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roach-the-villain · 8 hours

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Petition to add more disabled magical creatures in fantasy

Like picture a mermaid. When they have to be on land their tail turns to legs, but because their body is used to lower gravity their joints tire easily and are chronically in pain.

Also depending on how deep in the ocean they live, it’s likely they have circulation problems because their body is used to the water pressure holding everything where it needs to be and now their blood is always fucking pooling in their legs and they have to wear compression socks everywhere.

Wheelchair user mermaids. Partially/fully blind mermaids because who needs to see when there’s no light at the bottom of the ocean?

Mermaids with sensory issues who have to wear headphones all the time because sound is so much louder up here on land and they are constantly overstimulated. And also the sun is simply Too Bright™.

Mermaids who have POTS because in the water postural changes make no difference and their bodies don’t know how to stabilize with so much gravity.

I’m really fixated on the mermaids rn but PLEASE feel more than welcome to add more!!!! I wanna hear about disabled dragons

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roach-the-villain · 1 day

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At some point in your life, you were taught that being slightly annoying is an unforgivable sin. Maybe it was by your parents or a teacher or a friend or a bully or an older sibling. But someone taught you that being slightly annoying is a crime punishable by death.

You must unlearn this.

You must accept that all people will be annoying at some point or another in their lives, maybe all of their lives, and that this is okay. It is okay for strangers on the bus, it is okay for children in the grocery store, it is okay for people on social media, and it is okay for you.

If you ever want to truly love your fellow humans, if you ever want to truly love yourself, you must have forgiveness for being annoying.

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roach-the-villain · 2 days

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For autistic (and some ADHD) people, internal sensations can be just as dysregulating as external ones.

Feeling excited, hungry, or in pain can also be a source of sensory overload and can contribute to us shutting down or melting down.

This is particularly tricky to navigate when alexithymia or poor interoception makes it hard (if not impossible) to pinpoint the source of these internal sensations

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roach-the-villain · 4 days

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Coquette academia emo pastel goth grunge balletcore moodboard

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roach-the-villain · 4 days

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On this blog (my main) @roach-the-villain I mostly post the random stuff that either seems important or funny or looks nice. I’m not as active in my main as I am my girlblog which is why I haven’t made a separate pinned for it.

🎀 Welcome to my girlblog 💕

💌 Name: Analee Rose Valentine

♥️ Nicknames: Roach/ Roachi

🥀 Age: 24

💋 Gender: agender/ genderqueer hyper femme

💕 Pronouns: anything

🎀 More about me: writer, fashionista, artist, future model/ actor/ singer, and current YouTuber and girlblogger 🎀

🍓 I’m engaged to my wonderful fiancé and so I might post a lot of my overly romantic ramblings obsessing over him 💕

💕I love positivity and women supporting women

💋In my glow up era

❤️‍🩹 Recovery is a relief

💕 My YouTube:

Stay safe and take care of urself ily xx 💋

My old vent blog has moved to @the-real-slimmest-shady

#pinned post #pinned intro #analee rose valentine #mine #Roachi rambles

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roach-the-villain · 4 days

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If I ever become rich there are two things I am doing immediately:

Personal chef and house cleaning service.

My chronically ill ass is so tired of having to figure out what to eat 2-3x a day every day and routinely having to eat suboptimal food because it's available/close by and I'm disabled. And definitely tired of spending all my energy cleaning and then by the time I recover from the cleaning the house is dirty again. I've started waiting longer and longer between cleaning sessions but that just makes me sad because my house is dirty.

But fr I feel like people really underestimate how hard it is to (affordably and regularly) feed yourself good and healthy food when you're disabled and work a full time job. Perhaps if I worked part time or not at all I could go shopping for fresh food and cook my meals at home more, but if I don't work full time I can't afford food at all so...

And same logic goes for cleaning, except it's so hard on my body I'm not sure quitting my job would make that situation much better.

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roach-the-villain · 4 days

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#vintage coquette #girlblogging #coquette #female manipulator #gaslight gatekeep girlblog #girl interupted syndrome #femcel #40s 50s 60s #coquette dollete

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roach-the-villain · 4 days

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me seeing a mutual's happy post: "hell yeah buddy :)" *hits like*

me seeing a mutual's sad/vent post: "aww no buddy :(" *hits like*

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roach-the-villain · 4 days

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my heart goes out to you if you're a disabled person who has a complicated or negative relationship with sleep. if you need to sleep a lot but can't due to life circumstances, or sleeping extra causing other symptoms to flare up. if you can't sleep enough due to pain, or nightmares, or psychosis, or bipolar, or depression. if you sleep way too much and find it hard to stay awake. if you can't fall or stay asleep. if you need medication in order to be able to sleep. if you don't feel rested from sleep. if you wake up a lot in the night. if you have bladder or bowel accidents while asleep. if you twitch or convulse or move too or get injured in your sleep. if you can't control your sleep schedule no matter what. if you can't sleep during "normal" sleeping hours. if you can't sleep for 8+ hours straight but can sleep for shorter amounts of time. if sleep is what you need but for one reason or another you just can't or refuse to do it.

i care about you. your disabilities deserve to be seen and acknowledged

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roach-the-villain · 6 days

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Hey, my fellow Jews with food restriction issues and eating disorders. I see you. I know it can be triggering to have to deal with elaborate food restrictions, and I know that oftentimes people who don't have to deal with this all the time can be really dismissive of how hard this can be for us.

It really isn't the same for someone with celiac or someone in recovery for ED as it is for people not grappling with that, and it's okay if it's too much and you lose your shit or fuck up and eat something you "shouldn't." It's okay if it's really really hard and you feel alone.

You aren't alone, and this isn't supposed to hurt. Please take care of yourself first, body and soul. You can't make it to next year, wherever you may be then, if you don't take care of yourself first, okay?

HaShem does not command us to hurt ourselves, and in fact commands the opposite.

Get rid of the Pharoah in your head whose hard heart asks you to hurt yourself. Be free. It's okay.

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roach-the-villain · 8 days

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Long covid has derailed my life. Make no mistake: It could yours, too.

By Madeline Miller for the Washington Post, August 9th, 2023.

Audio version available in the inline link.

Madeline Miller, a novelist, is the author of “The Song of Achilles” and “Circe.”

In 2019, I was in high gear. I had two young children, a busy social life, a book tour and a novel in progress. I spent my days racing between airports, juggling to-do lists and child care. Yes, I felt tired, but I come from a family of high-energy women. I was proud to be keeping the sacred flame of Productivity burning.

Then I got covid.

I didn’t know it was covid at the time. This was early February 2020, before the government was acknowledging SARS-CoV-2’s spread in the United States.

In the weeks after infection, my body went haywire. My ears rang. My heart would start galloping at random times. I developed violent new food allergies overnight. When I walked upstairs, I gasped alarmingly.

I reached out to doctors. One told me I was “deconditioned” and needed to exercise more. But my usual jog left me doubled over, and when I tried to lift weights, I ended up in the ER with chest pains and tachycardia. My tests were normal, which alarmed me further. How could they be normal? Every morning, I woke breathless, leaden, utterly depleted.

Worst of all, I couldn’t concentrate enough to compose sentences. Writing had been my haven since I was 6. Now, it was my family’s livelihood. I kept looking through my pre-covid novel drafts, desperately trying to prod my sticky, limp brain forward. But I was too tired to answer email, let alone grapple with my book.

When people asked how I was, I gave an airy answer. Inside, I was in a cold sweat. My whole future was dropping away. Looking at old photos, I was overwhelmed with grief and bitterness. I didn’t recognize myself. On my best days, I was 30 percent of that person.

I turned to the internet and discovered others with similar experiences. In fact, my symptoms were textbook — a textbook being written in real time by “first wavers” like me, comparing notes and giving our condition a name: long covid.

In those communities, everyone had stories like mine: life-altering symptoms, demoralizing doctor visits, loss of jobs, loss of identity. The virus can produce a bewildering buffet of long-term conditions, including cognitive impairment and cardiac failure, tinnitus, loss of taste, immune dysfunction, migraines and stroke, any one of which could tank quality of life.

For me, one of the worst was post-exertional malaise (PEM), a Victorian-sounding name for a very real and debilitating condition in which exertion causes your body to crash. In my new post-covid life, exertion could include washing dishes, carrying my children, even just talking with too much animation. Whenever I exceeded my invisible allowance, I would pay for it with hours, or days, of migraines and misery.

There was no more worshiping productivity. I gave my best hours to my children, but it was crushing to realize just how few hours there were. Nothing was more painful than hearing my kids delightedly laughing and being too sick to join them.

Doctors looked at me askance. They offered me antidepressants and pointed anecdotes about their friends who’d just had covid and were running marathons again.

I didn’t say I’d love to be able to run. I didn’t say what really made me depressed was dragging myself to appointments to be patronized. I didn’t say that post-viral illness was nothing new, nor was PEM — which for decades had been documented by people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome — so if they didn’t know what I was talking about, they should stop sneering and get caught up. I was too sick for that, and too worried.

I began scouring medical journals the way I used to close-read ancient Greek poetry. I burned through horrifying amounts of money on vitamins and supplements. At night, my fears chased themselves. Would I ever get relief? Would I ever finish another book? Was long covid progressive?

It was a bad moment when I realized that any answer to that last question would come from my own body. I was in the first cohort of an unwilling experiment.

When vaccines rolled out, many people rushed back to “normal.” My world, already small, constricted further.

Friends who invited me out to eat were surprised when I declined. I couldn’t risk reinfection, I said, and suggested a masked, outdoor stroll. Sure, they said, we’ll be in touch. Zoom events dried up. Masks began disappearing. I tried to warn the people I loved. Covid is airborne. Keep wearing an N95. Vaccines protect you but don’t stop transmission.

Few wanted to listen. During the omicron wave, politicians tweeted about how quickly they’d recovered. I was glad for everyone who was fine, but a nasty implication hovered over those of us who weren’t: What’s your problem?

Friends who did struggle often seemed embarrassed by their symptoms. I’m just tired. My memory’s never been good. I gave them the resources I had, but there were few to give. There is no cure for long covid. Two of my friends went on to have strokes. A third developed diabetes, a fourth dementia. One died.

I’ve watched in horror as our public institutions have turned their back on containment. The virus is still very much with us, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped reporting on cases. States have shut down testing. Corporations, rather than improving ventilation in their buildings, have pushed for shield laws indemnifying them against lawsuits.

Despite the crystal-clear science on the damage covid-19 does to our bodies, medical settings have dropped mask requirements, so patients now gamble their health to receive care. Those of us who are high-risk or immunocompromised, or who just don’t want to roll the dice on death and misery, have not only been left behind — we’re being actively mocked and pathologized.

I’ve personally been ridiculed, heckled and coughed on for wearing my N95. Acquaintances who were understanding in the beginning are now irritated, even offended. One demanded: How long are you going to do this? As if trying to avoid covid was an attack on her, rather than an attempt to keep myself from sliding further into an abyss that threatens to swallow my family.

The United States has always been a terrible place to be sick and disabled. Ableism is baked into our myths of bootstrapping and self-reliance, in which health is virtue and illness is degeneracy. It is long past time for a bedrock shift, for all of us.

We desperately need access to informed care, new treatments, fast-tracked research, safe spaces and disability protections. We also need a basic grasp of the facts of long covid. How it can follow anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of infections. How infections accumulate risk. How it’s not anxiety or depression, though its punishing nature can contribute to both those things. How children can get it; a recent review puts it at 12 to 16 percent of cases. How long-haulers who are reinfected usually get worse. How as many as 23 million Americans have post-covid symptoms, with that number increasing daily.

More than three years later, I still have long covid. I still give my best hours to my children, and I still wear my N95. Thanks to relentless experimentation with treatments, I can write again, but my fatigue is worse. I recognize how fortunate I am: to have a caring partner and community, health insurance, good doctors (at last), a job I can do from home, a supportive publishing team, and wonderful readers who recommend my books. I’m grateful to all those who have accepted the new me without making me beg.

Some days, long covid feels manageable. Others, it feels like a crushing mountain on my chest. I yearn for the casual spontaneity and scope of my old life. I miss the friends and family who have moved on. I grieve those lost forever.

So how long am I going to do this? Until indoor air is safe for all, until vaccines prevent transmission, until there’s a cure for long covid. Until I’m not risking my family’s future on a grocery run. Because the truth is that however immortal we feel, we are all just one infection away from a new life.

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roach-the-villain · 8 days

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So what makes a butcher knife more butch than other knives?

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roach-the-villain · 9 days

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oh shit, it's 3/21/23, 32123, palindrome day

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roach-the-villain · 9 days

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