Procrastinate your life

I’ve been reading through the notes and I just have to say that I absolutely promise, promise, promise you that nobody in the dental surgery is there to judge you, and we’re certainly not mad at you. Cavities happen. Even to dentists. You think your dentist has a mouth full of virgin teeth? Unlikely! They’ve all visited eachother’s surgeries to get a quickie filling (ooh, saucy) between patients. They understand that life can get in the way of oral hygiene sometimes. They understand that life’s too short not to eat chocolate. They understand that you’ve got to live. I swear to you that everyone in that room is just there to help you. Please, please, please don’t stop going to the dentist because you’re worried they’ll be mad at you. It’s really not the case. They understand. It’s fine. It’s really, really fine. Please go to the dentist. I promise you it’s ok.

You would not believe how comforting this is.

And if your dentist DOES shame you, you have every right to leave and find a new dentist.

I recently had my first full dental cleaning in a decade. I had so much shit caked on my teeth that it took *hours.* And you know what the dentist told me? That he was impressed with how well I did for the super invasive cleaning, and that the dental team was really excited that they were helping me get a fresh start to good oral hygiene.

The hygienist even recommended me a good electric toothbrush that would specifically help me keep the spaces between my teeth clean, because I expressed that I have a hard time flossing due to disability and abnormal tooth spacing. She told me that she was excited to help me have and KEEP my fresh start, and told me several times how good it is that I came in to get some help.

Your dentist should not be there to shame you. You deserve to have compassionate, competent healthcare, full stop, and most dentists I’ve met are truly lovely people who are there to help.

the autistic view of the world has insight and beauty in it, and we’re taught that there’s something wrong with it.

What’s fascinating is that the parents who didn’t know it was the work of an autistic kid praised it as well.

Technically, we don't know that it's an autistic kid's work, either. 5e infographic doesn't say Cadence is autistic.

"appropriate play skills" is such a horrid phrase, goddamn

This happened earlier this year but I didn’t see anybody talking about it and its kind of important but in september the american burying beetle was taken off the endangered species list and reclassified as threatened despite the fact they are still critically endangered.  

This isn’t just some random act of malice against these beetles, this is something that the oil and gas industries have been pushing for for years because their populations are in areas that they want to use for development, which they were prevented from using due to their endangered status.  This was, essentially, a green light for the destruction of some of their last known habitats, not to mention the harm that the resulting pollution will have on people.

[F. Thot Lichgerald @MyDadIsOld

on twitter says: “everyone says “if you want to be a girl you can just be a girl” but sometimes “if you don’t want to be a man you don’t have to be one” is easier. you don’t have to know where you’re going to leave behind something that hurts you.”]

About ten years ago I decided that the next step I needed to take in my life was to accept and explore what it meant to be a failure and to have failed. This infuriated almost everybody in my life and clearly terrified a lot of people. People do not want you to accept failure. They dont want you to like... Sit with and think about it and pick it up and turn it arpund in your hands and really examine it. They want you to keep throwing yourself against the impossible walls until your body explodes! They do not want you to say "alright then, I've failed. What does that mean for me? Im still here. What does the life of someone who has failed look like?"

This makes people very angry and panicky.

My mental health improved in ways it had not in the previous DECADE once I stopped. And. Sat. With failure. And thought about what my failure ... Was. And looked at the structures that produced it and examined them critically.

It is so taboo to fail and admit it openly and talk about it. It is so taboo to talk about or think about failure in an accepting way rather than hiding it shamefully until you experience a degree of success in some area which allows you to present the past failure as "a stepping stone" to your current situation. Fuck that. We are put in positions of guaranteed failure by society every day and then punished and shamed for it. Lets fucking talk about failure

As a medical student, I can honestly say that the system does in fact teach fatphobia, but not necessarily in the way you would think. Throughout med school, we are taught that while a patient’s body habitus is important to consider, weight loss and gain can be signs and symptoms of SO many conditions, and can mask other underlying conditions (Cushing’s disease, heart failure, etc). The med schools also teach to not discriminate, and to treat all patients equally and ethically. Students come out of pre-clinical med school very optimistic, thoughtful and cautious.

This all changes during placements. In clinical years and internships, watching your superiors make these diagnoses, and being told “they come in all the time, they would be better if they just lost some weight”, something starts to stick. Med students become cynical from treating hundreds of cases of the same thing, in mostly elderly patients who do actually just need to live a healthier lifestyle. But when exceptions come along, they are so jaded by their experiences in the system that they won’t consider differential diagnoses. This is a SYSTEMIC problem.

Also, if you weren’t aware, the number one mental illness among medical students?

Eating disorders.

This is not a #notalldoctors message, just so we’re clear.

I spent two weeks in the hospital last year. Between that and chemo and everything else I dealt with last year, I probably saw eight doctors and dozens of nurses and dozens of techs.

Only one of them told me I needed to lose weight, but it was so incredibly demoralizing that I didn’t want to go see another doctor. And it could have killed me, because this woman thought I was just fat when I actually had ovarian cancer.

My sister is a fat doctor.  When she was a medical student despite being impeccably dressed and groomed she repeatedly would get marked down during her clinical placement evaluations for not having professional appearance.  When she would question her superiors on what she could do to improve her professional appearance they never gave her an answer.

When she had a child she had gestational diabetes and because she was a physician she had perfect sugar numbers.  She had gotten an insulin pump and the professional grade programming to micro dose herself.  Her sugar numbers during her pregnancy were better than any “healthy” persons.  An OBGYN in her practice walked into the room saw her and decided without looking at her numbers or her case history and assumed she had uncontrolled diabetes and started planning her C Section.  

Without looking at anything in her chart.

She was unlucky enough to have that doctor in her delivery and she almost bled out because the woman was so convinced she was going to C Section her that she didn’t pay attention to the baby crowning and so had no instruments in the room.  The lack of preparation meant the nicu team that was supposed to be in the room was not even called until minutes after my nephew was out and grey.  He had a terrible initial apgar score and she lost an obscene amount of blood hemorrhaging out on the floor.

When she wrote a medical journal article about it (with the review of her own OBGYN) because she’s an expert in the health care system other doctors trolled through my family’s facebook pages looking for old pictures of her to prove from our family vacation shots that she must have had weight related pregnancy complications… that she didn’t have… because they felt they could diagnose her based on pictures of her.

One even filed a complaint against her with her state medical board because they assumed she’d written the article without giving her doctors a chance to respond.

Medical fatphobia nearly killed my nephew, my sister, and later tried to threaten her professional career.

as much as i am definitely anti-paywall and i wholeheartedly think newspapers specifically have a duty to not lock news behind a paywall, i think it’s important to keep in mind that the reason right-wing shit never has paywalls is because they’re being given a blank cheque by incredibly wealthy people who are relying on the continued existence of the infinite conservative propaganda machine. anybody not part of that machine instead has to ask its audience to help fund the news. it’s not enough to just demand that news sites remove paywalls (though they should), we also have to ask why they’re struggling to remain afloat while alt-right news sites rake in millions because they can afford to just throw out all the horseshit they can because they’re literally never in danger of shutting down or going bankrupt. like yeah sure the paywalls but this cannot be allowed just like in general we cannot seriously be doing this

crying

user markshotaros going shooters for karl marx

u forgot the best part

This came across my feed a little bit ago so I'm glad I finally have context for it

@ukaizawa

God, that explains this:

[ tweet by Ruth H. Hopkins

As you celebrate thanksgiving, know that the Trump administration is taking away 321 acres of land from the Mashpee-Wampanoag, the tribe that helped the pilgrims survive and were present at the first thanksgiving. Tell legislators to support the Mashpee Reservation Reaffirmation Act. ]

For those who don’t live in Massachusetts, that is literally ALL THE LAND THEY HAVE! All of it. The state aims to make the entire ~3000 person tribe homeless.

Can we please bring male corsetry into style it’s like a basic vest but laced up all pretty.

Anyways, male corsetry by Innova is really cool. 

ah, i’m so bad at posting here. acknowledging this Day of Mourning from the lands of Kiikaapoi, Peoria, Potawatomi, Myaamia & Ochethi Sakowin people, aka Chicago, derived from a native word for garlic (mmm…) which is really suitable for me because I live here now 🌱🧄✨

whose.land are you on? talk about it over dinner this weekend with your fam & what it means to give the #landback. considering everything, listening & learning from indigenous people is the least you can do.

Spock is a Jewish-coded fucking Vulcan who grew up on an alien world and was played by and basically created by a Jewish man and in 2019 you guys are still drawing him in Christmas sweaters and writing 18 billion Christmas fics about him

Reminder that in the Star Trek extended universe novels Amanda Grayson is made explicitly Jewish and thus Spock is not merely Jewish coded, he's straight up, undeniably, legal under any movements definition, Jewish.

Bead work by Native American artist and designer JAMIE OKUMA.

This explains so much!

Well, that’s just great!

my brain when somebody tells me to ‘try harder’

This is why creating an environment of acceptance for people with ADHD and other learning disabilities is paramount. It’s not only the basically humane thing to do, it also actively helps them achieve the goal you’ve set for them. 

Bead work by Native American artist and designer JAMIE OKUMA.

the concept and idea of “you can always start trying to be a better person” is extremely important to me both in media and irl and i continue to be deeply deeply disturbed by the trend on this site pushing that these ideas in media are bad writing or even morally reprehensible

because theyd rather someone stay terrible or just straight up die than become a better person 

from a compassionate point of view it’s deeply distressing and from a pragmatic point of view it’s outright frustrating

it’s fucked up. 

What is the most important step a man can take?

The next.

I think part of the pushback about this is the idea that, to “redeem” bad people, their victims must first forgive them for unforgivable acts.

This is false. No one is obligated to forgive you. You can learn from your mistakes and become the best, kindest person on earth, and the people you’ve hurt still won’t forgive you, and you’ll have to accept that. And that doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to grow. Because we aren’t just “pure” or “sinful”, we’re complex.