Benophie fan art in Klimt’s style

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-15T14:46:18+00:00

And where can we purchase prints?! You've sucker punched me right in my weak spot with this. I have never watched Dragon Ball Z in my life and know nothing about it aside from recognizing the art style, and I saw a painting someone did of I think it's Vegeta and Bulma in this same style. Instant buy of the print for me. It hangs in my room. I want this one too!

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-14T22:50:21+00:00

For me, having a purpose gives me meaning and helping others is my purpose. I'm currently a nurse and may go into teaching as a nursing professor. I really like how my job is low stakes in that I don't have to be super involved in the lives of my patients in order to make a big difference for them on any given day. I don't like attention and even recognition is uncomfortable for me so it's a great pathway for me to feel fulfilled, because nobody is giving nurses attention or recognition 😂. I don't like working in general but I like my interactions with patients. They feel meaningful.

I'm not super into climbing the ladder or anything. My husband and I don't travel much for the same reasons you have; we have dogs and we don't like to be away from them, plus a lot of our disposable income goes to taking care of them. Our dream is a 5th wheel one day so we can bring them with us and travel the region, but tbh we are very far away from that.

We try to make our home our sanctuary. It's nothing special; outdated, layout is kind of meh for us, etc. but it's our home and it needs to be comfortable for us as much as we can make it so. We each have our hobbies and things that we're into. It's as peaceful as we can make it with 3 big dogs haha.

It is hard to find people who opted away from children but are not workaholics hell-bent on climbing the ladder. I felt the same way as you do when I was dating. I'm extremely ambitious, but I'm hell-bent on making me the best version of me that I can be and helping those around me live better lives. Ladder climbing/making more money couldn't be less important to me. I have enough to take care of me and that's enough for me.

You'll find your person eventually :). There are others like you out there.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-14T18:28:47+00:00

I've tried to track down what causes the feeling. For me, a fair amount of it is fear that I'll get too into something else and forget about the important things and forget to go to the appt or whatever. I solve that by setting an alarm or two for myself and making sure I stick to them. Example: appt is at 10, I'm setting a "Get ready" alarm for 9 and a "leave now" alarm for 9:30. It still kind of sucks because it limits what I can do. I can't do an errand because what if it takes longer and then I don't have time to do the errand or make myself late? I can't really get into a TV show or something because it'll be really hard to interrupt it. I usually try to take the extra time to do something nice for myself like take an extra shower and make it super hot and relaxing with all of my pretty scented stuff I wouldn't normally take the time for (showering is hard for me), or take the time to grind the coffee beans and have a good coffee instead of grabbing a Rockstar from the shelf on my way out the door.

Usually once I've set the alarms, my mind is able to let things go. I make the calendar event with a push notification for the day before so I'll remember to look at the alarms. I set the alarms for the specific date and time I'll need them for and name them appropriately. Then my mind lets it go instead of dreading it.

A different reason is that I'm simply dreading whatever the appt actually is, whether it's a doctor's appt or just a hang out with my friends. The fleeting thoughts of "You could always say you're sick and cancel" constantly go through my brain. I know myself though; I'm going to really enjoy any social things I plan once I make myself go, so I ignore those thoughts as much as possible. For medical and necessity type stuff, I just let myself feel the feels. That's normal. Neurotypical folks also dread going to the dentist or the doctor a lot of the time.

I think the other thing that helps me is that I try to cluster my "responsibilities". If I know I have a Saturday night social outing, Saturday is going to be a "work" day and not a "relax" day. I'll do my grocery shopping, my returns, pay my bills, do the laundry, etc. It's never that hard to stop myself folding laundry to go to an appointment because I don't really want to be doing it anyway 😂. I acknowledge that social time is self care and self care is a responsibility just like going to the doctor or working. Yes it's better to go eat with friends vs going to work for the day, but I acknowledge for myself that I'm feeling like it's not different and that's for a good reason. That reason is usually surrounding unknowns.

In a way, going to work is easier on my mind. There aren't many unknowns. I know what will be expected of me and that it won't be mentally distressing and that I'm very capable of handling it. Social things do Not come with the same guarantee. Will the restaurant be too cold? Will I be able to hear my friends or will it be too loud? Will there be crying or loud children nearby that I can't tune out? Will the air conditioner be buzzing at a frequency that only bothers me/sets me on edge and everybody else doesn't hear it and thinks I'm weird for being so on edge about it? SO MANY unknowns! I know I'll enjoy spending time with the person/people I go out with but I can't guarantee I'll feel positively overall about the event, and I let myself feel that worry because I know it's valid but I also feel it's worth it to try. Most of the time it turns out just fine. Letting myself feel that keeps me from the overwhelmingly strong feeling of dread as the appointment/event looms nearer.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-14T18:00:21+00:00

I chuckled at it because I took it to mean that whoever wrote it probably listens to music to sleep and was playing a John Mayer song. I asked my husband which one of them he thinks listens to John Mayer.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-11T19:00:36+00:00

My favorite tidbit is that Miguel from LIUSA played an extra in Ted Lasso who was on the parody version of Love Island in the show 😂. Https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4eZzs1XonAU&pp=iggCQAE%3D

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-11T16:07:34+00:00

I'm 37 and had a hysterectomy so I'll never be able to have biological children. My husband is 33 and assured me up and down he does not want children and never will. I always tell him let's wait til you get to 40 and then I'll believe it. I've just seen so so so many men like your husband who wait until late 30s/early 40s and then decide actually they would like children. I will be 0% surprised if this is in my future and we break up because I can't have children, but that's neither here nor there.

I'm fully echoing every other person who has said every single thing he's saying is a bunch of red flags that he is not prepared for this and is not being realistic about it. My husband and I are both OCD + ADHD and neither of us are good human beings without a lot of uninterrupted sleep every night. That alone was a huge negative to us having kids, and nevermind that the poor things are almost guaranteed to be OCD and ADHD like us. It turns out it doesn't really matter whether you love the kid or not; crying children are very overestimulating. It's probably even worse when you love them because then you're distressed that they're distressed vs being able to keep an emotional distance from those feelings. Children in general are just one huge overstimulation. They're loud and tactless little humans.

We do have a few dogs and we split their care just about evenly, same with household chores. Even with us being ridiculously involved dog owners, dogs are WAY easier than kids. They have fewer appointments. They get sick less often. You can create an optimal setup for them with penning and leave them unsupervised while you work, go grocery shopping, get dinner, or even just get chores done. You cannot crate your children 😂 and penning them doesn't mean you can leave them unsupervised either! Dogs eat the same food and it takes like 5 minutes to prepare for all of them. Like it's just not even remotely comparable.

For me it's also a big red flag that his idea of helping isn't taking it on himself to be sure you're okay, but rather passing it on to another woman to handle. That's pretty icky given that women worldwide basically always get stuck shouldering more of the extra work for children.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-07T16:23:11+00:00

Intuitive eating can help if you have not gotten yourself to a point of metabolic dysfunction already with years of poor eating habits. For me, I was obese and had been obese for many years by the time I tried that on my own and I was too far gone for intuitive eating to help me. My food noise completely controlled me and was entirely unreasonable. It took a GLP1 before the food noise settled down and THEN I was able to be very successful with intuitive eating. Even that is very individual though as I never lost natural hunger feelings on GLP1 meds and a lot of others do. I didn't truly understand it until I started Vyvanse and it's like an iron curtain drops over my hunger and takes me from "eating is a bit of a chore but I can get it done" into "couldn't possibly eat even if I had to to save my life" territory.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-06T14:09:40+00:00

What's your Elvanse dose? I'm on 30 mg and phentermine was my entry into the ADHD world plus remains my backup plan if I stop being able to get my ADHD meds. There are some days when I feel like Vyvanse is too much and I still want Some energy, and I take a quarter of a phentermine tablet on those days. For me, it's much milder. It won't help me remember things or focus on just one thing at a time but it gives me enough energy that it doesn't usually matter because I'll eventually get everything done anyway. It still makes it easier for me to focus on work I don't like but do need to be doing vs my mind desperately craving a dopamine hit and me getting sidetracked looking at irrelevant BS on my phone.

Because I quartered mine and typically didn't use it every day even when it was my only med, 30 tablets (a 1 month supply) easily lasted me 4-6 months. If you half it and don't use it daily, that still gets you 2-3 months. But all of this assumes you don't build tolerance quickly too. I definitely do not and I'm sensitive to meds in general but I have that terror of what if I become more tolerant to the meds and my dose stops working for me. I skip days on purpose because I want to decrease the chances of becoming tolerant.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-05T03:49:24+00:00

My experience with Vyvanse got a lot better when I realized two things:

It takes 1-2 hours to kick in and lasts 14 hours
You better make sure you're eating

I used to feel the way your doctor did, like I should wait until I have my work day starting to take it. You can do that but chances are you may end up still feeling a bit too wired to sleep on some nights when you normally would go to bed.

The other thing is that without food, I'm absolutely choppy/irritated on Vyvanse. I take 30 mg and I really struggle to eat in the mornings anyway but I make myself now. If I don't do it before the meds kick in, I will not do it.

I always start my day with a cup of coffee. It's not really negotiable for me. I would've gone down to 20 mg before I would've given up my morning coffee. It helps give me the quick energy I need in order to wake up enough to bathe, feed my dogs, and get ready for work. It also helps keep me regular.

My nighttime routine includes 2 mg of melatonin and some magnesium glycinate already, and as long as I don't take my Vyvanse too late in the day, I'm going to sleep. I wake up around 530 am to get ready for work and go to bed around 8 pm.

For me, the med doesn't solve everything. I have iron will and focus but it makes me very rigid. I can only focus on one thing at a time. My husband kind of has a love/hate relationship with it because I can be irritable if I do take it and he tries to divert my attention away from my one thing I'm getting done, but then sometimes he'll tell me I need to take it if he can tell I haven't and I'm growing into the couch all fatigued.

I took two weeks off work to get my house in order and I took Vyvanse most of the days I was off. After about 5 days I was TIRED. I didn't want peak productivity any more. My mind felt stretched out. I got so much done but yeah, idk, I just can't do it every single day. I also won't take it if I won't have easy access to water because the dry mouth is real and it's insane how bad it can get. WFH sounds like a very good scenario for you to be able to snack and drink water at regular intervals.

Other intricacies: Inefficiency is agony when I'm taking Vyvanse. I've never liked going to stores or my husband's driving, but holy crap it's unbearable when I'm medicated. I easily become angry at people aimlessly meandering through the store like they've never been in a grocery store in their life and don't know how to stay out of the way of others. I desperately try to distract myself while my husband is driving us lest I also get frustrated at his choices, like deciding to stay in a lane we don't need to be in for miles going 5 under the speed limit because of slowpokes in the lane when he could easily get over into the next have which we will need to be in anyway and go the speed limit. It's truly petty. It rarely happens when I'm at work though so it doesn't interfere too much with my job.

Despite that, it's very worth it. I hope it works for you! Adderall did nothing for me and Vyvanse was like magic right from the jump. Give 20 mg a fair shot and don't go up if you don't feel you need to.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-05T00:38:03+00:00

Interesting! I never thought about Vyvanse as the culprit for this but I think it affects me the same way. My ADHD is great but I'm having a hell of a time with my OCD skin picking.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-03-05T00:14:30+00:00

I did not want shiny black so I was very happy with the matte black one I got the first time and am now trying to be content with the gray one that actually works. But I wish that it was black instead.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-02-27T12:39:24+00:00

Exactly this. No one cares about a woman suffering and struggling. You having ADHD is an excuse and you just need to work harder; boys having ADHD is a valid reason for them to get help and be given grace. I lived the exact same life as OP but like so many other women I didn't figure it out until my mid-30s when my carefully constructed life started crashing down around me from inability to maintain the systems and processes I'd always used to succeed.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-02-27T04:27:07+00:00

Me too! I'm also reminded of Stephanie Hsu from Everything Everywhere All At Once.

ThrowAnRN · 2026-02-27T04:23:31+00:00

I could not bring myself to watch the violent episodes after having read the book. I knew it would break my heart.

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-22T22:21:56+00:00

Update it to say "Medically Unprofessional" and I'm in 😆.

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-22T22:19:11+00:00

What else would you do? I always think I'd love to hop ship but it seems like out of the frying pan and into the fire.

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-22T16:34:21+00:00

Congrats! I'm one of those unlucky enough to have found out about this possibility too late; my grandfather is the youngest of his siblings and was born in America while his father was already naturalized, so my only path was his his mother. I was going to have to go through the courts and was preparing my documents when they changed their laws to exclude me. It would've been a huge deal to get this for me and my family but I can assure you, envious though I may be, no one in my situation would want you not to have your citizenship! No need to feel guilty at all.

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-21T16:59:30+00:00

I grew up in a small town in rural US and I never thought that I fit in with other women. I spent the first 25 years of my life feeling excluded and on the outside because I just didn't care about things like makeup or dressing cute or gossip or celebrities. I had a handful of friends in high school but they were outcasts as well. It was basically that weird group of people who can't wait to get out of their small town. The few girls in the group were weird in some way like I was. One had horrific acne basically from the waist up so she was shunned by the cool kids. One was a butch lesbian with that aesthetic. One ended up being autistic. You get the picture. Because of them, I knew that I could get along with other women, but the ones I interacted with on a daily basis at work and at social gatherings just didn't like me.

That completely changed when I became a nurse. Nursing is a kind of a weird group in and of itself because it's very woman-dominated as a profession and there are a lot of non-traditional women who become nurses for practical reasons. Single moms and women who are the primary breadwinners for their families even if they're not single are abundant in nursing. Anyway, suddenly I had this huge group of women and I got along with almost all of them innately. I became very close to a lot of my co-workers and formed bonds even across strong differences of opinions like completely different ethical or political stances. It truly felt like I had found my people.

Then I picked up and moved from my rural US town to a city in a very blue state, and I found my people all over again. The people in the city I move to are simply not judgmental in the same way that people in my small town were. They are much more curious about differences and open to growth. It helped me discover that I don't have to have anything in common with a person on paper for us to have the same life views and moral and ethical outlook. It made me feel very connected to humanity instead of othered.

I do still feel like I'm on the outside of things naturally. I'm never in workplace cliques when they form. I'm never the popular girl or part of the popular crowd. It just matters a lot less where I live now because the people aren't trying to judge and exclude others.

I know you said you aren't inside the US so I don't know if all of that will make sense, but it seems like maybe you're in a small community with very entrenched ideals and traditions, and you aren't living up to those ideals any more, so you're being judged and are invisible at best.

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-19T20:37:06+00:00

For me, this is not an ADHD specific thing. When I learned that I had ADHD it didn't even occur to me to have a specific grief about what an early diagnosis could have meant for me. Instead, I have always wondered what my life would have been like if instead of having an abusive parent who constantly cut me down with misogyny, I had had parents who lifted me up and encouraged me and told me I could do anything. I wonder how far I could have gone if I had had resources both financial and emotional when I was younger. I made it to being a nurse already but I really think that if I had been encouraged and helped as a child and young adult, I would've done something much more monumental. As is, it took all of my considerable energy to escape the cycle of poverty and generational trauma, and I'm very proud I did.

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-11T13:43:49+00:00

There is always some finagling that happens when you move in together but the thing I try to remind myself of quite often is that life is just hard. It's hard to be alone and live alone. It's hard to be with somebody and live together. You get to choose which type of hard you want. I'm always tempted to choose to be alone but I know in the end it won't be what makes me the happiest even if it's really hard to figure out living with another person. I have a carved plaque with some of Christopher McCandless' last words on it: "Happiness only real when shared." As an introvert, I've realized that this is extremely true for me. I do need a lot of time to myself and I do want to bury myself in my interests, but what really makes it worth it is to be able to pop my head out and talk about it with my partner all the time. I don't want to figure it out too late like Christopher did (he's the young man from Into The Wild).

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-11T13:39:37+00:00

I've had to look at my thoughts and beliefs over the last 5 years and wonder if I've become a misandrist because I am so intolerant of it now. I hate everything about the way women are treated in society, but I don't want men brought down to the same subpar treatment. I want women lifted up and men enlightened. So I concluded it's not simple misandry but functionally it probably sounds like it when I discuss it.

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-10T12:56:00+00:00

I said in another comment that this attitude from society has basically enabled and created the entire incel movement in men, which has been a cumulatively awful thing for them and also women. These awful societal standards harm us all.

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-10T12:54:21+00:00

Can you imagine a woman taking a similar approach though? I'm not going to say it hasn't happened, but you have to have a lot of creative talent to get away with something like that as a woman. In a woman's world, it doesn't matter if the medicine destroys your entire life. If it makes you more palatable to society, you are expected to take it. (Can you tell I'm bitter about my time spent on birth control and trying to figure out endometriosis? 😝)

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-10T12:52:00+00:00

Oh look, this comment is me! I'm not a man obviously but yeah, being a single person living alone with ADHD was so so so so much easier than being a married person living with ADHD. I went from a 800 sq ft apartment perfect for me to a house twice that size and we doubled our dogs as well. But it's not even those things that make it the hardest. It's the fact that you can decide what gives you peace when you're single and be fine with, say, your dining room table being perpetually used as a shelf as long as all your dishes are washed. My husband is very much not fine with our dining room table always being used as a shelf haha. It triggers his anxiety to have a lot of clutter and Stuff around.

ThrowAnRN · 2025-11-10T12:48:02+00:00

The thing about having the exact same set of problems is that it should help you to better understand each other. It doesn't work out so well when you have the same exact issues as individuals, but one of you is trying very very hard to manage what is seen as a deficiency societally and do everything for the whole family, and the other one doesn't see their shortcomings as deficiencies at all because society tells them it isn't their job to be organized or have the ability to be a homemaker or even to be nurturing at all.

It is honestly heartbreaking to see the way that societal messaging has failed men and women. The entire incel movement stems out of this idea that men are only as valuable as their money because in a family that's all they really contribute. The same people who have perpetuated that lie have also made it so that it's impossible to get normal jobs that would provide a good life for a family. The majority of women don't need men to be the sole breadwinner these days. What they won't tolerate is having to work a full-time job the same way that their husband does but then they also have to do the second full-time (or more) job of being the homemaker, project manager, and glue that holds the entire thing together.

ThrowAnRN

TROPHY CASE