What is this?

Hope you’re having fun! Snow is always so beautiful. One of the things I miss since moving away from the north.

I briefly shadowed at a medical examiner’s office. “Choking” was a scarily common cause to see up on the board. So I have a hard time believing only one person has ever died eating a donut in that same span of time.

Note that I am pretty sure a lot of those choking deaths are in older people because your swallowing can become impaired.

Lol!! Believe it or not, I hate cutting my food!

Because…

1. I’m lazy
2. When you’re used to using ultra sharp knives, things like steak knives feel so incredibly dull that it’s infuriating/“difficult”. At work, I go through scalpel blades like candy. A sharp blade is always key for my work!

I get every organ or piece of tissue that is removed from you during surgery. I cut up the tissue so it can be made into slides for the pathologist (a type of physician) to render a diagnosis.

Is this a real photo??? What is wrong with your cat???

Regularly use for work? Scalpel blades. My job would be essentially impossible without them.

Thank you!

Glad it’s working for you! I’m seeing two therapists concurrently right now (“cheating” on my old therapist with a side hustle lmao) until the end of the year because I’ve met my deductible. Then I’m gonna figure out who I want to drop.

I have appreciated my old therapist for getting me through a crisis, but I’ve just stagnated and don’t feel like I’m getting enough direction and guidance and specific things to help me. Her therapy style is more “big picture” and generalized if that makes sense, without giving me a lot of specific techniques to help me.

My work has threatened to fire me if I can’t get my shit together so I really want to make more progress.

The new one wants me to work through an extensive DBT workbook over time that gives very specific techniques to use. Then each session we kind of talk about my week and go over what I think worked and didn’t work in the book. Her input is not overly substantial, but I do like how the book can give me more direct techniques and potentially more progress idk.

So I’m considering dropping my old therapist but I feel some type of way about it.

Idk sorry you probably don’t care about me blabbering on lol.

Well…if you have anxiety, CBT is supposed to be the primary therapy modality for that lol.

What specific issue are you looking to address? If you figure that out, you can find out which therapy modalities are shown to work best for it.

How quickly it “starts to work” is entirely dependent on a) How honest you are, b) how open you are to outside perspectives, and c) how much baggage you’ve got to unpack.

More caveats to this…other things I’ve found…

1. If you don’t know what specific issue you need to work on, it may not even “work” at all. You’ll need to introspect and research and /or even seek others’ input if you don’t know already.
2. A lot of therapist I’ve come across, especially in online organizations, seem keen on using unstructured talk therapy. It can be great for basic validation, but not if you have more significant and complex issues. If you know your specific issue, it might help to research what kind of therapy modality works best for it. Then, look for therapists who use said modality and who have treated said condition.

I learned these things the hard way.

I have started and stopped therapy a zillion times before. People would always tell me “go to therapy”. It’s kind of insulting, honestly, as if it was some magic cure all way to dismiss me.

What I’ve found is that therapy doesn’t help if you don’t have a specific enough problem to work on!! So people would always tell me “go to therapy” and I couldn’t figure out wtf I was supposed to work on there so the therapists didn’t focus on anything helpful either.

BUT I feel like I’ve just finally discovered a specific thing I want to work on after years and years of this back and forth BS. So I researched a therapist that is said to use a specific therapy modality to treat my specific problem. We’ll see how it goes with her.

ALSO…it has been frustrating to me, but I’ve found that most therapists I’ve come across are just simply “talk therapists”. There is no real goal other than giving you validation and some general advice and vague concepts and techniques. This can be great for people…but for me it just hasn’t been helpful enough. It just doesn’t give me solid enough direction. But maybe a talk therapist is what you need…who knows?

I realize these don’t answer your questions directly, but I figured I’d share what I learned to hope if might help you. Best of luck.

Damn I’m really sorry to hear you don’t like it. :(

What did you do beforehand if you don’t mind me asking?

My mom was a stay at home parent for all of my life. In her early 50s, she ended up going to college in order to become a nurse. Been over 10 years now and she’s still a nurse.

I would say it’s only ever really too late if you’re beyond working age or nearly there. Because at that point you’re no longer working toward a career.

The real issue is whether or not you have finances and a support system to get you there.

In my mom’s case, she had a husband who already was the only breadwinner anyway, so it didn’t cause much of a financial impact per se. My mom ended up taking out student loans like everyone else, of course, but student loans are seen much more favorably than credit card debt.

I have a friend who is going back to college right now in order to get a better job. In their scenario, their parent let them move back in while they get an education.

I ended up eventually going to an intensive grad school where many of us had to move and we also did not have time to work during the program. There, I met plenty of people who already married, already had careers, etc…and yet they still managed to survive and get through the program just fine. (Again, remember we all took out loans lol.)

Then you hear online about med students having children while going through med school and residency. Sounds like hell, but they manage to do it.

But also, the career you seek should be worth it. Don’t go back to school to do one of those dumb “ingegrative studies” degree or whichever one they call it when you couldn’t pick a major lmao. Won’t net you anything.

Similarly, it wouldn’t make sense someone in their 50s to attempt to go to med school. The return on investment is just not there for the amount of effort and loan debt if you consider how many working years you have left. Yet, as I said, it was worth it for my mom to become a nurse because she never worked before and it allowed her to be able to earn a living wage sooner and with less debt. The return on investment for her was greater.

Point is, I don’t think it’s a matter of “too late”, but rather a matter of…

1. Life circumstances
2. The specific career you are working towards

To add to this, I found out that paying the statement balance before it’s due harms your credit score. Because then when the statement comes out, it shows that you owe zero and this makes it seem like you’re not using your card. At least, this has been my experience.

So, DO pay your full balance on time each month, BUT you need to wait for the statement balance to be generated before doing so.

I mean, AliExpress is great, but for many things I’m really just not interested in waiting 2 weeks for my item.

You said don’t buy directly from brands, but that’s the main thing others in this post are recommending lol.

Thing is if I bought that item from Amazon instead of Samsung, they would have immediately rectified the mistake instead of making me fight for it. And the item would have come sooner. So it’s still a win for Amazon.

I still do get why people don’t want to use Amazon for moral reasons, but again, they simply provide a massively superior experience than literally any other retailer I’ve used.

I don’t get why multiple people in this post are recommending AliExpress over Amazon. Like yeah it’s cheaper and more from the direct source…but not everyone wants to wait a month to receive the item they want to buy. I’ve seen some items on AliExpress advertise that they now have “faster shipping”, but it’s still very very slow in comparison…still taking multiple weeks in my experience.

There is a reason why Amazon got big over other online retailers. Even the online shops for many brick and mortar stores end up making you pay more for the item, make you pay a sizeable fee for the shipping, and make you wait 1-2 weeks all on top of that. Not to mention that if your order does get fucked up or you do get scammed on Amazon, they are very quick to give you your money back because they know it helps with customer satisfaction.

I had an issue with an online order from Samsung before. And despite also being a massive company with shittons of money, they gave me a hard time and I really had to fight to rectify their own mistake.

I get Amazon is evil and all but there’s a reason why they are the most used shopping platform. If no one else comes even remotely close to what they do, they aren’t going to gain much of a foothold.

I always love the nonsensical order of letters that these companies use.

Bahahaha

Thank you! He gets wet food and I have an auto wet food feeder, but it is a real PITA to set up and clean and it only holds a couple of meals. I’ll have to work on being more regular about it.