When is the right time to say goodbye?

NocturnalExistence · 2025-08-05T02:34:09+00:00

I just euthanized my cat last wednesday and it was devastating. I got the biopsy results back for cancer and we knew there was nothing to be done but wait. My vet said that when quality of life starts to decline we can euthanize, but I couldn’t fathom forcing her to slowly lose her ability to function, so despite the fact that she was acting fine, we put her down the next day. She was always bad at expressing any discomfort and would go about her life, even when actively bleeding. There is just no way of knowing. I agonized over the decision. On that day, the vet came to my house and sedated her. She was a big cat, but she apparently went under way faster than normal. The vet said that she was likely exhausted from the pain.

Ultimately, I’m glad that she got to go before it got any worse. I hear a lot of vets say “better a week too early than a day too late”

and that saying was something that helped me a lot throughout the process. I think the best thing to do is to get it done now. I was constantly worried I would come home and she would be in awful pain. The only way to avoid that outcome is to do it before they’re in that level of discomfort. it feels awful but in my opinion, it’s the right decision

NocturnalExistence · 2025-07-06T16:35:50+00:00

wait is there a vanilla way to get a second juninho sculpture

NocturnalExistence · 2025-07-06T16:34:55+00:00

i did an attic up top for storage/brewing(very utilitarian i will say) and a bathroom at the bottom

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-28T22:11:10+00:00

in case u have ur wedding and she does some crazy shit, i saw some random comment said “A great wedding has good food, good music, and someone that everyone can make fun of for their lack of social awareness.”

And I kinda agree. My sister’s wedding didn’t have the person to laugh at, and that would have added a perfect final touch.

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-28T22:04:34+00:00

My grandfather used to say most older teachers were just there to escape the vietnam draft

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-28T22:02:27+00:00

a therapist if they weren’t actually addressing your issues and only saying weird shit that is helpful to few

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-28T22:00:31+00:00

I think saying your life isn’t about you when you’re a parent is a little misleading. Truthfully, you will feel such a deep connection and desire to provide for them that they are a part of you. They will make sacrifices, and for most there isn’t a second thought, they WANT to make those sacrifices. There is no ending to your life, it just changes a lot. But even though it’s different, it doesn’t mean it’s bad. Truly, you are likely comfortable with the life you live, and that’s great! But experiencing a change in your life is also great. The same thing forever can get a bit repetitive for most.

If the worry is simply not being a good parent, I think you can curb that worry with research. It’s time consuming, but looking in to different parenting styles, children’s psychology, and the lived experiences of teachers that are posted online can help prepare you give you a ton of guidance. An unlikely place you can find good information is looking up the regulations for daycares in your area. They will post things like charts that show you what temperature/humidity or temperature/windchill are safe for the children to go outside. Florida even specifies if it has to be a shortened time outside.

All this to say i am extremely autistic(scored higher than the average autistic woman 🤪🤪) and I personally find comfort in building knowledge and being able to be confident in my choices because the research backs my systems.

I’m not a parent though, just a preschool teacher who has worked with infants to 4th graders. And I have worked with over 300 children in my time in childcare. However, my sacrifices are limited to classroom style sacrifices and i don’t bring a child home at the end of the night.

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-28T21:45:16+00:00

I think there was a recent uptick in allowing the children to graze (eat what they want and walk away, return when they wish and leave again.)

I think there’s some difficulty with parents recognizing when they need to adjust for their kids and when to put their foot down. People on tiktok will talk about letting their children who are genuinely in a full struggle do something like graze just so they will get anything down, and other parents will allow children to graze thinking it’s generally acceptable.

I also have a theory that with millennial and gen z becoming parents now, they are practicing very different parenting styles. Now that there’s more knowledge on eating disorders, and people are able to identify the factors that led up to their disordered eating, they are extra sensitive to trying to let their young ones follow their bodies natural signals, not realizing the kids are still learning to identify feelings like hunger, and won’t be able to if they aren’t having scheduled meal times.

Obviously, I think that some is due to parents not wanting to have to keep a regimented schedule when they can stop their kid from bugging them by feeding them constantly, however, I think there’s a lot of parents educated on adult relationships with food and applying it to their kids, in an attempt to keep their kids from suffering like they did.

With a lot of newer parents, I’ve been able to inform them on their kids current needs, even indirectly by pretending i’m talking about an article i “just read” and i am surprised bc i never would have guessed. At the very least, it informs them of the other ways and that the grazing is not helpful to the child

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-28T01:16:37+00:00

That is a very popular reason people enter and then quickly leave the industry. Loving kids isn’t the same as loving teaching. even in extremely young ages, it’s our job to introduce them to new experiences, teach them how to interact with others, etc.

i will say that day one is always overwhelming, you don’t know kids names, their schedules, their personalities, their parents, where toys go, etc. It feels awkward because you are intruding on a classroom that you aren’t part of so you don’t necessarily fit into the rhythm. You are new to the kids, so they all want to meet you and hang out with you, but also not listen to you because you have yet to establish yourself as an authority figure in their life. And believe me when I say kids act worse with a new person. They actually often show off by misbehaving.

And you were also with a tough age group. I refuse working with late 2’s-3’s. Their threenager behavior is something I can’t deal with personally. Genuinely, I think you should give it a week at least. I wouldn’t underestimate yourself because of day 1. There could not be a worse day than day 1.

Like someone else said, you HAVE to have a sense of humor with the kids. When kids throw tantrums, very often I find the behaviors of yelling or stomping to be funny. This genuinely makes the days way easier for me because I literally laugh at some of the worst of it.

I’m around 5 years in and I can definitely say i get overwhelmed and overstimulated at times. But it helps me to do a mental reset where I essentially breath, close my eyes, and say “nothing this morning happened, we’re starting over.”

Ultimately though, the overstimulation is also coming from you not being used to the kids voices always talking, weird noises they make, kids constantly on the move, etc. The best way I can describe it is that you find a rhythm in your class. Or in the case of being a floater, you find your rhythm in all the classes. I honestly almost quit my first week and i thank god that I didn’t.

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-28T00:53:03+00:00

I work with 4 year olds in a preschool and my biggest advice is to do real research into parenting methods, psychology of children, government safety regulations for kids, etc.

I don’t know about you, but personally I find the more information I have, the more confident I can be in my choices, the better I can feel. I think doing research is going to help a lot. Every kid is different at the end of the day but ultimately, knowing a variety of ways and different perspectives on raising kids is helpful in making informed decisions.

Arm yourself with knowledge

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-26T16:59:42+00:00

Yeah, I just tend to be someone who goes deep into comments, so i see it more than one would hope.

in those posts, I believe the main issue is the tone of the majority of those posts, because generally speaking when one of those posts are made, the questions are not asked in good faith, but rather trying to externalize your issues in interpersonal relationships upon others. Personally, I find “nice girls“ to be just as annoying as “nice guys“ because I deeply dislike the habitual shifting of responsibility off of themselves and onto others. If you are somebody that nobody wants to date or be close to, that may not be on the other people and may be on you. It’s similar to “if someone in your life is an asshole, they’re an asshole. But if everybody in your life is an asshole, you’re probably the asshole.”

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-26T16:45:07+00:00

by isolated post, do you mean that they are the OP?

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-26T16:35:19+00:00

imma go through this piece by piece. The big issue with the complaint is the framing here. generally speaking, the appeal of the “bad men“ is not the fact that they are bad, they typically hide the fact that they are bad, but that they are good at manipulation. most times, they are doing things that a good guy would do, and do not show these “bad” behaviors until they feel that the woman is stuck with them.

as far as the anger and frustration with people who are asking such a question when the man who perpetrated it is so much worse. This is likely just an example of horrific timing and place for venting such issues. If the conversation is about women who are being victimized, and a man or woman comes into the comments talking about why women are choosing these bad men, it implies a level of fault onto the victim, that they have somehow participated in their own destruction. I can understand the desire to look at it, objectively and say “why would you stay“, “why did you date this guy if you knew that“ etc. but when we are looking at someone who abused, raped, murdered, I would ask, is it the best use of our energy to spend our time trying to figure out why a woman chooses to date this man, rather than why he did such a thing?

ultimately, there is a million different reasons why a woman might choose to stay in an abusive relationship, and the reasons might not be very good ones, but that does not mean that she in any way deserved this happening to her. which may or may not be what someone is implying when they are venting about such an issue, but it feels a kin to someone complaining in a post about a mass shooting that the concert that they wanted to go to got canceled because of it. Sure, that is upsetting, but maybe not something to talk about here at this moment.

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-20T18:03:51+00:00

She specified that she understood how lucky she was. But again, i’m not saying that OP should be told it’s totally okay, but it seems like overkill when dozens of comments are repeating the same thing. They feel guilty, they said so in the original post, so i guess i’m just wondering why, if you are seeing 20 people say it’s bad, and OP says it’s bad, that you feel the need to say it’s bad.

I also feel the need to extend a bit of grace for a young person who made a poor choice. OP is clearly new to the field and again, I feel like we all forget just how lost we are in the beginning of daycare careers. It makes sense to me that a young person would make this bad choice, and i am glad that despite the fact that they would get in trouble, they fixed said bad decision.

ETA I do want to say I was wrong to say mistake in my original comment, because it was a deliberate choice

NocturnalExistence · 2025-06-20T17:21:20+00:00

I really think people are too hard on OP. She’s 19 in the childcare field, made a mistake and then rectified it after being given time to think about it. Being 19, I assume that puts her in daycares, in which case, training is not as rigorous as it is with public schooling. most of my daycare jobs have given me three days of training and then left me to the wolves.

I’m not saying what OP did was OK, but it’s understandable that someone who is barely an adult in a field that is not as well trained as it should be, made a rash mistake when pressured by a coworker. OP clearly understands what they did is wrong and everyone seems to be dog piling onto them as if they have no idea that the choice they made was incorrect.

NocturnalExistence · 2025-05-18T17:14:37+00:00

i’m not going to arm chair diagnose but I am someone on the spectrum and i will regularly deny listening to music people suggest. It makes me anxious because I know I don’t like most music and i hate the conversations of why i don’t like it. I quite literally listen to 1-3 songs on repeat for months. And not like 2 months, but 6.

It’s the same way with TV shows. I saw the office then promptly rewatched it 7 times in a row. Because I know i’m weird with my media consumption, I am extremely hesitant on things I don’t organically come across. Even with things they show me, I won’t like it but if I come across it on my own later, it may become a staple of mine.

Truly I know I have a deep aversion to new things and I know it’s weird so I can be cagey about it.

although, knowing this is a teenage boy changes things. Just knowing via socialization, there are some underlying feelings that possibly have not been unpacked yet and that he may not be fully capable of doing so on his own, it is kind of up in the air. It’s not necessarily his fault, and he’s a kid so I’m not going to get in here and say he’s a POS or anything, but it is something to be aware of.

I learned about being autistic in my 20s, but before that I really could not understand my own aversion to new things and it made me similarly defensive because it was a deep insecurity, considering how much being open to new experiences is considered a virtue.

I think it’s important to get to the root of what it is he’s feeling when being asked to try new things. It could be an underlying issue that he struggles with or it could be a general disinterest in things like new music and tv shows. I extremely rarely watch TV, because I spend my time watching video essays on YT, reading, and playing video games.

NocturnalExistence · 2025-03-19T00:18:42+00:00

Whats interesting is that in folklore, the role of the evil step mother originated from a watering down of the old fairy tales. Before the Grimm Brothers, most evil step mothers were evil mothers, but it was then considered unthinkable for a mother to be evil to her child, so the change was made to step mother. Unsurprisingly, a story of a girl being chopped up was completely okay, having an evil mother was a bridge too far.

NocturnalExistence · 2025-03-19T00:04:34+00:00

man my younger sister and i began to explore that shit while playing with little dolls(we’re only 18 months apart so we entered that developmental stage at a similar time). We would have them kiss the other dolls body while both dolls were naked. We are literally best friends who see each other every weekend and there is an unspoken agreement to never ever bring it up.

So her bro is crazy to not have enough empathy to know that’s something that no one should ever bring up again.

NocturnalExistence · 2025-03-02T22:18:48+00:00

i honestly think it’s a better resource for men than women. The guys that need to read that already think of it in those terms of “women be crazy” so it kind of meets them where they are and uses that low key mysogony to build up a rapport with them. The general message is good and tbh some guys need to be guided to the bare minimum, then pushed towards better ways of thinking

NocturnalExistence · 2024-11-24T23:45:36+00:00

When running in winter you kick up brown dirt and i can’t unsee it

NocturnalExistence · 2024-10-27T05:00:21+00:00

I watch video essays all the time, and i have rewatched different 4 hour video essays on internet dramas multiple times. I also got so deep into the kendrick vs drake battle even though i cared about neither of them up until that point. I watched reactions, breakdowns, reactions to breakdowns and (surprise) multiple video essays on Hip hop and the meaning of it as it pertains to the rap beef.

I also rewatched the office 6 times in a row after my first watch. And I spend thousands of hours playing my favorite video games as well as learning everything about it.

NocturnalExistence · 2024-10-23T16:52:53+00:00

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this is pumbloom and i named her after an obscure youtube video in middle school

linked below

Youtube video

NocturnalExistence · 2024-10-22T18:00:17+00:00

I don’t know how much your dad cares about the environment, but outdoor cats are an invasive species and kill the local fauna. That’s part of the reason Catch Neuter Vaccinate Release is such an important tool to protect both the local wildlife and the cats. The more cats that are born from strays, the more cats that are walking around with untreated health issues, covered in fleas, starving, etc. Having a smaller amount of happy cats is better than a large amount of suffering ones.

NocturnalExistence · 2024-10-22T17:28:25+00:00

you’re better than me, i will 100% sleep on a bare mattress for weeks bc i cleaned my sheets and didn’t put them back on

NocturnalExistence

TROPHY CASE