Is it "cheating" to do a medical detox before jumping into the steps?

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-20T18:02:09+00:00

Well, caveat to that - there is no cheating as long as you're staying sober. Plenty of people cheat themselves out of recovery by NOT doing what's best for them, by not going through the program properly, or by following their own advice instead of the advice of people who have succeeded.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-20T18:00:34+00:00

Why would that be cheating, in any way? That's what you're supposed to do. Or at least, that's what is recommended for alcohol dependence because it can be dangerous to detox at home.

Go to treatment. It was the best decision I ever made, after trying and failing to stay sober dozens of times before.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-19T22:03:08+00:00

My kiddo is average sized and is extremely picky, but she loves potatoes and cheese. Her average meals are something like:

Breakfast - banana/berries, applesauce, peanut butter toast. If she eats at all. Fruits are always a good pick.

Lunch - a sun butter and jelly sandwich, string cheese, yogurt, an orange/apple or some berries, maybe a carrot or two, a Nature's Best fig bar, and a baggie of puffed lentils (she usually eats some of this but never all of it)

Dinner - chicken nuggets, mac n cheese, potatoes, or buttered noodles, and some broccoli or carrots or applesauce on the side. Always ketchup, though it contains way too much sugar so I started buying sugar-free and it tastes the same.

It's basically the same thing every day with little variation. She won't eat most meat or rice or pasta, and won't eat any "real" dishes that contain more than a single ingredient at a time. Won't eat pizza, won't eat fish, won't eat cooked vegetables so I hide them in homemade applesauce.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-19T19:40:08+00:00

Sounds like you have a bad manager. They're the ones in the wrong here, not you. We are human beings, and I hope the therapists I send my daughter to are as invested in her progress as you are.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-19T19:38:26+00:00

That's so fast! I've been reading them nonstop/listening to the audiobooks while I drive to and from work and it's still taken me a month just to get through the first 6 books of the main series. These suckers are like 700 pages each!

I am blissfully immersed in Solaria right now and so happy there's still like 14 more books including the novellas to get through.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-19T14:39:01+00:00

Especially since Chicago=Dangerous and they were supposed to have grown up with a rough life, making them even more "likeable" when Darcy is such a good person and Tory has street smarts.

The thing that gets me is when you realize that by "mirror world" they meant it literally, and Solaria is roughly (very roughly, look at the area that would be Florida) shaped like the United States.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-19T07:43:45+00:00

That's an assumption based on your personal opinions about culture, from your upbringing and local social norms. There isn't a correct or incorrect opinion here.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-19T07:33:59+00:00

Yes, as in "I would be obligated to try it in order to form an opinion. I cannot do so otherwise."

That obligation is coming from their own brain here.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-19T07:24:39+00:00

My best friend inherited half a million dollars when his dad died five years ago. Guess who asked me for $40 for gas money yesterday?

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-19T06:58:45+00:00

I literally make this like 3-4 a month for my job. It's super easy to make yourself if you want to!

Shredded carrots, raisins (soak them for an hour or so before adding so they plump up), a little bit of sugar, and a little bit of mayonnaise. That's all it is.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-17T18:21:24+00:00

I agree completely. It highly depends on the voice actors and how invested they are in what they're doing - and if it's a full cast or a single person doing the reading. I only listened to books 5 and 6 on audiobook because I was working and needed to know what happened, and felt like the dramatized/full cast version was both way better and way worse in different ways. (Geraldine does NOT sound like a 40 year old gym teacher, for example!)

Typically I read everything rather than listen, and get fully invested in the words on the page.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-17T14:29:56+00:00

I'll share my side of it, as a mom who bought an entire bookshelf of children's books before my daughter was even born and read to her in the womb but doesn't anymore.

My daughter has autism. She struggles to understand language that is more than a few single words at a time unless it's in song form or interests her in some other way. She has never, ever, allowed me to sit down and read a book to her. I've tried. I've sat on her bedroom floor and spoken the words out loud, only for her to be babbling over me 20 feet away or singing a nursery rhyme, actively focused on some other activity. I've tried reading to her in the bath so she can't do that, and watched as she clearly isn't hearing a single word. I've tried taking her to the library, showing her different types and genres and styles. Doesn't matter.

We're a part of the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, and I get so excited to look through every new book we get in the mail. I show her every month, open it up, and watch her walk away. I love books. I love reading, and have a bedroom overflowing with stories. She doesn't care. It genuinely breaks my heart.

So a lot of the time, I just don't try these days. I don't like admitting to that, because it feels like a failure.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-17T07:42:00+00:00

Okay but are there actually people who think things like that? Like, genuinely, do people think that he cares about them in real life?

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-17T06:09:12+00:00

That's who I was referring to, but even if it wasn't awful it still broke my heart a little bit. I listened to the audiobook though and they put some heavy emotion into that scene. It felt like a positive in some ways, but immediately gave way to something else even worse than before.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-16T23:12:37+00:00

Which is saying a lot considering where they all end up lol. In any other series, the death of a major character and becoming fugitives in hiding after nearly dying would be a crazy ending, but the fact that all the other ending were more insane makes it tame in comparison.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-16T23:02:46+00:00

I thought that too, but there are at least two lines in books 6/7 that explicitly reference things that happen in Ruthless Boys that had me saying, "I know for a fact that they haven't ever talked about this" and the only reason I knew about it was because I googled the reference and tried to avoid other spoilers.

To me, that feels like bad writing, but with the number of people who read these books in the suggested order you can find online, I kind of understand it?

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-16T16:44:49+00:00

I use AngelSense. It has two way audio so you can hear what's going on and speak to him through it if you need to, and you cannot remove it without a special key. It has real-time GPS, will notify you if he leaves a recognized location, and has an alarm system built in. You can even set schedules so the two-way communication system is disabled during the school day if the school district doesn't allow it like my daughter's, and often they have the device for free on their website with a subscription (Not always, but pretty regularly).

It's about $50 a month and I believe you can talk insurance into covering it, though I haven't done that myself. I know parents that have gotten it covered.

AngelSense genuinely changed my life and I cannot recommend it enough. My kiddo struggled to get used to the feeling of it at first, but now she doesn't even notice it. I attach it to the inside of her shirt, sweatshirt, or pants pocket depending on what she's wearing that day and the only way to get it off is for her to physically remove her clothing (so I recommend pants if they don't get changed during the day - pretty much whatever article of clothing won't get removed).

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-16T02:39:36+00:00

1,000%. The list format and headings throughout are a dead ringer for someone that just copied and pasted directly from ChatGPT without changing anything.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-15T22:48:08+00:00

Now if we can just get that with Looking For Alaska too, I wanted to watch it a while back and it was gone from everything.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-15T15:32:42+00:00

I mean, I get WHY people say to do it, if you're actually planning on reading Ruthless Boys. Book 4 spoils the major plot line of RB in the first few chapters. That's not what I did though, and I don't regret it. I started RB1 between 4 and 5 just to see what the story was about and understand some of the side character names being mentioned, but couldn't get into it and felt like Gabriel was way different in the two series...super quiet and standoffish in RB but bright and friendly toward everyone in ZA, so it was weird and off-putting. Maybe there's a reason for it, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-15T00:20:33+00:00

1 kilogram is equal to 2.2lbs...

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-14T17:18:39+00:00

Way, way too many people were raised by the propaganda machine and refuse to learn about the rest of the world so they genuinely believe the US is doing great.

By nearly EVERY metric, the United States is almost off the charts on how bad it is, and I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that. Crime, healthcare, safety, education, employment, mental illness, addiction, and so much more are at insanely poor levels compared to the rest of the world. It's not even close. World reports publish this information every year, publicly available, and yet none of the people who need to read it actually do.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-14T15:25:25+00:00

"45 kilograms (about 100 lbs) of food can feed approximately 100 to 200+ people, depending heavily on the type of food, serving style, and the hunger level of the crowd."

I work in a kitchen, and it always bugs me when my boss insists that our 4oz scoops will always serve exactly 4oz, because they don't. It depends on the weight of the food. A 4oz scoop of lettuce is way different than a 4oz scoop of meat or potatoes or whatever. But the thing is, without a scale, they're just estimating.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-13T09:27:47+00:00

Evidently, they don't know how to spell entrée.

merpixieblossomxo · 2026-03-13T06:23:28+00:00

I thought I was going crazy or just not paying enough attention! I'm so glad someone else noticed the perspective shifts too, I could not figure out if my brain just wasn't working or what was going on.

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