u/minatozakiparty

Hey all,

It'll be my third trip to Japan. I've done Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka twice, and I've done Takayama, Uji, Fuji area, Hiroshima and Miyajima.

I'm going to be going back in December, and I'm looking for some new spots to explore. I will probably be flying in to Osaka, and will be spending some time in Tokyo, but that's all I know. I will be in Japan for around three weeks.

I love good food, nature, quirky places/nightlife, and nerdy things.

I have been in 'remission' for about three years. I got to a point where my OCD was negligible and it rarely impacted my day to day life.

And then...my 'thing' happened. The thing I am fixated on, my theme, came true. My theme is, unfortunately, not something that uncommon. I have contamination OCD, and I have a thing about warts.

I got a wart on my foot. Ever since, it has taken every bit of my energy to not spiral back into intrusive thought and action patterns. I tried to do what 'normal' people do, and go to the podiatrist and get treatment, but it hasn't worked. Meanwhile, I feel utterly zapped energy wise, I don't feel myself, and I feel like I'm falling into depression.

I know many people have warts and live life like nothing at all is going on. The problem for me is that having a trigger constantly on me is really testing me and requiring me to be really in the zone 100% of the day. It's also a struggle because there are normal hygiene things people do when treating warts, which exist on a spectrum, and I am constantly tempted back into reassurance seeking thoughts trying to figure out what I should and shouldn't be doing with a manifested 'threat'.

Has anyone dealt with similar, and how did you cope? I am looking for advice about techniques I can use and how I can work towards staying recovered.

Hi guys,

My first experience with plantar warts, I went the cryo route. I had one wart originally, and not long after cryo it spread immensely. They all eventually disappeared, almost spontaneously, at a much later date.

Ten years later, and I've had a wart come back on the ball of my foot. Ostensibly, it looked really small/new from the surface. But I've gone to a podiatrist who has used acid and advised me to use OTC acid for about 2 months now.

My foot has abscessed twice and I've experienced second degree burns from the treatment. I've been unable to walk for about 3 weeks and I've had to do wound management with a GP.

What other treatment options are there that aren't extremely invasive or likely to require more recovery/time off of feet? I am at my wits end

I’ve been dating my girlfriend for close to 12 months.

I genuinely love her and have fallen for her.

However, it’s become apparent that she hid her depression and its extent quite well for the first three or so months of our relationship. I had no idea she had it or that it was this bad.

She cries almost every day/night and has spirals where she ruminates on how much she hates herself. She won’t get out of bed before 2 on the weekends unless she has plans. She struggles to shower every day despite working in healthcare (where…it’s not great not to shower). She has no hobbies and has lost interest in everything she enjoys, which has actually made it hard to talk to her because she’s not reading anything or doing anything so there’s nothing new for us to discuss. She talks about feeling hopeless and like she can’t see her future or what it would be like.

The thing is, I have suffered from extreme depression in my past. We are talking not showering for long stretches of time, unemployed, very close to not wanting to be around, no friends, no hobbies, sleeping at 3 am until 3 pm. I recovered. It took a few years of really consistent work but I recovered. I do sometimes struggle with depression but I’m much more functional now, much more grateful, and I have coping mechanisms.

I have tried everything I can think of bar a pure ultimatum to get my girlfriend to see that she has a disease that has treatment options. I’ve offered to do some of her hobbies alongside her, like co reading a book together or planning walks. I’ve asked her multiple times to consider therapy and I’ve offered to book her into sessions and find her someone she might gel with. I’ve talked to her about how her constant negative self talk is perpetuating her mood. I’ve tried to encourage her towards exercise for the endorphins and told her she can tag along with me. I know she hates her current job and it doesn’t earn anything much, so I’ve found options for her to re-skill in areas she has shown interest in but there’s always an excuse as to why she can’t do it (when in reality, she’s become the kind of person who would find any workplace intolerable after a year because she’s just mentally burnt out).

She isn’t receptive to anything and has said she will “think about” therapy but I know she won’t go, even though it’s very accessible where we live. She has convinced herself her whole family hates her but from what I’ve seen, they are concerned and she’s often objectively rude to them and antagonistic and self isolates. Her mother, for instance, clearly feels worried that she doesn’t have an actual career despite being smart and is worried her daughter is in bed all day, but my girlfriend takes that as evidence that her mother hates her and further parental trauma.

The thing is, I really do love her. When she’s in a decent mood and when we are out on a date or talking at one of our homes, I am so happy with her. But her moods are becoming increasingly present and I also find her constant self victimisation really unattractive, but also detrimental to my own recovery. She currently seems to believe that how she feels is simply a product of who she is, and that there’s no room for improvement. When I, someone who has been where she is, know that’s not true.

I feel scared that if I leave her, she’ll a) get worse or hurt herself and b) I’ll have left someone I really love. But I am also worried this will never improve because she hasn’t even reached the point of realising this is a mental illness and not an inherent personality she needs to stop identifying so heavily with.

There will be some mild spoilers in this post.

Yesteryear promises to be a novel about a trad wife influencer who travels back in time and has to contend with the realities of the life/epoch she heralds, in the modern world, as being superior. This is a great concept.

So many things could be explored with this concept. Why are white women, in particular, drawn to conservatism that doesn’t serve them? How does conservatism mythologise and misrepresent times and attitudes of the past, or the realities of people who lived in them? How do we reckon with the rise of white women on instagram who glorify servitude and wish they could return to eras where slavery was widespread? Etc etc etc.

The author herself was, at one point, a conservative Christian white woman. I think this ends up being incredibly obvious in the tone of this novel, which feels more interested in being condescending and vindictive than it is in examining an actual social problem, its ramifications, and taking a nuanced lens as to how these women even get here, what forces are at play, and their complicity vs victimhood.

Natalie is completely irredeemable. Which I suppose is fine, and I’m not saying unlikeable women aren’t great protagonists (they are often the best ones). The issue is that if it’s established pretty early on that Natalie is really tremendously awful and has no humanity, interiority, ability to change or any genuine complexity…everything in this novel then is really just poking fun at a trope or concept, enacting violence on a woman who is yucky, without any meaningful critique or examination.

As it turns out, the whole conceit of the novel and its premise actually isn’t even really happening. The author pulls the “it was all a dream” in an actual contemporary fiction novel which I personally felt was a cop out and extremely disappointing. All at once it allows the author to never actually establish the premise or deal with the hard stuff (ie world building in a premise that has a sci fi/fantasy element), the author doesn’t have to stick that landing or meaningfully deal with the element of the past, and at the same time…it means that the potential of that premise is ultimately lost. Also, to be frank, the modern day influencer part of the premise isn’t that interesting to most modern readers - we all know what trad wives are and what they seem to get up to. The interesting aspect was the time travel…which barely features and does nothing meaningful at all.

Personally, I didn’t get anything from this novel. If you’re its target audience, you already ostensibly agree that trad wives are cringe and bad. What was interesting about the premise is the idea of throwing this person into the past and exploring themes of white complicity, white womanhood, American Christianity and anti feminism…none of which actually happens. Natalie is a trope wrapped within another trope - she isn’t a real person with fleshed out beliefs or fears or justifications or perspective. The question of “what makes a trad wife” appears to be answered with “being an asshole, some patriarchy and apparently significant mental illness”.

What’s more is that I feel like the almost forgone inherent success of this book says a lot about what or rather whom tends to sell and who tends to be ignored or to attract a smaller readership. This premise has been done before - a great example (and a much better executed one) is Kindred by Octavia E Butler. Kindred is by no means super obscure, but a black author writing about a black modern woman sent back in time, meeting her enslaved ancestors, and reckoning with race and complicity etc is seen as genre fiction and not sold as a big ticket item. White women are immediately more intrigued by books that are from their own or depict their own. Kindred does this premise, in my opinion, about a thousand times better but a lot of the critiques of Yesteryear will be defended with “you just don’t like unlikeable women characters”, when maybe…the book is mediocre.

Ultimately, this book really had nothing new or insightful to say about the issue it wants to contend with. It felt to me like a white feminist writing a blog post about how much she hates this specific kind of woman, without examining why she herself was one, why these women are the way they are, or offering her humanity whilst examining her behaviour. It delivered none of the genre elements it promised, and the implications of its twist basically turn any meaningful critique into mush (and evoke the often used trope of “woman just be crazy”).