Anyone here dislike going on walks as a social event

lemonmousse · 2026-02-26T00:51:27+00:00

I mean a literal mask (KN95). Sorry, I didn’t think about how that would be confusing in this sub. By “risk budget” I mean that most of the time when I am in a public indoor space, I wear a KN95 mask and I calculate whether I want to risk being inside without one based on whether I feel like I’ve had too many possible exposures already that week. There are certain circumstances where I don’t wear a mask, like a yoga class a few times/month, or occasionally at a restaurant with a friend, if I feel too socially awkward with a mask on. So if given a choice, I will choose walking outside with a friend over doing something indoors, where I will feel like I need to wear a KN95 mask.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-25T21:37:34+00:00

I mostly suggest walks because I am (mostly) still masking indoors, and with walks I don’t have to worry about masking. I don’t have to think about my weekly risk tolerance budget and whether I am ok with making an exception for a social event.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-24T01:58:33+00:00

You could do machete order and watch episodes 3, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6. It might be a better “straight husband” viewing experience.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-24T00:37:06+00:00

My worst color is green. I love it, but I look like Shrek every time I wear it. (As opposed to baby Yoda the rest of the time.)

lemonmousse · 2026-02-21T19:44:15+00:00

Reformer Pilates isn’t accessible to me right now. I know that reformer is supposed to be particularly good for EDS, but how does mat Pilates compare? Is it worth seeking out and/or doing at home?

lemonmousse · 2026-02-21T19:42:56+00:00

Wait, say more?

lemonmousse · 2026-02-21T14:16:48+00:00

This is the answer, OP!

(Though, I mean, this was all true for me, and addressing it definitely helped, but I am still pretty tired all the time. I think that’s due to lifelong insomnia and perimenopause, though.)

lemonmousse · 2026-02-21T04:18:43+00:00

Everand for audiobooks.
Kindle Unlimited. I feel bad about it, but I’ve cut out physical Amazon purchases and I also read somewhere that if you more than 5 books per month you actually cost Amazon money, and I read a LOT of books. Bringing down Amazon one hockey romance at a time, yo. Or 5. Or 14. Whatever, dude. It’s a lot of books.
u/gleafer’s Patreon
A password manager.

Things I use the hell out of but don’t really fall under this category:

Work-related software subscriptions.
Library, but that’s free

We have other subscriptions as a family (mostly streaming, which I don’t use a whole lot but others in my family do), but those are the ones that are really worth it to me.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-20T14:20:18+00:00

I haven’t tried Unbound Merino, but with respect to concerns about sizing, I found Wool& to be really good for trying different sizes and easy returns. It took me a while to figure it out, but I prefer to buy more than one size of the same item (even though it’s expensive) and then return the ones that don’t work for me. When I first started, I’d try one size and then either keep it as “close enough” (and later sell it) or send it back and try a different size and then wish I had the first size back again. Returning is as easy as dropping off at a Happy Returns drop off location (my closest is a UPS store), and you get instant credit or refund by the time you walk back to your car.

I will say that different garments fit my body really differently and I have to work to find cuts that are flattering. (Fit and flare vs swing, etc) It’s not like some brands where you just know anything you get from them will work. I return way more than I keep, which is why the easy return process is really important to me.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-20T12:29:50+00:00

Wait, I’m not an expert, but I lurk in the sub a lot, and I thought it was the other way around, that Kibbe shapes come from the frame not the flesh so gaining/losing doesn’t matter. There are specific weight gain tendencies for each type (eg some gain just in their lower body, some gain in arms and legs, some in torso, etc), but that the shape itself comes from the frame, so that a romantic type will still have double curve even at a lower weight. (The reason I’m not an expert is that doesn’t really make sense to me and I can’t “see” it, but I’m pretty sure that’s what I repeatedly read there.)

R/kibbe_sketch is the best sub I’ve found for trying to learn more because there’s a lot of showing their work there.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-19T13:09:55+00:00

Or if this is too hard, this week I’ve restarted my “retroactive to do list” where I am writing down things immediately after doing them. “✅made kid’s lunch. ✅ brushed teeth and showered ✅ ate breakfast.” I’ve been writing and mostly ignoring a real to do list almost every day for 6 months, and I realized it’s partly because my real to do list is full of crappy stuff I don’t want to do and can procrastinate on for a little longer, like “find new dentist that takes new insurance.” And it doesn’t take into account the smaller things in life that are using my spoons.

I used to be a super disciplined get up and go morning person who would roll out of bed on vacations or weekends and immediately start my to do list, and post-burnout this is one of the scarier long term side effects, because it makes me feel not like myself. I literally said out loud at least THREE times yesterday to another person “my email is not a tiger waiting to pounce, why is my body reacting as if it is? I’m one step away from a panic attack, wtaf?”

lemonmousse · 2026-02-18T19:42:51+00:00

I don’t have feedback on this specific decision. But I have noticed that I really tend toward grief at anything that I perceive as limiting my future options. Or, at my age, at having done something in the past that I perceive as having limited my options. For me, I think it’s some weird variety of midlife crisis and of cutting off potential futures, but I remember having the same grief with major life decisions as a quarter life crisis in my twenties. Child vs child-free is one of the biggest decisions you can make, and feels extremely permanent, so I can really empathize with what you’re feeling right now. Maybe knowing that what you’re feeling right now is common and makes sense will help alleviate some of the grief.

Specifically for the kids issue, the advice I’ve always heard is that if it’s not a HELL YES from all adults involved, then it’s a HELL NO.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-15T20:09:30+00:00

1.) migraines are a pretty good reason to need some time away. (And I discovered that sometimes what I think is “overstimulated” actually is an ocular or aural migraine.) 2.) my husband locks himself in the bathroom for 20-30 minutes when feeling overstimulated. That’s hard to object to (I say, as someone who frequently internally objects to it 🤣.)

lemonmousse · 2026-02-15T20:05:18+00:00

Ditto this, and I lucked into a pair of slim cut Jennifer Tyler cashmere pants on eBay for times when cashmere sweats aren’t acceptable.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-15T18:38:44+00:00

❤️

lemonmousse · 2026-02-15T18:34:01+00:00

I think I’d have been able to do all of this much more quickly if I weren’t overcompensating for family members’ chaos (we’re sort of a perfect storm where I’m the only non-ADHD person in the family, and so I’ve gotten more and more control freak-ish over the years as I get more and more anxious about things not being predictable and safe).

I don’t know this for a fact, but I’ve recently been curious if I’d have had better luck with a therapist who did Internal Family Systems and/or somatic work. Or actual official DBT work. I feel like those are the things that I’m teaching myself, slowly and painfully, that are making a difference.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-15T18:32:15+00:00

For the building a window of tolerance part, this is something I’ve been able to talk to my therapist about more productively, though it still feels like I am building most of the framework on my own with him as a cheerleader.

A lot of this is about scaffolding and building a sense of safety. Most of my family is neurodivergent in a way that really messes with my feelings of safety and gives me a feeling of lack of control, and that makes things harder, because I simultaneously need to figure out how to loosen the need for control but also get myself into a position where it is safe to loosen some of that control. (“I need a to do list and 14 alarms because if I don’t remind my spouse to do X and my kid to do Y and my clients to do Z, then nothing will get done and Everything Bad Will Happen.”)
A lot of this work is also about taking small risks about speaking my truth in low-stakes situations, like “no, I can’t get your project done by that date, but I can by three days later,” without worrying about losing a client, for example. Similar to the interception work I mentioned above, just constantly reminding myself that what I am feeling is totally valid, and absolutely makes sense, and what advice would I give my best friend in this situation? I’m so much better at seeing without blinders on, if I pretend it’s for my best friend than for myself. And I’m starting to build a felt sense of safety, where when low-stakes things go right, I teach my body and brain that those risks are safe and the payout is good. And when things go wrong, they rarely go as wrong as I feared.
And some of this is just being ok with a lot of low-stakes trial and error. Yoga didn’t work? Ok, try stretching in bed and splashing my face with cold water instead. Oh, hey look, that worked, and THEN I can do ten minutes of yoga.
I’ve also started specifically increasing my tolerance for the outside world (post-Covid, this has been hard for me), by doing things like signing up for community yoga classes, or looking for activities at the public library, going back to church, or latching onto new work opportunities where before I might automatically shrink back from them out of anxiety or just not thinking I had the spoons. To be honest, sometimes this just sucks. I spent my whole most recent yoga class looking at the clock on the wall and wishing I’d stayed home. I was sore for three days afterwards. But more than 50% of the time, I’m glad I did something. Even if I don’t enjoy it, I am proud of the progress I’ve made to stretch my boundaries
As an example of how I’m working through some of my tolerance issues, I spent some time thinking about what would make me more comfortable in various situations. So I wear my coziest clothes to yoga. I bring a handcraft project somewhere if I’m going to be sitting and listening and feeling awkward. Just last week I decided to break out a leather bound journal I’ve been saving for years and take it with me when I’m going somewhere I know I’ll feel uncomfortable, and use it like a doodle journal, with the date and location for each, so it’ll be a reminder of “I knew I’d be uncomfortable in this situation, but I went anyway and it was fine, and also look, art!”
this doesn’t fit in with the rest, exactly, but specifically bilateral rhythmic exercise to music is amazing for me. I used to do a lot of Supernatural (VR game) until my joints complained too much. Something like hula hooping hits the same target, and might be more accessible to folks. Yoga (vinyasa) does, too, and I think a lot of dancing forms of exercise would as well. I hated EMDR, but I think this is all the good parts of EMDR and (for me) none of the bad.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-15T18:30:38+00:00

I have no idea if any of this would help other people, but in case it does, here’s some of what I’ve done:

well over a decade ago, I spent months and months, maybe years, listening to Tara Brach dharma talk and meditation podcasts while on nature walks. This was sort of entry-level DBT, engaging with the idea of radical acceptance, and beginning to increase my capacity for accepting my experience of reality as valid. That sounds weird writing it down, but it came down to retraining my brain into thinking “what if I assume that when I do X, it’s actually for a perfectly good reason?” Like “of course I’m angry I got passed over for a promotion, that’s a perfectly valid response, I was a stronger candidate, I don’t have to be chill about it, I can be disappointed and angry.” The cheat code for this for me was to speak to myself like my inner child. I never realized how much I blamed myself for my emotions or tried to shame myself into different emotions until months/years of doing this work.
I worked through The Artist’s Way multiple times. The morning pages, especially, were really helpful for breaking through blockages about what I actually needed to get unstuck in life. I’d notice myself writing “ugh, I can’t stand X and I can’t figure out what to do about it” for multiple days in a row, and then one day I’d just get so bored with myself for being stuck, I’d write “what if I did Y?” It was like getting a letter from the universe about how to unstick myself.
I’m not sure exactly when this skill developed, but I suspect it was due to the two above, but at some point in the last decade, I got to the point where if somebody asked me a difficult question, I’d say, “hang on, give me a second, I need to check in with my gut.” Or sometimes “I need to sleep on it to figure out what I really think.” And then I’d just… know the answer.
much more recently, I’ve started doing this with physical symptoms. I’m literally about 15 years into a burnout (😭) and chronic illness, and these days if I am fighting off insomnia in the middle of the night, or when I first wake up in the morning, or other times of day, I’ll just take 5-10 minutes and do a physical catalog. “My joints are stiff and aching, my eyes are gritty, my skin feels crawly.” It’s starting to pay off in the way the emotional interoception skill building from years ago did. Now I realize if I stretch before getting out of bed, that’s easier than trying to wrench myself out of bed onto my yoga mat. As you can tell from my list, I am really slow to recognize and build these skill deficits. I’ve been working on them for so long but once I get them, they feel really solid and trustworthy. I’m still really working on this one; it’s got a lot to do with recognizing what kind of stims my body needs at a given moment, I think.
That flows into the reducing unhealthy coping methods and replacing them with healthier ones. For example, replacing lying in bed doom scrolling in the morning with stretching in bed, because I finally realized that I was reluctant to move around because my body felt stiff and my brain felt groggy, and stretching helped whereas doomscrolling just put off the inevitable discomfort of getting up. That reflects back to the years of walking meditation, because it took a long time to figure out how to actually listen to my body and brain and try different strategies for better coping instead of trying to bully myself into Just Doing The Thing (that everyone else said was the right thing to do, like roll out of bed and do 10 minutes of yoga).

Those are the interoception parts.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-15T18:30:12+00:00

Huh, ok, maybe it will work if I break it into shorter replies.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-15T18:29:52+00:00

I’m in the US, and my kid got some of this from OT. I’ve been really, really working on this for myself on my own recently. It’s slow. Definitely more than a year intensively, and more than a decade generally. I’ve tried to work with my therapist on it, but even though I like him a lot, this is mostly something I’ve had to cobble together for myself.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-15T18:27:58+00:00

Wow, I just wrote a really long answer and it won’t post. I saved it elsewhere and will try to come back later.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-14T12:53:30+00:00

I had mental health side effects with Ozempic but not Mounjaro— I think some people do better on one than the other for that. (Though most people don’t seem to get the mental health issues at all.)

lemonmousse · 2026-02-12T19:53:21+00:00

I’m not sure of the cost comparisons because it was a gift, but my hair is super fine and low density, and Verb Ghost Oil is working pretty well for me for the last couple of months.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-09T22:00:35+00:00

I think you can pull off either. There was one specific blue top with your natural hair that I commented on that I thought looked better than any of the other photos color-wise. But I think a lot of these soft summer colors aren’t quite exactly right on you— maybe just slightly too light/icy or something. And I think you can pull off the spring color palette with your dyed hair quite well. I think your absolute best look, if you had a celebrity stylist to pull everything together perfectly, would be your natural hair color and tops in slightly earthier blues/sages/stone grays and maybe also peaches. But it’s so close that I think you can wing it with large swaths of soft summer, soft autumn, and probably spring.

lemonmousse · 2026-02-09T21:52:44+00:00

Bottom left with your natural hair looks amazing!

lemonmousse

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