As someone chronically Ill, I feel this so hard.

Every minute that I’m not at work I’m dedicating to making sure I’m likely to be well enough for work tomorrow.

I don’t do anything after work without asking “how will this impact my health tomorrow?” and that includes things like not being able to sweep my own floor because I know I need to sweep at work and the nerve damage in my arms won’t let me sweep twice in one day without keeping me up all night in pain, and if I don’t get enough sleep, I’ll get a migraine and won’t be able to physically see anything.

Most of my days off are spent in agony trying to restore myself and desperately trying to reset my house and home life so I can keep up with work, without overdoing it on Sunday and making myself sick for Monday.

So yeah, on the one day a month where I wake up for work and I don’t throw up or almost shit myself, and my heart rate is doing what it’s supposed to do, and I can see and hear and feel my feet… The temptation to “call in healthy”, so I can actually have a day off to enjoy myself for the first time in over a month is really hard to ignore.

I actually did that this week because Wednesday was my birthday, I went to work, it was a “bad workable day” (vs a “good workable day” or a “bad unworkable day”) and Thursday I woke up feeling really good, I only had a 2 hour shift and it was just admin so I took my first sick day in 6 months and used it to do all my linens and towel laundry. It felt like a proper day off because I was healthy enough to get stuff done for myself, without being in pain or having to stop to run to the bathroom or let my heart calm down, or give up on folding because I can’t feel my arms.

I can’t do that every time I want or even need to though. My bank account is really good at forcing me to go to work, healthy, half dead, or heaving. Chronic illness is expensive, and some days trying to keep up with work feels like it costs my health more than not working. but sadly not working is not an option for me, because I’m capable of work, so I must. (and continue to push my gov for universal basic income)

For context as to how working while disabled messes you up. I got hit by a truck on the way to work last year, I got to the office and used their first aid kit to patch myself up. Booked a doctors appointment, told my boss I’d be leaving early, then kept working until my appointment.

My boss was fine with this, and then someone on reddit posted a photo of the crash and my boss saw, they realised when I said “I was hit by a truck” what I meant was “I was hit by a truck”

When asked how I was feeling, and reporting “no different to usual” my boss sent me to the ER because they thought I had a concussion and was acting confused. ER checked me out, dislocated shoulder and wrist, soft tissue damage here and there, but otherwise nothing major or serious or nothing I don’t already deal with on a daily basis. I went back to finish my shift and my boss asked what I was doing working after I’d been hit by a truck.

I feel exactly the same level of pain today as I do every other day. If I take today off because this level of pain is apparently unworkable, it’s a slippery slope, eventually I’m going to have to come back to work despite being in this exact same level of pain. This is my baseline, now I can truly compare it to being hit by a truck.

I used to be on a pension, I wanted to work because I wanted purpose in the neo-liberal hell scape of my society. but my mental health was too shot because of this deep rooted idea that I deserved rest just for being in any level of pain that was out of the ordinary, and subconsciously I would talk myself out of doing anything because I deeply believed I shouldn’t have to.

But I don’t have that luxury, my ordinary will always be “hit by a truck” level, so right now I either learn how to consistently work through it, or drop dead broke and homeless.

In Australia Google maps has issues with routing cyclists on 80km busy truck transit roads that have no bike lanes, footpaths or shoulders. You’ll regularly get stuck behind lost uber eats cyclists whose map took them through a motor vehicle only underpass.

The other day google maps decided to reroute me from a quiet, wide street with no bike lane that was otherwise perfectly safe, and tried to send me through a nightsoil alley, down a heritage stock run that was paved with cobblestones and crossed over a storm drain 4 times in a zig zag.

Yeah, “safer” because there’s no cars I guess, but not suitable for bikes at all.

Get tired? No, get a sense of sorrow in professional failure and apathy when someone’s level of ability is fundamentally misaligned to the class.m, hell yes.

I’m an adult educator, so while not a fitness instructor, I teach adults life skills, including health and nutrition.

We aren’t paid to be individual tutors, but the fact is that some learners need one on one training, or additional time, or a slower pace, or a totally customised syllabus and resource package for their needs.

There’s nothing tiring about this.

But there’s also nothing we can do. You learn quickly in this job to say “I recommend a more entry level class, or starting with a some home learning” or you burn out trying to juggle 25 different levels of need in a class of 25.

I have galactorrhea, pumping rooms aren’t a natural maternal family matter, for me, it’s a medical procedure.

Privacy is a lactating person’s choice, and right. public feeding is a choice that I agree needs to be destigmatised. Personally I’m not comfortable with public pumping, because I see my breast milk as medical not nutritional, so I choose privacy for myself.

It’s also difficult, it’s stressful, it’s uncomfortable. Having comfort, focus, peace and quiet, it’s important.

I don’t even have a uterus, so getting my leaky chest out in public is even further from being socially acceptable. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had mastitis because I have not been able to expell in a timely manner. Partly that was because I was embarrassed by my condition and didn’t stand up for myself and my need for access to a pumping room at work, and part of it was because my employers didn’t understand my need for a private room, they pointed out that it’s never been a problem for mothers in our office to whip a tit out when baby was hungry, and/or that my need was different because the reason I I had breast milk at all was different.

No one gets to expect me to be comfortable with nudity. My breast milk, my choice if I have privacy or not.

I used to do it in the bathroom because I didn’t have anywhere else, but that was a gamble, do I let myself get an infection because I’m letting my ducts clog, or do I risk an infection by pumping milk in the toilets.

Accessibility.

We will never get rid of the analogue clocks from our school, we’re an adult education and alternative model highschool qualifications centre.

We primarily teach adults with no to low English, adults and teens with disabilities, and adults and teens refered via corrections services.

There is a significant level of illiteracy within numeracy, and for some of our students, it’s not a failing of the education system, it’s just a fact of life given their specific circumstances (eg, acquired brain injuries are common among our students)

Some students can learn to tell time on an analogue clock even if they didn’t know before.

But even my students who will never in their life be able to fully and independently remember and recall their numbers can tell the time with an analogue clock.

I tell my students “we will take lunch at 12pm, so if you look at the clock and the arms look like this /imitates a clock/ we will go to lunch”

And now I avoid 40 questions of “when’s lunch?” because you don’t need to tell time to see time with an analogue clock, they can physically watch the hands move, getting closer to the shape they recognise as lunch time.

And my other students can just read the time, from the clock, and not feel infantalised by having a disability friendly task clock like they’ve done at other centres I work at - they’ve had a digital clock for students who can tell time, and a task clock as the accessible clock. But a well designed face on an analogue clock can do both.

I myself have time blindness due to a neurological/CRD issue, so analogue clocks, and analogue timers are an accessibility tool for me as well, as the teacher.

Yeah, boomers will just brute force their way through repeated “wrong password” attempts and inevitably make a new account every time and their take away from the experience is that “new fangled technology is so convoluted and never works”

Meanwhile the millennial experience is to have zero issues actually using the product because we’re technologically competent, we’re just going to complain the whole time that’s it’s taking unnecessary data, or find weird ad hoc ways to make burner accounts.

I will lecture my dad for having 14 different email accounts and he will retort with “you also have more than 10!”

Yes old man, and I use all 10 and know exactly how they differ and what each is used for. You think you have one account when you actually have 14, they all share one password which Is probably my name written backwards, and you’re sending mail to your old account address then getting mad when you can’t find it in the inbox of your new account, and you still refer to all mail platforms as “Windows mail” even though you’ve exclusively accessed your yahoo mail via the browser for the last 5 years, and have owned a Mac for 10 years… We are not the same.

At the end of the day, alcoholism, depression, and obesity, they are unhealthy states of being.

They are not something people choose, and while there are treatments, it’s not something everyone can control.

That doesn’t mean we should simply accept this state of being. People living with depression deserve better, people living with alcoholism deserve better than for us to say “it’s out of their control, they can’t help it, so we shouldn’t judge, let them be” when what they need is better support and better treatment options.

Likewise, obese people deserve better than “eat less, move more, fatty!” but they also deserve more than “all bodies are beautiful, just let us be”

I say this as someone who was a fat kid, and a fat teen, and a fat adult. I had a BMI of 50 for a most of my life. In my mid 30s, I got it down to 28, and still going.

So I say all of this is as someone else who was fat, obese, and morbidly obese. Obesity should be viewed the same way we view depression and anxiety, though depression and anxiety also need some better PR.

Being obese may not not always be a choice, but the the ultimate end goal of how we view obesity as a state of being is to find ways we can all manage our weight. Because obesity is not healthy, for those who can’t easily control their weight, life sucks, they are patients in need of treatment, not morally failing people, but also not “perfect plus sized activists who are healthy at every size”

Because while bodies and sizes vary and we can do healthy things at every size. Obesity is inherently unhealthy. Obviously being bullied won’t solve anything, but neither will society politely ignoring how hard it is to live a full life while suffering from obesity.

Being black isn’t an inherent health issue. It genuinely is just a different state of being. 99% of problems unique to black people are social issues, not medical issues… So the comparison between obesity and substance abuse issues is more helpful than trying to compare being obese to being BIPOC.

That’s alright, there will only be a handful of gen alpha even eligible to vote in a 2029 election, since they were born 2010-not even born yet

Yup, thyroid, adrenals, and gonads have been checked, both with blood work and untrasound.

I have dysautonomia due to a brain stem herniation, and temperature regulation is effected by that, but it’s just been so weird that the way this symptom effects me was decades of not feeling the cold, then suddenly now I’m not feeling the heat.

I know which one I’d choose if I got to pick… and it’s the one where I don’t need to go to a wound nurse for frost nip in February.

I was a year round shorts guy, genuinely didn’t feel the cold. Last year I suddenly became a year round thermal stockings, skivee, thermal gloves, jumper and woollen pants guy.

I can’t get warm. It’s like I’m catching up on 30+ years of never feeling the cold by feeling the cold all the time.

Generally millennials born after 1989 would fall into the “younger millennial” catagory.

The difference between old millennial and young millennial is how much of the 90s you actually remember because you were old enough to form memories, and not just the kind of made up memories you invent from looking back on old photos and trying to imagine the stories your parents told you about your childhood.

I never really understood at what point a language evolves enough to be an entirely new language.

Old English feels so far removed from even middle English, let alone modern English.

We have “new” and “old” to differentiate them, but with how many Latin words alone entered English between Old English and Modern English, It’s something I’ve never found a comprehensive answer to.

I guess, what is it about proto-indo European that we acknowledge as a distinct language from the hundreds of thousands of languages that evolved from it, other than time scale and global impact.

Three words. Edward scissors hands.

It’s been years since I’ve seen them movie but I recall having a third interpretation of the joke.

I thought Austin has assumed the communists won because prior to being frozen he felt that USSR had a stronger standing in the cold war and would be the more likely victor, regardless of Austin’s personal opinions on communism and capitalism.

To expand on this, you could also imply that Austin assumed the capitalists lost because he was frozen. He knows he’s a great spy, what chance did capitalism stand without him fighting for it?.

I don’t intend to rewatch the movie because my life experiences since then have made it impossible to enjoy media that uses homophobia and transphobia as common punch lines, but I can still agree that it’s a great joke, a great movie for it’s time, and cleverly written.

I’m sorry you’re dealing with that mate, that honestly sucks, but at least couples therapy and coparenting isn’t a uniquely cishet experience, so you’ve got community to draw on for support wherever you go, best of luck.

I don’t think a stereotype can ever be constructive because it will always involve the need to be restrictive and limiting in order to be a stereotype.

I guess we need to question who benefits from the constructive stereotype.

“drivers can’t see you” is constrictive for pedestrians, and also drivers, but it’s not constrictive to the graffiti tagger who is trying to go unseen by passing cars (not that a tagger is being constructive in the first place)

Nah, I’m just a person with leaky tits.

You do anyway without piercings.

The nipple isn’t technically one hole, it’s kind of like a porous sponge. After all, mammary glands are just mutated sweat glands, it’s a series of holes connected to a series of ducts.

So a lot of people find when lactating that it can spurt in crazy directions from unexpected parts of the nipple.

The number of times I find myself plugging the iron in behind the TV and then holding an old Amazon box against the wall and juggling my pants while I iron because I’m in a rush and that’s the available outlet plug and space.

The first pride was pretty wrathful.