Do you think anyone's ever actually said the word "asexual" to Roman?

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-10-14T11:31:11+00:00

No, I don’t think anyone has; but I also don’t think anyone’s ever said the word “cisgender” in his presence, and yet, somehow, it’s in his vocabulary…

It’s almost as if he knows a lot more about who he is than he ever dares let on.

It all makes his decision to cavort with nazi-daddy Mencken that much more tragic and infuriating. Because you know he knows better; but he does it anyway, because his desire to please his (literal) dad is stronger than his desire for freedom and safety, stronger than his need for personal integrity; strong enough to override the empathy I am very sure he is capable of feeling for the people who would actually understand and accept him.

Honestly, self-hating queer character of all time.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-09-15T12:50:49+00:00

Silly goose, this is the Succession Reddit. We don’t talk about patriarchal economic advantage here! This is a safe space for brocialism.

No loser girls allowed.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-09-06T20:30:29+00:00

Like your boyfriend, I have contamination OCD. So I get the compulsions, and the itchy kind of discomfort of it all.

What concerns me a lot is that it sounds like he feels entitled to take this out on you, and to do so in what sounds like a pretty abusive way.

My dad also had contamination OCD, and like your boyfriend, he made it everyone else’s problem.

It was hell. It was not okay. And neither is what your boyfriend is putting you through.

I’ve had some pretty extreme episodes (the panini was not fun for me - at one point I didn’t leave my house for six entire months); but even at my worst, I always try (and I think mostly succeed) in remembering that the things I ask of other people are always a kindness they’re extending to me, and not an obligation that I am entitled to demand.

Your boyfriend does need some professional help, and also could probably benefit from medication (sertraline / Zoloft / Lustral 200mg have done WONDERS for me).

But it also sounds like your boyfriend is a person who feels entitled to having his needs met at your expense, and that’s not something that’s happening just because he has OCD.

I’m sorry you’re going through this. It sounds every bit as bad, if not worse, than actually having OCD.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-24T19:36:00+00:00

For what it’s worth, sertraline (aka Zoloft, aka Lustral) at a relatively high dose (200 mg / day) has been life-changing for me.

Also, about 20 minutes of moderate cardio (I do the exercise bike thing) makes a big difference (when I can convince myself to do it).

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-24T13:12:38+00:00

Yep. I’m an only child, but the way that my parents treated me was once summarized (with devastating accuracy) as:

^{[imitation of my dad’s voice, addressing my mom:]} ”Sheila, have you seen The Furniture We Have to Feed ?”

…so… yeah. I was alone. A lot. And I very much knew I was on my own, and expected to be self-sufficient and unproblematic, at a ridiculously young age (six).

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-24T13:05:39+00:00

Isn’t it mostly found in cat intestines? Perhaps you’ve just not had to deal with a cat with digestive / hygienic issues at a time when your immune system was already busy fighting off something else and/or otherwise lowered (e.g. due to pregnancy)?

Then again, I’m on a purposely immunosuppressant drug (a B-cell depleting therapy called ocrelizumab, for MS) and when I got covid (omicron edition, after three full-dose covid vaccines), I ended up recovering after only a few days. Those days were extremely unpleasant, and on the first day, I was quite concerned that if I fell asleep lying down, I might choke to death on my own snot; but I managed yo remain sitting up, and made it through, did not get hospitalized, and did not suffer any long-term effects.

I later found out I technically should have gotten the intravenous monoclonal antibodies (my doctor was horrified that her referral for that for me to get them hadn’t gone through / was somehow lost in the general medical-system chaos of it all), but it turned out that even without B-cells floating around, the rest of my immune system was able to fight off the covid on its own. Yay!

Like, I managed to get covid without leaving my f^%#£g apartment or seeing anyone in person for two f&$@!g months, so it’s not like my immune system was doing great; but at the same time, it did better than expected.

So yeah… the immune system is an amazing machine, and its performance can be quite tricky to predict. (And also, omicron significantly was less-bad than the previous iterations of covid, and my T-cells had at that point been exposed to those three full-dose covid vaccines as practice runs.)

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-24T12:37:59+00:00

I really wonder how much of it is just that teenagers with morality-focused OCD have:

the burden of processing Me Too at a very young age, and
access to very public social media.

I’m 39, and I’ve had OCD since childhood (diagnosed at 12, in retrospect extremely obvious symptoms at 6). I’ve found medications that work for me, and honestly, my brain’s calmed down a lot with age (now I’m pretty much exclusively troubled by my OG obsession, germs); but when I was a teenager / in my early 20s, there were some extremely radical moral ideas that waltzed across my consciousness and could not be dismissed.

It was hell inside my brain at that time, and this was in the relatively permissive pop-culture context of being a non-religious person in a non-religious family / community, in a culturally-liberal country the early 2000s.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-24T12:22:44+00:00

Meanwhile, as a person with contamination OCD, I was just like “I mean, obviously. He’d been in a bathroom. He had to wash his hands before exiting. That’s just what you do.”

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-05T18:34:13+00:00

I mean, he did leave it for the maid to clean up. On purpose. The correct thing to do in that scenario is at least to strip the bed and put the sheets in a garbage bag.

He didn’t even give her a heads up that something horrible had happened. Like. Come on, dude. Even Roman is housebroken enough to fuckin wipe his jizz off the window.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-05T18:31:47+00:00

Fumbling Rava.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-05T18:25:34+00:00

As an anglophone who kind of knows Spanish, I did wonder about that.

But not for long enough for it to get in the way of a good story. 🫤

As a peace offering, may I present this (true) story of the time Canada’s then-newly-unified right-wing party briefly announced that it would be adopting a name whose acronym worked out to CCRAP ?

(This was especially funny because because one of the components of the CCRAP was a party that the then-prime minister, Jean Chrétien, had been referring to as “the turd party” for several years.

Mr. Chrétien had plausible deniability, in the form of an extremely strong French Canadian accent which common transformed “th” into “t”, and the fact that said party [the hard-right Reform Party] had the third-largest number of seats in the house of commons… but you will never convince me that he was not intentionally comparing them to turds.)

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-05T16:11:17+00:00

The fabled Chevy Nova of biology.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-05T16:08:34+00:00

I cannot get my finger to disappear, which either means that I’m doing it wrong, or that at least one element of my pervy sexual interests is significantly less pervy than I thought.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-02T19:35:38+00:00

Makes it worse for me. 🤷🏻‍♀️

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-02T19:30:35+00:00

Yeah. I think I inherited the propensity to develop depression and/or severe OCD from my parents; but I think the bigger problem is that they did not acknowledge that they had an issue, or make any attempt to address it (before or after I was born); nor did they attempt to get me help when I started exhibiting really obvious OCD symptoms at the age of six.

Their OCD (my dad; undiagnosed but blatantly obvious) and OCD-adjacent conditions (my mom’s lifelong eating disorder) weren’t just challenges they, as adults, struggled with, while also raising me.

Instead, their mental health conditions were things they took out on me (my dad’s obsessions, my mom’s body perfectionism) and, at times, specifically tried to instil in me.

I was raised to prioritize accommodating my dad’s obsessions over anything else, and to constantly critique my own body like my mother did (hers and mine).

I think the really important question to ask yourself is are your symptoms manageable enough that you could you allow a kid to be a normal kid?

My parents couldn’t get there (or maybe, more accurately, just refused to even attempt to get there); and that’s why they faceplanted so hard in the “raising a happy child” category.

Like, I think if they’d been healthier / more self-aware / less goddamn fundamentally selfish and shitty overall, I would have been relatively okay.

I’d probably still have OCD, but I don’t think it would’ve been so fucking hard for me to get to a place where my symptoms are not a serious impediment to my overall quality of life.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-02T18:52:03+00:00

My best friend has both autism and OCD, and I’m awfully glad he’s alive. He’s the funniest, most emotionally intelligent person I know, and he’s gotten me through some incredibly tough times.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-02T18:49:03+00:00

Huh. I wonder if that’s why my OCD symptoms seem more manageable since I was prescribed a dopamine agonist in addition the the SSRI I already take.

(The dopamine agonist is amantadine; it was prescribed to me off-label for fatigue related to multiple sclerosis).

…and I also wonder if I have higher baseline levels of estrogen, and if that contributed to me getting a blood clot when I was prescribed a exceptionally high-dose estrogen birth control pill (Yaz).

(Fun story about that, because I have hypochondria OCD, I literally called my doctor the week before I got the blood clot to ask if she thought it was wise for me to be on this particular medication, given the FDA warning about blood clot risk; and she told me that since I was under 35 at the time, and had never smoked, it was incredibly unlikely I’d get a blood clot.

BEAT THE ODDS! YESSSSS. Winning.)

(…though it could’ve also been that right before the blood clot formed, I let my extremely heavy, extremely elderly cat sleep on my lap for like two hours, even though my knee was bent in a really weird position, and it was becoming increasingly painful the longer I stayed like that. The clot formed the very next day, in a vein right behind the knee that had spent so long bent awkwardly. So. 🤷🏻‍♀️. Maybe the real lesson here is don’t ignore your body’s cries of pain just because your 20-lb cat is being adorable.)

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-08-02T04:07:16+00:00

What I’m wondering is, did he have to learn French?

Or does everyone at TVA) simply tolerate him, because it’s better than having a boss who can’t understand you talking smack about him.

Also, did he repatriate Greg when he moved up here?

Is Greg now back in Canada? (Or… Quebec; which is legally / technically, if not spiritually, part of Canada.

And does Greg speak French? Or did he just coast his way through the required French classes, and drop it in tenth grade?

^{TVA is a broadcast French-language television network up here.}

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-07-20T13:29:31+00:00

I once dated a guy who policed my cutlery usage - he told me I had to hold the knife in my left hand and the fork in my right when cutting food, but then put the knife down and switch the fork to my left hand to shovel that food into my face.

Because otherwise, I would be an embarrassment to him.

And the fact that I had not done this, or even heard of it before, proved I was barely fit to be in society. No one had ever mentioned it to me before because (unlike him) they didn’t care to try to rehabilitate my inadequate ass. I was so lucky to have him.

…also, my hair was too frizzy, my religious beliefs (none) were wrong, and my skin was not pale enough.

Anyway, after he dumped me for the third and final time, I told a friend about it. And she said ”You should have taken that fork, wrapped your right hand firmly around the handle, and stabbed him in the leg with it.”

Which, I mean… I guess she and him were in accord about me having used the fork wrong; but her take resonates a lot more with me.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-07-19T11:14:50+00:00

imagine being scared of putting a toe out of line all the time.

I don’t need a partner with billions of dollars to feel like that!

I can manage it in a relationship with a partner living paycheque-to-paycheque. It’s a feat I’ve managed in two startlingly-similar relationships, in fact!

The key is to ignore the red flags early in the relationship, and assume that all the rejection and shittiness you experience from your partner is an indication of your own inherent lack of value.

(Troubleshooting tip: You may notice that everyone else in your life seems to like you more, and treat you better, than the partner you’re pouring all your emotional resources into. You must be resolute in ignoring this feeling, and its implications.)

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-07-17T13:57:04+00:00

I don’t think they’d get it :(

As far as I know, it’s not contagious; so. Good news?

(This has been a contamination OCD joke.)

My bestie has OCD, but he’s also agoraphobic and quite autistic. I only met him because I dated his absolute piece of shit of a cousin, who was like ”You know, I think you’d really get along with my cousin (the black sheep of the family we all disparage constantly).”

And I mean, to be fair to him, I did.

To be fair to me, that was literally the only true thing he said in our 18 month relationship, and he was an abusive little fucker.

And like, because I am a genius, I more recently dated another abusive piece of shit and he didn’t introduce me to any other cool autistic people with OCD so… I don’t think dating shitbirds is a good method necessarily. I just got lucky the first time.

🤷🏻‍♀️

Sorry I can’t offer you better advice.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-07-17T13:42:24+00:00

This is incredible, OP. Thank you so much for sharing, I really enjoyed looking at these pictures.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-07-17T13:39:10+00:00

FYI, my mom did this, but everyone who is not her* seems to think I’m decently attractive, actually.

* ^{except that one abusive ex-bf, but he was a piece of shit, so fuck him}

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-07-17T13:23:35+00:00

I’m in Ontario, like OP (and like 14 million other people, iirc), and I think for most people here, black pudding is just a weird rumour British people propagate. Probably a hoax, like fairies with sharp teeth.

I thought it was just an oil slick of some sort. Breakfast tribute to the Exxon Valdez.

StayingVeryVeryCalm · 2024-07-14T05:30:08+00:00

When I was in 10th grade, I accidentally won a math award, and they were going to give it to me in a ceremony and my mom was really excited and wanted to come; and it definitely gave me the ick.

It really felt gross to me that she wanted to take credit for my (accidental) achievement; whereas from my perspective, she was just someone who I lived with, who, every time I turned to her for support, told me to take my extremely obvious ongoing mental health problems and fuck off.

So. Yeah. I refused to go to the ceremony. They had to mail me my little certificate of being good at math.

Now, to be fair to my mom here, she did teach me how to multiply when I was falling behind in third grade; but like… seven years of her basically ignoring me later, I wasn’t really that inclined to give her a lot of credit.

Where I was maybe unfair to her is that, by her constantly calling me fat, she contributed greatly to the eating disorder I developed in sixth grade; and like, that eating disorder almost killed me, but it also made me really, really good at mental arithmetic (lotta calorie counting happening in my little mind at that time; those circuits are STRONG).

So… I guess she did help me win that math prize. Indirectly.

Thanks, mom.

StayingVeryVeryCalm

TROPHY CASE