sprigatito_bread

Circulation issues have been plaguing me for the past several months, and getting a doctor's appointment is taking an eternity. As I've been waiting, the issue has only worsened, to the point where I am ~~quickly losing sensitivity in my hands and fingers.~~ EDIT: "Quickly" as in over the span of a few days or weeks having cold hands, not hours. If that makes a difference.

As a cis male, this has also begun to affect a certain part of the body that requires good blood flow to properly function. Without an incredible amount of sexual excitement, it remains worryingly cold and lifeless. I'm enjoying what I have left while it lasts, but it would be horribly fitting for me to lose feeling there too before I can even set foot into the vascular specialist's office.

It's brutal. It really is. I'm in my early 20s, and this, on top of a multitude of chronic health problems, is hitting me all at once. I've never had a partner, but I was always so excited to find one someday. But now, things have just gotten a whole lot harder. (That is, except for one thing.)

I don't want to lose hope. I've already tried that in the past from my other health issues, and it only makes things worse. But it's kind of difficult to imagine what a relationship looks like without functioning parts. Especially when this doesn't magically make me asexual. I still want to enjoy some kind of sexual activity, but I'm not sure that I'll be able to do it in the way that most women who would otherwise be compatible with me are hoping for.

I'd appreciate any kind of hope or encouragement, or just practical advice for what to do if the worst comes to pass. I feel that this is a scenario that I need to be prepared for, because god knows that the medical system isn't fast enough to do anything except record the damage that has already been done.

Thank you, and I wish you all luck in dealing with whatever fucked up shit has come your way, too.

EDIT 2: You know what? Maybe this isn't about my junk as much as it is my entire fucking body. "Oh that's weird, the lack of circulation has spread from my fingers to my entire hand in a few days." Uh, yeah, you THINK? My feet are turning blue, my hands are going numb, my mouth is getting cold, and I'm worried about THIS? Maybe the commenters telling me to get care immediately have a point. Maybe I'm the meme guy who worries about the economy while a meteor crashes into Earth.

I don't fit very well with the idea of masculinity. I'm just a goofy nerd with a gentle personality and the desire to make others happy. I have always wanted to look soft and approachable; I have smooth, rounded facial features, wavy hair, big glasses, and a clean-shaven face. My personality is utterly non-threatening. I love caring for people, I enjoy being silly and whimsical, I'm a bit clumsy and get flustered easily, I wouldn't hurt a fly (unless I had to), and I'm polite to a fault. My paradise is a warm, cozy, quiet safe haven surrounded by cute plushies.

I'm not manly in the slightest, and I love being that way. I'm a total softie through and through, and I purposely align my appearance with my personality. I look gentle because I am gentle.

I have always been treated differently than my male peers. Many people are inexplicably nicer or softer on me even if they barely know me. Female friends have fawned over me, calling me things like "cute," "adorable," and "sweetheart," and expressing a desire to protect me. And I love it. I don't find it offensive or infantilizing at all.

Through extensive introspection, I later figured out that care and nurturing are incredibly attractive to me, and the funny tickle I felt whenever I was shown care and protection by my female friends was actually a subtle tinge of attraction. It's rather curious that my personality and gender expression just happened to develop in such a way to subconsciously solicit that kind of attention.

This is all well and good, but I worry that this makes me categorically unsexy due to my intentional suppression of gendered characteristics and desire to give off pure, wholesome vibes. Could I really be sexually desirable if I'm the kind of person who apologizes to trees for bumping into them? Some women have even teasingly called me a "Christian" or "virgin" because of this perceived innocence, suggesting that some people do indeed associate my personality with sexual restraint or abstinence.

In reality, I absolutely do want a sexual relationship, and I have always imagined myself treating a partner with the same gentle caregiving energy that I myself crave. I don't do "naughty" or "dominant"; I would view a partner's body as something to passionately take care of, not something to tease or conquer.

I would appreciate some outside perspective on this. Thanks!

Whenever it's someone's job to help me, I think of it as an opportunity to create a bright spot in what would otherwise be a pretty boring shift. I make them laugh with my silly commentary, engage them in interesting conversation, and above all, show that I care. I hope it makes them as happy as it makes me. And if it doesn't, well hey, there's always next time, right?

I want to show people that there is still good left in this world. When social media blares humanity's worst all the time, love and compassion need to be loud, too. Cynicism, nihilism, and indifference have pervaded every aspect of our culture and, in my opinion, they just aren't cool anymore. Joy is rebellion. Kindness is radical. Optimism is counterculture.

It may be their job to provide the service, but it's my mission to provide the goofy to whoever needs it. Yes sir, I know this is a Wendy's, but I'm not going to let that stop me!

I always assume that my brain is structured in a way that at least 5% of people could relate to my general thought processes, but it turns out that some of my experiences of being a human are really just a "me" thing. I've often told myself that I'm just like everyone else, and that all of my personality traits are explainable by a mishmash of stereotypes and systemic influences. But I guess there's more to it than that, and I've been selling myself a bit short.

I'm interested in a wholesome relationship dynamic where the girlfriend acts as a comforting source of warmth, protection, and abundant physical affection. She's a cozy safe haven, wrapping her boyfriend in adoring hugs and showering him in doting kisses. He's gentle and sensitive, relaxing in her care and taking it all in, responding in an endearing way that fuels her nurturing.

It seems like the Internet's idea of a "strong" female presence in a hetero relationship is a dominant/submissive coercive femdom dynamic. That's not what I want at all; I want to see a female character who is eager to lead out of a loving desire to snuggle and care for her boyfriend—she wants to protect him, not exploit him. There is also no power imbalance or one-sidedness; while the girlfriend's doting affection is a defining feature, the boyfriend happily initiates and reciprocates affection as well. There are lots of open heartfelt exchanges, and it's all so subversively tender that it feels taboo.

I have never seen a relationship like this depicted anywhere. It took months of introspection and creative writing to work out the essence of my preferred dynamic and understand that labels like "gentle femdom" or "gender role reversal" utterly fail to capture the nuances of what I truly want. The romance novel and adult video industries almost completely alienate me. It feels like there is nothing for me, or at least no way to easily find it in the vast cosmos of the Internet.

It would be wonderful to find something, a book, some kind of show or movie, an obscure Internet board... really anything to scratch this constant itch that I have. Despite my mediocre skills, my own writing vastly outstrips any media I've seen so far. I'd love to see something made by someone more professional.

And yeah, mayyyybe I've dodged a bullet by being immune to the endless piles of sex appeal industry slop and provocative ads that deactivate the frontal lobe, but sometimes I want in on the fun too.

Every time I encounter another problem with my body that a healthy person wouldn't have, I'm always tempted to think to myself that nobody would want a partner like me because they could just pick someone healthier and more capable. I'm in my early 20s and my health is already getting a little worse each year without any real way to stop it.

I could tell myself that my unique story is compelling, and that enduring all of this hardship has cultivated a more powerful mindset than mainstream materialism and hyperindividualism, and that anyone who shares my values would appreciate me for who I am, even if it means potentially foregoing wealth and luxury. But I just wish I had something more to go off of, something a little more than just blind hope.

I know that lacking confidence and having an external locus of control aren't helping at all, but I find that I can only feel confidence and control if I have a solid, well-reasoned belief that I can succeed and my actions are meaningful.

So, I'd really appreciate any success stories, those who found love despite having challenging medical issues, or any good arguments you might have. I don't think there will be any one thing that does it for me; every little bit will help. Thank you.

As far as I know, the current culture around dating/relationships includes meeting your SO's family and letting them meet yours. And probably sometime on the first few dates, at least asking about family. Problem is, my family is batshit insane.

• My parents are in an abusive relationship and constantly scream at each other

• My father is a violent abuser who avoids talking to people because he can't even pretend to be sane

• I had to raise myself because most of their advice was hateful trash; they tried to raise me into a bigoted loner asshole who only cares about himself and ties his self-worth to pretending he's better than everyone else

• My brother is an emotionally volatile gun owner in a relationship with an insane psycho who abused her cat to death

• They all believe that people who are different should be suppressed or purged from society because God or something

I think at this point, my family may be too dangerous to maintain ties to at all. I really wish I could burn it all down and start over, but I might not be so lucky due to my fledgling financial situation.

Ridding myself of my family's influence has been a decade-long project that I've been working hard on, and I gotta say, "Your parents raised you well" has got to be my least favorite compliment.

Jokes aside, I'm interested in hearing about experiences from others in similar situations. How did you talk about it?

I feel like this is an unavoidable red flag either way for a lot of people (After all, how would anyone know that I'm as sane as I claim to be?), but I'd still like to find the least horrible way to talk about it without lying.

Thanks!

It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I experience heterosexuality very differently than my peers. I'll describe in broad terms to keep things SFW.

Bodies are not "hot" to me. I'm drawn to feminine features because I find them pretty, but bodies do not physically excite me in the way that they excite others.

My sexuality is focused on receiving loving and romantic physical affection, and to a lesser extent, giving it. To my brain, affectionate physical contact is sex ITSELF, not a prelude. In practice, this means that I'm very attracted to kisses and don't care about real sex unless I had a partner who wanted it.

If I approach a woman, it's because she seems nice and I want to get to know her, not because I find her physically attractive. I never pursue romance from the get-go; I develop friendships for their own sake and romantic feelings may develop later.

I have some concerns about this.

I've long suspected that there are certain signals that I don't give off. Female friends have called me things like "innocent," "adorable," or "Christian" (lol). While that may be due to my gentle demeanor, I wonder if my unique attraction profile eliminates behaviors that signal sexual availability, such as flirting. Perhaps the absence of these signals creates an impression of purity and sexual abstinence.

If that's the case, I feel like that might prevent most people from finding me attractive, simply because I lack the hardware to speak their language. My actions might just come across as friendly, and I don't want to lie about feeling attraction that I don't have.

Another concern of mine is submissiveness: my physical attraction is centered around receiving. Although I want a relationship that's reciprocal—giving and receiving in equal measure—I absolutely need moments of receiving affection to be sexually fulfilled. From what I've seen, submissiveness is stereotypically a turn-off, and I don't know how widespread that is.

But I'm not BDSM-submissive; I don't want a dominatrix. I just want someone gentle, kind, and willing to kiss me a bunch lol. I want to create a space of warmth and safety where we meet each other's needs and I love the idea of being an affectionate and caring partner. The receptiveness I describe is episodic, not all-consuming.

These worries may sound silly, but being different is a catalyst for insecurity. It's very easy to speculate because I can't measure how much heterosexuality varies. I would expect that I'm a rule-breaking outlier and most heterosexuals have similar attraction models.

But I lack perspective, especially because I've never been in a relationship.

What do you think?

I've been nuking my online presence on big tech platforms, and among the biggest data sources are my Google accounts, including the one I used for watching YouTube.

Using a service they provide for exporting data, I was able to download a list of every video I've ever watched since mid-2020. How many of them were there?

Fifty-four thousand.

I have watched more than 54,000 videos since mid-2020.

I knew that I was chronically online and became complacent due to my disabilities, but seeing it laid bare like this suddenly made it feel much more real.

I am awake an average of 15 hours a day. That's 5,475 hours per year. It's not unreasonable to assume that I spend around 15 minutes on each video on average, especially given that I often read comments. So that's about 13,500 hours for all of the videos.

That means that, since 2020 alone, more than two entire years' worth of my waking hours have been consumed by YouTube.

Two full years of my life, gone. From just YouTube. And the worst part? I hardly remember any of it. Out of all of those videos, I remember maybe 10 or 20 of them off the top of my head. The remaining 99.9% of them were just noise. Void. Nothingness.

How many novel experiences could I have had during that time? How many thought-provoking books could I have read? How many interesting people could I have met? I don't want to know.

I've always felt like there was something wrong about it being 2025 already. It feels like it should be much earlier in the decade. But I think I finally know why: I have created very few memories in the past five years, because most of my time was spent staring at monotonous and forgettable Internet content. That's why time has gone by so quickly.

Instead of trying new things, engaging with enriching material, and meeting new friends, I allowed my time to be siphoned off by an attention-hungry algorithm that doesn't care about the incalculable damage it's doing to millions of lives. I am not the first one to have these regrets, and I certainly won't be the last.

Never again.

“Everyone will think you’re useless,” my brain tells me, as if every person thinks that way. It thinks I’ll be shunned if I ever need help or can’t do the same things others can. People will think I’m gross and want to stay away from me because this neck brace I have to wear makes me look like some kind of sick, feral creature. I could never get a partner because I would be too much of an economic burden and my chronic conditions take the fun out of everything.

What’s my source for this? My narcissistic father, who always tells me that I’m a useless failure who will never succeed. He told me that people would react in that way. My lived experience refutes many of his claims, but apparently that didn’t stop me from internalizing them. Maybe I should start wearing earplugs around that guy.

I’m getting ready to touch grass for the first time on my own since I become disabled 3 years ago. I know things won’t be easy, but I also know that this kind of self-defeating thinking is more than useless and literally why it took me 3 years to want to go out in the first place.

Maybe I should reject my father’s framing entirely. Why can’t I put a positive spin on it? The world threw a bunch of bullshit at me, and my presence alone is proof that I didn’t give up. I kept going. If people see that as weak, that’s their problem.

I should stand in solidarity with everyone else fighting through their own bullshit and we can help each other in whatever ways we can. Life wasn’t meant to be a singleplayer game. We’re in this together, and I can find like-minded people who recognize that.

I hope my defiant spirit that’s ready to kick some ass and make lots of buddies wins out.

To my brain, nothing is worth pursuing or trying. “How can you guarantee that you’ll be alive to finish anything you start?” My brain asks. And it’s right. I can never make that guarantee.

It directs me to spoil myself with instant gratification because it knows I will still be alive to experience it. There’s no risk of working towards nothing. Don’t make goals. Don’t take risks. Embrace mediocrity. Do the bare minimum needed to survive. That way, you will never be disappointed.

I’m so tired of thinking like this. It started when I got a serious chronic illness that couldn’t be diagnosed. I always manage to survive for longer than I predict, and then I look back and notice that I have done nothing for the last 3 years.

I hope that I don’t continue to make the same mistake in response to Current Events™. I’m sure that falling for it again would be helpful to the exact people I really don’t want to be helping.

Defeatism, cynicism, doomerism, essentialism, materialism, anti-intellectualism, consumerism, and cruelty are everywhere on the Internet... and I'm just not into it anymore.

I used to buy into self-limiting beliefs because I thought they were answers from people with more life experience than me, but they just limited my thinking and led me astray. They were why I was insecure and unhappy. They were why I was doing nothing to make my life better.

Once I started to push back on all of the Internet's supposed "wisdom," I figured out that my fundamentally flawed beliefs were paralyzing me from actually doing anything with my life and being brave enough to take risks, especially socially. I'm noticeably happier, I've developed a positive life outlook, and I'm more comfortable in my own skin because I stopped getting my opinions from the Internet and started thinking for myself.

I recognized that others' opinions don't define reality. Opinions are the result of someone's life experiences filtered through their brain. They may have some value, but they are often incredibly biased and should not be taken as gospel. If you take them all seriously, you will be riddled with insecurities in no time flat, subconsciously trying to appeal to people who you don't even like and would never be friends with.

I honestly can't say I know who social media is even for at this point. There is so much content promoting unhealthy ways of thinking just haphazardly strewn about everywhere. I don't know how anyone can avoid it all. I don't know if the benefits can outweigh the costs. Even the most harmless content is forgettable and eats up valuable time that could be used for something more meaningful.

Sometimes I think about how we never see any posts from the happiest people alive. They don't need social media validation, their positivity wouldn't generate clicks, and the negativity of social media platforms probably scared them off long ago. As a result of their absence, negativity and unhealthy thought patterns have proliferated unchallenged.

I feel like I don't even belong on the Internet anymore. I can't relate to all of the doomers and cynics. The constant firehose of simultaneous anxiety and apathy, the lack of introspection and empathy... what use do I really have for it all at the end of the day? It's getting so old and stale. I feel like I can't grow as a person anymore if I continue consuming Internet slop.

There are so many, much more constructive ways I could be spending my time. If I should be using the Internet for anything, it would be to aid me in doing that. For example, finding good books to read. I can't wait until I finally overcome my behavioral inertia and move on with my life.