursue a diagnosis because they were having problems like depression, etc., but the others are quite happy and haven’t apparently been bothered by any symptoms.
There are a lot of us in the autism blogosphere who agree. We also were more likely to have typical interests in weird ways/at weird intensity levels vs the stereotypical idea of a boy into something like refrigerators. (I’m nonbinary but afab.) I actually wrote diagnostic criteria that are less gendered a few years ago. They’re on my tumblr (username is the same) if you’d like to check them out.
“something like refrigerators”
Ha! As it happens, I’m kind of obsessed with 1920s and ’30s kitchen appliances. 🙂
I’ll check that out, thank you! That definitely describes me and a lot of the people in my family. The internet has been a true godsend for us, in terms of making friends with other folks who share our weird interests. (And for the Toast, of course!)
This is more of an open thread question, but any other sexual violence survivors out there?
I’m having a shitty time and my usual support network is not quite there and sometimes getting to okay is just very very hard.
I am a survivor (though it took me a long time to be ok saying that) and I am here for you. I am so sorry to hear that you are having a shitty time and so sorry to hear that you are missing your support network.
<3<3<3<3<3 jedi hugs if you want them
Hi there. What’s going on?
I’m a sexual violence survivor, too. It’s been over a decade now and the scar has faded for me, but it never seems to ever completely go away.
But it does get better. I’m just sorry it sucks until it does. I wish your support network could be there for you, but we are here for you in this space and sending you jedi hugs if they feel okay to you.
I am, and it certainly is. What’s going on?
“Okay” seems like a very long, impossible way off sometimes. Some days are better than others, and some days are nearly perfect, but it does seem to come and go, rather than being a linear healing process that is moving towards a done-with-this-forever. I’m in therapy now, and hoping that will become a possibility.
Sending you good thoughts. If you need/want some of the anti-anxiety exercises I do to get my head together when I am in an especially bad spot, I am happy to share.
All I could think of regarding the YHL blog is thank goodness they’re still actual humans with opinions and are acknowledging the differences between what they want and what their fans want. I have (or had, I suppose) a close friend who became a semi-famous DIY vlogger over the time I knew her and she had the opposite reaction.
When I first met her, she had a lot of obscure interests and was really into music and tv that was really not mainstream (she kept trying to get me into fan bands for cult TV shows that I didn’t watch, or obscure Disney channel movies), and it was great because she didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought of her interests. Over the course of the decade that I knew her for (she started making videos maybe a year after I met her), she transformed into someone who now is utterly dependent on feedback from her fans and her self-confidence is heavily tied to her highly-curated online image, and her opinions are all essentially crowdsourced. There’s not really any of her personality left in it. The last time I hung out with her, she was horribly worried about whether the blouse she was wearing in her newest video wasn’t the right shade of green because she was getting negative comments about it, and she was trying to figure out whether to color-correct it.
It’s really sad and our friendship faded because I felt like I was talking to pinterest instead of a human person.
tl;dr I’m glad the people behind YHL are real people.
It’s kind of crazy to me that people on youtube (I refuse to use the word “youtuber”) actually read the comments on their videos. I watch beauty vlogs occasionally and usually can’t even bear to look at the comments because it’s all so judgmental without any reason. I guess feedback is important and you need people to keep watching but if there’s 500 comments yelling at you about how you didn’t do something exactly as the audience wanted why bother?
I have no idea if reading the comments on your videos is normal since I’ve only got one famous vlogger buddy to use as a baseline. I assume people who are known for being wacky or creating their own style care less about the comments than people who are rigidly trying to subscribe to a specific aesthetic, but who knows.
I also remember having a conversation with her once along the lines of, “Why do you care if people don’t like your blouse? So you lose a viewer who really hates that shade of pear, big deal, he or she can go watch a different video with a less offensive blouse and you have lost a viewer who is a garbage person.” And she was always like, “But they’re my faaaaaans and I don’t want them to be upset.” It was not an argument I could win.
(Also solidarity, I hate the word “youtuber” beyond all reason because I now associate it with my old friend and her cohort of friends with similarly crowdsourced opinions and styles.)
Yeah, lacking a thick skin and holding out for universal approval does not seem sustainable for a professional vlogger or any kind of blogger. Kind of an alarming characteristic, in fact. I’d be really worried about (or gobsmacked by) her too
Yeah I’ve been waiting for her to fall and hit rock bottom because she has no self-confidence anymore and she just… keeps getting more and more famous and getting more publicity? I’ve known her for roughly a decade and she’s been internet famous for maybe 6 or 7 years, apparently it’s sustainable for longer than I thought.
From what I’ve glimpsed, it seems that once you hit a moderate amount of popularity, there’s a snowball effect (especially if you keep producing content). You’ll have fans that’ll stick with you through anything — and sometimes they’re the same ones who heap abuse on you with each new video. It’s unfortunate how some people find anonymous, vindictive criticism cathartic, in a way.
So yeah, if she’s been in the game that long, I expect she can keep it up forever, until she chooses to shut the whole channel down and walk away. And that’ll take a seismic life-redefining event.
I’ve watched a few people who say things like “don’t forget to comment, I read all of your comments and really appreciate them!!” and I know that they’re probably lying but the possibility of somebody actually subjecting themselves to that is…upsetting. There is nothing good to be found in youtube comment sections.
I closely followed the demise of YHL, which was at one time one of my favorite blogs. I actually think John and Sherry fell prey to exactly what you’re talking about. Especially Sherry who personally approved and responded to all comments on their blog, which must have been in the seven figures over the years. They became very self conscious, defensive, and unwilling to apologize when caught in a lie. It really made me dislike them and I’m glad they’ve gotten some distance from the whole thing. It seems impossible to maintain that level of internet fame and have any sanity left.
Caught in lies? Do go on…
(Long-time YHL reader but only from my RSS, never read any comments, so I felt like I missed all the drama)
Oh god, I could talk about this for an embarrassing amount of time. If you want to fall down the rabbit hole, go to Get Off My Internets: http://gomiblog.com/forums/young-house-love/new-h…
ANYWAY, the one that stands out to me was buying the third house, and the lies that went with it bc of the six month overlap where they owned two homes. For months we got the decoration of “Clara’s Big Girl Room” which many people pointed out was weirdly generic – beige walls, reused daybed. J&S were super defensive “Clara loves it! She picked the beige wall color!” Welp turns out they had already bought another house and were staging that room for sale, not for Clara’s use at all. There were several projects they had done that were really half assed and bad for your house, like dowels with fabric stapled to them screwed directly into window frames instead of proper window treatment brackets and a drywalling over a junction box in their family room (which is actually against code) but they excused these projects saying “This is our forever house! We’ll always be here so we’re doing what works for us!” Which was clearly not true since they had already purchased another house.
There were several photoshop blow ups, including one where Sherry was hiding her second pregnancy. That was complicated because it wasn’t a personal blog, but their nastiness towards commenters who guessed correctly what was going on was pretty uncalled for, imho. They also vacillated between being a family blog (they had a separate family blog for awhile & they put a post about Clara’s potty training on the main blog!) and a DIY-only blog in ways that seemed pretty click-bait-y.
As time went on I also didn’t like some of their decor decisions so I stopped reading before the now famous curtains post. But I saw someone post about it on GOMI as it went down and spent several hours soaking up the drama. Nothing like a low stakes internet fight! I really do wish John and Sherry and their family all the best.
Thanks for the link! This is fascinating! (I discovered FreeJinger, a blog devoted to people talking about the Duggar family, pre-scandals, and even though I had never watched the show, it was just amazing how far strangers like to dig into “famous” people. This feels similar)
Goodbye, productivity for the day!
If you like Free Ginger you will love GOMI. There is a whole sub forum dedicated to YHL and it was once the busiest forum on the whole site. Sometimes the snark crossed into meanness but I found the critique of YHL’s work to be intelligent and hilarious. There is a lot of teasing about YHL-isms like “hope that helps” and “you can read about that here here here and here.” The discussion of house #3 starts here if you’re looking for a good place to jump into the 3000+ page main thread: http://gomiblog.com/forums/young-house-love/young…
I read YHL starting when it was This Young House so maybe starting in 2008 and was so bummed when they stopped. Anyway I always loved their posts and only read RSS so never dealt with comments. But who cares if they had to keep a pregnancy or a new house under wraps? Come on! It’s their lives and they already broadcast quite a bit…do they no longer have any right to privacy about anything? Our own friends often hide these kinds of big life changes until they’re ready to make them public and that’s okay, people need time to process and make announcements. Every blog in the world has these kinds of “lies” if you even want to call them that. I’m just so surprised at the vitriol that got written about them when they were doing a great job being real people in real time. The negativity sounds so nit picky and like “gotcha!” rather than appreciating the overall picture and sharing the joy. Drama like GOMI is for bored middle schoolers who have nothing better to do than cut down others.
Man I didn’t know I had so many feelings about this! Tl;dr: <3YHL why can’t we all get along?
Does anyone have any experience with approaching a psychiatrist you’re already seeing about adhd? This is something I’ve been thinking about A LOT lately, and I actually did receive a diagnosis when I was 17 that wasn’t pursued for a number of reasons (mostly family drama, not really relating to the diagnosis). I’m seeing a psychiatrist now for anxiety issues, and I’m considering bringing this up with him, but I don’t really know how to bring it up without being like “I think you’re wrong and have missed something!” Emphasize my attention issues (which have indeed took a turn for the very worse)? Just say that I’ve been thinking about adhd a lot and wondering what he thinks?
It is totally legit to go into a session and say, “So, I haven’t mentioned this before, but when I was 17 I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. Could we talk about that?”
Your therapist should not feel slighted or insulted or anything like that, I promise! It would be just as if you said, “By the way, I’ve had this really sore foot for ages now…” Your therapist is working with the information you’ve given him, and he’s not going to feel like he’s “failed” because he didn’t know something that you haven’t told him yet. His reaction should just be something like, “OK, let’s talk about that. How do you feel about that diagnosis?” That’s your cue to say that you’ve been thinking about it and that it fits with X, Y and Z but you’ve always been worried that you’re overthinking it or whatever your feelings might be.
I did just that last week (and mentioned it was something my therapist felt very strongly I had) and she immediately switched gears so we could talk about my history and why we thought I might have it. And I felt so nervous and silly and was convinced it was all just me overblowing things, but she agreed that I had a classic presentation of inattentive-ADHD and just felt bad that she’d been working with me for so long and never caught it since it’s something she specializes in.
Weiner!!! I must admit I am fascinated by the whole scandal (mostly because of the name “Carlos Danger”), but I’ve also never really taken the time to dive deeply into Huma. Hopefully this documentary will not be too damaging to Huma (or Hillary!).
I got mixed vibes from that article as to whether or not Weiner and Huma are endorsing this documentary. I couldn’t even imagine — you begin filming thinking it is going to record your victorious moments, and then the world falls to shit.
It will certainly be damaging to both of them this year, no? Clinton is already hearing muttering about her husband’s past, and if this is released in October and she is the candidate, it will not be helpful.
I’m not sure what an “endorsement” would mean exactly. Like will they do a press tour for it? The article says they haven’t even seen it and had no approval over it, and it sounds like it doesn’t make them look good, so I would go with no.
I’m deeply curious about Huma and fascinated by Weiner and other politicians like Edwards and the Appalachian trail governor who purposefully put themselves in the spotlight knowing that doing so will likely expose all these skeletons. Who agrees to giving a documentary crew full access when you (weiner) know you have this big secret to hide? Is it hubris or wanting to get caught?
My friend wrote this about the Flint water crisis. It’s definitely worth reading : http://www.vox.com/2016/1/20/10789810/flint-michi…
Ursula K. Le Guin is a glorious queen and that is all.
I want to sit between her and Margaret Atwood at dinner.
Articles like the one from Anil Dash make me crazy. No one ever stands up for a ‘brown person’ when this happens? And the cabin attendant thanks the obnoxious coward for being an obnoxious coward? This country needs to take a good look at itself and admit that the ‘Home of the Brave’ part should be stricken from the national anthem. Ooooh, I am so mad.
The article makes you crazy or the fact that are on display in the article? I think you mean the later, but if you could clarify?
Pulling someone off a plane because of how they look is some shit. If this person passed the screening – and you KNOW they got secondary screening – what the fuck business is it of some random passenger to decide who’s OK to fly?
But Delta is the worst, just the WORST.
“If any man ever hit you, if anyone ever sexually harassed you, you’d tell him to fuck right off. You want to be, no, you will be the kind of woman who can tell anyone to fuck off if a fuck off is deserved, so naturally you start a Fuck Off Fund.”
https://thebillfold.com/a-story-of-a-fuck-off-fun…
Holy shit, I love this so much I can’t put it into words.
I changed the name of my emergency fund IMMEDIATELY.
Also I think it gets at the visceral gendered aspect of personal finance in a way that few pieces do. For women money means freedom in a much more direct way than it does for men.
Totally changing the name of my emergency fund.
(and, yes, money = freedom, which I try to remind myself when I consider making a smaller payment on the big ass credit debt that I’m hoping will be gone in less than 2 years.)
THIS IS THE BEST THING.
This reminds me of the scene in “To Have and Have Not” where Bacall, having previously said she was broke, offers Bogey some cash, leading to her line.
“You think I lied to you about this, don’t you? Well, it just happens there’s thirty-odd dollars here, not enough for boat fare or any other kind of fare. Just enough to be able to say no if I feel like it.”
The “Just enough to say no if i feel like it” has always stuck with me, as has the general awesomeness of Bacall in that pic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Ay727EYzw
this is so good. also reminds me of lucy liu talking about the same thing. it’s in gifs, but: “The one thing I did know that I learned from my father was that everything’s a business. So I worked a lot in order to just have money. It was called ‘fuck you’ money. If you have it and something’s not working out, and they say you have to take this job, or you’re fired, you can be like, ‘Fuck you.'”
Late to this, but it’s awesome. And this is also partly why – despite the fact that legally the boy and I share all our assets – I always want to keep a bank account that it’s my name alone. It means I don’t have to explain my purchases to anyone. It means that I can actually treat the boy to dinner and have that really be treating him to dinner … And it also means that if things ever go off the rails, I know that money is available to me and me alone.
*sees the “anxiety about being a gross sleeper” and “ADHD in women” articles*
…dang, I wish I had a stash of Kleenex at work. This hits waaayyy too home for me.
(also, thank you.)
Agafia Lykova, the Siberian hermit talked about on the Toast in the past, has been in the news lately: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/15/sibe… http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/russ…
British filmmakers are making a movie about her called “The Forest In Me.” What an interesting woman. Can you imagine being 70 years old and completely alone and self-sufficient for all your needs?
From an article on The Cut about a man who is outed from his secret life as a PUA:
“Before long, Jared’s sex life was like a part-time job. While some PUAs try to rack up as many one-night stands as possible, Jared was after a series of regular sex partners, what’s known in the Red Pill world as a harem. He hit on customers and friends, suppliers and strangers, women on Tinder and women on OKCupid. He had sex with women in the apartment above the coffee shop and in the garage out back. He created a spreadsheet that he updated with each conquest, color-coded based on how he met them and how the relationship ended.”
ETA: This article gets… bizarre…
“If you’re going to say you’re a loving, supportive community and then just kick out everybody that does something fucked up — I think that’s wrong,” Jared told me. “You don’t get to say, ‘We’re loving and supportive and inclusive’ and not put in the work to be that. ”
Thanks for sharing this, I’m both fascinated and horrified by the “manosphere.”
I am honestly amazed at the thickness of this guy’s head.
“Nobody reached out to us to say, ‘What do you need to heal, to be better men?’ — except Trey.” I do really believe that people can change. I think that you can make horrible mistakes, hurt people, and get better. But none of that means that the people you hurt have to forgive you, much less help you!!! I mean, if you hit someone with a car you don’t say, “well, they didn’t come back and help me learn to drive better.”
“I think that’s where I got off the mark a little bit with this. I thought I had the answer — but the answers I thought I had hurt a lot of people and hurt me.” And this is what makes me think that he isn’t actually going to make changes for the better. “Off the mark a little” A LITTLE? O.O
but seriously tho it’s all everyone else’s fault why won’t they include me
That line was so infuriating. Why are you asking other people to care for your well-being when you clearly didn’t care for theirs? He sounds so obtuse, and deserves the censure.
Jared and the Victorian Lady would get along really well, methinks, what with their perverse ideas of “tolerance.”
Reading this article like
I mean, everything about this man is 10000% horrifying, but this really got me:
“He hit on customers and friends, suppliers and strangers, women on Tinder and women on OKCupid.”
Do not hit on your customers. Do not hit on your suppliers.
I do love Trey though. I mean, he’s really committed to the Enlightened Man of the 21st-Century thing and it’s working for him. I want to read about him in 40 years after he retires from his tai-chi studio to devote himself to growing food for the local food bank, with pictures of his happy family and testimony from people he’s helped.
Why, yes, I am getting overly-invested in stranger. I’ll stop now.
Trey sounds like an overall decent guy who simply doesn’t get how deeply these guys hurt those women and how facile and unconvincing their apologies are.
Does anyone know how they tease apart depression/anxiety from ADHD when diagnosing ADHD? So much of the descriptions I read of it in women ring true with me, but I always assumed that the issues I have experienced with attention, daydreaming, organization, slacking, etc, were caused by childhood & adolescent depression and anxiety. I had interpreted the fact that I still experience these ADHD-type issues as an adult as being the result of not learning good habits when I was a kid. But now I wonder… was part of that depression and anxiety caused by a struggle with these symptoms? Add to that the fact that my family life had some issues, and I have no idea how anyone could ever tell if I have ADHD or just a crappy brain from painful childhood experiences. How do the shrinks figure this out?
There’s a lot of overlap in symptoms, plus they interrelate in a lot of ways. My sense (from my therapist) is that there’s really not a lot of focus on teasing everything apart, but rather, treating you as a whole and seeing what the best regimen is for you.
If various treatments for ADHD (medical or otherwise) are effective for you, you probably have ADHD. Or maybe just similar symptoms related to something else!
It’s not a virus, where a precise diagnosis is the whole ballgame.
^^^-Yep. The notes from my appointment last week include the words “should help with anxiety.”
Same problem!
A lot of it is talking about your history and your symptoms and what’s behind it, and a lot of it is seeing how the medication affects you. For me, it seems like my anxiety (which focuses mostly around schoolwork/career stuff and being a failure at it) stems from the undiagnosed ADHD, so we’re going to start backing off the anti-anxiety medication. But if you have a good therapist and psychiatrist, they will get there eventually.
Toasties, not quite related to the Link Round-Up– but for those of you who take some kind of SSRI for depression or anxiety, how many missed doses does it take for you to feel off? I missed three days over the long weekend because I forgot my sertraline bottle at work, and though I’ve now taken it on Tuesday and today, I’m still feeling pretty sad. But I’m not sure if that’s because of the missed dosage, or just the normal course of feeling depressed some times, or a reverse-placebo effect, or if it maybe means I need to talk to doctor about upping my dosage.
I notice if I miss two days, and it can take me almost a week to get back to normal. I’m also on sertraline, and thinking about increasing the dose bc anxiety is getting out of control again
ughh, I am now so annoyed with myself for not keeping better track of the meds. I think when I’m feeling pretty good (because y’know, the meds are doing their job), I get careless and start to wonder if I even *need* the meds, and then this happens and I’m like, oh, right.
I’ve on and off them for almost 20 years, but in the last 5-6 have really started to get the “I feel better on meds” thing stuck in my mind. I keep a few in a tiny bag (from a spare button) in my purse, just in case I forget to take the bottle with me somewhere or end up spending the night away from home.
I found sertraline was HORRIBLE unless I took it absolutely like clockwork, and it would usually take me about a week of taking it same time, every single day, to get back to normal after missing a dose.
And I would have horrible withdrawal in all that time, with all the weird faint-y, dilated-pupils-y, migraine-y side effects.
Oh man, that sounds terrible. I’m not experiencing any of those kinds of withdrawal effects, just a lot of sinking sadness.
One missed dose definitely messes me up for a day or two.
I can tell if I missed my dose the day previously, even if I remembered the day of. (20mg, Lexapro.) Fortunately, ‘telling’ usually means ‘feeling vaguely glummer and slower than usual.’
It depends on which med. I’m on Prozac which has a really long half life, so I can miss several doses before it starts to affect me. Google says seraltine has a 26 hour half life, meaning that you’ll likely start to feel it if you don’t take it every day. I hope you’ll start feeling better soon.
Hrm. That makes sense. I’ve always wanted to learn more about the pharmacology of SSRIs– like, if it has a 26 hour half life, does that mean that half of ALL the seraltine in my system will clear in 26 hours? Shouldn’t that change depending on how long I’ve been taking it, and therefore, building it up in my system? Or is that not how it works, that medication doesn’t actually build up, and your body clears out the doses on an on-going basis? Any biochem-y Toasties know more?
I know only the very very edges of this stuff, but!
Once you take a dose of something, it’s not a clear line between ‘Full dose’ and ‘Nothing remains’. Half life is a concept I struggled with like you wouldn’t believe. If the halflife of a drug is 12 hours, that means that in 12 hours, you can expect that approximately half of the dose will be gone. However, it doesn’t mean that after 24 hours it’s gone, because this stuff isn’t linear.
Now, the effective dose may be gone after one or two halflives, but there may still be traces in your system. Certainly there’d be a different low level of the drug in your body after you’ve been using it for a period of time in comparison to when you first start, but I think that level remains relatively consistant (with fluctuations around when the next dose is taken, etc).
This link explains it much more nicely than I can: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/448250_3
Oooh, this is very helpful, thanks!
I’m on sertraline and I’ve missed single doses in the past and not noticed anything obviously amiss. A few months ago I forgot to refill my prescription and went about four days without it, and was having noticeable withdrawal symptoms.
Just read today’s Dear Prudie; my daughter’s middle name is my dead ex’s last name, which I did tell my husband before we put it on the birth certificate, but not til a few hours after we’d announced her name to family (who all recognized the name). I feel the need to tell someone this, but not at Slate! So here you all are.
Loved the Can I Pet Your Dog? podcast!
Guys, can I have some random advice about ADHD and testing and stuff (after reading a lot of your comments above)?
Whenever I complete those tests I get like, 70% on them. Like, if there are 17 questions I usually answer 9 or so, and I am fairly confident that I *don’t* have ADHD but for several years now I have been a little concerned that I *could* have ADHD and am I just really, really paranoid and should let it go or should I actually see a doctor about this?
I have no advice for you but also I have the same question. Also I think I’m maybe just a little bit depressed, and have some very light anxiety issues. Maybe I just need a new job! Or possibly a new kitten! Or maybe a nap! But maybe some drugs. IDK.
lemon and uncertainty high five! o/
\o
I feel the same way. I’m pretty sure my issues that lead me to answer yes on those test questions are from anxiety and from my specific working environment. The problem is I’ve been stuck in the same working environment for 5 years (grad school) so it’s starting to feel like I’ve always been this way. I’m hoping that my working habits will improve when I get out of here and get a job with actual supervision and clear tasks to do.
I am seriously considering trying to start some sort of grad student survival support group.
That’s a cool idea! The thing I find interesting is that grad students can struggle for so many different reasons. Too much supervision can be just as bad as too little supervision, and same for too much or too little feedback and help. I often feel ashamed of myself for not being able to get up in the morning and make it to my office by 9AM (usually get here 11AM), but now that I take a step back, is that really unreasonable given that I work alone in an office and sometimes go the whole day without talking to another person?
ha, I’m currently in Grad School, with a lot of people looking over my shoulder but barely any supervision. I have learned to deal with it and am barely done (2 year prog) but still, last year and figuring out to deal without guidance was the WORST.
Are you me???
Inspired by this thread, I just made an appointment with a counselor! Even if what is wrong with my work ethic is not adhd, it probably can be improved by CBT rather than being simultaneously a deep rottenness at the very core of my person and something that could be easily overcome with just a little elbow grease.
But then I looked up the counselor (the only one covered by my insurance in walking distance) on Facebook and it’s all motivational quotes over baby animals and sunsets and we. are. not. going. to. get. along.
So, I probably will dodge all of her calls, and this was just an extra-creative bout of procrastination. WEE!
I really love this statement: “simultaneously a deep rottenness at the very core of my person and something that could be easily overcome with just a little elbow grease”. I definitely get that feeling.
Replying as an avatar of my mother, the therapist- the rule for any mental illness is really that most people have *some* level. However, it is when illness prevents you from living a full life (essentially “achieving goals” because this could be anything from having a romantic partner to holding down a job, depending on what you want out of life) is when you should go see someone about it.
So if you feel like those traits are preventing you from living the way in which you want to live, holding you back at work or causing you personal problems, I would say see someone. If you are even unsure, like you think maybe but maybe not, ask yourself if you are making excuses to avoid getting help (I do this with depression) and see someone. A good therapist should be able to help you figure it out. Be honest! If it helps, write down issues as they happen so that you don’t forget or make excuses later.
Hmm… those are good points. I don’t think they really are, honestly. it’s more of a, “could my life be better if?” question, not “my life is pretty bad rn” question. So perhaps I’m not in need.
A screening test isn’t diagnostic, it’s just a screening test. Its job is to throw up a flag that means “we might need a real ADHD evaluation”, not “this person has ADHD”. No test is perfect, so it won’t flag everyone who has ADHD, and it won’t NOT flag everyone who doesn’t. A good screening test is pretty good at telling who’s in the risk zone, but it’s not always right, and it will be biased towards flagging too many people rather than too few.
Soooo very late to this and I meant to comment earlier but of course, I got distracted.
I’d love to have a conversation about ADHD and the internet… specifically, I remember a time in my life where I did not have my own computer and did not really “get” or use the internet that much, and I was much much more able to focus and complete tasks when I needed to (or maybe I just had more wholesome distractions?).
I was diagnosed with ADD in high school, but it really only affected me in math and science class. Once I went off to uni and never took math or a challenging science again, I was once again high achieving and fine. Fast forward to my mid 20s and I had forgotten I had ever received this diagnosis. I am now noticing as I read more of these articles and comments here, that I feel like my ADD is “back” or is affecting me in a lot of ways it didn’t used to. And I think a lot of it is the constant available distraction that is the internet. I work on a computer all day (so many tabs open all the time), the nature of my work is very “do this! NO do THIS!”, my phone is always there for me to check at every microsecond I am not engaged elsewhere.
Does anybody else notice this, too? I remember coming home from school and needing to zone out for a while before homework, but late at night I would read (paper) books for hours, or write novels, and generally do something that was fun but rewarding. Now, when I’m exhausted and burnt-out I just waste endless time online. I can barely focus on anything that I am making myself (knitting, writing, cooking, etc).
I thought this was depression and I’m sure a portion of it is, but I also feel like the internet is kind of terrible for people with ADD? (I don’t mean to sound like the MOST obvious person of all time. I genuinely want to know if others with a diagnosis feel this way)
I have honestly been considering going back to a flip phone just to wean myself off the terrible phone checking habit (SO MANY APPS!!) and looking into getting some sort of cheap laptop/tablet that I don’t hookup to internet so I can just use it for writing and nothing else (I’ve found I can no longer handwrite at the speed I think, sadly). Does anyone have any experience with this? Is it useless for me to notice this since it’s 2016 and the internet is going nowhere?
Mmmm, so I don’t have ADD to my knowledge, but the Internet does distract me a ton. However, it only distracts me at home! At work or out, there’s no problem, because I only have a “basic phone” (it’s like phone retailers knew we might call them “dumbphones” and named them accordingly). So I would endorse your flip phone idea– less distraction and a lower phone bill 🙂
I have similar experiences with the internet; I will often find myself wasting hours just mindlessly browsing, not getting any satisfaction out of it but struggling to stop. I also find it hard to focus on things that require more concentration. I assumed this was part of depression (or just a general moral failing), but I don’t know.
I’m more of a cat person, so I don’t listen to Can I Pet Your Dog, but I am a BIG TIME fan of the Maximum Fun network of podcasts, so I am happy to see this crossover. Although Guy Branum gave a shout-out to The Toast on the Pop Tarts episode of Pop Rocket, which tickled me to death.
Re: ADHD and women, this is sort of a tangent, sorry.
I know I was read as an ADD or autistic or…somehow Not Right little girl pretty consistently, but I didn’t get actual treatment because my parents were…pretty non-optimal. I had some Experiences related to school and family as a child / teenager, and subsequently started transitioning.
I am now a young man/genderqueer in therapy, and going to a neuropsychiatric thing next week to try to assess WTF my brain is doing, since there’s family history of autism-like and anxiety-like stuff and I have had some difficulties.
I have previously been diagnosed with Bipolar II, PTSD, and ADD (inattentive), and I am fairly confident that the bipolar diagnosis was a mis-labeling of either the trauma-stuff or the attention deficit stuff (or the autism spectrum stuff???). It’s also possible I’m only interested in finding a “root cause” or “real diagnosis” because I am a nerd, and the data I want cannot be dug up, by this neuropsychiatric assessment or any other tool on Earth.
Now I am worried about this event that might hopefully make me a less-perennially-worried person. What do?
"Okay" seems like a very long, impossible way off sometimes. Some days are better than others, and some days are nearly perfect, but it does seem to come and go, rather than being a linear healing process that is moving towards a done-with-this-forever. I'm in therapy now, and hoping that will become a possibility.
Sending you good thoughts. If you need/want some of the anti-anxiety exercises I do to get my head together when I am in an especially bad spot, I am happy to share.
shit I read this and immediately noticed myself tapping my feet.
I recognised myself too much here
i love this dog . i think it is the cutest dog ever.
i love this dog . i think it is the cutest dog ever.
Uh. Your second paragraph is frighteningly familiar to how I lurched my way through high school and college.