soos_mite_ah

Just looking for an adultier adult to help me with this because I'm going through a transition and I'm trying to figure out how to navigate through different relationship dynamics. I know when you grow up and leave school that you have to be much more intentional with maintaining your old friends (and even if you're making new ones) because people are living their own lives, moving to different places, schedules don't match up etc. I also know that it's natural and healthy to grow apart and grow back together since it's important to give people space to grow. Most importantly, you need to be able to have these kinds of vulnerable conversations to plan out these relationships and talk about your needs from the connections when it comes to different transitions. I'm pretty comfortable with having these conversations with people I have known for years since we have gone through these kinds of phases before. But I have made a few friends in college and while I do enjoy their company and am comfortable with opening up about things, I don't know to what extent I'm planning on keeping in touch with them or to what extent they would want to either since we've known one another for a semester and a half and hung out like once a week or so. I'm definitely planning on having a conversation with them about this and I feel like I would be content with either maintaining contact or going our separate ways. My question isn't on how to go about these conversations but I will say that I feel like I'm going into somewhat uncharted territory. I'm just wondering what has been y'alls experiences with maintaining friends as an adult, the outcome, challenges that have come up, etc.

That's pretty standard for the first few dates. If anything, a really good piece of advice I got was make the first few dates kind of at boring but chill locations (coffee shops, parks, restaurants, etc. as opposed to amusement parks for example). That way you can focus on getting to know a person and see whether or not you like them instead of getting swept up and distracted by the excitement. No it isn't weird. Don't be shy to ask if you are unsure. Even if she isn't comfortable and says no, it still looks respectful and she'll appreciate that you asked. Social experience doesn't hurt and it's good that you are learning a lot. Yeah I do think it is the lack of attraction/ yall not clicking. If you're with a person and both of yall are into it and have things in common with one another, it isn't that hard to have chemistry whether it be platonic or romantic because you will be genuinely into getting to know one another. That in itself will be interesting and you won't have to go out of your way to make it so.

I remember seeing accounts like this and basically from what I can gather is that these silent rooms don't drive you crazy from the lack of sound rather it's what you hear in that silence. Like there are reports of people being able to hear themselves breathing, their heart beating, and other bodily functions that are so minute that we otherwise wouldn't hear such as your blood flowing. And that's the thing that drives them insane. If anything, I feel like being hyper aware of those sensations can stop you from focussing on the present moment. I believe the first video talked about the room being -9 db. My guess is that the best for meditation would be 0 or just a little higher (granted I don't know how decibles are calculated nor do I have any idea on what a regular silent room would fall in that spectrusm).

Finally Getting Over Myself I don't even know to what extent this post is really cohesive. After writing it, it did feel all over the place. I guess enjoy me rambling and trying to check in with myself. My self deprecation has been much lower in the last couple of weeks. Lately, I've been feeling like I've been getting over myself and stepping into healtheir, albeit fuller and busier routines. There is a part of me that feels like I've used my self esteem as a punching bag enough and I'm just over it. It's not in the sense that I'm so done with life and I want to make a big change but it's more like *yep, I'm done throwing a tantrum.* I guess the last few months was me just purging a lot of neurotic thoughts to the point where they don't really come up anymore since they already passed through me. It feels kind of equivalent to whenever I spend 3 hours straight of playing some random game on my phone and then after a while I just stop caring even though it was rather obsessive a minute ago. I think the other thing is that I'm finally getting used to my schedule. I'm pretty busy throughout the day and a few weeks ago I felt really burnt out and over all just done but now I feel fine. I know for the last couple years I have been really taking it easier due to my physical and mental health and it took me a minute to get back to my normal degree of functioning. I basically went from having all of this free time to myself to work through things and now I don't have as much free time (though I still prioritize it) so it was an adjustment. I don't feel socially drained as I used to now that I've gotten back in the habit of prioritizing that aspect of my life more. The same goes for work and school. There is still this remanents of mild depression here and there. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Maybe I'm still adjusting and I need to take care of myself more or maybe it's me still dealing with family issues and the aftermath of that. While the anxiety hasn't kicked in and neither has the doomer spirals, I don't really know what I'm doing with my life after college and how to manage both my friendships and my family relationships going forward...... I really need to figure that out huh lol? It also might be the by product of working through the little hiearchy of needs. I got most of the relationship / self esteem stuff covered but as far as meaningful work... yeah I have a ways to go.

Title says it all. I'm going back and forth from once a week to twice a week. What's a good number when it comes to getting a blog off the ground and what kind of time frame am I looking at? A lot of sources have mentioned that doing something everday or 2-4 times a week is a good number to aim for but I want to do something that is sustainable since I have a life outside of this and it isn't a full on job lol. I know I can't get exact numbers to plan things out regarding when things will take off but a general idea would be nice. If anyone else has done something similar, I would love your input and your experince.

I like writing and I want to exteriorize it. I'm just sharing my vision and ideas on the internet. I can see on how the SEO would likely be more important than frequency of posts. I suppose it was rather idealistic and impractical to assume that if you post enough on what you like to write about that things will get off the ground in that way. Oh well, I'm having fun with this. It is something that gives me a lot of purpose and that means a lot to me but I'm not super attached to it to where I expect income and attention. Those are a nice plus but just getting my writing out there is more of my priority.

I felt everything in this video. Lately, I feel like I'm doing better at letting go of my restrictive habits and attitudes around food but I still feel gross in my body. Issa work in progress.

The "nice guy" is a person who has this image of himself being a good person when really he is a people pleaser who thinks that just being nice to people will have them give him whatever he wants. He exchanges niceness not as base level human decency rather he does it to manipulate women into doing what he wants. He will be "nice" to you and do all of these things just to get in your pants, be possessive etc. And when you say "hey i'm not really interested in xyz," he isn't going to respect that boundary. He is going to lash out at you and call you a bitch, a whore, etc. and then complain about how all women are the same and how he is always friendzoned. That's why "nice" is in quotes. Because a "nice guy" isn't actually nice at all. He isn't even a good man which is why people try to avoid him like the fucking plague. A good man in this same position will think "that sucks, let me go process my emotional feelings for a little bit and appreciate the friendship for what it is, just friendship. Because I still like being around this person and I wasn't just trying to be her friend to get into her pants"

Things like bitterness and entitlement comes from things like constructed power dynamics, privilege, and systemic violence being normalized. It's important to call out those power dynamics and the things that cause them to exist if we ever want to progress both collectively and individually. Having these discussions is the very thing that alleviates these tensions because it gives justice to those who are treated as second class citizens.

I'm talking about how we have been socialized differently. If this behavior is the product of learned behavior and socialization, that by definition means that it isn't something that is innate or inherent to a person.

I feel like you're looking at this in a very individual light rather than looking at this in a collective system. Yes people of all genders suck. But our behaviors don't exist in a vacuum and are influenced by culture and society, particularly on how that society views men and women. I never said that one gender is inherently worse. I'm just saying that the way that society has conditioned men into thinking they are owed everything is a big problem and explains why men get so butthurt and bitter over being friendzoned to where they develop "nice guy" syndrome. Women don't have this same mechanism because we are taught to respect people's boundaries and be more considerate with other people. Women get friendzoned. They might get upset and sad about it but they just don't bitch and moan about being friendzoned to where they take it out on other people. And don't even get me started on the whole false accusations thing....

Women get called entitled and bitchy when they try to set up boundaries or when they try to stand up for themselves. How often do you see a man get attacked or shot for saying no to a woman or telling her she isn't interested? How often do you see women becoming school shooters after being rejected. How often do you see men fearing for their lives as they walk down the street at night or when they go to a party. How often do you see men be only dismissed as an object and nothing more? Women get called entitled when they try to assert that they want a mutual relationship where they are seen as people by men who are actually entitled. It's projection. The difference between men and women who get friendzoned and incels are that the former group can take no for an answer. Sure it sucks and it hurts and you give yourself time to grieve, but you don't go around with a victim complex that causes you to demonize the person who rejected you. The latter gets all bitter, starts performing mental gymnastics of how women are evil and how feminism is destroying western civilization and how the world is divided into chads stacys and incels, and they fall deeper and deeper into hatred of not only themselves but also everyone else around them. As a man, just like women who get friendzoned, you can be friendzoned and not be a dick about it. Everyone gets friendzoned at some point, that's not a gender thing. The gender disparity comes up when bitterness comes into question, when you start to create a victim narrative of how you and your gender are the only ones who have faced such a thing. Not all friendzoned men are incels, but the vast majority of incels are men.

It isn't inherent to gender but generally speaking, women are more socialized to value relationships while with a lot of men there is a sense of entitlement and there is a sense of not being able to see women as people

@patricknotstar Yeah.. that's because women who get friendzoned tend to not make a huge deal about it because they can take rejection and appreciate friendship for what it is even if they want more.

That's not the friendzone for women, it's just a situationship. Women get friendzoned like guys too... idk where you heard otherwise.

There's nothing wrong with taking a break from dating in order to get some clarity regarding what you need and where you stand. It can be a great time to reconnect with yourself and figure shit out. If anything, I think it's essential. Just don't go full hermit mode and make sure to nurture the other relationships in your life. That can help with the whole "don't supress yourself" thing. If anything, pouring your energy in building those relationships by opening up and being vulnerable will help you with any neediness issues you may have because you won't be relying on the people you're dating on to meet all of your emotional needs. Especially when it comes to guys, the whole needing to be a stoic, lone wolf thing actually does a lot more harm than good. If you don't have friends you can go to with things and really open up with them, often times what happens is that they end up getting really clingy and start trauma dumping on whomever they are dating. It can be with any gender but this can especially be true with guys who are taught to supress their emotions from a young age. And this isn't healthy for the woman in this dynamic either because she would have to do the bulk of the emotional labor and that can cause strain over time.

Some say it can help get it off the ground and generate more traffic. Parasocial relationships in a nutshell is when creators engage in a one sided relationship with their audience which creates a false sense of intimacy. It's often the result of lacking personal boundaries and oversharing and can lead to issues with personal mental health as well as impact the audience negatively.

@Spence94 It's basically going to be like my journal posts on here but in place of my own. My target reader consists of people in their late teens and twenties who are into sustainable forms of self development by learning through reflection life experiences. They care about collect social/systemic issues and how they affect themselves and the people around them in a persona and individual level I know it's kind of vague but honestly, rather than targetting an audience and putting all of my focus and efforts towards them, I'm trying to write about my experiences as authentically as possible and have my audience find me.

I have a really good bank of things written down so this isn't really much of a problem. I just didn't know about the whole frequency aspect of things since I'm so familiar with how YouTube typically works given the algorithm. I think at most I could do 4 posts a week but that's pushing it. I guess in that case 3 would be a better number? Yeah I thought about that. I originally started out with youtube only to realize that being on camera and editing videos wasn't my thing and I genuinely enjoyed the writing aspect so much more to where I can be pretty consistent with it. This is a medium I find myself really working well with and finding fulfillment in. That's actually part of the reason why I want to do this. Even though I like how my personality come out in my writing, I don't want the way I deliver my message cloud the message. Sure, the voice needs to be engaging and relatable, but things like parasocial relationships are becoming more and more of a problem as people start getting access to every bit of a creator's life and personality. Engaged not attached, that's kind of what I'm going for. This is part hobby, part long term thinking. I'm not expecting this to give me much money or hell support me, at least anytime soon. A little extra income would be nice but I'm not expecting too much. I'm mainly trying to envision what it would be if I were to be consistent for the next +5 years.

I'm Getting My Hunger Cues Back !!!! So I'm really excited because today I actually had reasonable hunger cues at appropriate times. I woke up a little hungry at around 8 ish so I got a bowl of cheerios and some almond milk with whatever fruit was left over in the fridge. I also ate one of the lychee jelly snacks I got at the Asian market a few weeks back. I got hungry again at 12:30 and I got myself a sandwich with jalapeno cheese bread, some salami, turkey, spinach, tomato, pesto, and a little bit of onion along with some ranch. I also got myself a kale salad that had kale, onion, carrots, and cranberries and I added some black beans and cherry tomatoes along with some red wine vinegar. I went to a coffee shop at around 3:30 to get some of my school work done and there I got a warm cup of green tea and a chocolate crossaint. It was little on the flakier side for my taste but it was really good nontheless and it was nice to have something warm to munch on. I started catching myself losing focus at around 6:30 and I thought it was a good time to head on home. On the way back I got myself dinner. My school has a place where you can get personalized pizzas so I went with that. I got a pizza with sausage, pepperoni, spinach, tomatos. and onion. I also got some fries on the side because I haven't had fries in a while but I only managed to eat a couple for the taste since I ended up feeling full. As I was eating the pizza, I just felt really satified with it. I was getting some of my vegetables in, a good amount of protein from the sausage and pepperoni, and fiber from the bread. The fat from the cheese and the protien I was getting was enough to fill me up and I felt more energized after eating the bread because believe it or not, carbs are not the enemy and are needed to fuel you. Shocking I know *insert eye roll.* Speaking of the bread, normally at this place on campus, I normally get the salad because they have really good salads. But today, I just didn't feel like it. I felt like as far as carbs go I needed something more substantial than a whole bowl of vegetables. And this isn't something about what fills me up more. The salad would have probably filled me up just as well given the volume that they serve at this place, but I just felt my body wanting and needing something different so I opted for the pizza instead which was significantly smaller in size but nevertheless really filling because of the fats, the protein, and the fiber. I know a lot of people who especially talk about clean eating and going raw vegan talk about how you can eat large volume of food for less calories and how this is almost presented as the ideal but sometimes you need something more calorie dense and is also super filling because it has the fats, protien, and fiber in one small place. Another big thing I have been noticing lately as I have been trying to eat intuitively and start seeing food in a more neutral/positive light. I can appreciate the things that might not be considered "clean" or "healthy" by diet standards and still appreciate it for what it is whether it is for the taste, the occasion, or ways that they are actually good for you. Like, who tf told me that a sandwich or a burger isn't a healthy meal? You have some carbs, some vegetables, and fat from the spreads and the cheese if you want some (personally I don't like cheese on my sandwiches and burgers but that's just me. I think it can become a problem if it's overly processed, you eat more than you should because you weren't paying attention to your hunger cues, or because it doesn't have enough nutrients (usually not enough vegetables in the burger or on the side). Because sometimes, you are craving a burger because that's what your body needs and it' nutritionally appropriate for you on that day just like for today, my body thought pizza was necessary and healthy. And that's something that I find almost magical about intuitive eating. Once you stop judging yourself for craving things, let go of the novelty of certain foods because you no longer demonize them and see them as this forbidden fruit of sorts, and start listening to your body, you start to trust your body more and the cues it sends you makes more sense. And those hunger cues and cravings can be really specific too and it can say a lot about what your body actually needs. The other day I woke up just really craving a lot of meat and eggs. So I got myself three eggs and added some bacon, turkey, spinach, tomatoes, onions, and mushrooms. Normally I only go with two eggs and just vegetables but today just felt different. And then it hit me. For the last couple days I was mainly eating a lot of carbs and fats but not enough protein and this craving was just my body's way of telling me that. Because in the end of the day, your body knows what it needs to function and know when to start and stop much better than any particular diet or lifestyle. We just lose sight of that by either not listening or by forcing it to do something otherwise. Finally, I was able to do all of this without feeling guilty or feeling the need to binge. Normally, after a day like this, I would find myself feeling bloated and feeling the need to restrict. I'm finally getting my appetite back. I would also see a day like this as a "cheat day" of sorts and try to eat "clean" just out of habit without much conscious thought. But today, I feel genuinely satified with my food choices and I don't feel too full nor do I find myself reacting badly to any of these foods. That's another thing, if you restrict certain foods for too long, it can impact your gut bacteria causing you to react weirdly when those foods get reintroduced into your diet. But if you eat a good variety of meals, you're likely to have a good diversity of gut bacteria which can help against or alleviate food sensitivities. All in all, today was a really good day for me when it comes to my relationship with food and I feel like I reached a milestone. I'm so glad I'm eating like a normal person again.

Or this is even more of a reason to life a purposeful life and not spend it on petty things. Of course, treating yourself and pleasure isn't inherently petty and you shouldn't restrict for the sake of restricting or because you're holier than thou. But full on hedonism get old and empty really quickly. Spend time with people you care about and cut out anyone who is toxic or drains you. Eat in a way that lets you connect with other people, enjoy a social life, and fuel your body in a way that makes you feel energized and alive. Start that big project because that's what you always wanted to do. Take a few risk, face your fears and limitting beliefs etc. Basically, before my comment turns into a collection of cliche sayings, there is nothing wrong with hedonsim so long you are being responsible and you're not harming yourself or the people around you. It's perfectly fine in moderation but that involves you being conscious about your limits.

I'm shocked but I'm not surprised by how infrequently I check this website now that I don't have my notifications on anymore *insert surprised pikachu face*.

Title says it all. I'm just curious. I know there is a lot of common advice talking about how you should date more than one person at once so that you can save time and so you don't get attached too soon. Same goes for having multiple fwbs. Personally, that doesn't work for me because I have an attention span of a goldfish and I can't focus on more than one person at a time lol. Do any of yall take that advice or.......?