u/Mammoth-Assistance13

About a year and a half ago I (16f) was diagnosed and prescribed Adderall. Up until I started taking the medication, I used to be so expressive and energetic. I used to laugh uncontrollably at just about anything, and I just felt comfortable in my own skin. Now, I've noticed that I've become socially dead and even more easily affected by my environment--I can't even stay at a party (even if it's my best friend's sweet sixteen) for more than an hour or two before I get overwhelmed by all the constant stream of discordant noise and strobe lights and beg my parents to take me home. I've become much more impatient and short tempered; recently, I fought (verbally lol) with some of my friends over innocuous topics and lost my temper that I caused a scene. I knew that what I was doing was unnecessary given the unseriousness of the situation, but I couldn't stop myself at ALL. The worst part is that when I'm not angry, I feel nothing. When someone makes a genuinely funny joke I process it and understand that I'm supposed to laugh, but I can't even force it, and the person I'm talking with looks so confused and hurt that I feel terrible. Some of my friends say that I've become a totally different person because I sound so dead inside and I lost all my personality. I'm currently seeing a therapist, but I don't know where to start with this next time I meet them. I'm sick of who I've become, but an unmedicated me wouldn't survive another day in the real world. What do I do?

I'll call this friend Katie because it's the first name that popped into my head. Our friend group consists of 8 girls (all 16-17yrs). Me and another girl (Sarah), and two other girls (Dani and Alice) are are two pairs of childhood best friends, while the other four girls (including Katie) aren't as close as the four of us are.

For more information on Katie: I do love baking with Katie because it's a hobby we have in common, so I invite her as much as I can to my house to bake together. I feel like her sensitive personality (she's very very very sensitive, meaning she'll cry if someone's brutally honest with her), her low self-esteem and insecurities, and her strict parents' rules are what led up to her wanting to leave our group. She doesn't have any other friends besides us (she's very reserved so I imagine it's difficult for her to make new friends).

When Sarah and I or Dani and Alice hang out, it's an unspoken rule to not tell the others about our hangouts so they don't feel like they're missing out on something. Sarah moved away when I was in fourth grade and returned in ninth grade, so we've always done everything together to make up for the lost time (our parents are close friends so it's easy to plan hangouts with her). Dani and Alice go to each other's houses for sleepovers almost every weekend (their parents are family friends so it's no biggie). We try to plan outings with the entire group once a month, but Katie can rarely come because her parents don't want her leaving the house during the school year for "unnecessary" reasons. We try going by their rules and modifying the plans so they'll let her go, but their decision is always final. In the end, we can't hang out as an entire group more than thrice a school year.

Here's where it gets messy: At the end of sophomore year, Katie sent a giant paragraph message to the main group chat, accusing us four best friends of ALWAYS leaving her out of hangouts. Mind you, this isn't true, as we've always changed the date and time and place to accommodate for Katie. I believe she's not acknowledging that her parents are the root cause of this reoccurring situation. She accuses us of never including her in conversations hangouts that are between best friends, and suggests that if more than two girls from our group are planning to meet, they MUST ask the rest of the group if they want to join. Sarah and I, who were having a sleepover when we received the message, reluctantly agreed because we didn't want the group to fall out over this. However, I think it's really......I don't know how to explain it. Sometimes I want to hangout with only Sarah and Dari so we can catch up with each other. It doesn't seem fair that we have to extend the invitation to everyone all the time. Consequently, we've literally stopped hanging out in groups of more than 2 because we don't want to have to tell everyone, and, in the case Katie or the other three find out, they'll blow up.

The entire group hung out together the week before school started. During summer break, there were no entire group hangouts due to last minute plan conflicts (excluding us best friends meeting with each other, again, with only 2 at a time).

Start of junior year (this year): everyone's already stressed. Katie has cried a total of seven times these past three weeks and it took the entire group to comfort her, so we couldn't do anything else during those lunch periods. That's normal for her, and we're accepting of this. But last week, she suddenly stopped talking to EVERYONE and, when the entire group stopped to ask her what's wrong, she just ignored us. Now, how are we supposed to help her if she doesn't want to tell us what's wrong? We aren't licensed therapists in the slightest, so we just leave her alone after reassuring her a bit. Then yesterday, she tells ME that she wants to leave the group because she always feels left out and extremely lonely. Maybe she felt comfortable enough to inform me since we bake together (her parents trust me to not do stupid stuff), but now I don't know what to do with this information. It's been weighing on me all day, and I'm going to bake with her in an hour. I'm thinking of sitting her down and talking about how she feels to understand her situation. I don't want her to leave the group; I know she'll be even worse off eating lunch with no one, and I won't be able to spend time with her without feeling like I caused her to feel horrible. I want to make this work, and I don't want the group to fall out for real this time. AITJ, and what the heck should I do?

i was looking into clep exams this morning and they seem to also offer college credit so you can skip college intro classes. how are they different from ap classes, and is it worth taking these exams on top of aps?

i LOVE cedar wood and i'm looking for advice + tips on how i can cosplay her while making my costume easy to understand (wooden puppet). unfortunately, i can't sew at all, and i'm on a tight budget :(

i think i have an idea of what i'll do for the rest of her costume, though.

i'll use dark brown or black body paint (since i'm dark skinned) to recreate the wood grain texture of a wooden puppet.

https://preview.redd.it/9iv3j9qgo2hh1.png?width=189&format=png&auto=webp&s=e325c21f04fcb3f5b8301a5c735485f98e01c11d

to recreate those circles at the joints, i need to find a way to attach gold brads in the same places as well.

thankfully, i have the stockings, hair, purse/bag, jewelry, and cricket headband covered.

https://preview.redd.it/5urpr5ukn2hh1.png?width=387&format=png&auto=webp&s=e05b1a17a5ed7e9e508f28f7350da900864a3f2f

to really make my costume clear to non-eah fans, i'm going to try my best to make the cross and puppet strings, since cedar's still a wooden puppet in the series. finding a way to make the cross suspended in the air like in the image above might just be the hardest part, but i have an idea of how i should fasten the strings to my hands, head, and feet.

and that's all i have so far! lmk if there's stuff i should add or improve on!

https://preview.redd.it/ofokl1upqo9h1.png?width=1522&format=png&auto=webp&s=81bb32a41d802bc48495eedc55fe69e461c046ab

first try with minimal studying i got a 1500, felt like i could do better. i got a tutor and i thought i was improving but i got a worse score the second time. my parents want me to continue with the tutor because he was all like "trust me bro" to my parents and they fell for it. i've been studying for over five months now and my practice test scores keep fluctuating in different areas and i'm literally at my wit's end. i'm really feeling the pressure now that my parents signed me up for the september sat, and according to them, it's my last shot at getting a 1550+. i feel terrible for wasting their money on a tutor and these tests, and i'm ready to study every hour of the day if it means my score will improve. what should i do??

desperately seeking any advice especially for the dbq and leqs, and just time management during the exam

context: I've never cheated on ANY assessment ever. I think it's equivalent to cheating yourself of learning (usually) valuable information which you can use in your future career or everyday life. I'm taking ap world this year and I recently learned that 80% of my classmates found the CB question banks and have been using it to score well on the unit tests. My history teacher is super laissez-faire about cheating (students from other periods have literally shown him the question bank which people are using but he does nothing about it), but he refuses to give extra credit to bump up your grade. Tests are weighted 90% and homework 10%, so it's impossible to increase your grade once it's dropped below a certain percentage. However, if your grade is an 89.5%, it'll automatically get rounded up to an A-.

We just finished our history final and my grade's an 89.4%. My teacher refused to give out review worksheets/questions for points or curve the test because "interestingly, you all are doing very well despite not being on task for most of the year" blah blah blah, and I was SO PISSED. I'm okay if people cheat once in a while but they still study, but others just coast through the course by memorizing the entire question bank and not picking up the textbook more than a handful of times. Now I kind of regret not cheating, at least on the last test when I knew my grade depended on it. I would definitely feel horrible about it for the rest of hs, but at least my gpa wouldn't get ruined by a subject I have no intention of pursuing in the future.

So here's my honest question: should I start cheating like the others? Is there actually any point in slaving away for good grades?

my apwh teacher said we can only use the chromebooks on our apwh exam, but last year i used my own device for my ap micro exam. has the device policy changed or is it just my school?