i am disabled just enough to be in a dilemma.

interpersonal trauma, audhd burnout and immunodefficiency don’t mean i can’t do anything or that i can’t even be as ‘productive’ *over time* as other people. what it means is that:

• i can’t give them ass-in-chair for 8 hours every day;
• my shortterm ‘performance’ cannot be consistent or predictable enough for the boss;
• i can never succeed at the day-to-day drudgework; and
• i can never be a ‘culture fit’ in any workplace.

it’s not that i can’t do anything; it’s that i lack the appearances of profitability.

despite huge past professional successes in complex projects: i am unemployable.

so instead i work a fulltime job with overtime researching my condition, my rights and the local law — filling out paperwork and attending a dozen appointments every month where i answer the same 20 humiliating and condescending questions over and over again, too exhausted to care for myself inbetween — just to keep the disability compensation flowing in. and in every meeting, my ‘giftedness’ and all those times where i was successful are used to clobber me and argue that i’m just being ‘lazy’. i’m never given any treatment, because the healthcare system has been balkanized into poverty by privatisation and New Public Management, and they’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas.

i find time once or twice a month to study, on my own, with pirated courses and books. and the opensource projects i contribute to, and the organising work i scrape up spoons for, and the mutual aid and legal help i give to my disabled comrades, are things i still do. but i have to do them under aliases, and i can’t ever discuss them with anyone who knows me, because if the welfare office finds out: i can end up imprisoned, indebted and permanently marked for ‘welfare fraud’. because part of the deal of being disabled is that i can only be disabled.

no studies; no parttime; no volunteering; no activism. all because of the way i was born, and because i had the audacity to barely survive two separate attempts by politicians to sacrifice my demographics to Moloch. i know several other people in this same Kafkaësque hellworld.

how am i not supposed to end up radicalised?

it seems to be, yeah. i think it’s about how it’s prepared. tempeh, edamame or any ‘raw’ beans are a no-go if i’m unstable, but tofu’s been fine (and soya mince is okay, in moderation).

when i’m fucked up, my ‘tummy stabiliser’ is:

1. two/three slices of toast with light amounts of plantbased margarine, cumin and salt; and
2. ginger tea (or tincture) with ~15 ml apple cider vinegar.

if i’m super fucked up (by my IBS), i also take some simeticone and loperamide with my stabiliser.

my recovery meals consist of things like: pedialyte, soymilk, vegetable/mushroom broth, tofu, rice, soysauce, applesauce, oatmeal, mashed potatoes, coconut yoghurt, saltines, graham crackers, spinach, nutritional yeast, and more toast.

there’s a bot that will do this for you over on lemmy.world. i think you’d like it better over there.

signed out, cleared cookies and cache, restarted browser, signed back in: same issue when in a new tab.

:3c

And it probably would have been better for my mental health growing up if I hadn’t thought “wow if all these adults believe this thing then it must be true and I must just be an idiot” […] Basically the entirety of your hometown, and most of your family members are just delusional. You’re not wrong and they don’t just not believe you because you’re a kid, they just don’t believe in evidence, and there’s no evidence one can use to convince people who don’t believe in evidence.

for me, the thought was: ‘wow, these are the people who get to have power over me? and they use that power to actively limit my potential and freedom of association? these are the people who keep clawing me away from independence, because they think they know better what’s good for me?’

it made ageist remarks — particularly the sexist ones — go from irritating to infuriating. disappointment, anger and deep depression, that these people are allowed to have any responsibility at all.

when you have an AuDHD student who skips lunch every day to read and work in the library, and all the teachers are conspiracy-thinking fundamentalist yokels who: haven’t studied anything in over two decades; only became teachers so they could have power over children; regurgitate superstitions, fakelore and urban legends; and have no concept of information/media literacy — then it’s very possible to be smarter than your teachers and get regularly put in detention for pointing it out.

their diplomas would’ve been better used as toiletpaper.

i live in a country of mostly lactose intolerant white people, and the ingredients list on a ‘vegan’ item will check out except every other item will list ‘lactose’ by itself. and every time i wonder where the fuck the lactose is coming from, or why it seems to be in everything when these people can’t digest it.

a workplace problem that has persistently followed me thru my entire life: at school, at home, and at every job i’ve had, across multiple continents.

i have a ‘non-native’ name which isn’t hard to pronounce but which my coworkers refused to learn, so they started calling me something akin to ‘Jane Doe’ in $language.

when they were told by HR they can’t do that: they took to the funny ‘joke’ of calling me “the bot” and sometimes referring to me as ‘it’. ‘hey, where’s the documentation on this system?’ ‘idk, ask the bot’ my manager even got on my case about how i shouldn’t ‘use ChatGPT to respond to work messages’ — because i wasn’t using ‘enough emoji’.

but i’m the immature one for thinking all the NTs i’ve had in my life are insufferable. ok.

this is the type of comment i want to leave any time someone praises a scandinavian country for almost anything.

the image of the nordics most people outside of them have is from 40 years ago.

support a “right to work” instead of UBI. Work is great and it’s more than making money, you achieve self-determination through work etc etc.

this is common in most of western/northern europe, to the point that most social services for citizens or ‘integration’ support for immigrants ends at employment. the assumption being that any employment is all anyone really needs.

you’ve been fired from your last three jobs because of your worsening depressive spirals? but it didn’t stop you from getting that temp job last week! do some yoga or something smh.

you’re a migrant who doesn’t know the local language? well, it didn’t stop you from getting a job! take a night class or something smh.

you want to switch careers or further your education? but you’re already in a career; clearly your education is fine! attend a conference or something smh.

you have no friends or family and no freetime to develop your hobbies and interests? but you have a job! get drunk with your coworkers on Fridays or something smh.

workwork. okiedokie. zugzug.

i believe they’re @ing you because they’re posting from Mastadon.

before i left my last job, we were being required to use github copilot.

this is after i gave them numbers showing that after one month of trialling it:

• tasks took me the same amount of time on average to complete, but
• code reviews took twice as long, as:
  • the code was shit.
  • i didn’t understand my ‘own’ code.
  • the code wasn’t idiomatic to our design patterns, and had to be rewritten.

i already had half a year of experience of successfully wrangling copilot for extrapolating/translating large/repetitive administrative shell/ansible scripts. but for heavy coding tasks — rather than modelling the problem and developing a solution — i was spending the same amount of time effectively letting a JS bootcamp intern (mis)interpret my specifications line-by-line and then i would proofread their mistakes. in a way, this took more time because it left me very little time for self-review before i was under pressure to move on to the next thing.

the bosses got the same results from the other two people who trialled it, and decided not only to buy into copilot, but to implement chatgpt to automatically write copy and translate it for customers. that went about as well as you might expect.

i am so fucking done with tech.

in most places i’ve lived, my physical neighbours did not want to be known, and did not want to know anyone else, either. granted, most of them really only used their apartments/houses as a very expensive sleeping place and nothing more. they didn’t really live in their houses; it was just where they usually slept between working.

even when the neighbours were friendly, there were no common spaces and the housing too small to accommodate get-togethers, and no third places to go to. and the friendly neighbours were always apart of the conspicuously racist pensioner cabal.

All the time spent thinking how to solve a problem is also work.

try telling that to every manager i’ve ever had.

ˈsɪmpl̩ ɛks

you can hear this pronunciation in this talk from Evgeny Poberezkin, the author of the whitepaper.

my experience is also primarily with tired parents with mortages… who blame minorities for their unhappiness (so they vote right-wing) and get all of their social and emotional fulfilment from work (so they willingly buy into the C-suite cult).

they are also usually so tech illiterate that they have the vibe of someone who never learned a trade and fell for the ‘learn to code’ advice at some point in their life.

tell you that violence is a terrible thing that can never be excused or condoned.

aha! but they say violence has no place in the so-called United States (if you ignore wage slavery, prison labour, the police, and the entire capitalist system). violence overseas always serves their interests, until it doesn’t.

checkmate tankie /s