no boys allowed in the room!!!!

In more fun news, I got this cool dress thing from my MIL for my birthday:
https://www.shopzuri.com/collections/all/products/hearttoheart?variant=9592210292783

wow that is v cool

Xp Bartholin’s gland cyst, maybe? They are very common and nbd unless it is bothersome (painful).

That dress is so badass

Yeah it doesn’t hurt and is v v small so I haven’t been worried, but also I’m v much head-the-sand when it comes to health problems 😬

I recently found some of my paper dolls from 30 years ago. Some are from the Eva Joia Club magazine and some I drew myself. I keep meaning to take pictures of them.

I love that dress. The period tracker app I finally started using: month 4, it is 50% accurate at this point. But thaat's more a problem of my cycle than anything. I was early by 5 days last month!

xpost quincie I can barely anymore with these guys muddling through their "manhood." It's probably why I go the asshole route because I get so irritated. This shit shouldn't be this hard.

i think about this thread a lot, hello thread

hello y'all

i am tired of arguing

Helloa estelloa!

Yeah I don't care enough to argue w people anymore so I end up...not posting. Mostly I wish I had more time to DO things, like gardening or DIY. Yerac, you'e a champ.

After the holidays I'm going to get my health stuff in order: heart health & other things. Too many ppl in my family have had heart trouble and I'm worried by the difference in symptoms between men and women: the "known" signs of a cardiac event are burning, tension in chest, pain in arm, ie the things that men experience. But apparently in women, the start of a heart attack feels like...back pain or muscle tension in your upper back. Which I have literally every day and resolve with foam roller and/or rubber balls to roll out the cramps. But if it were something else, how would I know? So...to the doctor I go.

Yeah, we are on a cycle of pain so I don't know if I would be able to pinpoint something extremely abnormal. And I would probably wait until I could no longer move to see a doctor. I was thinking yesterday of maybe looking more at the iwatch or whatever it's called that has the ekg thing. Even though I swore off buy anything new apple.

Both my dad and my younger brother have already had heart attacks and I worry that I've possibly already experienced some kind of cardiac events but when the symptoms are "dizziness, fatigue, muscle ache, nausea" which are also the symptoms of every kind of sickness EVER, there's a certain lack of clarity about where to direct my unfocused anxiety.

I always think I am having kidney failure right before I get my period and then I have to remember how much higher my kidneys are.

My brother had a heart attack at 38 but I am pretty sure that was due to steroids and too much chinese takeout.

i am giving myself the gift of mental health this holiday season. pretty excited about it tbh!!

this is the first time i have deemed myself worth the trouble. a positive development!

in orbit i am glad you are also concerned about your health -- caring for our bodies can be terrifying. keep breathing!

Excited for you LL! You are worth whatever it takes! Ilu. How is the quest for mental health going? There should be a board game.

My brother's heart attack was in his mid-30s and he was an extremely fit cyclist with a low resting heart rate so I'm probably rolling the dice. I need to love myself more and make better and less fatalistic choices. I'm starting to look at being with my romantic partner in the longer term and it's giving me all kinds of complexes.

Speaking of which I know a lot of us have our own special relationships with the institution of marriage, and I, for one, am extremely freaked out by the whole idea but life is kind of forcing me into it thanks to our broken health care system and my desire to hold an EU passport lol. I welcome any reflections on weddings, married-ness, etc.

i wasn't super into being married but i have been for 15 years this year and it has been great! sounds stupid, but i love being able to choose my family and he is it.

as for my mental health, i have started by trying to repair my severely fucked up nervous system via flotation therapy and i am way into it. it's everything i hoped it would be.

weddings are whatever you want them to be, or not. i think everyone should do their own thing based on their personal and cultural needs.

based on my friends' experiences of weddings (i haven't had a wedding, but want one ... long story), it seems like the most stress comes from family and family expectations vs. what you want ... also money.

yeah that is why i added the "cultural needs"
i didn't have that issue and my parents were used to me at that point. i agreed to not elope and that was about it.

Event planning gives me hives and I have no desire to spend .01$ on this although my perspective could change over the next year+ before it would actually happen. Like I said, it's a ways out there. I'm just having to be slightly more concrete about something I thought was safely far away in my future. Lol suddenly the future is now.

Going several non-traditional routes for which there is not an over-abundance of role models: marriage without a wedding (not that unusual anymore) and not living together (possibly never living together), which is a little weirder (shout out to Yerac for blazing this trail). Whatever we need and can support happening is what will happen obvs--I'm not going to go crazy.

Just reflecting. Also bored at work tbh.

event planning also gives me hives and i hate spending money so that is why i didn't do it. you are under no obligation to do it either unless your family is literally forcing you. just relax about it and do what you want.

I love planning events and have done so professionally, hence why I want a wedding at some point in my life ... but if you have a strong aversion to event planning ... yeah. follow the wisdom of La Lechera

Oh, I want to hear more about flotation therapy whenever you have time.

inorbit, just do whatever you want to do. I did. the only thing I would've changed is maybe not having drank so much two nights before during a co-op board meeting when i hadn't been drinking all month. I also did not invite my brothers which I have absolutely no regrets about. I am trying to think what we spent money on.
F got a new tie and shirt (our friend who works at RL took him to use his employee discount)
I got a non-wedding dress off the internet and that jacket I wanted
Picked out flowers for a bouquet the night before at Sprout in Blyn it was like $40
Paid for my parents' hotel room
Fees for city hall (we didn't have a photographer, just my friend's iphone)
Subway?
F's dad paid for lunch after at Gramercy Tavern
Dinner for 16 people at L'artusi the night after in their wine room. We went through like, 22 bottles of wine. But I think it still stayed decently priced at like ~$2000?
Karaoke after in koreatown, byob. I really don't know how long people stayed. ~$400-$500?

And things change, F and I went two years without living together, 6 years living together and then 7 years not living together. Both of us had full developed other lives so it wasn't a big deal. Now we've been living together again for the last 2 years? And I had huge anxiety the night we got married "like wtf have I done?" And then I got over it. It's all exactly the same.

Jesus christ I haven't told my family anything, I'm not an idiot. If my mom finds out we even talked about it, I'll have created a monster.

I haven't figured out where my over-abundance of ~*^~*FEELINGS~*^*~^* is coming from, I'm sure more than one place. I'm not that into marriage and feel kind of claustrophobic at the thought of "forever," but the legal formality solves several other problems. And my partner deserves for me to fish or cut bait and not act like I need to have one foot out the door all the time. I mean I know myself, I'm not going anywhere and my life would be poorer without my partner, who's absolutely committed to me and supportive of basically whatever I want. I'm just not very relationship-focused/romantic/whatever, I'm sure partly because I was taught all this Evangelical Christian marriage stuff for 20+ years of my life. It's time for me to heal myself from my past I think, and be able to move forward.

Sorry for processing out loud a bit.

xp LOLOLOLOL "And I had huge anxiety the night we got married "like wtf have I done?" And then I got over it. It's all exactly the same." <--- this sounds familiar and is extremely helpful.

what would you like to know? i think everyone gets their own benefits from it and arrives at it for their own reasons. my strategy for talking about it is to ask "do you find the words 'sensory deprivation' appealing?" and if so, i keep talking. if not, i stop.

for me, it's an absolute dream come true. obviously it would not be for everyone.

It's time for me to heal myself from my past I think, and be able to move forward. otm -- that is why i am optimistic about my gift to myself of mental health.

it = flotation therapy, sorry for xposting

I was having panic attacks in the middle of the night after it was all done. It was terrible. And I so don't care about marriage and think it's a terrible deal for most women.

I told my parents a month before calling from an airport right before I got on an international flight. I was just like, this is what's happening, it will be lowkey, you don't need to come but if you do I will keep two seats at dinner for you.

oh, i know almost nothing about it and thought it was for going into a meditative state.

in some ways it is. i am using it to heal my nervous system, which has been malfunctioning to the point that it is interfering with my ability to function normally.

my life would be poorer without my partner, who's absolutely committed to me and supportive of basically whatever I want. I'm just not very relationship-focused/romantic/whatever

of course you should focus on what you want and you need, whether that's this partner, or any partner. Idk I have a close friend that is the serial monogamist type that is having issues w/r/t her partner, who lives with her, and she has complicated feelings, mixed feelings, but she will say, "well, he is in love with me and is supportive of whatever I want to do" -- and to me, there's an element of gender conditioning there, where as women, we are taught that we need to be in a relationship and that we are, in a sense, the object of our partner's affection, and it's less about what we want, whether this partner is the right person for us. I definitely grew up with that. So, it's the kind of thing where I end up questioning "is this what I really want, or is this about me finding contentment in meeting socio-cultural standards for success as a woman?"

otm "is this what I really want, or is this about me finding contentment in meeting socio-cultural standards for success as a woman?"

I hate that women think getting married is success or an achievement.

my strategy is to just forget about these straw-women -- even if they do exist, i don't share their belief system. for example, many people (friends, people i haven't even met) snap-judge me because i changed my name when i got married. in reality, those people don't know the first thing about me, why i made the very deliberate decision to do that, or what its significance is to me. who cares what they think? i sort of relish people being mostly wrong about me if they are going to leap to conclusions about something they know nothing about. been dealing with this my whole life tbh. fuck it!

xp to LL: That is concerning and I'm glad you found something therapeutic that you'd been wanting for a long time!

xxp to sarahell: I hear you and agree with all of that. I think I would be fine not being in a relationship but this person brings a lot of things to my life that I would miss and would have a less rich life if they were gone. If I did the math I'm sure I get more than I put in, by my own measure, because he has different needs than I do and that's our balance. I would be fine staying together without marrying but the world is not that way--the first time he has any health need, it will bankrupt him, and looking long term I don't want him to die because he can't go to a cardiologist or w/e. So for our mutual well-being I need to resolve some of my shit.

xxxp: my strategy is to just forget about these straw-women -- even if they do exist, i don't share their belief system. SNAPS X 1000

god it feels good to say "fuck it!"

you are all great and I support you in the fuck its!

Ilx is quite difficult to come to as a new person and it feels (to me anyway) like everyone knows each other a long time and that can be quite intimidating because you don’t want to be the stupid outsider blundering in. I feel this even more keenly with threads like this, but I’m posting here cos I’m glad it exists and I also notice the lack of female posters in most threads.

I generally stick to a few threads for various reasons (UK politics mostly because it’s relevant and it’s nerdy enough for me not to bore people irl about it), but I have read the same threads as previously mentioned and have avoided posting on there for much the same reasons.

I used to be much much more interested in talking about these sorts of topics when I was younger online but I got so ground down by having my experiences denied and just really aggressive responses and it’s like, what’s the fucking point? It doesn’t change anyone’s minds.

Sorry to go on like, but tl;dr I like this thread even if I don’t know anyone else on here and I’m always happy to see it active!

in orbit, I used to want to get married when I was younger and I’ve been engaged a while but really feel no urgency to do so, weirdly. 99% of the reason is worrying about disappointing family and mental health (lol I’m a mess) but I love my other half and want to be married to him. Ideally I’d love to just say fuck it and do a registry office wedding but my family, I think, expect certain things. I should really just do it.

LL, I hope you don’t mind me commenting, but that’s a really great thing to read. I hope it goes well for you.

most of the posters here have been here way longer than me, so I totally empathize re new-ness

And I just realised reading that that I’ve posted on and off here for years, so I realise it might sound ridiculous lol but it’s how I still feel! Thank you, I’m glad I’m not the only one!

I was going to say, I for sure know your name!

I lurked on ilx for the first couple of years because I was intimidated at the intellectual standard of discussion. So even though I've been here for a long time, I was not immune. Now I don't know if I'm less intimidated or we're all dumber. Probably both.

Hi, gyac!

i am absolutely less intimidated than i was ...13 years ago when i slowly started posting (??!?!?!?)
also now people tend to ignore me when they don't like what i have to say instead of attacking, which is nice

i am actually a lot more sensitive to verbal attacks (compared to physical) and i MUCH prefer to be ignored

L, I’m with everyone else - if you get married, do it how you want. You don’t even have to tell anyone- you could just go to the courthouse and do it.

Personally, I regret having a wedding. We did the courthouse thing first for immigration stuff, and I wish I’d known how special *that* would feel, and made it more of a thing for just me and my husband. We had a tiny wedding ceremony a year later and it was pretty lame for the most part.

I have friends who eloped to Vegas, other friends who eloped to Hawaii, and an old ilxor did a cool thing where they eloped and got really nice photos done in marfa (I think).

I think of it this way:
My wedding was pretty dumb but my 10 yr marriage has been nothing but awesome (LL so otm about choosing your family - I never felt like I had a real family till I met him). My BFF had a gorgeous destination wedding in Italy at a castle or something, it was crazy decadent and she had an amazing day. A few years later her and husband were cheating on each other and then divorced.

HMMMM. Maybe we can elope to India or something. He likes it there.