u/thisisntgraces

The warrior who defeated 15 night crawlers ⚔️

I’m making this post very exasperated because I just got done trying to style my hair and it looks terrible. I am always trying to get those beautiful bouncy curls that sit nice and have volume and always failing.

I know I have some sort of wave/curl pattern because even when I brush my hair wet and do nothing to it, it drys with kinks in it. I also deal with a lot of frizz. I just can’t figure out how to style it without it looking crazy or frizzy. I would really love some guidance from people who’ve figured it out :’)

My current wash/styling routine is as follows:

- Double wash with Kitsch rice water shampoo bar

- Condition with Kitsch rice water conditioner bar
and leave on for 5-10 minutes

- Finger rake hair/detangle

- Rake in Shae Moisture then scrunch

- Rake in Lusti hairstyling gel then scrunch

- Scrunch in Flex maximum hold mousse

- Defuse 10-20 minutes

I wash my hair once a week but thoroughly rinse my hair and scalp with water every other day in the shower. I also have a pretty rigid nightly hair care routine that includes scalp stimulation, bamboo brushing and then boar bristle brushing, followed by oiling my ends with rosemary and castor oil. I wear my hair in braids at night.

I also recently got Garnier Sleek & Shine anti frizz but it doesn’t really do much for my frizz. I’ve applied it on my hair damp and dry and it’s still very frizzy.
I’m open to product recommendations, but affordable options that don’t break the bank. I would really love styling advice and tips on how to get more behaved or uniform curls. Seriously any help is so so appreciated :’) <3

Look at the gorgeous globulous girl 🥹 I just love her so much!

I did it. I chopped off 4 inches of hair last night. As much as it pained me, it needed to happen. My ends were so dry and coarse, like horse hair. Pic 1 is right after I cut it when it was still wet, pic 2 is dried and styled (apologies for my bare back 😭 I wanted to display the true length of hair).

I am coming here for tips and advice on retention and how to maintain length. I’m hoping I cut off enough to have a clean slate, I would be distraught if I had to cut off any more. I want to keep my ends healthy and continue to grow my hair out. I desperately want thick, long, and healthy hair down to my mid thighs or knees.

Here is what I do for my hair right now:
- Massage my scalp to stimulate blood flow using my fingertips and a wooden scalp massaging tool
- Gently brush my hair starting at the ends and working my way up with a bamboo bristle brush
- Eat lots of eggs as a natural source of biotin and collagen
- Wear my hair in protective hairstyles like braids about 90% of the time
- Only use heat on it about once a month just to straighten it and see how much growth I’ve gained
- Wash my hair only once a week with Kitsch rice water shampoo and conditioner bars

What I’m looking to learn:
- I want to start oiling again and I’m looking for tips on frequency, especially when it comes to oiling the ends. I’ve attached a photo of the oil I’m looking at on the third slide, is this a good option?
- How to keep my ends healthy and prevent them from splitting and getting dry again
- How to promote fast hair growth if possible
- What heat protection is best to use before applying heat to the hair?
- How to reduce frizz for wavy/curly hair, which products are best for that?

I’m also looking at a boar bristle brush to help with the dryness my hair has been having as well as a hair dryer with a cool air setting so I can use the diffuser attachment to refine my curl pattern. I’m open to any suggestions or advice, I want to really lock in with my hair care routine so within a year’s time I’ll notice results. Thank you to anyone who’s read this far and anyone who’s willing to offer advice! :)

OMG HI! I’m super new to the aquatics hobby and I fell hard and fast. I’ve grown to absolutely adore shrimp and set up my first shrimp tank about a month ago. I’m so excited because when I got these shrimp, the lovely pregnant one who is in the video was pregnant when I picked her out at the store. I was told that shrimp almost never keep their eggs when they’re moved from the pet store to a new tank, but it seems to not be the case here! She is still pregnant and squirming those babies all around!! 🥹 I’m so happy and excited to see the shrimplings when the time comes. That’s all, just wanted to share my love for this new found hobby. Feel free to drop fun shrimp facts below or anything you think a beginner should know! 🫶

Hi! To preface, I have been no contact with my mother since I was 18. I moved out two days after turning 18, and am now 23 and still no contact. Throughout the years, she has made several attempts to reach back out to me and force me into breaking no contact. She abused me my entire life through a series of strange and sick behaviors. She put my entire family through hell, pushed my half sister to the breaking point at 13 causing her to move out and live with her dad voluntarily, verbally abused my dad in front of us for as long as I can remember, physically abused my brother and I, but scapegoated me the most. Almost all of her anger was directed towards me and I believe she blamed me for all of her hardships, leading to such abuse. Throughout a lifetime of abusing me, she somehow always framed herself as the victim, and in doing so, justified “punishing” (abusing) me.

I want to accurately portray just how horrible she was in sharing a few examples. My sister told me that she has memories as far back as 4 and 5 years old, when I was an infant, of our mother calling me attention seeking, or neglecting me because I was “too fussy” or “too whiny” (I was a BABY mind you). Instead of reacting with normal anger to my dad occasionally standing up for me during abusive fits (which he rarely did as the bystander) she would accuse us, my dad and I, of having an incestual relationship, something she did on more than one occasion. Too many times to count, she threatened to sell our pets just to get a rise out of me. She once threatened to release my hamster into the woods simply because I had grown an attachment to it. As young as 5, she would come into my room and tear posters and cutouts off my wall and shred them up right in front of me, then punish me for crying or having a reaction. When I was in high school she would come into my room and take all the clothes out of my closet, destroy my room and then tell me to clean it up or I would be grounded. She had a phase where she would accuse me of being on drugs for no reason and also call me a slut because I would talk about having a crush at school. She also went through a phase where she would storm into the bathroom while I was showering and rip open the shower curtain, leaving me feeling exposed, then cut the water off and tell me to get out because I was done, even if I still had shampoo in my hair. And as you can imagine, she projected all of her disordered eating onto me, leading me to have a severe eating disorder that lasted over 6 years, and is something I am still healing from.

There are many more examples but this post would quickly become book length if I dared explain any more. All that to say, I was completely justified in going no contact with her, and wouldn’t have been able to do it without the help of my friends, who took better care of me during the 4 years of high school than my mother managed to do in 18 years.

Like I said, in the 5 years of no contact, she has managed to force her presence on me in one way or another. When our family dog died, and coincidentally my hamster at the time also died, my dad and I agreed to have a double burial to say goodbye to both of them. I drove from my apartment back to my childhood home so I could participate in the “funeral”. While there, my mother took my dead hamster’s body and refused to give it back until I would talk to her. Eventually, my dad was able to get the body back and I managed to ignore her the entire time, but those are the lengths she will go to in order to break my no contact boundary.

As someone who has found a great deal of peace in going no contact, and allowed myself the time to heal and reflect on everything, I can’t help but see every attempt at reconnecting as a manipulation tactic to reel me back in. I have to imagine that my silence is her greatest pain, her favorite victim taking power in stepping away. The attempts at contact feel like nothing more than low hanging fruit that she’s just dying for me to pluck. In the past two years, her attempts to speak have been more apologetic, sending me emails or forcing my dad to give me handwritten notes of her accepting fault.

This note, the one attached in the image, is the most recent one I got in the mail 2 days ago. While I’m sure she’s had time to self reflect, and I truly hope she’s done so, this note comes off as incredibly disingenuous. It’s like she’s playing the role of someone who’s trying to hold themselves accountable but failing miserably. She knows that her religion means nothing to me. One of the last things I said to her before I left was that she is the sole reason I no longer practice religion. So why would she think that I care? And the whole vegetarian thing in the note is such bullshit. I went vegetarian in 8th grade, and never *once* did I ask her to go out of her way to buy me fancy or expensive groceries. I didn’t expect her to cook separate meals for me, at that point I’d come to accept that she’d rather eat bricks than do anything for me. Sure, her utter neglect in accommodation to my diet upset me, but I never made a big deal out of it, and during that time I was severely disordered anyway, so when she told me to eat the meal she prepared or go hungry, it was an excuse for me not to eat.

Even in the note you can see that she’d rather blame anyone for her actions than take true accountability for them. If she was feeling unsupported by my dad, that was a problem she should have worked out privately with him, not take it all out on me and then blame him for it. Writing that “we’re both at fault because we’re imperfect” is like a slap in the face. I was child. I accept no fault, what hand could I have had in my own abuse? She refuses to accept any responsibility for her own actions. Back when I would still try to make her see reason, she would laugh in my face when I referred to her treatment of me as abuse.

It’s taken years for my family, but especially my dad, to stop pressuring me into reaching out to her. For a while, things got better. When I got to see my dad, instead of turning it into a pity fest for my mom, we would just be able to spend time together and hang out. But recently, things have started amping up again. My mother was diagnosed with a rare congenital heart condition called amyloidosis, a discovery made upon having a stroke. She’s gone through major stem cell transplant surgery, daily chemo to weekly chemo, and my poor dad has gone into debt caring for her in all this. (Another thing I should mention is that my mother has always been unemployed. She was a stay at home mom, which as you can imagine meant free rein abuse for all of us kids, but also meant that my dad was away most of the time working to support our family.) With all of the health issues and chaos that’s ensued, my dad has been more pushy about my mother and I’s relationship. Having a near death experience followed by a terminal diagnosis kind of forces a person to do some heavy self reflection, and I’m sure in some ways she’s felt guilty for the things she did to me, but nonetheless, I can’t see myself ever reconnecting.

It sucks the most because I get major judgment from everyone in my family over this decision. My dad thinks I should take pity on her and humor her by reconnecting so she isn’t forced to take her guilt to the grave, but that’s *her* cross to bear, not mine. The entirety of my extended family just cannot comprehend the abuse I suffered and makes it a point every time I see them to coax me into reconnecting with her. My whole family treats my decision like a major overreaction, as if I’m being too harsh. I’ve even been told I’ll “regret it for the rest of my life” because once she’s gone I’ll have to reconcile with the fact that we never set things right. But I don’t want to set things right. I want to say she’s become a stranger to me, but to be honest, she’s *always* been a stranger to me. She’s never once made an effort to know me as a person. My interests and passions were never encouraged or explored, only shot down and shamed. She’s never known me, and I’ve only ever known the version of her that was cruel and unjust.

How can I express this to my family once and for all? I’m sick of the constant beratement. No one can know what it was like for me except me. And I’m so much better now. I rarely even think of my mother unless something triggers me like heavy fast paced footsteps or loud argument. I not only have done extreme self healing, but I’ve also found an amazing partner who is able to tend to any unhealed mental wounds with care and patience. I feel at peace and I don’t let what I’ve gone through dictate my life anymore. I’ve channeled that energy into getting to know myself, practicing healthy hobbies, deep self reflection, and making new friendships and connections with other people. I don’t wallow in self pity, I don’t loathe my life anymore, and I don’t use her abuse as an excuse for my behavior like I once did. I’ve truly changed so much in these past 5 years because I’ve had the time and space to. I wish my family could see that and accept me for who I am and the decisions I’ve made.

I don’t even know if there’s really a point to this post, perhaps just a space for me to voice my frustrations or see if anyone else has experienced something similar. Being an estranged adult child is hard, not because I miss my parent, I long since got over that grieving process, but because I am always being treated like I’m dramatic by my family. I’ve explained how hard it was, up, down, left, right, and sideways to my family to try and make them understand and they just can’t wrap their minds around my childhood being that bad. And it’s tough. I want a relationship with my dad still, I love him. And even though he’s to blame in a lot of this too, I’ve forgiven him, because at the end of the day, he’s her victim too you know? But it’s hard to see him still stuck in that viscous manipulative cycle with her, attempting to pull me back in as well. That’s all I guess, just looking for thoughts, or feel free to share how you’ve handled similar experiences.

(Sorry not the best photos)
Last night I found one of my mystery snails with a horrible collapse and ended up having to euthanize her today. My other mystery snail, the one in the photo, has been best buds with the one we lost, they’ve been inseparable. We got them together and they always lingered around each other in the tank.

While I was scrambling around last night, trying to figure out what to do, she was all over her injured friend. They are both very active snails. Upon the disappearance of her friend, she spent the entire day hidden in the back corner of the tank, neither my partner or I saw her once. This is very uncharacteristic, as she is always climbing the glass and exploring around the tank.

I’m wondering if she’s experiencing depression over the loss of her friend? I have to assume she understands what happened because she witnessed the injury and was very attentive to the situation last night. Is there anything I can do to ease her pain? I ended up getting another mystery snail today, not as a replacement, but perhaps a new tank mate who can offer company to my grieving snail? When I put the snail in I pulled her out of the corner she’d been hiding in all day to introduce them and she came out, investigated the new snail, and then walked away.

I’m wondering if anyone knows anything about this or has experienced something similar? I’m very new to the hobby, this is actually my first tank and these were my first snails. I’m pretty upset over having lost my snail Remi, and I imagine my other one (Ursula) is too. I just wanted them to live the best lives possible and feel like I failed a bit at doing that. Do you think the new snail will come as a comfort to Ursula or cause her more stress? I was unsure of what to do and I hope I didn’t make this decision in haste.

help!! i found my snail outside of her tank and her shell is broken. i read about patching and have a boiled egg shell ready to go but she’s sticking her head out of the hole. i don’t want to try and patch it with her face just out like that, i don’t want to accidentally get super glue on her actual body. can anyone advise me on what to do?? i feel so bad and i want her to be okay more than anything

Hey everyone, so my partner and I decided to raise tadpoles this spring and it’s been immensely fun but they’re almost all toadlets now and growing fast! We scooped some freshly hatched tadpoles out of the river where we live and have had great success in facilitating their growth. They’re native to where we live and ultimately did this for the experience with the intention of releasing them back into the wild once they’re ready. We want to keep one or possibly two and release the rest but I’m now trying to figure out when the best time would be for their release. Our first toadlet emerged on May 10 so they’re all a little under a month old. I don’t want to hold onto them for too long and diminish their chances of survival in the wild but I also don’t want to release them all too early since they’re so small and have been living off flightless fruit flies. Does anyone else have experience in this situation that could offer advice? Any tips are welcome, just trying to do what’s best for these little ones! :)

Is this snex or am I dealing with some nefarious shell munching here?

Holy moly I’m so proud of it 🥹 It looks better than I could have imagined and I know Acorn is going to love it 💞 I’m just waiting for him to wake up and go spray crazy!

newest froglet absolutely chillin before he commits to his terrestrial lifestyle

Hey everyone, so my partner and I have been raising tadpoles (our first time) and they’re starting to become froglets. I’m trying to figure out when we should start moving them from the tank to a small terrarium. This guy has got to be brand new, we didn’t see him yesterday, is he ready to be moved out so we can feed him or is he probably still absorbing his tail?

i’m noticing this as we redo her 40 breeder that had to be scrapped and restarted but i dug her up and saw all these weird little speckles on her skin… is this normal? i don’t feel like i’ve noticed this before and i want to be sure it’s not some sort of parasite or bacterial infection or something. i know reddit is not a replacement for the vet and i will absolutely take her if needed, i just want to know if anyone has seen something like this before. i want to make sure pinkie is as healthy as possible. thank you to anyone who comments!

It’s 6’x2’3’ and I just made changes to the lid so it would look nicer :) I’ll be adding more sprays once they get here. Also, I’m putting a cork liner on the inside of the wheel before I get him. I’m getting a new hamster later today and it’s been about 2 years since my last one. I think this is my best setup yet, my skills have definitely evolved over the nearly decade I’ve owned hamsters lol! I’m open to any suggestions on what to add/change if needed ( ˆ𐃷ˆ) .ᐟ.ᐟ

she has been unearthed, everyone tell her hello 🧡🩷