u/CommunityItchy6603

Obvious TW’s, but also a vague mention of suicide. (Not sure if this qualifies as nsfw, nothing graphic at all)

I go through this shit every month. I get super depressed, and my brain goes back to old issues that I’ve otherwise resolved/don’t have feelings about on a normal day, then I check my tracker and surprise, my period’s coming. Like all this old shit just comes to the surface like I squeezed a pimple or smth. (Also, every joint in my body constantly feels like it needs to be popped and/or just wrung out like a towel, and I’m dizzy and cold and hungry all the time, but that’s irrelevant, me-being-a-baby stuff)

It’s at a point where I didn’t even track it for like 3 months bc I just felt it. I basically stop sleeping (so great when I have a major exam to hopefully get my teaching license tomorrow), then sleep like 11 hours on the day I start bleeding to compensate for it. My brain goes “you should’ve offed yourself x amount of years ago” and I’m like “wow, I gotta check the tracker” and 9/10 times, I’m right.

I keep looking up therapy (even tho I had some bad experiences with it in the past and while I have a lot of respect for the people who do it, didn’t/don’t find it super useful for my specific case), then scheduling something, getting my period, realizing “ohhhh, that’s why”, and cancelling it. I’ve done this like three times now, because the problem I’m seeking help for always passes, and it’s not like talking is gonna control the hormones changing in my body (plus, talking usually makes it worse because it’s so clearly irrational and I will, in fact, get over it soon, so it’s not worth dwelling on, especially if I need to step out of a session to go interact with other humans. I’m emotionally rubbed raw as it is, why add fuel to the fire?).

Of course, I’m a hypocrite saying all that, given that I do have a first appt scheduled (the saga continues, since said appt is probably gonna be post-period and so, will probably be cancelled again 💀)

And I can’t even talk to anyone I’m close with about it—-my friends are too new/not that kind of friendship and the few family relationships I have (it’s complicated lmao) are part of the old “metaphorical scabs”.

Anyway, I’m a little over a week off from it, which is also when my semester + student-teaching kick off (yay, I guess). I’m not gonna be able to sleep tonight and I’m working at 9AM with a new tutoring student so loads of talking/interacting and trying to project good vibes.

It’s nice, I guess, to be glad when I bleed, because it means the end is in sight. I guess that’s an upsetting sight for most girls/women. But this is…not fun.

I feel like I should add: I’m not gonna do anything, no plans, no notes, nothing like that. I know what a passing storm from my brain/body looks and feels like and I know it’ll be fine in two weeks. I just need to mope now. This isn’t me baiting or making a threat.

General context:

However, I do leave spaces for myself to fill in if I do choose to bring this to another level, mostly just low-stakes conflicts that can be a barrier for my characters, and this is one of them (btw, I also suck at economics). This is intentionally made to be both obnoxious and kinda-sorta manageable for the people in the world because I love minor conflicts like school drama or city council debates in fiction for characters to bitch about.

So, my world has 2 currencies:

IC - international currency, able to be used in certain countries/cities

LC - local currency, universally used in a given place

Everybody lived on boats for a couple generations, some populations still do, so the world is generally seafarer-friendly. However, parallel currencies means some families and businesses are rich in one currency and poor in another, since you can't get your money converted.

So, for families who did settle on land, most have a "familial trade". If your great-grandparents bought land that was really good for growing apples, then congrats, you and your kids will likely be apple farmers, unless you re-sell said land (however, land was originally gifted as an honor, so depending who you are, you will piss off your family because it's a little like selling grandpa's war medals).

Now, annual taxes (or, their equivalent) can only be in local currency (LC), and if you're a merchant just rolling through during tax season, you still have to pay, since taxation isn't based on who lives there (citizenship isn't really a thing, most countries are too new to be that steady). Of course, you don't have LC, so you have another option: goods-based taxes.

Essentially, it means that you can produce whatever goods you're transporting in a value equivalent to what you're being asked to pay, plus a percentage for re-selling (e.g. the government wants $100, so you give them $100 worth of the apples you grew on your farm, plus a $30 fee so they can pay somebody to stand outside a municipal building and sell those apples so they still get their $100 in local currency). People who do these tax re-selling jobs are also generally seen as sleazy.

Now, aside from the obvious, people don't love this system for a few reasons.

1. You won't find out what you need to produce until really late. If the value of one apple is changing year by year, you can't know how much to set aside/preserve to be able to send, so you're always scrambling. And, if you get those numbers wrong and leave some fruit on the branches, it might rot off, and you're just screwed because you have nothing to send (this also prompts a lot of people to steal from their neighbor's trees to "fluff up" the crates they send in, which leads to a ton of fights/disputes, or just put a bunch of rotten fruit in the bottom only to claim they "must've gone bad in transit").
2. A family or merchant ship trading in luxury goods will have a much easier time accumulating enough to send in. $100 in gold vs. $100 in blueberries are very different amounts of labor.
3. It's really, really unstable. If you're a fisherman and there's an oil spill two weeks before the day you're expected to send your stock in, you're entirely doomed, and just about everything you have goes back into your job, so the penalty for not paying (though there is a grace period) means never being able to pay again, since most people invest their money and energy into something that'll help with their trade (so the most valuable thing in a farmer's house will be the equipment they use to farm, and they won't be able to keep up with their land after having that stuff confiscated, so it's next to impossible to bounce back).

Also, I feel like I should mention: the eventual (that's a very important word b/c it happens in maybe 10% of cases) penalty for not paying is getting equivalent values confiscated/surrendering them to pay, so if you owed $120 in March and it's October now, you'll owe $190 now, $10 increase each month). However, you can send in anything to make a penalty payment, not just the results of your particular trade, so some families actually wait for the penalty to kick in, then send in scrap metals from old/broken house appliances or even just chopping a ton of firewood annually because their actual trade has no chance of meeting what the government will ask for and they know it.

So, I’m a lifelong skin & nail picker, and a lot of the ways I can prevent myself from picking aren’t an option at my current job or the upcoming one (I tutor, so lots of free time while the kids are doing their assignments, they’ll notice any fidgets or I’m doing with my hands, and I get the occasional breakout from not washing my pillowcase enough and/or my period, if it’s okay to mention that here, and all those marks eventually turn into tiny “wounds”).

Very few of those have ever scarred, but are there any face washes or face creams/ingredients that are good for healing or at least cooling it off so this doesn’t take so long?

I notice that the red marks from picking (the lines/inflammation from my fingers on my face, not the scabs themselves) disappear after I use this one face mask, but I don’t want to overuse that. Obviously no miracle cures here, and I need to start using my brain instead of leaving it on autopilot so I don’t have this issue, I’m just looking to make some of the marks seem less…angry if and when I mindlessly start picking again. Has anyone experienced this? Particularly on the face?

Last season, Charlie got into a van with a woman after the lemonade stand scene. Am I wrong to assume that was foreshadowing some insanity this season where there’s a kidnap attempt on her specifically? Like this season’s Big Bad™️ was trying to scope out Jo’s home/family situation to lead up to whatever’s happening now?

21F, if it matters. I'm not looking to "fix it", just know if anyone else has this happen to them. I did post this elsewhere but copy-pasted it here bc I think it fits this sub better than the other one, so I'll probably delete it from there. Maybe. Idk where this post belongs if I'm being honest, I just need to talk about this somewhere.

So, I've been a writer & world-builder my whole life, dabbled in some other artsy stuff on and off, but especially since I started majoring in English (I'm on my last year, student-teaching in September), I don't necessarily write every single day, but I do create every day (character sheets, blurbs, Pinterest boards, plot diagrams, editing old work, etc.). I have this massive backlog of stories and poems I wanted to write during the school year that I lost the energy for bc most of my time spent in front of my laptop was spent on my school papers.

Anywho, I convinced myself I was gonna get around to all that when the Summer started, and while I'm not writing every day, I'm definitely getting a lot more done than I did during the school year. I'm also trying to pre-plot some stuff so I don't get stuck in the "I have characters & a setting but need something to happen" trap when my time is more limited next Fall. I'm just trying to avoid another writing hiatus when school picks up, so I'm setting long-term stuff in motion so the foundation is laid and it'll be less mental effort to come up with stuff when life inevitably goes crazy again.

But I'm noticing, and have been noticing for a while now, that I just...can't write or even plot when I'm PMS'd. It's like my creativity dies all at once, I can only re-plot and re-daydream stuff I've already come up with and have been working with, and I'm too mentally drained to string sentences together. Like any writing ability I have just falls off the face of the Earth 1-2 weeks each month. My usual "fixes" like free-writing or working on my "dummy docs" (kinda ever-continuing stories that are there so I always have a "practice dummy", but not meant to be finished or even entirely cohesive so the stakes are really low).

I definitely get hit hard by PMS in general (momentary headaches/dizziness/etc when I stand up, I get really moody/emotional/kinda forgetful, I can barely sleep leading up to my cycle and I've literally never been this hungry/able to eat this much in my life---all of which is not helping, I'm sure), but I'm getting through work (I've only had this job for like, a month, so I do still kinda suck at it) and everything, in a way/at a level that makes me feel like I should be able to function better when it comes to the thing I've been doing since before I could properly hold a pencil, if that makes any sense at all.

And it's not that I'm exhausted from work, a lot of my shifts are 2 hours (it's a tutoring job, the kids come for 2-hr sessions and sometimes you only have one in a day) and stationary. This is just so...I don't even have a better word, it's annoying. Because I know what my brain is capable of and it definitely doesn't stop at this.

Is this a known thing? Do other female/AFAB creatives feel this? Is it supposed to kill your creative drive? I feel like hormones and creativity probably do go hand-in-hand, but I don't remember this happening to me as a teenager or even when I first started college.

So...is this out of the ordinary or is it just a universal thing that happens to adult women?

(Edited a bit for clarity)

21F, if it matters. I'm not looking to "fix it", just know if anyone else has this happen to them. I'm also not sure if this even belongs here or in WomensHealth, but I feel like it's more relevant here.

So, I've been a writer & world-builder my whole life, dabbled in some other artsy stuff on and off, but especially since I started majoring in English (I'm on my last year, student-teaching in September), I don't necessarily write every single day, but I do create every day (character sheets, blurbs, Pinterest boards, plot diagrams, editing old work, etc.). I have this massive backlog of stories and poems I wanted to write during the school year that I lost the energy for bc most of my time spent in front of my laptop was spent on my school papers.

Anywho, I convinced myself I was gonna get around to all that when the Summer started, and while I'm not writing every day, I'm definitely getting a lot more done than I did during the school year. I'm also trying to pre-plot some stuff so I don't get stuck in the "I have characters & a setting but need something to happen" trap when my time is more limited next Fall. I'm just trying to avoid another writing hiatus when school picks up, so I'm setting long-term stuff in motion so the foundation is laid and it'll be less mental effort to come up with stuff when life inevitably goes crazy again.

But I'm noticing, and have been noticing for a while now, that I just...can't write or even plot when I'm PMS'd. It's like my creativity dies all at once, I can only re-plot and re-daydream stuff I've already come up with and have been working with, and I'm too mentally drained to string sentences together. Like any writing ability I have just falls off the face of the Earth 1-2 weeks each month. My usual "fixes" like free-writing or working on my "dummy docs" (kinda ever-continuing stories that are there so I always have a "practice dummy", but not meant to be finished or even entirely cohesive so the stakes are really low).

I definitely get hit hard by PMS in general (momentary headaches/dizziness/etc when I stand up, I get really moody/emotional/kinda forgetful, I can barely sleep leading up to my cycle and I've literally never been this hungry/able to eat this much in my life---all of which is not helping, I'm sure), but I'm getting through work (I've only had this job for like, a month, so I do still kinda suck at it) and everything, in a way/at a level that makes me feel like I should be able to function better when it comes to the thing I've been doing since before I could properly hold a pencil, if that makes any sense at all.

And it's not that I'm exhausted from work, a lot of my shifts are 2 hours (it's a tutoring job, the kids come for 2-hr sessions and sometimes you only have one in a day) and stationary. This is just so...I don't even have a better word, it's annoying. Because I know what my brain is capable of and it definitely doesn't stop at this.

Is this a known thing? Do other female/AFAB creatives feel this? I feel like hormones and creativity probably do go hand-in-hand, but I don't remember this happening to me as a teenager or even when I first started college.

So...is this out of the ordinary or is it just a universal thing that happens to women?

(Edited a bit for clarity)

I’m always curious about niche parts of other people’s family/childhoods.

By “sick food”, I mean the simple stuff your parents probably made when you weren’t feeling well as a kid (eg crackers). Takes very little time to make, can sit on the nightstand until your appetite comes back, and probably won’t come back up, basically.

In my family (Italian-American from NJ), it was pastina or buttered toast, usually alongside peppermint tea (though I think it might’ve been chamomile when I was really little?).

I’m trying to get back into studying Italian—-I was originally doing it for an actual benefit, since I spoke it fluently at a young age and lost it, and I have family who only speak it/very limited English, bloodline citizenship eligibility for Italy (daughter of a former Italian citizen, granddaughter of a current one), and a TEFL license to work there at some point. But now I’m trying to study it more for fun/being bilingual or multilingual, but the problem is, now that I’m not surrounded by speakers and I’m relying on media…I forgot how BAD a lot of it is.

I like a lot of the music, but tv seems to come down to soap operas that my nonna used to watch on RAI or just dubs of American shows (eg Dragon Prince). The only Italian YouTuber I like that I’ve been able to find has been Lucia Wang.

I’m a big fan of commentary, vlog/daily life, documentary, & video essay content. I’ve also been getting into gaming (mostly Minecraft, sims, & Pokémon, but also just general “cozy” game content) & tarot (or other witchy/mythological stuff). For those of us learning on YouTube, what are you guys watching?