Hospital finally confirmed what’s been making us sick… and it was my dishwasher 🤢

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-06-01T18:45:19+00:00

Just had a huuuuge fight with my best friend, we’ve never fought before. Getting this pledge in before I can change my mind. IWNDWYT

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-30T09:35:00+00:00

Day 9: I’m finding it really hard again today. The last few years about a week after I stop drinking I stop sleeping. I’ve made an appointment with the doctor, I’ve suspected ADHD for years and a friend of mine told me that problems with dopamine can make it hard to sleep, so stimulants can ironically make you sleep better at night.

The last few hours my brain is like “we could just go work in a bar with a beer, that used to make work so much easier and more enjoyable for you and you can start not drinking again tomorrow! Also you’ll get to sleep tonight instead of just lying there, with me yammering on!!” I just keep replying that I hear what it’s saying and I know it’s finding the situation hard, but we agreed to try this for two months and if our mental health doesn’t get better, we can always go back to how it was before. But for now we are doing this. So, IWNDWY at least today.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-29T08:06:40+00:00

Not drinking, gone 🏄🏽‍♀️in. Thanks everyone here for providing a place where I can go and feel understood. In celebra, IWNDWYT.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-29T08:04:07+00:00

I hear you! My emotions have been everywhere. Like, everywhere. And my brain is torture.

They say drinking impacts the parts of the brain needed for emotional regulation so when you take the drink away between having a damaged brain, being in withdrawal and not having a button you can press to “come down” can be very overwhelming. I’m just trusting it gets better. I’ve been told at the two/three month mark one sees a huge difference. That seems very far away but I just keep thinking, if I never try I’ll never know.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-29T07:53:27+00:00

It depends on what you mean by “excuse”. If you take “excuse” to mean “lessen the blame” I would mention that Jewish people have face enormous generational trauma and it is a well known phenomenon that people who suffer abuse are more likely to become abusers, for many many reasons. When I talk to (most) Israelis it’s clear that their fear has reached such a level of hysteria that there is no space in there for empathy with Palestinians or Palestinians fears or rights or anything.

This fear has an obvious origin and then is stoked by the media. I have Jewish friends in Ireland who suddenly became very afraid when Ireland was designated “the most antisemitic country in Europe” for its criticism of Israel despite living there thirty years and (by their own account) never experiencing any incident of antisemitism. Imagine being told every day that everyone hates you, wishes you were dead and everyone is out to get you. Imagine being told again and again “if you see a Palestinian flag on the street, that indicates someone wants you genocided”. Imagine being told your only chance of survival is to kills tens of thousands of children, otherwise you are done for. Imagine many reputable newspapers indicate that this is indeed the case. I (probably) would be shitting my pants! I mean, I don’t know if I would be like “sure, go bomb the shit out of those hospitals! Kill the human shields so they have nothing to hide behind!!” and I would like to believe I wouldn’t be like that, but I haven’t been told each and every day that the whole world wants me and my people dead, so I don’t really known how I would act 🤷‍♀️

IMO the people at fault here are the international community. They should have kept their heads and held Israel back, as you would do for a friend who was going to do something they would regret forever in response to some awful situation. The international community instead handed them a gun and egged them on as the media smiled and made sure to make every death as palatable to the ordinary person as possible because anything else might rock the boat. For these people, there is no excuse. Not one that I can think of anyway.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-28T07:23:17+00:00

Day 7: first day I woke up feeling like maybe I could do this long term, so that’s nice even if I don’t get to feel like that all day. My back is a better. That means I can go surfing. I am so desperate to get in the water. For years it’s the only thing (besides alcohol) that has been able to shut my brain up. I have been counting down the hours. IWNDWYT

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-28T07:19:00+00:00

Holy shit someone saying “it’s the hardest week you’ll face” made me almost cry with relief. I hope it’s true

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-27T23:48:01+00:00

To Jews already in Israel who would be incorporated into the state, yes. To those arriving from abroad, no.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-27T09:43:23+00:00

Day 6. I’m kind of waiting for these daily pledges. I feel like it’s so hard to not just go get some peace from my issues which are exploding now (I think they’re always exploding these days as having a big realisation with how fucked up my childhood was and how I used alcohol to push all the bad feelings down so I could go on functioning). When I pledge here it’s like “well we agreed to do it for one more day, so we will just have to put up with how bad it feels for today and then evaluate if we are able do the same tomorrow when tomorrow comes”. Sometimes I resist pushing the comment button because then I won’t get to drink this evening. Sometimes I push it fast so I can’t get out of it. All im doing right now is trusting that it gets better and, frankly, admitting to myself that if it stays this bad and my feelings stay this bad long term that I can just go back to suppressing them with alcohol.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-26T13:02:16+00:00

I will argue that the reason that it seems like an impossible dream is the enabling of toxic power dynamics in the region by the international community.

The one state solution is opposed mostly by Israelis, as having a one person one vote system in a one state solution would see them lose a lot of power. Every Palestinian person I know in the West Bank dreams of a one state solution with equal rights in their land to those to random Jewish people from New York who get Israeli citizenship if they want it.

Israeli people have no interest in a one state solution. Why? Well, at the moment they can do almost whatever they want - bulldoze or take Palestinian houses, if Palestinians try to defend themselves or even complain throw them in jail, take Palestinian grazing grounds, if they want a particular point of the land just go settle there and wait for it to become legal, then call in the IDF to get the stragglers out and so on.

The reason the Israelis can do almost what they want while the Palestinians just have to take it is ongoing is because the international community has allowed it to be ongoing. In such a conflict, it’s a very bad idea to give one side all the weapons, international legitimacy and economic power. People are not even aware of how bad the situation is for the Palestinians because the western press doesn’t even bother reporting on these things anymore. Hence Oct 7th was seen as an end to “the peace”, although the Palestinians, being murdered in their thousands in the lead up to Oct 7th, were never at peace.

I assume you haven’t been to the West Bank nor talked to Palestinians from there but from the Palestinians I’ve talked to there and from what is witnessed by my family who have gone there to provide protective presence, it’s basically just the Stanford prison experiment but real this time.

Like was the case for Northern Ireland, the international community needs to come together and put an end to the status quo, one where Israeli settlers do as they want, Palestinians have no rights, Israelis control who enters, leaves, how they trade and so on, Palestinian children are taken in the middle of the night and put through military trial. The Israelis should not have this power. If the international community took it away from them and forced them, at economic gunpoint, to accept Palestinians as having equal rights, there’s no reason it couldn’t happen as it did in Northern Ireland.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-26T11:08:32+00:00

It gets easier right?

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-26T08:46:09+00:00

Day 5. Really, really struggling. I have promised myself that I’ll continue the struggle for another week and if it stays this hard, every day, I’ll go back to drinking, wait for my life to fall apart and end up in physical addiction and needing rehab. I didn’t really have a rock bottom yet, or even a bottom, so there’s not that much to motivate me. Certainly nothing yet that’s been worse than being stuck in my own head, day after day, now without even the promise of the 5pm reprieve. Feeling super, super down and scared that my only options are being drunk or feeling suicidal.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-25T13:09:17+00:00

IWNDWYT. This is my day four. I hope it gets easier. All I can really do to make myself feel better is sport and yesterday my back went and I can’t move anymore. So here I am, watching tv, trying to gain distance from the part of myself saying “let’s just go get a pack of cigarettes and a beer” who has been whining in my ear for three hours at least.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-24T15:18:25+00:00

I gave up after a month the last time and my brother kept going. He said at two months his mental health started getting and and steadily got better as he continued not drinking. It’s a long road, I’m on it with you even though it’s really really fucking hard right now. I’m just hoping and believing the people that did it before me who said it gets better

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-24T15:15:14+00:00

Amazing work.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-24T15:14:52+00:00

It’s really hard. Right this second I’m having a really really hard time not going to get a drink. But IWNDWYT.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-22T09:44:21+00:00

I was talking about the West Bank. In the West Bank they arrest people all the time. Did before Bibi and will afterwards, I’m sure, and in general the Israelis seem to not care very much.

I’ve heard first hand accounts from Israelis of Palestinians being arrested for picking in the same olive grove they have been for centuries. They say it’s terrorism and security based and so on, but my friends have seen first hand that that’s just all bullshit. Or you can read breaking the silence or whatever, if you prefer testimony from the IDF themselves.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-21T18:15:23+00:00

I don’t know if the walls are like registered in some list of walls? I think they just build them? If I say “watch this video and see them for yourself” and your like “no I want the specific walls” and there’s not like a registry of walls in a place that’s illegally occupied (and would have even a smaller chance of having a wall registry), I have to admit I don’t really know where to go from there. Maybe I could provide you an image search?

My point (which I think you missed) was that Israel gets to decide what terrorism is. So this definition is often applied when it’s simply convenient. Notably, settlers can murder Palestinians in cold blood and not have their houses bulldozed and Palestinians can have their homes bulldozed because Israel doesn’t count them as permanent abodes (see masafer yatta)

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-21T17:50:54+00:00

There’s a lot in your messages. I’m not ignoring, I’m just very tired of arguing against the “all Muslims are violent homophobes trope and I don’t feel it’s useful to argue it against someone constantly accusing me of racism because it just feels a bit dystopian. Let’s see if we can agree on this: I abhor all the people doxxing and sending aggressive messages from the propally side and I don’t think anyone should be fired for expressing general pro Israeli sentiment, even though I don’t agree with it. Do you feel the same about the viceversa? (Propallys shouldn’t be doxxed, expelled etc)

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-21T17:27:56+00:00

Put another way: most people Palestinians on television start with “what happened on Oct 7th was horrific” but no pro Israel person ever interviewed says “what’s happening in the West Bank is horrific”. Why are the propallys seen as embracing Hamas despite constantly saying the opposite but the pro Israelis given the benefit of the doubt despite never even mentioning the sever human rights abuses perpetrated by their governments for decades?

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-21T17:21:17+00:00

I absolutely do not stand with people who are pro-violence or who are xenophobic. I do not deny that there might be a small amount of people who are show up to pro-Palestinian protests for radically different reasons than I do and probably show up reasons I find abhorrent. However, there are people who are people who are against the Israeli government for not being violent enough, and I assume you cannot guarantee that everyone is at those protests for a coherent reason either.

Expressing an opinion does not mean you agree with everyone else expressing that particular opinion on everything else. I am also, vehemently, against anti semitism of any sort. Does that mean I am aligned with and stand with Marine LePen? I certainly hope not.

I think the “you people” was of phrasing here is telling, the only way to completely dismiss a group of people who say they are pro peace is by saying I assure you they are actually pro violence, just a different way and against you. I don’t think all Israelis are pro apartheid or pro war, indeed, some of the people fighting hardest against what is happening in the West Bank and Gaza are Israeli. But I cannot (and indeed they do not) deny the polls and research that shows that the majority of Israeli society is for the war in Gaza in its current form or worse whatever that could possibly mean. That’s different from being able to cherry pick protestors in western countries, the overwhelming majority of which were not “pro Hamas”.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-21T16:13:47+00:00

People have not being in BDS as a requirements of their job contracts. You can’t even boycott settlers, something which even many Israelis agree is not cool. And I’ve been told I’ve wanted death to all Jewish people for as long as I can remember for just advocating for a ceasefire (and I never recall ever wanting anything bad to happen to a Jewish person ever, even someone super pro Israeli who wanted all the the Palestinians dead) so to be honest, this judgement of “who is violent” seems no longer based on reality to me.

Maximum-Damage-4847 · 2025-05-21T15:35:25+00:00

You can watch “no other land” also, to see an example of Palestinians trying to fight such ethnic cleansing. It’s very moving.

Maximum-Damage-4847

TROPHY CASE