u/McCrysler

I couldn’t tell if I was making my counselors’ jobs easier or harder since I’m getting my masters in clinical mental health and school counseling.

(TRIGGER WARNING SUICIDE IMAGERY) I felt like my Asian parent has always been a little unaware of context, but recently I processed a moment that showed just how extreme it is.

I was going through a really rough patch a few years ago involving former friends, a former love interest, and a lot of manipulation to the point where I thought I was a bad person. I was working on a self care activity book to help myself with my emotions and a page said “draw how you feel”. I drew a person hanging from a noose with a clearly sad and tearful expression, lots of broken hearts surrounding the person, and a pool of vomit below. To clarify, the hanging was not a hint toward ideations, but it symbolized how I felt, which was suffocated. My mom asked what I was working on and I showed her and she started giggling telling me how good this is because she saw all the colors and shapes.

One time in fifth grade I missed an important dance performance by accident and I showed up on the wrong day in my costume. We went home and I started crying in the bathroom. My mom opened the door with her digital camera telling me I looked cute in my costume and told me to look at her and she took pictures of me while smiling because I looked “so cute” in my dance costume.

I love her but good lord read the room lol

All I have to say is I have so much sympathy for young goth/alternative girls under 18 who dress like this every day and go out into public. My friends wanted to dress up and take pictures with Santa for fun and go print the pictures out at the drugstore, but so many grown men were taking pictures of us, following us around, touching us, catcalling us, trying to take up our space, etc. All I could think about was the teenage girls who want to live their lives and dress how they want and they deal with the same thing. I am a victim of chronic online grooming from age 11 until I stopped getting harassed after I turned 18. I just feel awful for what those younger girls go through.

I have brought a sign that says “free hugs for those who don’t feel loved every day” to Pride festivals and suicide prevention walks. Many people take up that offer every time. There is a Juneteenth festival coming up in my town. Would it be necessary to bring it there?

I am an intern at a catholic private high school. I was assigned to look for scholarships for their students and seniors going to college. Where is a good place to look?

Hello! I am a third year grad student and I’m entering the second part of my internship. My first part took place at a school where sessions were around 20-45 minutes. Since school is out, I will need a clinical setting where sessions last an hour or so. I already feel repetitive with my feeling reflections and meaning reflections with my shorter sessions. How can I exactly make a session last and be worth while at the same time?

I spent a week studying for a final by creating 400+ notecards by hand. My prof witnessed me working on them and said I’m the most dedicated out of the class. I couldn’t be in class the day of the final, so I met up with prof during office hours, and I took the final while she sat across from me. She offered a bigger space so it wasn’t as stressful but I was okay. She contacted me a week later saying I scores the highest in the class with a perfect score but she is canceling the grade for the final because the exam itself was formatted incorrectly. Even though I already had a 100% in the class, I still insisted she keep my grade because of how hard I worked on it. After some discussion and negotiation, she gave us all full participation points instead which was good enough for me.

That was almost two years ago, and now I’m questioning if I should have made a big deal about it at all. I posted this on another subreddit but they kinda made fun of me for thinking about this and why it matters. I guess my mind tends to wander around random moments of the past a bit. Maybe it’s because of my ASD? I’m not sure.

If you had a male best friend who was romantically leading on/uncomfortably sexualizing/disrespecting one of your female friends, and you had no idea it was happening, would you want her to tell you? How would you handle the situation?