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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • This week is the first week I’ve felt halfway close to being a human being in a really long time. My rTMS treatment for depression is finally starting to kick in. This is my 3rd round now and each time I see significant improvements, but they only last 4ish months and I relapse horrifically after.

    My most recent relapse lasted 3ish months while I was scrambling to get treatment (and an unsuccessful Ketamine trial). I finally found a hospital willing to treat me, and also give me maintenance treatments so hopefully I don’t relapse again.

    It’s just been hell for a while. Last weekend I finally felt the gears in my brain “click”. I am capable of experiencing positive emotions again. I still feel emotionally dead a lot of the time, but at least I don’t want to die anymore (for now).

    It feels good to not be in excruciating pain. It feels good to have less disordered thinking. I look back and it feels like I was a different person, I don’t even understand or recognize that person.

    Anyways, I’m just… Trying to take a breather. Trying to fully experience the moment. I don’t know how things will go in the long term, but I know the next couple of months will continue to be livable. Trying to be grateful for that, and not think too much about what comes next.






  • I don’t know if this will be helpful, but I wrestled a lot with dealing with despair/fear from upheaval as well. Mostly climate like I said, but I used to cry for days thinking about kids starving in Venezuela, for example (that’s a crisis from many many years back).

    Studying history actually helped me cope. Just learning about the past like 5000 years of human history and how much upheavals and famine and war and civilization collapses there have been.

    I kind of realized that feeling like the world is ending (as we know it) is the NORM rather than the exception for most of human existence.

    We’ve been exceptionally lucky in Western countries for the past 300ish years. But that caused us to believe that’s what’s to be expected. It’s not.

    It just helped me understand that humans have survived through lots of things. And the turmoil comes with being alive.


  • I understand your desire to stay informed but also grounded. I have actually fantasized about a newspaper exactly like that - tells the world as it is, but also helps the readers cope. My biggest thing is climate change and climate despair. I ended up googling how to deal with climate despair and came across a number of articles that were really helpful.

    Hooe you find something similar for Russia/Ukraine.


  • There’s one opinion that I’ve been afraid to say out loud forever because people are so passionate about it… Disco Elysium. I love rpgs and I love choice-based, narrative-driven games. But there were two main things which drove me crazy:

    1. I really didn’t like the writing. Honestly it felt like some fresh English lit major suddenly discovered big words and angst and went crazy with it. It was really cringy to me.
    2. I didn’t like the false paradigm of choices in terms of world views and beliefs, when the game very clearly sets them all up to suck. With a strong preference for communism. Like when you try to be measured and moderate the game actively negs you for being weak. Why give me the choice when you’re just going to punish me for it? And what if I have some anti-capitalist beliefs but don’t want to kill the landlords? It was just so extreme and off-putting.