Heya! That time again! For the new folks, this thread is a space to tell us about something fun and cool you have going on, vent about something, or find an ear that you may need. Hope you’ve been well!
Remember, you are loved 
For my own part, while my attention span continues to get worse and worse, im still powering through Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and trying to keep warm. Pretty nasty out where I’m at, and won’t get better for another week or so. No leads on the job hunt, but I did start looking into nonprofit stuff and got a few apps out, so thats kind of exciting in and of itself. Partner stayed with me for a few days last week, and am arranging a date with someone I’ve been seeing around in local leftist/queer/gaming circles. And by date I mean “come watch movies with the pup and I cause we’re poor.” Or maybe we’ll shoot some free pool at a spot by me, who knows.
Lastly - ayyyyy two months without alcohol! I seemed to have swapped it out with a caffeine addiction though, but oh well. More coffee, anyone?
Hope you’re doing well, friends!
Feeling daily like I could come down sick, must be the weather. Got dinner yesterday, felt good to eat a hearty meal after surviving on pizza for a while.
Glad you’re eating better, and hope you don’t get sick!
Had a real sudden blizzard in my city, which is way scarier when you work with houseless people. The emergency winter shelters are open but we’re struggling to get enough people to run them, and I’ve been doing a lot of street outreach in the snow.
But in a way I’m happier to be worrying about my local community than about global politics or personal problems. I can cry about that stuff later.
Glad you’re doing good work!
I too would like to do social work. Where should I get started?
Heck yeah, I love convincing people to try this work.
The easiest way to get in is to apply for on-call or night shift work at a local shelter. Most shelter jobs here are union, and the good shifts tend to go internally in my experience. Agencies are almost always hiring for something though, retaining shelter staff is hard. I started as an on-call night shift worker at my first shelter, but pretty quickly moved up to managing whole programs because the work didn’t scare me away and I kept coming back.
There’s no education requirement for most jobs, and they really highly value people with lived experience with homelessness or recovery. If you’ve ever couch surfed or lived in your car or struggled with drugs, that’s actually a credential now. Look for job titles like “residential advocate” or sometimes “case manager”. There’s some resource coordination and such to be done, but most of the work is usually just managing the space, making sure guests get what they need, keeping things clean, and keeping calm if/when shit pops off. The best advocates I’ve worked with/hired are people who could be a calm and empathetic presence in the space and among the guests. The worst I’ve ever had were people who thought themselves better than our guests and showed it.
The good: this is the most meaningful job I’ve ever had. I’m doing good work and even when I’m grumbling about my agency (it’s frankly bullshit that we’re a nonprofit and not just a government function) and I’ve met a lot of great people. Most of my coworkers are fairly progressive if not outright leftist. It’s union work. The pay actually isn’t that bad. On a good day I’ll just spend the day hanging out with people shooting the shit and wont actually have to do any real work aside from light cleaning. Right now I’m typing a post on my phone and getting up to answer the phone and door. If nobody starts any drama, this will likely be the rest of my day.
The bad: you’re working with people going through what is probably the hardest time in their lives, and that can make people act like jerks. You’ll be surrounded by addiction and poverty. You will eventually have to narcan someone. You will eventually know someone who died in shelter, if you weren’t there to see it yourself. I have a fucking graveyard in my head and traumas that I can’t really talk about to anyone other than my shelter friends. There are employee protections, but you’ll still have to weather a lot of customer service type bullshit. Sometimes shit pops off and you need to be ready to convince people to calm down. Your agency will ask you to work weird shifts, especially during the winter. They will likely pay you pretty well for this inconvenience.
I’d be happy to answer anyone’s questions about shelter work either here or in PMs, and if anyone wants help finding positions in their city I could take a look if you don’t care about breaking opsec a little.
Thanks for all you do, comrade.
For someone with covid, holding up surprisingly well. Still got a few more days of this shit, unfortunately. Started a “book club” with exactly one friend where we’re reading through (all? maybe? hopefully?) of the Chunka Luta Network’s “required reading” list, but this covid brain fog is making reading anything really hard. Hopefully I can get my brain to internalize words before thursday
I’m sorry you have to deal with Covid.
I’m taking care of someone within my own home who has Covid-19.
Thank you on behalf of whoever you’re taking care of. I try and be as little of a bother to my mom as possible but even then asking her to make my meals so I stay out of the kitchen is still a lot of work on top of what she already has to deal with. Hope they get better soon
Caffeine is a lot better and useful than alcohol, though it comes with its own problems (still, not as bad as alcohol, I would argue, but definitely something to manage).
As for me, I was just at a pro-Palestine protest all the way in D.C. yesterday. I felt great being there. Met many other CPUSA comrades as well. Joe Sims was there too. He recognized me too from the Peace Conference. God, that was nice. But damn, was it cold! I may have come under-dressed; should’ve brought my coat rather than a sweater. And it was taking a long time to march as well. We should’ve gotten going earlier, imho.
Otherwise, I’m trying to get my brother a good chair, like this:
https://www.amazon.com/GTPLAYER-Computer-Footrest-Adjustable-360°-Swivel/dp/B0BBPRZHRX/
(Sorry for the Amazon link; I’ll try to get it directly from whatever store it comes from.)
Does anyone have any suggestions at all? Any great chairs you can think of?
I need the best of the best because the current chair my bro uses is from the kitchen and he’s getting damn tired of it (he’s got back issues too).
Thanks in advance!
Can’t help you on the chair, but good work being at the protest! I’m sure it wasn’t the most fun thing in the cold.
No, that part wasn’t fun at all. I left earlier than most, but I saw some leaving even beforehand, I think. It was hard to tell 'cause some went to and fro.
I’m trying to stop drinking but probably won’t give up caffeine, at least for now. It’s a dependency that I’m aware of but alcohol is worse like you said. I don’t wanna try and cut out energy drinks since it’s one of my treats I still allow to get through the day but I can just do like tea or coffee in the afternoon. If I’m after a pick-me-up.
Good luck with the sobriety thingy!
Yes, of course!
It’s actually been a pretty shitty and frustrating week. Me and my sister (only family member I’m really close to) have both been dealing with our parents acting fucking toxic as hell. She’s unemployed, despite having an engineering degree from a pretty good school. I’m underemployed, trying to go back to school but I’m worried now the thing I’m trying to study isn’t going to be as safe as a bet as I thought and I’m debating if I want to waste another 2-3 years on another dud degree. We’re both in our early 30s and struggling to have stable lives, which sucks cuz she really wants to start a family with her BF and I really want more freedom and autonomy to travel. Both of us currently kinda live with our parents, well more specifically we both rent properties our parents own that they only live in occasionally but we usually have to ourselves. They’re renting to us at a slight lose, but they act like this is a massive act of charity despite the fact they could never get a regular tenant who’d be chill with them crashing in the guest room every other weekend. Both of us are greeting pretty doomer about our job prospects, I’m fed up with the service industry and think I’d legit rather go crust punk than keep doing this, but I’m a little old for train hopping now. My sister is a bit bougier than me so she’s struggling with the prospect of going back to being a barista after a decade of (barely) middle class income.
I’m very tired and fed up and honestly it’s been making me cranky and I’ve been lashing out at people which I don’t like.
I’m sorry comrade. Hoping things look up soon. Been out of work for 4 months myself, so you aren’t alone
I nearly sliced my thumb off today with a razor sharp santoku knife. That was fun. Never try to stop a knife from sliding off the counter onto the floor. Just get the fuck out of its way.
Oh shit. Was it able to be reattached?
It didn’t come off thankfully, but I definitely sliced some nerves. It cut about a 1/4" deep and I lost a good bit of blood. Did not go to the ER like I really should’ve.
Can you still feel it? I lost feeling in one of my fingertips after an incident with a forklift, which is small but annoying sometimes lol
Somewhat. Very pins and needles feeling and very reduced sensations when touched. Similar to how my left forefinger feels nowadays except much less severe. That’s a much worse story for another day though. Let’s just say I definitely severed the nerves in that finger.
One time I cut my hand open trying to cut a squash. Waited about 8 hours for the stitches in the ER and got bored so I drew a pentagram with my blood. That was the most metal thing ill ever have done.
Glad it wasn’t any worse for ya!
There’s a political crisis in my country and I’m still in my department (state) because our leftist presence is really only effective here. Hoping the comrades out there can bring about a change but not expecting much with how liberal most of it is.
In the meantime, I’ve found a love of making sandwiches.
Good luck on the political project! What kinda sandwiches you been making?
CUBANS
Idk i really wanna kill myself still and always have, even as a little kid.
The world is better with you in it, comrade. If you ever need an ear, just holler!
Fien…
Glad to hear it
Treatment resistant depression. I’ve been seeing a therapist and shrink for years while being on a rotation of psychiatric drug cocktails and still feel very anhedonic and listless. Thinking of dropping the current therapist and finding another.
On the bright side, apparently some work on a PR I made for an open source project turned out to be useful to the project’s maintainers.
Good luck with the therapy! Hope you find something that works! Congrats on the project!
Unsolicited advice but…
Whenever I hear treatment resistant depression and it’s someone who has been through the system for a long time and they’ve played antidepressant roulette so many times that the doctors just kinda shrug instead of having ideas for where to go next with treatment, I always encourage people to consider stuff that’s somewhat off the beaten path.
Adult ADHD is typically where hyperactive traits from childhood, if they existed much at all, tend to turn into inattentive traits. Not always and not 100% but I’ll spare you my idle hypothesising about why that might be. The important thing in this is that ADHD and especially the inattentive traits can often resemble TRD.
For very complicated reasons, autism can also end up resembling TRD especially in adults.
This next part is armchair expert stuff but I have a suspicion that the overlap between TRD and catatonia is much higher than is recognised in mainstream psychiatry and I’m staking this claim on the fact that the symptoms and most effective treatments for both have a major overlap.
I also think that it’s worth starting from a clean slate with regards to symptoms and mapping out what they are in an objective fashion while withholding interpretation to try and identify if there’s any outlying symptoms that are indicative of an underlying condition which has gotten swept up into the TRD diagnosis or a condition which has gone completely unexamined. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that it’s really common for long-haulers to just attribute symptoms to TRD immediately without a critical assessment of whether this is accurate, and often this is something that is imparted to the person by the attitude of experts who treat them. Sometimes going over things with a fresh perspective can yield new options for treatment or symptom management that haven’t been considered yet. Sometimes the “small” symptoms that you just deal with or ignore can actually be more central to the condition(s) than you realise and because you’re so busy trying to manage the “big” stuff (or perhaps it’s better to think of this as downstream symptoms), you never find the opportunity to examine the “small” symptoms or to treat them which can sometimes be the key to achieving better outcomes. Sometimes you have the interplay of more than one condition simultaneously which introduces complexity in terms of diagnosis, treatment, and management that does not exist for a solitary condition.
This is even more important when you start bringing in physical symptoms too, as mental health generally gets treated as its own discrete matter rather than looking at things in a (ugh) holistic sense. Not like crystals and chakras holistic sense though. You get what I mean.
Is it possible that you’ve got TRD due to the luck of the draw - a shit childhood, unfavourable living conditions, your particular neurochemical makeup, stuff to do with brain physiology like your particular development or taking a knock to the head at some point that has just turned out badly due to misfortune? This kind of thing is absolutely a possibility.
But I’d urge you not to let doctors just write you off and consign you to the too-hard basket and especially not to take that on board yourself. Even if you’ve exhausted all your treatment options, which is actually rarely the case in reality, this can indicate that the model of treatment itself is wrong and not that you’re truly at a dead end.
I’m going to talk personally here as an analogy. I’m asthmatic. I’m also unfit because my mental health has been absolute garbage in the past couple of years in particular so it’s been a matter of survival taking precedence over my physical fitness. Sucks, but that’s life.
Imagine if I looked at being unfit through the lens of asthma - superficially the symptoms line up and you could make a decent case for why it’s asthma. But imagine if I was operating under the idea that what I was experiencing was all just a case of poorly managed asthma or severe asthma. Maybe the argument for why this is right is convincing because, at least some of the time, my symptoms respond to asthma medication. But maybe I start avoiding exercise because I’m worried about it aggravating my asthma symptoms or triggering an asthma attack - by operating under a false paradigm or an inaccurate application of the paradigm (Yes, I’m asthmatic but no, that doesn’t mean that every time I’m out of breath that therefore it’s asthma) you can conceal what’s really going on or you might even follow treatment/symptom management which aggravates the underlying cause (e.g. experiencing breathlessness -> avoid exercise -> become more unfit -> experience being breathless more often).
Am I telling you that your diagnosis is incorrect or that how you’re treating it is actually making the symptoms worse? Fuck no - I don’t know the first thing about your situation.
Am I telling you that your symptoms—all of your symptoms—are valid and deserve to be treated with the highest levels of respect, consideration, and care and that you’re allowed to think about your condition as being “treatment-unexplored depression”, and that it’s better to give up hope for the diagnosis being accurate than it is to give up hope that the condition itself is treatable and that there might be options for better symptom management? Fuck yes, absolutely.
Now that you mention it, I’ve been thinking I might have undiagnosed autism. I imagine that is having an effect.
Year has started with a flu followed by a gout attack and my throat hasn’t really healed and I ran out of vyvanse and it’s been really fucking hot (which probably triggered the gout attack), but other than that it’s actually been pretty good overall.
Feel better soon!
On the mend
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Talked with my partner last night and we’ve decided to start a podcast. I’m an Extremely Online theory-brain and she’s a burnt-out former activist, and we both know lots of people in media and activism/organization.
That’s awesome! Good luck!
In a queer space, I met a lesbian lady who lives in Pakistan and works for the Department of School Education.
For like two seconds I thought this was cool, but she started talking about how “the tribals” in Punjab are all “dangerous” and “keep their girls from going to school”, and how the Department delivers USAID textbooks, uniforms, so on. Smelt really bad to me, like this is an imperialist thing right? USAID textbooks were also what the Taliban used in Afghanistan for radicalisation, right?
Worthy to note, I just asked her about what she does and how it gets done, I did not unhinge my jaw and spew forth a DOG OF THE USAMERICAN EMPIRE rant, because you know what they say about No Investigation. I do have something like a filter. It was kind of surreal to be sniffing out western propaganda in realtime while talking with this queer woman from Pakistan though. Plus, it was kind of irritating to have libs chime in all UR DOING A SERVICE FOR UR COUNTRY on something that fucking reeks of pinkwashing & homonationalism.
Your thoughts please, thread.
Hope you get an answer! I’m not informed enough to have any response at this moment, but maybe make this its own thread?
Perhaps I shall!
Edit: I did
I’ve been having panic attacks all weekend and I’m really over it.
I’m sorry comrade, how are you now? Hope things calm down
that fuckin sucks comrade, i’m sorry
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Hope you find something soon
Thanks!
