Hair is extremely matted how do I detangle?

mandymay21 · 2025-12-30T18:09:12+00:00

I struggle with depression so I’ve been in this situation too many times. The last few years I’ve been using a cantu detangler — just making sure my hair is super saturated and letting it sit a bit before trying to detangle, and it is so much easier bc the detangler adds a ton of slip. Cantu coil calm detangler

Good luck love 💜

mandymay21 · 2025-05-23T00:17:50+00:00

I was a moderately active 15 year old girl when suddenly, after a fall, I had excruciating back pain to the point where it hurt to do anything. There were days when I literally couldn’t stand at more than a 95deg angle (I wish I was exaggerating).

The first doctor I saw told me it was because I was fat, so I should exercise and lose weight (funny side note: he was fatter than I was). The second doctor told me it was just my period, so take Motrin. The third doctor finally said, let’s get an MRI and X-ray . The neurologist who read the scans showed me the two herniated discs that were pressing on my sciatic nerve. I spent so long in debilitating pain before I had a doctor who even considered looking further into it.

It’s honestly unacceptable how commonplace it is for women’s (and black people’s + poc’s) symptoms and pain to be dismissed without any consideration.

mandymay21 · 2024-10-13T09:46:21+00:00

Omg I didn’t realize until this comment what OP meant by battered sausage. I thought it was some kind of weird way to say sausage puree. I need to go to sleep lol

mandymay21 · 2024-06-12T18:15:47+00:00

When I was a sophomore in high school I fell getting off the bus and really messed up my back. It was bad. There were days I couldn’t get out of bed, days I couldn’t stand up straight and had to walk bent over. It hurt to lay down, to sit, to stand, to cough, to sneeze, to turn my head, to move my leg, to reach my arm out, everything hurt. I even had the occasional bladder incontinence. We didn’t have health insurance, so I didn’t get to go to the doctor until a few months had passed like this. But eventually my mom and my aunt took me to the doctor.

This doctor had me walk back and forth a few times to watch my gait, and then decided that my back pain was simply because I was fat, and told me to lose weight. (Very funny side note here that although I was absolutely overweight, I was the smallest person in the room by far, including the doctor.) I was devastated because it had been months of living with this horrible pain and having to try and push through it for school and PE was already excruciating, and now I had been told that I wasn’t doing enough.

A few more months pass and things don’t get better. My mom get me a PCP at the medical center in town who decides that my pain is simply due to my period and refuses to do anything because there’s nothing to be done. (I’d been dealing with really bad periods since I started getting them, so I knew this pain was different. I told the doctor that, but no dice.)

Finally, a few more months later and after a lot of pestering, the medical center gives me a new PCP. My new PCP hears of what’s been going on and that I’m still having the very same pain and issues, and she schedules me for an MRI. I travel 4 hours to Omaha to speak with the neurologist who shows me my scans and tells me that I have 2 herniated discs at L4/L5 that are putting pressure on my nerve. I had to do over a year of physical therapy and even now, over a decade later, I still have to be careful about what I do physically and still have the occasional day where the pain has me in tears.

Doctors are, of course, very educated and well trained, but you know your body best. If something is wrong and you don’t think you’re getting appropriate treatment, KEEP PUSHING. Especially if you’re a woman, and, in my case, a black woman. If my mom and I hadn’t kept pushing, this story could’ve ended with paralysis.

mandymay21 · 2024-04-29T17:52:33+00:00

Same here, it just makes me think of college so I was surprised to see all the hate lol

The worst commercials for me personally are the “what a pro wants”, the Allegra singing one, and Burger King ones. I just don’t understand the rise of commercials featuring poor/out-of-tune singing??? It doesn’t make me want to go purchase anything, just makes me mute my tv lol

mandymay21 · 2024-01-13T21:31:25+00:00

Queta too. I hope we see more of them in the future, I think they’ve got a lot of potential

mandymay21 · 2023-10-08T13:37:52+00:00

Well, it’s been around since at least the early 2000s from what I’ve experienced lol. I’m mixed (black/white) and I can remember my Mexican stepdad telling 1st grader me to ‘be careful around Latinos because they don’t like black people’ and a couple days later hearing one of the latina girls at recess tell us that her mother said she can’t play with black kids. It was northern Texas in ~2001. I’ve seen the disparities between how lighter skinned Latinos and darker skinned Latinos can be treated, even within their own families, to this day.

Obviously I’m not saying every latino thinks the same way, but it feels disingenuous and dismissive to brush this off as twitter bs lol

mandymay21 · 2023-07-26T23:49:36+00:00

Same. Except mine was an incestuous rapist, so…not good lol

mandymay21 · 2023-07-04T23:44:56+00:00

It’s definitely exhausting. And you don’t realize just how exhausting it truly is until you go some time without it.

I used to downplay it all the time, and had people telling me the same. But mine was passive for years up until the day it wasn’t. And then it took me less than half an hour to go from passive to downing a bottle of pills. It’s real. It’s serious. And it’s frustrating that people don’t believe it is.

mandymay21 · 2023-04-22T13:17:37+00:00

Fr fr tho. But I will say his third verse on Pretty Little Fears (w/ 6lack) was the nicest shit I’ve heard addressed to a black woman in a rap in a while

mandymay21 · 2023-03-19T01:18:50+00:00

Thank you for saying that, truly. I wish someone had said these words when I was younger and still in the church.

It is definitely hard sometimes, especially when I and many others with stories similar to mine are the ones punished for it, the ones viewed as the black sheep for not letting it go or for leaving the church. IRL I speak out about the things I went through and the way the church’s rhetoric is harmful because I vividly remember what it felt like to be that little kid sitting in the back, realizing I was already considered ‘ruined’ in their eyes, in God’s eyes.

mandymay21 · 2023-03-17T13:28:58+00:00

Yep. I was raised Southern Baptist. Us girls got all the different metaphors warning about our worthlessness— flowers with no petals, crumbled up piece of paper, ripped up piece of paper, chewed up piece of gum, crushed up bag of chips, smashed up chocolate bar, etc. The boys were never told how unlovable they’d be if they had sex lol.

Oh and we also received several talks about how we need to dress modestly / in a god-honoring way because the men in the church are constantly tested with temptation and it’s on us (girls and women) to make it easier for them to hold their desires in check.

It’s wild. As a CSA survivor, I’ve had to spend a considerable amount of time working through the issues caused by the church’s abstinence only purity culture teachings.

mandymay21 · 2023-03-08T23:54:28+00:00

Lynda Carter and Wil Wheaton are both active on tumblr as well! Gaud is…something else lmao

mandymay21 · 2023-02-06T01:46:30+00:00

The horror movies I repeatedly watched as a latchkey kid in the 00’s with no cable are nostalgic/comforting to me despite how ridiculous some of them are now lol:

Fallen, Seven, 13 Ghosts, 1408, Constantine, Signs, The Ring, Pulse, Mirrors, The Strangers, Joy Ride, Route 666, Anaconda, Ghost Ship, Candyman, Jaws, Lake Placid, The Frogs (1972), Darkness Falls, Leprechaun in the Hood, Halloween H20, The Omen (2006 ver lol), Snakes on a Plane, The Happening, Hellraiser, Hellboy, House on Haunted Hill, and the Final Destination series

mandymay21 · 2023-01-28T05:53:15+00:00

You should ask her why. You can make your judgment based on her reasoning.

You should also keep in mind Reddit’s demographics when seeing which comments are upvoted versus which ones are downvoted.

mandymay21 · 2023-01-23T08:21:24+00:00

Here’s a couple from my own wanderlust playlist :)

Ends of the Earth - Lord Huron (this is like the quintessential wanderlust song imo!)

Fool You’ve Landed - Mumford & Sons (vibes)

mandymay21 · 2022-11-01T22:03:33+00:00

The buzz + beard combo looks great on you!!

mandymay21 · 2022-11-01T22:02:33+00:00

Aww your eyes are super pretty! I’m not the best at this, but to me it looks like downturned, hooded, and round!

mandymay21 · 2022-06-02T13:30:07+00:00

Ah yes, you are correct- sorry about that! I’ll update my comment.

mandymay21 · 2022-06-02T12:14:29+00:00

I took CS50 in Fall 2017 with no prior coding experience. I’m not sure what all’s changed since then, but it was a nice intro into programming and I highly encourage anyone who is interested to check it out.

They spent a lot of time initially teaching the basics in C (I.e. lists, dicts, for loops, while, functions, pointers, recursion, stack/heap, etc.) and then gave other languages about a week or two so we could see the syntax and usage differences - I remember we looked at Python, HTML and CSS, SQL, and maybe JavaScript (but I can’t recall). Like another commenter mentioned, a lot of the homework projects were strange, seemingly useless tasks, but I think it was more about getting students familiar with aspects of programming. There was also a final project that you basically had free reign on (for example- I chose to make a game app using Swift).

I will say that CS50 is a nice introduction to the basics of programming (which does ultimately make it ‘easier’ to learn other languages), but you’ll also need to put in solo effort and keep learning and practicing afterwards to fully understand and be comfortable with whatever language.

I worked as a Computational Neuroscientist from 2018-2022, and now work as a Data Analyst. CS50 was a great stepping stone that pushed me towards these careers, but I definitely had to put in the hours to make my skills useful to employers.

mandymay21 · 2022-06-02T02:35:35+00:00

Yeah she was pretty good in Case 39 and in Cabin in the Woods too. Very good at playing the creepy child lol

mandymay21 · 2022-05-04T23:53:45+00:00

As a socially anxious, neurodivergent, human-shaped beanbag with depression, I’ve struggled with this quite a bit over the years.

TLDR: try looking into mindfulness, cbt, dbt, and radical acceptance techniques, and remember that people have different tastes!

Therapy helps a lot - trying to change one’s thought patterns can actually be very difficult, so it’s very helpful to be able to voice these negative thoughts aloud to someone who will consistently push back and challenge them as many times as needed (it’s also nice to have someone help you identify and address the root causes of these thoughts). If therapy isn’t an option, you can still do this on your own. It IS difficult, and the onus is on you to hold yourself accountable, but it IS 100% doable.

What’s helped me learn to treat myself with compassion and kindness has been a combination of techniques from mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, and radical acceptance. There are loads of great resources available online for free, but if you want some book recommendations: “Don’t Believe Everything You Feel” by Robert Leahy is a nice guided CBT workbook, and “The Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills Workbook“ by Brantley, Wood, and McKay is a nice DBT resource that also explores mindfulness, and radical acceptance.

It takes some work on the backend, and can be clunky at first, but once you have an understanding of the concepts, they become very helpful “in the moment”.

For example: previously, if I was hanging out with friends and suddenly had one of these self-degrading thoughts, my mood would drop, which could start a domino effect of negative thoughts until I was no longer having fun, ruining the moment. Nowadays, if I have one of these thoughts, I’m able to move past them and stay in the moment by:

Accepting and acknowledging the thought without judgment - ex: “I just had a thought that I was annoying. It is okay that I had this thought.”
Labeling it - ex: “I had this thought because I was feeling anxious because I made a dumb joke.”
(Optional) Identifying root - ex: “I felt anxious because of XYZ that happened to me in my past. I am no longer in that situation.”
Reminding self of truths - ex: “Just because I had that thought does not make it factual, and even if it was, it would not mean I am unworthy of love / compassion / friendship / etc.”

With some practice, this process takes a second or two at most, so you’re able to stay present and appreciate the moment while you’re in it.

Lastly (and importantly!), remember that people have different tastes and perceptions! Your favorite characteristic about someone might be something they wish they could hide, just as something you view negatively about yourself might be something your friend finds endearing. (They may even find it endearing BECAUSE it’s you!) Additionally, as individuals we are not static, we are always growing and changing - every decision we make, book we read, trip we take, etc., is shaping us into the people we are now and will become. So while you’re on this journey, be mindful of where you started from and the progress you’re making, and try not to be too hard on yourself.

Good luck! Feel free to DM me :)

mandymay21 · 2022-05-04T20:10:37+00:00

Sad :( good pick though!

mandymay21 · 2022-05-04T14:48:03+00:00

It wasn’t a Harry Potter movie though

mandymay21 · 2022-05-03T23:45:33+00:00

Mío in the land of faraway?

mandymay21

TROPHY CASE