thibault

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Everything posted by thibault

  1. @Preety_India Hey I just read your journal on borderline as to be honest the relationship that I mentioned earlier on in this thread left me with some unanswered questions and I was curious to find out your perspective. First, I wanted to apologize to you. In this thread I gave you some opposition because it seemed that you were questioning my story or invalidating my experience and I didn't appreciate that. Now I realize my wording may have been too painful to read and I'm sorry about that. Second, I wanted to thank you for sharing your thoughts on the interaction between bipolar and borderline in your journal thread. I am diagnosed bipolar myself and although I had thought of the interactions before, your commentary was incredibly insightful to read and made me understand why the relationship failed on a deeper level than I had previously. Third, I'd like to make myself a little more vulnerable on the topic of that relationship as I think it's only right after I have benefited from reading your thread : When I was in that relationship it seemed like there was nothing that could satisfy her. It seemed that stabilizing the relationship constantly required me to be operating at 100%, firing on all cylinders. It seemed that I was not only expected to solve every logistical problem imaginable but also be able to almost read her mind, solve the potential emotional problems that could arise before they even did. A real nightmare for most, a fun problem to work out for me. The way the relationship ended is that I had noticed she would cycle me through happy - angry - detached - happy over and over and over again. When I fully became conscious of that, I felt cheated in a way as if all this was artificial and she was toying with me. So I observed... and the next time she came back all giddy after a few days of pretty much ignoring me, I didn't play into her game. She noticed instantly, got extremely angry and hung up on me (this was on the phone). I had told her in the past that I wouldn't tolerate her hanging up on me (she had done it in the past). From that point on I decided that she would call me back and apologize or it would be over. 3 days went by and she didn't call. This was now a day where we previously had plans to see each other so I called her and asked if she still wanted to see each other. She said yes, her voice was trembling. I was expecting an apology or a break up, I got a break up. Thanks again and I hope this was the kind of testimony you were expecting. Unfortunately I haven't decided if this is my best or worst relationship yet and I'm a bit afraid that I never will
  2. I love this phrasing and this is exactly how I think about doing good in the world ! I'm really glad you pointed that out. I had to sit and contemplate that for a few minutes. Now I realize that it is because I see so many people/companies/institutions being bullied through money and I figure that if one day it's my turn, I want to have enough that I can stand up for myself. It does seem irrational. My worst nightmare is to have my dreams crushed by money and my solution to that is to... get money. Saying it now, I'm realizing how much this has been weighing on me for years. Thank you for that nugget of wisdom !
  3. Simple question : I'm 24, a lot of my life is still ahead of me. Focusing on making money distracts from other things yet not having enough money in the future might slow my progress on my life's work. My current way to operate is to think about what my life looks like as far as I can imagine into the future, estimate how much money I need to get there and double it. Have you found ways or mental frameworks to think about this problem ?
  4. You mean like the grim reaper ? I'm not sure I 100% understand the question.
  5. Let's say my life's work is solving some genetic condition. After years of research I find out this can be done by mining some minerals only found on asteroids. I am now stunted in my ability to give because I don't have money to fund the mining expedition. Obviously I'm simplifying but does that make sense or am I overthinking it ?
  6. To be clear I'm not asking for a specific amount, that would be foolish. I haven't given you details on what my life purpose entails, if it involves going to Pluto then that is going to take a lot more than 100k/year. I'm asking how you think about money in the future. With the imperfect information you have today, how do you best evaluate how much money you will need tomorrow ? What frameworks do you use ? Structure rather than content guys...
  7. I think this is a great suggestion in that discussing current events encourages all the most half-baked takes. The best ways to view a given event usually come after years when all relevant information has come to light.
  8. I definitely recommend freeCodeCamp as well. I got all my basic web development education through them.
  9. I'd just like to make some clarifications because I think misunderstanding and confusions about mental disorders cause more stigmatization. Here is some information on bipolar (BD) and borderline (BPD) from Wikipedia : Symptoms of BD Symptoms of BPD Frequency of BD Frequency of BPD Expert witness psychologist I recently saw testifying in the Johnny Depp - Amber Heard trial about what "personality disorders" are : With all this information in hand, here is my understanding of the difference between BD and BPD. BD is a psychiatric disorder in the category of mood disorders. This means that there is a problem with someone's mood on the level of the body. Much like Shannon Curry says in the video above that people who have depression can be treated with anti-depressants and in some cases this alone will be enough for them not to have any issues with depression in their lives ever again. The same can be said for people with bipolar who are treated with mood stabilizers. In bipolar, as the Wikipedia symptoms describe, the problem is a fluctuation of mood that happens regardless of changes to environment. Talk therapy is never enough to treat bipolar, it is a disorder that requires mood stabilizing medication like lithium to get better. This is a body/biological problem first before being a mind/mental one. Depending on the severeness of the bipolar disorder and the support the person affected has from friends and family it can be a normal life kind of disorder or an extreme disorder that causes massive disturbances in a person's life needing them to spend months hospitalized to regain their sanity. Here is how BD is diagnosed. Note how no specific behaviors are used to diagnose BD, a therapist looking to diagnose BD will look for whatever behaviors indicate big changes in mood over time. Regarding borderline personality disorder, there is a big difference in the way it functions. In the video above you see Shannon Curry describing personality disorders. Since personality disorders are disorders of the mind rather than the body there is no easy treatment where we can give medication and the problems go away, much like how talk therapy is inefficient on its own for bipolar. For diagnosis of BPD therapists are expecting to see disturbances throughout the person's life continuously unlike episodic illnesses like depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia. Here is how BPD is diagnosed : There is also significant comorbidity of 31% between the two disorders possibly explaining some of the confusion between the two. Hope that was helpful for everyone.
  10. I don't know if I want to continue sharing my opinion with you because although it is what you asked for at the start, I feel some defensiveness coming from you. I want to make sure you are OK with me continuing to explain how I see things. I almost get the feeling that you believe I think poorly of people with BPD which is not the case at all. I definitely don't want to be overstepping any of your boundaries so please let me know if you want me to say more on this topic or if this is not helpful or constructive for you.
  11. I understand. Here are the aspects of the story I would identify as "BPD-like". She was very quick to share very intimate, traumatic aspects of her life on our first date together. Although I'd known her for a while, we'd never been more than acquaintances and she jumped from that to sharing incredibly intimate things about her personal life. A form of "oversharing" I guess which unless I'm mistaken is common in people with BPD. Right after this she steered me into a sexual interaction in a way that I think was rushed and that I later interpreted as "I am not confident in my ability to choose sexual partners so I am in a rush to find out what they are like in bed before getting attached to them" Mood changes from one date to the next where in one instance we could be extremely close and intimate and the next she would be cold or angry. This was completely unprovoked. I didn't describe her general demeanor but she was very volatile. She could switch from being very fun and happy one instant to immediately becoming closed, combative, angry if things did not go her way. There's also more details I could give that might enable you to see her point of view but I simply don't want to. I think some things are fine to talk about and others should stay private, there's only so much I feel comfortable disclosing to strangers online. I also understand that maybe I focused on aspects that for you are not representative of BPD but I wanted to give MY perspective of what it was like to be in a relationship with a girl with BPD which means I highlighted the difference that I saw with her compared to other girls I dated, not her perception of the what was going on. I thought this is what you wanted. But if you want me to do my best attempt at armchair psychoanalyzing what was going on for her I can also try to do that, just let me know. For me whether she was "officially" BPD or not is irrelevant. All I know is she was diagnosed with it and that she showed several signs from my limited reading about it online like unstable identity (changing her mind on deeply important things one day to the next), fear of abandonment (irrationally afraid that I would leave her when every time it was HER who wanted to leave), and other more sinister symptoms of BPD that I'm sure you are familiar with but that I would rather not go into details here out of respect for her.
  12. Yes although she did tell me she did not believe the diagnosis but after reading up on it more after the relationship ended, I can only say that it seems highly likely to me that it was an appropriate diagnosis.
  13. Hey first of all I want to say that I don't have the answers because I dated a girl with BPD and it ended after 7 months. Clearly I haven't "solved" anything. Since I am not BPD, I don't know what it feels like from the inside but I can at least try to explain what it felt like from the outside. I went in to the relationship with this girl with very few expectations, I didn't have a rigid idea of what I wanted with her or where I imagined this going, I think this was a huge strength in dealing with the BPD aspects of the relationship. Wall of text incoming. Right away there were some unusual things, I kissed her on a Saturday, we met up for coffee the next day and she instantly shared some very intimate details about problems with her family and started crying, I felt sad for her and tried to comfort her but I was not naïve and knew right away these problems would be with her probably for the whole of our relationship. After maybe a maximum of an hour into this coffee date, shortly after she had stopped crying she asked me if I wanted to go back to my place. No sugar coating or anything, she clearly wanted to have sex. With hindsight I wish I had found a way to delay that. Blinded by hormones, I didn't realize how uncomfortable it made me feel that she was pushing for sex so early and so soon after opening up about very emotionally intense aspects of her life. This first date with her is extremely indicative of the rest of our relationship, it seemed like she was always in a rush. A week after that first date - we had seen each other a few times since - we met up in a park as she wanted to discuss our relationship. I asked her what she wanted to discuss and she told me she wanted to define what we had between us, once again this felt rushed but I took it as a harmless form of insecurity and was open to being anything she wanted. I asked her what she wanted but she seemed to kind of deflect trying to read me maybe. Problem is there was nothing to read, I wasn't hung up on being "boyfriend-girlfriend" or something more casual, but from my intuition I was able to tell she wanted an exclusive relationship. Her moods were always shifting. Quickly I learned that if I felt great leaving at the end of a date, the next date would be terrible. I interpreted this as a fear of opening up and letting me in. I was okay with that, I thought that over time she would be able to trust me. After I think 2 or 3 months was the first time she wanted to break up with me. Things had been a bit strange for a few weeks, kind of like we were drifting apart. One particular date was horrible. We went to a bar and I did my best to make conversation but it was like one of those incredibly awkward first dates where nothing is cutting through the tension. When we left the bar, I started walking her home. In my head I could feel this deep sense of this is going straight into a brick wall. I was mostly silent trying to gather my thoughts but I think she sensed this and was doing everything she could to fill the silence. After I had a good enough sense of why I felt so uncomfortable I started asking her questions about us, genuinely looking for answers. After some time she admitted to me that she had actually been planning on breaking up with me for a few days. I asked her why she did not do it tonight and she replied that she had planned to do it a couple days later. We talked candidly about all the things that she may have felt were wrong in the relationship and I was very accepting. Although my ego was a little bit hurt, we had only been dating a couple months and if it were to end then that was that. One of the things that she mentioned that would become important later is she thought we had been too quick to define our relationship, I reminded her that it was her who pushed for that and she agreed, almost in a fatalistic way, as if to say "I fucked it up again". Eventually I joked that now after having talked it seemed like we had worked through everything and there were no longer any problems. She agreed and expressed regret that we had not talked about this sooner because then we would not have had to break up. I found this EXTREMELY strange. This is the part of BPD that I saw coming back over and over that I could never really understand. It seems to me that almost everyone in that situation would have the awareness that there was a perceived problem in the relationship, now this problem is resolved and the relationship can go on. She was placing an additional time constraint on the resolution of the problem that was extremely intriguing to me and that she seemed to almost believe was out of her control. I made light of this and as I was continuing to walk he home, the tension was vanishing. Eventually she said to me "I almost feel like we are still a couple" and I replied "I kind of feel like that too". Now she started to ask me "So what are we ?", I replied that minutes ago she was telling me how we were too quick to define our relationship and now that our relationship had come loose the first thing she wanted to do was redefine it. But still she insisted and all I replied was "I don't know". She asked me what this meant if we were still going to see each other, if we could sleep with other people, I just replied "I don't know". She was so enchanted by this reply that she went how and drew a sort of cartoon character for me named "Mr. I don't know". I hope this gives some outside perspective of what it was like for me dating a girl with BPD. I'll stop here for now since I don't know how useful it is to keep going and describing every detail of the relationship but if you want any additional details, feel free to ask and I will reply depending on my motivation. Thinking back to that relationship, the thing that I felt like I never really had in a deep way with her is trust. Almost like every day our relationship was reset to 0 and I had very little leeway to impose my own "rhythm", I was mostly dancing after her hoping she would eventually get tired, she didn't...
  14. When people ask me this question I always give the same answer. Don't go around looking for the best language, there isn't one. What you want to do is start coding things that you have an interest in and use whatever language is best for that. That way you will develop a skillset that suits your specific interests. Having that skillset will make you want to code more things that you are interested in and will snowball your learning. If you start off saying I need to learn everything about Python and the TensorFlow machine learning module but have no end project in mind, you will never get through the debugging hell that is programming. Always start coding with a goal in mind. Anyways to narrow down your choices I would ask you what you want your first finished project to be : A video game ? A website ? A mobile app ? A telegram bot ? A desktop app ? A simulation ? etc... etc... etc... Start with answering these kinds of questions then narrow down to the language. The question you have asked as it currently stands is like asking "What is the best tool to build a house ?". I mean are you building a wall ? The floor ? The roof ? The bathroom ? Are you working on the electricals ? I think you get my point... EDIT : Oh and regarding what others above have said about learning the general principles, just play around in Scratch for a few days/weeks until you get the hang of it. That should be enough general understanding to get you started in programming.
  15. Obviously he wants kids to read about him in history books, everyone does. Leo is just saying that's not the main reason he's doing it, it's just a nice perk.
  16. As stated in your post, it seems your problem isn't the apartment at all. It sound more like as you are going through life, you feel repeatedly taken advantage of by society, powerless to do anything about it. That is a problem, an existential one, not a first world one. I would highly recommend Leo's video on scams if you haven't seen it :
  17. Musk is genuinely driven to create the best future possible for mankind, he seems obsessed with efficiency and optimization. In doing that, I'm sure he realizes 99.99% of mankind (myself included) is so lazy in comparison that their laziness might actually slow down or kill some of his projects. So obviously he wants solutions that will enable maximum freedom to innovate while mitigating the risks efficiently through simple government regulation.
  18. @Leo Gura I think this sums up the issue perfectly. This is what everyone criticizing the move is worried about. My dilemma is this. What if there are three levels to the issue : - The park owners (Board of directors or Elon) - The park rangers/wildlife experts/etc... (Influencers) - The park visitors (Regular users who mostly consume tweets rather than create them) Now let's say the park rangers decide that for the preservation of the wildlife and greater ecosystem, all national parks should be closed to the public. The park visitors however want to keep being able to visit the parks so the owners have to make a choice. Isn't the democratic choice to side with the visitors ? Curious to hear your thoughts !
  19. Even funnier is the fact that no one seems to understand the original meaning of the artist which wasn't "Musk setting twitter free" but "Musk opening the door of the cage and twitter staying inside, shaking with fear".
  20. I would bet my left nut he is not bipolar. The "bi" part in bipolar as opposed to "uni" (unipolar depression for instance) implies two poles meaning periods of mania and periods of depression. Trump exhibits constant exceptionally high mood. Being bipolar myself and knowing many other bipolar people on medication I can tell you there is no chance in a million years someone bipolar could be president, act as erratic as Trump, not be taking mood stabilizers and not end up in the psych ward several times a year. Absolutely no chance. For nearly all bipolar people, stress is a trigger for mania or depression, look up the stress-vulnerability model. Political leaders in history like Winston Churchill who is thought to have been bipolar were on the contrary very grounded and centered to counteract the internal emotional fluctuations. So yeah I beg you not to spread misinformation on this disorder, we get enough stigmatization as things are, don't need Trump to be our representative lol. I would even go as far as to say I don't believe Trump has any psychiatric (biological/body) disorder. Personality disorders + drug use maybe, but psychiatric disorders definitely not. I am not aware of ANY psychiatric disorder that brings stability to someone who is stretching the limits of truth right to the edges, from my understanding only personality disorders (of the mind) could do that like NPD, BPD, ASPD...
  21. What I find even more hilarious is how he ended up such a strong republican after wanting to run as a democrat some years before If your ideals include consistency of beliefs over time he is the worst president in history lol.
  22. Is there anything you can think of that requires input from you ? Or does everything happen by itself in a way ? You breathe all day without noticing. Is is you breathing when you don't notice ? Is it you breathing when you do ? Who exactly is breathing ? Sometimes you sometimes not ? You all the time ? Never you ? If you question these things deep enough, whoever is talking may just come up with a convincing answer !
  23. Regarding this "extremist" talk, I have been running into similar debates with friends and family about what it means to be "far-right" or as we say in France "extreme-right". My issue is not in labeling these candidates "far-right" or "extreme" but it comes when their ideas are systematically dismissed and left unchallenged just using "far-right" and "extreme" labels. For instance a recent poll in France suggests that a majority of French people believe the "Great Replacement" (replacement of native population in the country by foreign population) is real and happening. This idea often gets labeled as "far-right" which is correct both in the origin of the term and in the perspective of the world it implies. However most people then make the jump that because it is far-right it is wrong or it needs no further debunking. Has anyone found a good way to explain that even though an idea is easy to correctly label as far-right, this can actually be detrimental rather than useful in combatting the idea ? Especially when there is something "true" enough about it that a majority of people would actually agree with it ?
  24. I would add one thing to what Leo said which may or may not match up to your experience. I've seen with many people who are born into "good enough conditions" who can pretty much do "anything they choose" but who choose nothing and end up in a very boring life devoid of any excitement or passion. I would guess the reason for this is that you were brought up in an environment where risk was heavily discouraged and safety/security was heavily encouraged. Your whole environment (parents, school, etc...) was set up to guarantee a minimum/base level of comfort that would guarantee not dying/not being a social failure/not ending up unemployed etc... there was very little of focus on passion, taking smart risks, principles for building your own life. I feel in the generations before us this deep fear of "slipping through the cracks" of society. It's almost like because they were the first generations to go through life without belonging to a religious community and lacked this mutualized this risk of "slipping through the cracks" they adopted this mentality of accumulating a maximum number of positive social indicators (good manners, diploma). All of this is evident when you talk about the stress of going through with a diploma. It is like inherent in your thinking, a negative outcome is weighted so disproportionately heavily compared to a positive outcome. In order to overcome this you will have to imagine a positive outcome for yourself that is so exciting for you that you are willing to take on the potential consequences of failing because succeeding would be so great. When you find something that resonates with you on a deep enough level, you won't need motivation or advice from anyone, it will just flow out of you.
  25. @Preety_India Thanks for sharing. Three levels of courage going on here. Courage to reconsider your view of men and sex. Courage to talk about it. Courage to empathize with incels and see them as being "like you" in a way. Mad props.