This scam made the California University study 124 imported oils and found that over 70% of samples failed the tests.

These failed:

Mezzetta

Carapelli

Pompeian

Primadonna

Mazola

Sasso

Colavita

Star

Antica Badia

Whole Foods

Safeway

Felippo Berio

Coricelli

Bertolli

These brands passed:

Corto olive

Lucero

McEvoy Ranch Organic

Omaggio

California Olive Branch

Bariani Olive oil

Lucini

Ottavio

Olea Estates

Cobram Estate

Kirkland Organic

Also, test the olive oil yourself at home. Put the bottle out when cold, or in the fridge for 30 min. if it gets solid, it is pure and has monounsaturated fats.

helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

Responding to "Lesbian is a Powerful Word:" With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

So I wrote the bulk of this essay in February of 2020 when the original article I reference came out. Then… I dunno, something happened. And I forgot about this in the face of… well, you know. Everything. But I think it’s still highly relevant, so I’ve wrapped up the ending, cleaned up my sourcing, and am setting it loose on the world. Enjoy.

A while ago, AfterEllen published an article by Claire Heuchan called “Lesbian is a Powerful Word: Here’s Why We Will Always Need It.”

This bothered me a lot, not because I disagree, but because I felt like the argument being made was disingenuous at best. The author assumed that their definition of lesbian (a biological female who is exclusively attracted to other biological females) is the only valid definition, then proceeded to use this assumption to explain why lesbian identity needed to be protected from modern queer politics or risk erasure.

I wouldn’t just disagree, but would counter-argue that Heuchan is pushing a dangerous false narrative, one that misses a huge swathe of discourse around how the term lesbian can and does fit into non-binary spaces.

But what struck me the most was that the argument itself was poorly constructed. There were multiple instances where I didn’t just disagree, but didn’t think that the argument even made logical sense. For example, at one point Heuchan cites three articles about how modern lesbians dislike the term lesbian. But there are two issues with this: the first is that two of the three articles are joking listicles with no real substance which of course could be torn to shreds with the most basic of counter argument, but the second issue is that Heuchan constructs this as an attack on lesbians by non-lesbians when in fact these articles were about how lesbians themselves feel about the term for their own identity. Not only that, but the only article of substance wasn’t provided a link for, so by lumping that article in with these two joking listicles, and then on top of that falsely claiming that these listicles were written by non-lesbians, Heuchan has literally constructed a strawman argument that non-lesbians are trying to tell lesbians not to use the term because it has too many syllables or sounds like a disease (a point made, ironically, by lesbian icon Ellen, who AfterEllen gets their name from).

I was so frustrated by this lack of well-constructed argument that I did some research, and I discovered that self-proclaimed radical feminist Claire Heuchan has a blog where she made a much longer, more nuanced version of this argument. And although I still disagree with the premise, I think it’s important to acknowledge that for me to respond purely to this AfterEllen fluff piece without an acknowledgement of the fantastic work Heuchan has done on black feminism on her award-winning blog would be as disingenuous as failing to include an intersectional perspective of lesbian that is trans-inclusive in an argument about where the term lesbian fits into modern queer rhetoric. Because not only is it the case that lesbian can fit into modern queer rhetoric, it’s a conversation that is happening in trans-inclusive spaces.

But Heuchan’s accomplishments as a black radical feminist don’t change the fact that she’s a radical feminist, and only the briefest dissection of her six-part series on sex and gender does legitimize my concern that this means that Heuchan is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. And on some level, I have a hard time taking trans-exclusionary arguments seriously, because they so frequently construct a false narrative. Heuchan’s argument assumes that all lesbians agree with her definition of lesbian, because in her world, a lesbian is a cis woman attracted exclusively to cis women, and anyone calling themselves a lesbian who doesn’t fall into that category is contributing to lesbian erasure. 

It’s a winner-take-all argument that allows for absolutely no middle ground, because all dissent is just considered oppressive patriarchy. Heuchan doesn’t believe in gender. At all. She believes that gender is a tool by the patriarchy to keep women (and by women she means people with vaginas) oppressed. So any argument that I attempt to make about queering lesbianism to include trans women or non-binary folks is stopped before it even gets to the discussion stage because the premise that people can identify as women at all is considered invalid.

If I were to make a counter-argument to the AfterEllen article, it would be to say that “lesbian” does have a checkered history of transphobia which means that lesbians like me have trouble relating to it. So do I stop identifying as a lesbian because it feels like other lesbians are trying to push me and the people I love out? Or do I try to open it so that more people can be included? The argument I would make is that lesbian fits into modern queer politics better by opening. Lesbian used to be defined as an attraction to women in general (fellow queer tumblrina star-anise has documented this extremely well), not an exclusive one, and that older definition is very compatible with modern queer politics. A loosening on the reigns of lesbian would allow non-binary folks and trans women to find acceptance of the very real experience they have. And although trans-inclusive rhetoric can get pretty aggressive, at times complaining that lesbians refusing to date trans women is itself transphobic, I think there is a place in the middle where we can acknowledge that trans lesbians and cis lesbians who date trans women exist, while still allowing for preference, much like anything else. No one is forcing transphobic lesbians to date trans women. This point even gets brought up in the much longer discussion Heuchan is encouraging on her blog, when she talks about the “cotton ceiling.” But the way in which it’s brought up here conflates the argument in a disingenuous way, not only by pointing out that the cotton ceiling was coined by a trans woman but then not providing links to the original conversation, but then also by dismissing the entire argument of the cotton ceiling and by extension the trans activist’s extremely valid point that cis lesbians are bad at talking about trans inclusion. 

I want to add a sidebar here to say that actually I think I can understand why Heuchan didn’t cite the original cotton ceiling discussion. It’s poorly archived. I am not the only person who has looked and failed to find the original source. Wikipedia doesn’t even cite the original source - they cite an academic article citing a blog that no longer exists. The oldest sources I can find are trans exclusive radical feminists tearing into it as early as March 2012, but none of them screenshot the original tweet (it is implied it’s a tweet). If it weren’t for the fact that I have heard other trans activists use the term, I would almost say it was made up whole cloth. At the very least I think it is telling that the term traveled through Heuchan’s spaces far more than it did trans activist spaces - potentially an example I see not infrequently of radical feminists blowing a bad take out of proportion and treating it as representative of trans perspective as a whole. 

To go back to my point about Heuchan’s premise, there is a counter-argument being skirted around that seeks to incorporate lesbianism into modern queer politics. The problem is that Heuchan’s argument doesn’t allow for this possibility at all, doesn’t even acknowledge it, because from a trans-exclusionary radical feminist viewpoint, lesbians who have sex with trans women are no longer lesbians and therefore do not get a say.

Another way to construct this argument would be to say that Heuchan is arguing that lesbians who think lesbianism includes dating trans and non-binary folks are themselves contributing to lesbian erasure, and that trans-exclusionary lesbianism is here to stay. But phrased this way, the argument sounds a lot less defensible. Because from that perspective, the trans-exclusionary stance is one that stands against other lesbians specifically. 

And yeah. It does.

Lesbian is a powerful word, and I want it to be here to stay. But it’s hard to advocate for a term when so many people have tried so hard to link the term lesbian with transphobia. And this especially hurts when… it’s just not true. 

In March of 2023, the LGBT+ youth charity Just Like Us published an early report on their survey on trans inclusivity among LGBT young adults. They found that of the over 3,000 LGBT+ young adults surveyed, lesbians were the most inclusive orientation, with a staggering 96% saying they were supportive or very supportive of trans people. 

Queer folk are more supportive than the general populace, but 96% is unreal. And yet, those numbers back up my own experience in lesbian spaces. Almost all of us are supportive or very supportive of the trans people in our lives. 

Lesbian does not necessarily just mean “female homosexual.” It can be a cis woman attracted to femmes. It can be a non-binary she/they. It can be a he/him butch. Hell, believe it or not, some trans women are also lesbians. 

Lesbians aren’t being erased. It’s just that a lot of the people calling themselves lesbians now are people you disagree with.

Welcome to the club.

Do Not Give Away Personal Information

Hopefully folks see this even though I'm a very small blog, but I have an important safety PSA for the zoomers on tumblr. Story time (Names and Locations have been changed for privacy).

Yesterday, I was waiting for the bus. There was a fashionable young man sitting on the bench with me. It wound up being kind of a long and boring wait, and so inevitably, this young man and I started making small talk. We found out we had a bit of a six degrees of separation connection - we were both doing events at the same venue, though on different days. We got into it a little bit more, and he explained that he got this venue spot through his dad, then gave me his dad's first name.

So that's personal information number one and number two: his dad's first name is Lincoln and he's associated with the Crowe Community Center.

We were chatting more, about the weather this time, and he mentioned how much more he liked the weather than in North Dakota. This stranger, unprompted, gave me three pieces of personal information. I would like to defend myself a little bit by saying that initially when I Googled "Lincoln Crowe Community Center" it was because I wondered if I knew who this was. After all, I was doing an event there too, so maybe our connection was a little closer than I thought. However, it became immediately apparent that this young man's zoomer inclination to not safeguard his information combined with his parents' boomer inclination to overshare meant that almost immediately I had a massive amount of personal information at my disposal. The "young man" I met isn't a man at all - he's a minor. His name is Gus Johnson and he goes to school and West Side High School, which is a little bit odd, considering he lives at 45 East Brewer Ave, on the other side of town. But turns out his dad Lincoln Johnson and mom Rebecca Johnson are fundamentalists - in fact, Lincoln was a minister at Living Promise, which is a tiny evangelical church he founded that was running out of someone's basement for a while. They were so fundamentalist in fact that they pulled their four kids (Gus, Jeremy, Abigail, and Saul) out of school, but couldn't manage it with schedules and finances for very long, and so sent them to West Side instead of East Side (probably because East Side was too liberal, but that's an extrapolation on my part). I found the social media pages of every single one of his immediate family, his parents' jobs, the city where he grew up, the high school his dad went to, his date of birth and year in school, along with several important life events, all within about 20 minutes. At some point I started to get morbidly curious, and just kept kicking over rocks, and then out scurried a bunch of driver's licenses and library cards as fast as they could. I want to emphasize again that I had a fifteen minute conversation with a random child at a bus stop, and that child revealed enough information that I was able to get his home address and the address of his school, and where his dad works, along with 6 separate social media accounts, without any tools beyond searching publicly available information. Most people are good people. I'm not going to do anything nefarious with this information, and probably won't even remember the details tomorrow. The problem is that the kind of person who would do something nefarious would have been even friendlier than I was, making up lies and asking prompting questions until the kid had given up even more private information than he did. Do. Not. Give. Strangers. Private. Information. And if you are going to say something personal and private, don't make it worse by saying more than one. Knowing his dad's name and home state wouldn't have pulled up the right Lincoln. Knowing his dad's name and association with the community center would have pulled up the right guy, but then I would have had to spend extra time confirming that it was him. And most of the time, people aren't going to take the extra step. Knowing his dad's name and association with the community center, and that he was from North Dakota, meant that the very first search result I got (a bio from the center) meant I knew in five seconds that I'd found the right Lincoln Johnson.

I just saw a story on AO3 tagged "pet p!ay"

TIK TOK MUST BE STOPPED BEFORE IT DESTROYS LANGUAGE

How To Be Anti-Zionist WITHOUT Being Antisemitic

Yes! It's possible! But it's not automatic.

This post is by no means comprehensive, but bear in mind rule one of the Internet: You CANNOT tell the difference between a well-meaning yet uninformed leftist, and a neo-Nazi sockpuppet pretending to be a leftist to spread antisemitic rhetoric. Reading and absorbing the information in this post will help you avoid dipping into antisemitic modes of thinking.

Don't deny Jewish history in Palestine. There's been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine ever since the Romans destroyed Judea - and not just the descendants of Jews who stuck around after that; Jews have been making aliyah to Palestine, and specifically the four holy cities (Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem), for pretty much the entire history of the Jewish Diaspora. Every time Jews got expelled from somewhere, some Jews migrated to Palestine. There was even an attempt, in the middle of the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians in the 7th century, to regain political autonomy in Palestine and reconstitute Judea under the Sasanids (it, uh, obviously didn't succeed.) This is all historical fact, but that doesn't mean any of it justifies apartheid in the modern day. Denying the history doesn't help anyone, it just makes you antisemitic.

Don't whitewash the Jewish population in Israel. Ashkenazim only make up about 31% of Israel's Jewish population, less if you consider that the 2019 study would have counted Bulgarian and Greek Jews as Ashkenazim, when they're in fact Sephardic. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim who were expelled from other countries in the SWANA region who wrongly blamed their local Jewish populations for the Nakba. There is an internal racial dynamic within Israel where Ashkenazim hold hegemony, and that is worth critiquing in concert with Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but just saying "Jews are white Europeans" is antisemitic and flatly wrongheaded. Jews are an ethnoreligious group whose members come from all racial backgrounds.

Don't invoke classic antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty, or tell Jewish Israelis to "go back where they came from". Most Israelis do not have a second passport, are not eligible for a second passport, and cannot return to wherever they or their grandparents came to Palestine from. Litvak Israelis can't return to Lithuania, their communities were destroyed by the Nazis and then paved over and replaced by the Soviets. Moroccan Israelis can't return to Morocco, they were expelled. American Israelis only make up about 5% of the Israeli population. Jews have always lived on "other people's land", the difference in Palestine is that we're the oppressor, rather than the oppressed.

Understand why Israelis fear the Palestinian Right to Return, even if that fear is something you (rightly) oppose. It's true that settlers always become anxious about the people whose land they stole fighting back, but with Israelis this is even more potent due to two thousand years of antisemitism, and in particular, an event in living memory. In 1932, German and Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, and when the Evian Conference was held in 1938 to address what to do with the Jewish refugees, all 32 countries in attendance refused to take in more than at most 30,000 Jewish refugees, and that "most" was from the USA and the UK. (Except the Dominican Republic, but that was because Trujillo wanted to bring in a surge of Europeans to overwhelm the country's Black population, so...) When my country, Canada, itself a settler colony, was asked how many Jewish refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war, the infamous response was "None is too many." Golda Meir, then representing the British Mandate in Palestine, and later a Prime Minister of Israel who said and did some awful shit to Palestinians, was not permitted to speak or participate in the conference, she was only allowed to observe as country after country refused to accept Jewish refugees in any large number. (Though it should be noted that Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first President and Prime Minister of Israel respectively, actually supported this bullshit, because they thought having nowhere else to go would drive Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were right.) Israeli settlers are terrified of becoming a minority, because they do not trust the Palestinians to be any different from the rest of the world. And again, none of this justifies Israeli apartheid, but it elucidates where the Israelis are coming from, and should inform your anti-Zionist work.

Be specific and precise in where your principled anti-Zionism is coming from. To say that "the State of Israel is an openly settler-colonialist venture that has displaced millions of Palestinians and continues to engage in daily human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing" is specific and precise. To say that "Zionists use the Holocaust to play victim and get whatever they want"... do you understand the difference between those two statements? And why the second one might sound like when you say "Zionists", what you really mean is "Jews"?

Avoid double standards. Unless you genuinely believe that all white people should be kicked out of the Americas and return to Europe, don't apply that same belief to Israeli Jews. There is no post-Israeli future in Palestine that doesn't involve Jews living there. See points 1 and 4. And just to be clear, avoiding double standards cuts both ways. There is also no just future that involves the continued apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It's evil, fascist, and genocidal for Israeli military officials to say that for all they care Gazans can go jump into the sea.

For fuck's sake stop putting the Neturei Karta on my dash. The Neturei Karta are a fringe group of Litvish Haredim who split off from other Haredim in Jerusalem. They're very publicly anti-Zionist while also being visibly ultra-Orthodox, so they get a lot of attention, but they're also Holocaust revisionists who attended and spoke at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference whose other speakers included David Duke of the KKK and several outright Holocaust deniers, and their leader defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a president of Iran who claimed Jews made up the Holocaust. If you want anti-Zionist Jews, there are plenty of us. Check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, or even the Satmar if you really want Haredim. Don't give the fucking Neturei Karta any oxygen.

Finally: Zionism is not a euphemism. Zionism is not "when Jews do a thing I don't like," and a Zionist is not "a Jew I disagree with/don't like". Zionism is a nationalism, and like all nationalisms, it hasn't fully delivered on the liberation it was created to provide, and it's oppressed others in the process. Zionism will never go away until the material conditions that drive Jewish nationalism - that is, global antisemitism - are addressed, and yet the Palestinian right to liberation is not and must not be contingent on the end of antisemitism. This is the fundamental problem at the core of the issue: Zionists believe Jewish safety will only come from a Jewish ethnostate with a Jewish majority, and since everywhere on Earth is populated by someone, it may as well be in Palestine, given the Jewish historical roots there. And they're wrong. They're doing horrific, evil, genocidal things in the name of Jewish safety, and they're wrong to do so. But we can condemn Zionism from an informed perspective, rather than from an ignorant one, and in doing so avoid antisemitism and strengthen our anti-Zionist work. The last thing we want to do is spread Nazi rhetoric in the name of Palestinian liberation.

Recently I've started calling my old Southern Baptist church a cult, but I felt weird about it because I had always been taught that cults formed around central charismatic figureheads.

But by this definition, it fully applies. Fundamentalist churches seem across the board in America to score very high on the BITE model in terms of cultish behavior. Some of the more extreme ones are not present, or at least not present in obvious ways.

For example, controlling where one lives. Obviously my church did not corral all the members into a compound. But I will say that the members considered it strange and notable that we didn't live in the same neighborhood as everyone else. If we lived in Jamestown, we should be going to the Jamestown church, not the Lewisville church. So even though there was not overt control about geography, it was used to encourage group think.

Anyway depending on how you count it, my old Southern Baptist church checks yes on between 28-32 of these 35 criteria. Yikes.

America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

This was an interesting read. Surprisingly nonpreachy given the subject; and well worth the time.

this site is very funny

I just don't get the appeal of streams

It's also much better for you! The oversaturation of blue light fucks up our night vision, makes it harder to sleep and relax, and damages your eyes! Red lights are better overall.

perhaps some will disagree, but i think the world got worse when we changed the colour of the night

Hi @psychoticallytrans, that's not at all what the science is based on. This person says, "no one knows how or why it works" which is an exaggeration. We absolutely know how it works, otherwise there wouldn't be research. No one knows for sure why EMDR works, but we do know for sure that Tetris can be used as a form of EMDR. We knew about EMDR so we tried gamifying EMDR. It is supposed to be done as soon as possible because the act of moving your eyes in a pattern during a traumatic event helps appropriately pack memories, so it should be done in conjunction with the memory, but you can actually do EMDR well after the fact with a trained mental health therapist. A version of this that wasn't about tetris would be literally looking around and refocusing your gaze to the environment (which should sound familiar from literally the thing that people do after a sudden traumatic event like a car crash), but more specifically moving your eyes across the horizon back and forth. Since this is a screenshot, here's a couple of articles: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7828932/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005796717300670?via%3Dihub https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/

I thought uquizzes were supposed to be fake.

Have you ever wondered what flower from Victorian flower language you are? I have! I have a quiz about it! (my credentials are that I have a spreadsheet of over 600 flower meanings)

I also cannot handle horror, which is why I never talk about it on my pop culture media analysis diary, but that was my first thought as well that the horror in question is due to the surveillance state.

It's not just the surveillance state. I think it bears bringing up that these are subtle overarching themes, but there are also extremely explicit things that the authors stated intent about, and given what those themes are for 2020s horror, I don't think it should be left unstated, especially because they do tie in. A movie like Nope for example isn't just about the fear of observation as the surveillance state. It's about being observed as a minority specifically. The surveillance state, purity culture, these themes of being observed, they do affect everyone, but there is a greater threat of violence if you are a minority.

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

Landscapes of the Pacific Northwest 2

As I mentioned in 1, you can buy prints of these works at

Personally. This is my favorite. It's the Yakima River, which I've pinic'ed on many times. I love the gloss on the water, the way the medium makes the basalt sing. This was a joy to work on.

Since these are partly a catalogue of my journey, I should mention that my partner helped a little. I've gotten into the habit, as a result of this piece, of turning a completely finished project to my partner and saying, "okay, what is it that you think I'm still working on" and partner will invariably say something which winds up improving the piece. For this one, it was the shading under the shrub covered island. Always get a second pair I'd eyes on your work.

Wool isn't very tasty. Buy me a ko-fi:

Hi, I don't mean to bother you, but I'm at a loss and don't know anyone reliable to ask, but this is regarding your text post about SAVE. I went to apply for it, and got directed to apply for an IDR plan. Two days later the servicer received the IDR application, then I got a monthly statement from the servicer the day after. I checked my studentaidgov account and it states the IDR plan is approved. I try going to the SAVE plan, but get directed to IDR? Is there anything else I need to do?

Answering this publicly because student loans are scary and confusing. Save IS an income-driven repayment plan, so being redirected to IDR is normal and correct. It will tell you which plan you applied for on the student aid website (studentaid.gov) if you navigate to My Activity on your account dashboard. You can select View All Activity and there will be a little more info. Screenshot for context!

If you aren't happy with what your requested IDR is, you can go back through the steps of applying under the Manage Your IDR option. You should be given all of the different IDRs that you qualify for. See below screenshot for context.

In all likelihood SAVE will be your best option. But it might not be. It's important to actually look at them and assess.

Anyway, go forth and save money, tumblr!

Most people only really know about Freudian psychotherapy, which is good for self reflection and regular mental maintenance, but there are lots of other types of therapies. Dialectic, behavioral, immersion etc. If the therapy that you're doing feels like it isn't working for you, like there's no point... you're probably using the wrong methodology. Most folks I know getting therapy for ADHD are doing cognitive behavioral therapy, to talk through issues ADHD is causing and build an action plan to reduce those problems - it's cognitive AND it's behavioral.

For me specifically, when I was doing therapy, I was doing something called EMDR.

EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It is well documented as a form of trauma integration. For folks who have recent or repressed trauma, EMDR is a really effective way of confronting and reprocessing that trauma so that it does not cause continued or delayed distress.

At the time, I'd been diagnosed with a really serious disease, which if left untreated is absolutely deadly, and it was literally triggering. I found myself in a mental state more similar to when I was a teenager than as a fully grown adult. I was depersonalizing badly. I was so exhausted and disconnected from my body that I was sleeping 18 hours a day. I wasn't eating. I needed the mental equivalent of triage, so we did EMDR. An average session with my therapist would go like this:

Talk about things since last week that had come up, in particular intrusive thoughts, feelings, or memories

Talk about a traumatizing event that has been particularly present, or one that came up in a previous session

2-5 minute Guided meditation which seeks to go further and further back in time to trace lines of recurring traumatic events or similar feelings.

After meditating, track a moving ball with your eyes

May or may not wish to discuss the memory that came up during guided meditation

Repeat steps 3-5 about five times

After dwelling on the traumatizing event in this way, imagine packing it away - putting it in a container, closing or sealing the container in some way, and sending it out of yourself

Refocus on the present using a focal point in the space that you are in

These steps required prep work first - building trust with the therapist, building a mental space to go in the guided meditation. And sessions could actually be pretty intense. It's like when you have a closet that at some point got kind of cluttered, and you keep tossing things on the top of the pile, because you just don't have time to clean it proper, and then you try to shove a broom in there and something about halfway down buckles and all of a sudden fifty-seven paper bags, three coats, a pair of shoes, and a bag of dog food spring out of the closet and all over the floor and you're standing there looking at it debating leaving it there for the rest of time.

But in your brain.

Doing this work shook loose old emotions that had been packed away. Doing enough of the work repacked those emotions better. It helped me work through an actual mental crisis and gave me valuable tools for working through stress in the future.

So yes. If you feel that therapy isn't working for you, try new therapy. We're all supposed to exercise, but not everyone likes running. So you go swimming instead. Some people can't exercise in normal ways because they're injured, so they do special exercises with clinically proven movements to try to work through the injury. Therapy is literally like that. If Freudian psychoanalysis isn't working for you, try cognitive behavioral, or dialectical, or literally anything else. There's plenty to choose from. If you feel like your therapy isn't working for you, tell your therapist that and talk about doing a different mode of therapy. If they don't know other modes... well then honestly you should probably consider a different therapist. Therapy is work and takes effort, but it shouldn't feel like a chore.

I've been putting off asking this, because I didn't want to fuck with anyone's process, and I know it can be hard to talk about therapy or hard to do it if you've talked about it, but like...people who are in therapy and feel you're deriving benefit from it, what do you do in it? Not generic stuff like "work on my problems", specifically what do you say and do? What do they do? What is the benefit you feel you get?

The problem I'm having is that it feels like how Catholic friends have talked to me about going to confession as kids before they fully understood how it worked, making stuff up to confess because they hadn't done much to warrant confession. I keep trying to come up with things therapy could help with, stuff to bring to the meetings, and not finding much. My therapist is fine, it's not that she's unhelpful; she does the stuff a therapist is supposed to do, like validating or active listening, but I don't really need validation and I don't feel any benefit from just talking about stuff. I think my access to catharsis is very narrow if it's present at all.

I tried bringing therapy types of problems to her, interpersonal stuff, but most of those I don't really have a say in solving, and the ones that I can influence I generally have already worked on. It feels like roughly 99% of my problems could be solved with money (admittedly more money than I have or probably ever will) and the other 1% aren't...solvable. Like there isn't much a therapist can do about the AC being off for the next three weeks in my building.

But my only other experience of this is when I was a kid and didn't get a say in it, and that generally felt like an obscure form of punishment. And I know people do get something out of it! It's not me trying to take a passive aggressive swipe at therapy. I'm just perplexed as to what I'm meant to be doing to make it useful. I feel like I'm missing the point, but also like maybe I'm just not someone the point was meant for.

I'm not trying to call myself the picture of mental health or anything but like, you can't talk-therapy ADHD into submission, and the other issues aren't under my control. I tried floating the idea of improving my emotional regulation but I suspect this is as good as it gets, because there doesn't seem to be any kind of process or system for fixing that. I don't especially anticipate it or feel better or worse about things after, I just log off the call and get on with fixing dinner. It's a non event other than the copay and an hour spent on Zoom. Which I can spare, I don't mind the money or the time, it's just....why am I doing it?

So, what do you do? Because if I get answers about stuff I'm not doing then I can try that, and if I get answers about stuff I've tried, maybe this just isn't for me. Wouldn't be the first time and won't be the last that I'm not quite built for something that other people find valuable. Although admittedly usually it's a tv show or a video game and not mental health treatment.