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screams uncontrollably

OK. Just tell me who to scream at.

Er, that was a terrible explanation and also you're in Finland so I don't know why you would know any more than the Americans would.

And also that was also a terrible explanation too.

I'm quite well-versed in American politics by local standard, though that's not saying much :-)

American politics aren't saying much.

Oh well, perhaps they will actually manage to destroy the world and then I won't have to suffer any longer.

Oh, and I meant to go to Dragons, but I forgot.

By all means do if you want to, or not if you don't.

Not that I don't sympathize, but... yeah, if you want to talk politics, please do so there :)

← 9 messages moved from TRPG General Chat

It's nothing to do with politics, I don't know how you got that idea.

I suppose it is sometimes with me in here but that's as much as anything just because I'm already upset about other things. If I wasn't already going through so much, I wouldn't care what kind of stupid the politics people said.

So no, it's got nothing to do with politics.

I just want to die.

Ah, finally managed to open a private window.

Been scrabbling around trying to work out how to get at it from what I had open.

Now I don't know what to search for.

"Who scream at" is understandably not cutting it as a search term. :-P

@A.B. You should seek professional counsel regarding this

Life needs to feel good, if it's not it's a problem that can be fixed more often than not

As in? Brain fallen over.

Repeating that, this time in English: how?

I just want somebody to talk to :-(

Well, actually, I want a lot of things, mainly for none of this ever to have happened, but also that.

I'm trying to look up chat helplines (not up to phones just now, and besides want to talk in private), but I'm having a lot of difficulty.

Sadly, I only know Finnish ones personally

I have a friend or two in Britain, mostly in the London area, who are the sorts of people who might know about mental health helpline options and how helpful they actually are. If you'd like me to reach out to them, I could.

(If I'm wrong about my assumption that it's a mental health thing, they might still be of use depending on what the topic actually is and if you're okay to be detailed enough here that I can tell them what sort of helpline is needed.)

Ah, hmm. I'm thinking about it. Thank you so much, both of you. I don't really like the idea of talking to something that bills itself as a "mental health" helpline, because I don't really want to have to say at the outset that none of the things that are worrying me are real. Because I dunno whether they are or not, that's why I'm worried about them and want to ask somebody.

How thoroughly can messages be deleted in this chat if necessary? Just so I know the score.

That's an issue for sure. Because the Stack Exchange is big on SEO, chat transcripts are actively seed to the Googles, so even if you get something purged by mods it'll linger in Google's caches.

My limited experience with mental health services is that they're usually (but obviously not always) pretty good about hearing problems rather than hearing diagnoses--if something's making life hard for me, that's real and deserves to be taken seriously regardless of what the diagnosis might or might not be.

Hmm, OK. With regard to the second message.

@A.B. just a little edit, hope you don't mind

The Samaritans phone line is excellent (from what I've heard)

not personally used them

I do mind, it changes the meaning 180 degrees. Can you delete it completely if you're going to do that?

@AncientSwordRage

Thanks.

@A.B. noted, apologies about that

Fair enough.

I get the sentiment though, I may have overstepped, but I like to keep the Sci-Fi chats swear free, and I assumed the same was here

With regard to the first message, about possibilities for deleting messages: that's absolutely terrible. OK, good to know where we stand.

will defer to local room owners next time

Like I said, I'm trying to look up chat helplines (not up to phones just now, and besides want to talk in private). Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the Samaritans don't do that.

@A.B. ah ok

text chat you mean?

Yeah.

(as for the swearing thing: nah, that's fair, I was just too fried to think of any other way of saying that at the time. It was just the way the sentence ended up saying the opposite when you just cut the swearing out! Language is weird.)

@A.B. language is weird

my concern is usually that stuff gets flagged, and then mods/10k users swoop in

but maybe less likely here?

thecalmzone.net/help/webchat seems to do a webchat

brb

I don't know, but I know what you mean about swooping. It's often unpredictable when things get dealt with by someone who's just got here and doesn't know what's going on. Useful to avoid that if possible,

Some of what I'm worried about is potentially (not sure, that's why I wanted to talk about them) real problems as a result of mental health problems. Does that make sense?

That webchat is men only for some reason, although I suppose I could always lie, I don't think it makes much difference to anything I can think of.

@A.B. true

@A.B. ah sorry for assuming

the only other webchat I found for was for members of LGBT?

mind.org.uk/information-support/guides-to-support-and-services/…

No problem, I'm one of these weird people who thinks it's funny :-)

@A.B. phew

And if you thought so, then maybe they will, so it sounds like a plan.

Hmm

I'll leave that up to you

Does "Is totally confused" count as LGBT?

hmm interesting I think that's a different LGBT chat helpline than the one I stumbled over, that one was Irish.

@A.B. It should. YMMV because I understand Britain's got some unpleasant category-enforcement going on in some spaces.

Hmm, I wouldn't know about that. Thanks for the warning. Probably say on their website.

@A.B. just FYI, at least in my experience people associate Helpline with Phoneline, but that may just be me (at least tis' why I was confused initially)

@A.B. I know for sure that if they're leaving the T out of their documentation, that's a clear sign to avoid them.

Yeah, makes sense, just wasn't sure what else to call it.

Good point. Not seen anyone not use the T for ages, though.

Yep, this one has the T and the plus sign too.

@A.B. good good good!

Yes, that seems hopeful. I like when I see people use the plus sign or the Q because they're specifically including "it's complicated". I am very definitely plus sign, I think :-D

@A.B. so you could say you're AB positive? :p

Yeah, LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQAA, their plussed varieties etc are all well-established acronyms that are commonly-enough used to refer to gender and sexual minorities as a whole

I'm fond of QUILTBAG for the pure whimy factor.

"LGB", OTOH, feels very much like "LGBT except we don't serve T" (pardon the pun)

@kviiri except some organisations exclude the T, let alone the Q etc.

@AncientSwordRage I wouldn't draw conclusions from excluding the Q, but my point is excluding the T feels very much like a statement

I wasn't trying to draw conclusions about excluding the T, but I see what I wrote it unclear

I'm lacking on run of sleep

In the last... five years, at least? I've yet to encounter a T-less cluster application in the wild that wasn't specifically and loudly making exactly that statement.

I don't think I've ever

I've only seen it in the context of people on twitter say "watch out of X, they claim to be good but they are LGB only)

But the T-less-ness is just an easy-to-diagnose warning sign, I've seen some TQ+-friendly spaces that still place an overdue emphasis on having precise and minutely accurate ID labels, which can make it really hard to accommodate actual nuance in practice--much less people who are exploring or unsure.

I'll be honest I've never fully understood the Q part, which from my best reading it sort of the point as it's complicated?

Queer covers a lot of ground

Yeah, that's pretty much my understanding of it. There's a lot of historical detail and theoretical ink spilled on it but generally in modern practice it's an inclusive term for existing under the umbrella of being marginalized for deviation from cishettery.

Yeah, there's a lot of people who suffer from some degree of marginalization because of not conforming to gender roles, without being gay, bi, trans or anything else easily categorizable

It's also important to remember that the experience of queerness and its oppression is culturally specific and there's no universal constant for any of this.

for the longest time, I thought the het in cishet meant het up

@BESW very true

@AncientSwordRage Gives new meaning to this meme.

@BESW hah yup

> so you could say you're AB positive? :p

X-D

I'm not sure I've ever heard QUILTBAG before, I like it :-D

re: above, I know I'm a little late to the party but the Samaritans recommend SHOUT giveusashout.org (free text to 85258 on UK mobile networks) as an alternative after they retired their own text service. Not a personal rec though, I've never used them.

Hmm, could work. I'm not used to texting but it could work. Thanks, Carcer.

"Queer" in the recent sense is kind of reverting to the original meaning of "queer", isn't it, or partway to it at least? Which I like because I like words history.

the best I've heard is 'not heterosexual'?

the usage most people I know would have would be to mean anyone who is not cisgender and heterosexual.

Hah, yes. Although "not heterosexual" kind of sounds like you're sure. And also like you're specifically not interested in the opposite sex, which isn't really what it works out as given that "heterosexual" is usually not considered to include "bisexual" but if you read it quickly it looks like that.

I agree on LGB, anyway. LGBT has been so standard for so long that if someone leaves the T off they probably do mean that they're not talking about transgender people.

LGBT is the version used automatically even by people who know no more about it than a dog does and can't immediately remember what LGBT stands for :-)

Queer is also sometimes used to include, somewhat controversially, people of non-normative gender expression regardless of sexuality

Yeah, and I distinguish between "my aunt trying her best but being a bit outdated" and "a queer support institution choosing to leave the T off."

I'm not 100% sure where I stand on the usage of queer myself, I feel in my bubble the more inclusive usage of queer covering non-traditional gender expressions even among heterosexual cis people is the most common, to such extent I was actually surprised to hear that queer heterosexuality is a contentious term

Like I've said before, I think it's important to give individuals a lot of space around their label use, for a ton of reasons starting with the fact that the most marginalized people are the ones most likely too busy with their own lives to keep up with the latest academic and social nuances. But big visible institutions, I'll hold to a more exacting standard.

Aye

@BESW that seems wise

also, it's best to be open to people with conflicting definitions when they are self labelling because they can be both valid and not in agreement

Hah, yes.

A mild tangent related the spectrum of queerness, I've always identified as cis-male though I realize I am one with a lot of buts (one t, sorry if you expected me to be a sort of butt-hydra)

I was really surprised when my current companion rather... not quite insistently, but enthusiastically wanted to make sure I actually feel like and identify as a male

In a sense I admire her consideration, though it kinda worries me that some people have a rigid enough idea of masculinity that the minor effeminacies in my appearance and behavior shouldn't fit in

for some reason the subject of my sexuality doesn't often come up in conversation, but I suspect several people I know would be surprised that I consider myself straight

@kviiri [disappointed]

@BESW likewise

I don't want to imagine the logistics of that

Then I have a search term you shouldn't use.

> Like I've said before, I think it's important to give individuals a lot of space around their label use, for a ton of reasons starting with the fact that the most marginalized people are the ones most likely too busy with their own lives to keep up with the latest academic and social nuances. But big visible institutions, I'll hold to a more exacting standard.

I may steal this explanation.

> In a sense I admire her consideration, though it kinda worries me that some people have a rigid enough idea of masculinity that the minor effeminacies in my appearance and behavior shouldn't fit in

All the this.

I mean, if somebody is so unsuited to what's expected of a certain gender (at least, what's expected of it in that town that week!) as to decide would be happier actually declaring is the other gender, then that should be OK.

But the world shouldn't lose sight of the fact that if a girl wants to do things that (where she lives, at least) are considered untypical for girls, without wanting to actually claim to be a boy, or vice versa, that should also be OK.

One thing that makes me uncomfortable about the whole "gender identity" movement is that it seems to involve so much talking up of supposed intrinsic differences between how males think and how females think. At least, it does in some quarters. Some of those quarters are probably populated by angry teenage girls who don't know anything, mind you.

couldn't it just as easily be angry teenage boys?

yeah it could literally just as easily be angry teenage boys