I’m genuinely concerned that I’ll have no real way to tell when it’s safe for me to start doing things again, because the CDC basically told everyone to get fucked and die, I’m surrounded by people taking the, “eh, if I get covid, I get covid” approach, and I can’t fucking tell what’s a reasonable safety precaution anymore.
I’m exhausted all the time, and I’m still scared of getting sick, but the world is moving on without me, and I’m just so disoriented, y'all.
Everyone I live with IS immunocompromised, and this comment comes off very “it’s fine, the only people who are still dying are disabled people,” which really just serves to cement my original point about the world moving on without me.
Just want to add that that person is so incredibly wrong! The current science (or in layman’s terms check here) says that about 50% of everyone who gets covid, vaxxed or not, immunocompromised or not, will end up with long lasting symptoms, ones that last beyond the four weeks of infection. Now this statistic includes symptoms that resolve on their own eventually as well as ones that are permanent. But one in every two people will have long lasting covid symptoms. Sure being vaxxed decreases your chances of catching covid in the first place and it decreases the chances of it being severe, but it won’t stop the long term symptoms. Even if you get a “mild” or asymptomatic infection, you still have a 50/50 shot of having long term symptoms. And this is just the most current science, for all we know the number could be higher! We don’t yet know the full extent to which covid fucks up the human body.
Oh and PLUS, omicron has an R0 value of somewhere between 8 and 15, making it the second most infectious disease in the whole world (second only to measles). The R0 number is a measure of how infectious a disease is. For comparison the R0 of the flu is generally 1.5.
And yet EVERYONE I talk to is completely ignoring this and calling omicron more mild than previous strains, that it’s comparable to the flu (never mind that the science says it’s about twice as likely that you’ll have long lasting symptoms from covid than the flu). It makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. But we’re not losing our minds. Especially if you’re disabled/chronically ill, getting covid could be devastating even with a “mild” infection. My brain doesn’t know how to process all of this. The wide spread scale at which people are saying “fuck you” to disabled lives makes me want to vomit.
But uh OP I hope this justifies your actions/thoughts. You’re not alone in this either!
I am triple vaxxed and caught Omicron while masked and outdoors, but working with the unmasked public.
Yes, technically I’m fine. But I spent a week basically unable to sleep or really rest because I had what I can only describe as restless legs syndrome. It hurt to lay down or sit down. I frequently had to move to keep from being in pain. While I’m grateful that this symptom eventually went away, it’s the kind of symptom - weird & neurological - that has become a permanent condition for others.
My breathing also remains permanently impacted. I am, was, in great shape - cardio and strength building exercises on the regular. I now frequently get winded walking up stairs. Exercise in general is much harder and I am fighting to maintain my current state, let alone get back into the kind of fit I used to be.
And there’s NO WAY OF KNOWING how long I will be impacted or if my symptoms will ever increase or resurface. We just don’t know.
I’m the best case scenario: a person in excellent health and triple vaxxed and I still suffered and continue to experience symptoms. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about your own health, and plenty more to care about and be concerned for the health of others.
The immunocompromised are not disposable.
OP, I’m sorry we as a society failed so hard and you have to live with this fear and exhaustion.
When you usually solve issues with your wips by working on another wip and waiting for ideas to come to you, but all your wips have issues that need to be resolved before you continue them:
1. leave in the morning. five is good, four is better.
2. no taxis, no trains, just the bus. if you want you can walk but you’ll have to run. no long sleeves. no nice shoes. just a bag, small as you can make it, and cash. no food or water, you won’t need it. your body is going to turn into air.
3. and here is the important part, here is the part that can kill you; you have to take it all with you. it’s often a book but some people have short videos, interactive dioramas, songs that last fifteen minutes at a time. you can make them yourself or you can ask your best friend or your favorite teacher. pay them well, even if they don’t ask for money. tuck the bills under their doormat and run away quiet.
4. you have to bring everything. your whole home distilled into one hundred pages or forty five minutes or one perfect painting. it all has to be there. and it has to hurt too, hurt looking at it, hurt seeing everything you’ll never get to again. pack it away and keep it safe and dry and clean. don’t lose it.
5. don’t stay in hotels. bed and breakfasts are good, convents are even better. go to bed early, wake up before dawn, keep running. pay everyone generously, don’t make eye contact, but smile. don’t ever hitchhike. don’t ever look behind you.
6. and you have to feel it every day. before you go to sleep go over your whole life again. take it out, unwrap it, hold it and trace the edges and look. look at it. maybe cry a little. you think it’ll hurt less in time but it’ll come in waves. it’ll never go away.
7. you’ll make it. most of them do. it’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but if you start you’re going to finish. you’ll know when you’re done. it’ll probably be a body of water that does it, standing on the white sand of a lake, or a rocky cliff before a beautiful valley. you’ll stand on the edge and feel the hurt in your lungs and your back will feel heavier then it ever has. breathe in.
wlw who flirt platonically with their wlw friends are valid but u gals are so fuckin confusing
me: oh this thing is cute
my wlw friend: not as cute as u babe ;)
me internally: gay??? i know gay but like, gay-gay?? gay????? i’m going to spontaneously combust. will it be for nothing????? is it just, friend gay?? or romance gay?? gay???????????
Look, I’ll be real, a part me is really glad that this website is going to be somewhat revitalized by the inevitable migration of Twitter refugees post-Elon purchase. Staff has been doing great! Tumblr deserves an active userbase because this website fucks harder than any other social media bar none! It is unequivocally the best social experience online! But oh my sweet Lord god in heaven help me the existential terror of having Twitterslither in its normalization of persistent social abuse, its puritanical means-testing of surface level ideological commitment, and its disgustingly narcissistic perpetuation of pervasive cultural pessimism is a genuine nightmare that I am not prepared to deal with.
Like, Tumblr has a such a unique and rare method of social interaction that disincentives the kind of low-effort, low-stakes (until it’s suddenly not) engagement that runs wild on Twitter. Somehow, beyond all odds, Tumblr’s culture of artful lowbrow mixed with thoughtful consideration has SOMEHOW managed to survive the whitewashing of the internet. We’re a living fossil in a fragile ecosystem. Twitter is an obliterate of any positive subculture; it panders exclusively to the lowest common denominator of online engagement, and then further feeds into a toxic mentality of enabling the weaponization of internet clout. You can’t get clout on Tumblr because engagement is anonymized, and the userbase, in general, has deliberately fostered a culture of not giving a shit about being popular. And that is a good thing – that is something we should want to protect and encourage.
And don’t get the wrong, Tumblr is built on the fundamental lowbrow.We all appreciate being crass, being strange, being ‘unmarketable.’ But this is Shakespearian lowbrow at its core. It’s shitposting painted by Picasso way more often than it is shitposting sold as a fucking NFT. It actually somehow contributes positivelyanduniquely to engagement most of the time, and that feeds into even more positive and unique engagement.
I cannot remember the number of one-off dumb jokes I’ve seen reblogged into beautiful efforts of collective poetry. I’ve seen posts asking if Ezra Pound and T.S Elliot fucked like rabid animals turned into significant contributions of literary analysis for their respective works. I’ve seen the stupidest fucking takes morphed into powerful pieces of social commentary by people who cared enough to contribute their time, their effort to do so: to create something worthwhile. That one post about the value of gold and silver in the post apocalypse comes to mind. Like, that’s the kind of thing that could never have survived, much less become prominent and valued, on Twitter. It would sink to the bottom of the bottom there and never resurface: digital echoes that promise something special, something unique, but are fundamentally wasted in the chaotic din of scramblingly awful takes.
I guess I’m just saying that I don’t want that to happen here. I like Tumblr, and I want Tumblr to prosper, but not at the expense of all the things that make it wonderful in the first place.
you ever write something and mid-sentence have to write your future-editing-self a note saying you’re sorry for all the angst they’ll have to dial back
What I thought I was getting into: blessing crystals, kissing plants and growing them for luck potions and cooking to give my friends happiness from home grown magic
What I really got into:“no I dont woship the devil, I didnt poison that, no this wont drag you to hell, no its just aloe, dont eat that, I’m not a demon, no this wont hurt you, its called a blessing for a reason, im not converting you by giving you a cookie, no I dont have a coven…”
