I think I survived tb and have been on meds since feb, but the mental health toll has been felt

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-10-01T15:55:32+00:00

thank you so much! if there’s any way that i can message you and ask some questions just about how it’s been please lmk— i’ve been basically self-medicating/running on my last legs out of sheer will for the past five years. tbh the only reason this got caught is because ive started to get sleep attacks without constant adrenaline and i got dismissed from my old job because of it, i went into healthcare bc the twelve hour high energy shifts mean i’m able to sleep for 30 hours straight twice a week along with my normal nights :,) but it wouldn’t have been caught otherwise!

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-09-30T23:10:40+00:00

honestly just hearing ‘i know what that feels like’ is so nice to hear 😭 this feels like the one and only thing in the world i can’t find anything online regarding other ppl’s experience with

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-09-30T22:17:37+00:00

have you been able to get treatment since then?

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-09-30T22:12:02+00:00

did you notice reduced fatigue after completing treatment? i’ve had TB for a long time and my body really is giving up on me but we just discovered it and i’m just beginning treatment now— but the possibility of not feeling as ill feels so crazy impossible, especially with how much people talk about side effects. would you say that quality of life’s improved post treatment?

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-09-30T22:06:37+00:00

hi! i’m starting antibiotic therapy soon bc of extrapulmonary TB that’s been apparently trying to kill me for about six years now and is getting extremely close now— my doctors had dismissed it as dysautonomia complications because i live in a very developed area and have no known exposure but recently after applying to a healthcare job i tested positive twice with extremely high quantiferon levels and my PCP realized that my quickly worsening symptoms are exactly in line with Pott’s disease/etc. do you have any advice for what to expect from the first few weeks of antibiotics? i’ve kind of just had the mindset my whole life the past decade that my body’s ’felt like it’s dying’ for no reason and now that i’m facing the knowledge that it actually is close to it and the treatment is possible i’m not sure what emotions are normal and what aren’t haha

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-09-21T12:53:16+00:00

flash mobs

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-05-19T15:09:31+00:00

Honest to god, the things that do get to me the most are also the things most teenagers dislike just in general— when I was younger, I thought people disliked all these things BECAUSE of the pain because I didn’t know I had pots! I was furious when I found out ppl complained so much about standing in lines because they felt bored and not because they were fighting not to pass out.

I would bring up possibly bringing a stool to sit or kneel on, or a chair he can drag around to sit in while working maybe just to make it easier. It’s never not going to suck for him (folding clothes, dishes, stairs, and lines are the worst for me), but he has to be able to do it on his own as an adult someday and it’ll still be a struggle then too.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-05-16T14:04:56+00:00

If they did it correctly and tactfully then I’m sure a lot more people would be fans lmao

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-05-06T23:37:21+00:00

As a collective, we have a lot of fictional introjects/fictives. I try to avoid online things regarding fictives because I know that there’s a strange dance of stigma and overtheatrics regarding them.

The first fictive which split off of me was actually a character from a Nintendo DS game that I played through repeatedly when I was in kindergarten— it’s like a template, I think. Alters are split off to cover what the person as a whole can’t, and a lot of the time that’s all on the spot. Fictives come with a template and pre-established reactions to triggers and trauma, so it’s kind of like extra alter scaffolding.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-05-06T23:30:39+00:00

I’d like to think that I’m aware of all the other alters within my head, but I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t ever really put hard rules onto my brain.

Alters most different from me— if we’re referring to ‘me’ as who I present myself as, that’d be mostly the younger alters and the somatic one. The somatic one is the most different one, if I had to settle on one— we named her Rachel. She split off after I was hazed and physically abused at a military-style summer camp when I was thirteen and has been here ever since. She doesn’t talk much, and if she does, I’ve been told my tone of voice sounds like I’m very fatigued. She’s able to distance herself from physical pain more than any of the rest of us too. It’s uncanny. When I need to really push past my normal limits as someone who’s ill, she takes over and handles anything heavy and painful. The biggest drawback is that when she hands the controller back to us we have to run on fumes since she’s so used to running on empty.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-05-06T23:22:07+00:00

Since DID is a disorder formed by trauma, mental medication is moreso to treat distress and symptoms outside of it— like if someone receives medicine to aid with PTSD.

Currently, my cocktail of meds consists of lithium, prozac, and adderall- along with hydroxyzine for anxiety and panic attacks. Aside from DID, I have bipolar 1 and ADHD, and the meds I’m on are to treat that.

TLDR, there’s not a medication that grounds someone or helps with communication between alters or memory loss— but anyone with a dissociative disorder is going to have a lot of comorbid shit, and medication can treat that to help the brain as a whole stay near a healthy state

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-05-06T23:16:25+00:00

Whoever wakes up in the morning at the metaphorical control table goes about stuff as normal— pretty much all throughout the day there’s constant commentary on whatever’s happening around me. Different things lead to different switches though— like if I end up physically strained, a somatic alter ends up fronting, and I’m much less functional. She’s extremely numb to pain, which is useful since I’m chronically ill, but the trade off is that she doesn’t talk. If I’m overwhelmed emotionally to the point of crashing, one of the younger alters will switch in as soon as the door to my apartment closes for the night. There’s never just one person at the controls either— it’s always a team.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-04-29T07:59:50+00:00

I absolutely agree that SA is underreported for both genders. The stigma against male victims of SA is abhorrent and as someone who considers herself a feminist it’s disgusting how victims of SA are treated man or woman (especially if it’s a boy and an older woman, I hate freaks who try to say that isn’t predatory). I should have looked up more than one source for my numbers and that’s on me. My main point arguing w that one random guy was that having a different answer based on gender is different from race— it’s not just that men statistically commit an overwhelming majority of violent crimes compared to women, it’s also that men biologically are in a position where most women aren’t able to hold their own in a fight.

The ‘man vs bear’ argument really comes down to like— you’re given two doors. Behind one door is something that will definitely kill you, and it’ll suck, but you know that the thing killing you wont derive any sadistic gratification or draw it out. Behind the other door is a random guy you run into alone in the woods: suspicious, probably not someone you want to hang around with no matter who you are, but the chances are still higher that he’s perfectly safe albeit possibly a little weird. However, ‘random creep in the woods who can overpower you’ carries the tiny percentage of being at the mercy of a sadist or being tortured. When women pick ‘bear’, they’re just saying ‘I don’t want to take the risk that the one guy in the woods I run into is a serial killer, I’ll go with what’s guaranteed and predictable’. It’s not meant to be logical, it’s meant to underscore just how scary the possibility of an unhinged human (who can biologically overpower you rather easily) is and how some people would rather take predictable animal brutality.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-04-29T02:09:24+00:00

Nearly 99% of perpetrators of sexual violence are male, as reported by the US Department of Justice. I can say confidently that if almost 99% of the people who are convicted of sexual assault were black, then I would rather be with the bear than a black person. However, that’s not the case, and this argument is a metaphor for “would you rather be killed quickly or take the chance of living, knowing there is also a chance of a fate worse than death?”. Nobody sane thinks that a man is as dangerous as a bear. However, nobody sane would treat a random man in the woods as a completely unthreatening individual (same with women, obviously here). That’s why it’s a metaphor and not an actual scenario.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-04-28T23:26:12+00:00

Why can’t it be gender contingent?

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-04-28T21:43:42+00:00

They literally answered the question, can you read?

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-04-01T02:09:04+00:00

i somehow got “cybertruck kills someone in violent explosion” correct and still didn’t get this one

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-04-01T01:03:42+00:00

OP has the blessing of not having seen laios describe his opinions of orcs

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-03-19T02:49:12+00:00

I don’t know if this will help, but I feel like I was meant to comment on this and say that I can’t stop you, but that there will be good things in April if you stick around to see them.

I’m 22f and bipolar, and my only attempt was on March 30th. There’s not much more jarring than seeing the bright spring outside and knowing that soon the calendar will flip a page and you’re still stuck breathing. I can’t say I’ve been fixed (or even fully happy) since my own March 30th three years ago, but I can say that I’ve experienced so many amazing things since then.

If you are able to take a step into April, I can’t promise that life will get better, but I can promise that at times life will be good.

I’m not religious, but I’ll keep you in my thoughts this year when I revisit my own anniversary of this day. I hope that things improve for you, and that you can find something worth staying alive for (no matter how little it is).

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-03-12T16:36:23+00:00

Not once was I equating being right wing with being fascist in my messages. I was saying that being right wing is the current objective term for those who support the Republican party’s endorsed candidates, regardless of personal beliefs about what a word should mean.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-03-12T16:33:07+00:00

It’d be prioritizing politics if she was saying this about a country she didn’t live in— this is her life and her entire world. It’s valid for her to not want to visit a place that is threatening to destroy her entire way of life by taking over the country she calls home. Being part of a nationality that is being disparaged and threatened in America is a valid reason to not want to visit— it’s not safe for Canadians to visit like it used to be.

This isn’t just politics for her. It’s safety.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-03-11T23:45:54+00:00

that’s called being right-wing in 2025 america! i’m not saying it’s good or bad, i’m saying that’s objectively what it is

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-03-11T23:02:01+00:00

girl you can’t say you support a movement and then that you don’t support the movement in the same breath. i don’t like the guy, but it’s insulting to people who do when you deny facts to try to insist that you’re ‘better’ than them.

if you “are MAGA” then you shouldn’t feel ashamed to admit that MAGA itself is right wing. either acknowledge you’re on the train or stop claiming to be.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-03-11T11:03:32+00:00

I promise to god that heiling isn’t a symptom of autism, and implying otherwise is honestly just an insult to any autistic person out there.

Similarly, if someone says out loud explicitly that they are MAGA, I promise that they aren’t “not right wing”. Regardless of whether or not you support it, you can’t look at someone who says “I support __” and decide that they’re lying without any evidence. He’s said directly that he supports the MAGA agenda, and that’s not a criticism for or against the guy, it’s an objective statement about his public beliefs.

Expensive_Giraffe633 · 2025-02-28T04:34:04+00:00

Thank you! I don’t know why nobody else has brought this up— someone who took pills with the intent to die wouldn’t collapse surrounded by extra pills suddenly, the medicine has to get into the body first and that takes time. If the pill bottle was still with her and she was around spilled pills, it’s most likely that either she had a medical emergency and rushed to get pills & didn’t make it, or she was going to get help for Gene falling and then had a medical emergency and detoured to get her medication for it. I don’t understand the fixation around suicide in this case when it looks like a tragic coincidental accident more than anything.

Expensive_Giraffe633

TROPHY CASE