confusedpuppy

My reasoning for seeking out that type of therapist came from a situation that happened about a couple years earlier. A former friend and coworker accidentally introduced me to a queer girl. Her and I talked a lot about mental health and became close friends over time.

My former friend was being a creep towards her and I saw how much it affected her when she came eventually forward to tell me about it. We no longer talk to him anymore. It was after both her and her partner asked me to come visit that I came to understand how caring and accepting queer people can be.

When I came back home, I realized I wanted to be treated like a unique individual just like how my friend and her partner treated me. What better place than a queer community where so many others have fought to be their own person. Especially when there's so much social pressure to fit into a single lifeless mould.

Being surrounded by uniqueness gives so much colour to life.

My sister weaponized her pettiness against me. Even after a close call with death, I was still at fault for things that were completely outside of our powers.

She spent so much effort making me feel guilty, isolated and weird but she hid it all behind her outgoing personality and charity work. She couldn't do a good deed without telling the whole world and everyone else things she's heaven sent because of her constant self promotion.

But if she's so great, why do we have no relationship at all? Why do I feel the absolute need to not share anything personal with her in order to protect myself? Why do my therapists, past and present, look at me in shock when I mention things she has said and done to me? And why do I and other men (mainly my cousins) in my family have to suffer from her pettiness and moral high positioning?

At least my parents learned to stop trying to blame me and control my behaviour, just not my sister. Nothing will ever be good enough for her.

All I ever wanted was a sister to talk to and help me through life as the youngest child in the family. Over the past five years I've found four sisters. And they love me. I know because they tell me and show me how much they love me. One of them even gave me a forehead kiss recently and that kind of love feels special. I love them all so much even if all they really did was just let me be me.

How do you think Ansible can help me? I've read about it a few times but it's hard for me to understand it's actual usage without spending time playing with it.

I can possibly look into it a bit more in the future. I've got a few things I'm working on like learning how to do TLS with Caddy so I can reduce my dependency with Cloudflare.

I haven't tried arch at all. I used Linux Mint for a year, LMDE for a year and only really started working with command line since last December. I think I chose to try Alpine because I wanted my web facing devices to have the least amount of software installed. Security-wise it made sense to me to have less surface area to exploit.

It took a bit extra effort for me to learn how to use OpenRC as the init system. As well as learning Linux from a bare bones linux perspective.

I actually found using Busy-box Ash interesting to work with and that's the only shell I currently use. I even wrote a whole script around Rsync in a POSIX friendly way because I liked the idea portable scripting.

If you're interested, I can send you a link that contains the setup notes for my server. It's about 85% of my setup process, the rest being some files that are mostly customization that I rsync into place towards the end of the setup process. That can give you an idea of what Alpine on ARM is like.

From my experience, it's hard to help others if I can't help myself first. After doing some intense self reflection, it's helped me to understand the type of solidarity I need to look out for in the future.

At the very least, I can be more mentally prepared to take future opportunities that rise up. Although deep down I feel that I'm going to have to a lot more to defend the vulnerable and those that I deeply care about.

If more people were willing to fight through the pain and discomfort of self reflection, solidarity against the powerful few wouldn't seem like such an intimidating mountain. But that's just what I believe.

I can appreciate that about Debian. Common tools and stability can be both convinient and reliable. Learning linux is already overwhelming with choices.

Even though I use Alpine for all my Pi boards and laptop, I keep a live usb partition of Linux Mint Debian Edition as my emergency backup. It just works.

The uprising "long shot" scene is burned into my memory. It's so chaotic and tense but so amazingly well done.

I have pretty bad social anxiety but I also am able to let my adhd do the driving. I've travelled and live abroad in foreign places but to my friends and family back home I'm nearly non-verbal. All that to say I feel like I live a very hypocritical life.

I behave differently based on the situation. My first queer social meet up was a bit strange. It was 95% women and I felt completely out of place. I ended up just talking to a guy for most of the night and as I was leaving, ended up meeting a bunch of other people. One of them happened to be going to the same concert as me the following week. We exchanged numbers and now her and I are super close friends.

I generally arrive to these events with an open mind and a genuine smile and that's enough for people to come talk to me. It can feel very intimidating at first but even getting out there at all is a huge step in the right direction. If you don't meet people the first time, there will always be another event. Becoming a regular face also helps other people coming to introduce themselves to you.

I'm awful for going up and introducing myself to others so I look for ways to be more inviting for people to come talk to me. It's not as direct but I've found some wonderful people that way. Whatever works is good enough for me :)

Now combine that with impatient people who don't give other people enough time to process information or enough time to properly explain something.

That's my whole family dynamic right there. Pure anxiety fuel :D

My frustration with Raspberry Pi OS is that the packages available were constantly out of date. Some were 2 to 3 years out of date.

I eventually started using Alpine linux on my Pi boards and have been happy since then. Now I can use the latest Docker and Podman packages without manually adding new repositories.

If I didn't prefer Alpine's minimal approach, I would have probably gone with Debian because of it's history in stability.

I live near a large city so my options are quite open. I was able to find queer events within that city quite easily. Eventbrite.com has pages and pages of events available for me.

I went to a few that focused on meeting queer people. Halloween parties, board game nights, trivia. You may also find events under neurodiverse labels as well. There would definitely be some overlap with the queer community there too.

I chose a therapist that worked with queer people and people who have alternative lifestyles. She was the one who made that suggestion to me and that was probably the most helpful thing she had done for me.

Hopefully you have some luck, I imagine it would be difficult to find queer communities in less populates areas.

There's a lot of people out there with mental health issues. Poor mental health doesn't discriminate and doesn't really target a single group. What's important to myself is that people are aware of their own health, honest about it and make an effort to deal with it in their own way.

I tend to find queer people to be a lot more open and accepting of others and their differences in general. Especially in comparison to the straight people who I've been around in my personal experiences.

Also, I have Autism and ADHD. I've stumbled through life and the people who I've felt the closest connections with also had differenly wired brains. The queer people I have met accept me just as I am.

I know I'd have more friends who identified as straight if they learned how to love themselves and care for their overall health. I can also say that about practically any other group of people as well.

However I can appreciate the uphill struggle to love a queer self in a straight dominated world. That's a steep hill to climb and most people are doing it with very little support. It's easy to see how some people just can't mentally handle it.