And if you want to be a write in candidate, you have to register as one. Everyone could decide to write you in at the last minute, but if you didn’t register, it won’t get counted.

brilliantly distressing

Hey, I don’t have to be polite to people who try to invalidate my life experience. Don’t tell me how I work.

Feel free to tell me how YOU work, but telling me that “it doesn’t work that way” when it obviously does for me doesn’t make your experience somehow universal.

Also, this is the Internet, if you can’t handle some people not being polite then I have bad news for you…

I guess I have something similar, but it’s all just nonverbal feelings. I don’t argue with myself about getting up in the morning, I just feel comfortable, lazy, frustrated, determined, and rarely tell myself “get up” but that’s the only voice part.

I love how we are all here talking about how we all think and perceive differently and you decided it was important to tell me that the way I process trauma isn’t real. You can go ahead and fuck right off.

Faces are hard for me too, but not impossible. It’s like AI. It’s easy to get a “teapot” but it takes more work and focus to get a specific individual.

Maybe. One way to process trauma is to re-visit it until it becomes more familiar and less of an extreme experience. Seeing it in your mind may make it more real, but it also means you can just picture a teapot instead if you need to get away from it.

I am trying to wrap my head around this. So if you are just walking down the street alone, watching cars go by, not reading, there a voice? What would it even be saying?

Picture a teapot. Picture it turning over so you can see the other side. Sort of like that.

Look, I’m a man, I’m not feeling insulted by this at all. If you are, maybe it’s time to ask why.

I have no problem being a man while also acknowledging that sexual assault by men is a problem that is big enough that it has created a “caution culture” where people teach their daughters to be vigilant and women will cross the street if someone is walking behind them to stay safe. It isn’t like this is overblown, studies vary but all agree it’s somewhere more than one in ten women are victims of sexual violence in their lifetime. That’s a non-dismissible statistic.

Sure sexual assault by women is a thing too, but men tend to handle it differently than women do. All we are doing here is acknowledging that in our culture “male stranger danger” is a thing that exists and is pervasive and strong enough that many women would be willing to risk the bear because at least it won’t rape them.

Why would you be taking that personally?

The fact that you think the point of this is your status and not someone else’s safety says so much.

Could you elaborate on that?

That’s just renting when the landlord sells the house.

As I near 50 my plan if I ever have to date again is just to wear a pin with my age and “single” on it and if anyone wants to know more they can ask.

Got something similar on my fire stick the other day. It said it could help me get back to the shows I love watching faster if I turn on the new feature that shares all the data from the different apps directly with Amazon.

The only options were yes and ask later. I had to go to settings to find and turn it off.

what we’re being asked to do is suffer alongside without being able to alleviate the suffering.

I know that isn’t actually what people think they are asking for, but it sure feels like it so often.

Thanks for putting this into words for me.

If feel like us guys are at a disadvantage here. All our lives were are told not to complain unless we bring a solution, not to cry, get up, keep moving.

Then suddenly the thought pattern we have been trained on all our lives turns out to not be healthy for supporting others and it’s a hard transition to make when we want so desperately to help and are asked not to.

Not saying it’s wrong, just hard.

It turns out if you save that 10% instead of giving it to the church you might not be destitute when you retire. Or you can buy the church for assistance and see how that goes.