• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 29th, 2024

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  • Congrats on coming out and being your true self, that was a very brave thing to do.

    Your mother, like many parents, had hopes and dreams about who you would become as a person. She’s now being faced with the prospect that those hopes and dreams are dead, that the person she thought you would become is gone. She’s going to need to grieve and from what you’ve written here it seems that process has started. Shock, denial, bargaining, some level of acceptance. I expect anger and depression might show up at some point. It doesn’t necessarily happen in sequence and can cycle too. She’s going to need some time to process, but what’s positive is she’s not outright rejecting who you are, there’s room for her to grow.

    My parents weren’t hostile when I came out as gay, but I heard similar things - it’s just a phase. Are you sure? Was it something we did? Where did we go wrong? What will your life become? Over time they came to accept it and told my extended family (including my very religious Pentecostal grandmother). Everyone is now very welcoming of my wife and my parents are delighted to be grandparents to our kids. I know it’s not the same, but there is hope for things to get better, just keep being authentically you.


  • I refuse to get a phone without a headphone jack. Mostly because I know I’m inevitably going to lose my headphones, forget to charge them, forget them in my trouser pockets that will go in the wash. The latter has happened at least a couple of times with my current headphones and they still work just fine. Try that with your Bluetooth pair and let me know how it goes.








  • I think the fundamental difference between that experiment and the “suicide capsules” vs the death penalty is that in the *former the people going into it are doing so willingly. I imagine people undergoing the same procedure involuntarily will probably resist, hold their breath, panic, do whatever they can to sabotage the process, etc. The reason this method is rarely used to euthanise pets is precisely because of this - the animals get stressed (as many often do at the vet where they need to be for the procedure) panic, react, and it takes way longer than it should as a result.

    Edit: edited for clarity




  • I think I might be able to answer this one from my perspective. I was born in a Portuguese speaking country, so on paper my mother tongue should be Portuguese (which it sort of still is). But we moved when I was a kid and I lived in multiple countries, so I went to international schools for most of my life. English then became my mother tongue over time and it is dominant over Portuguese. I now work in an organisation where English is the main working language, but I live in France, so I acquired a third language, just not quite at native level. Here are some of the interesting things I’ve observed:

    • I have slightly different “personalities” in different languages. This may be a reflection of exposure to different cultures and times of my life I learned these languages, but also very much a confidence thing. I am funnier and at ease making jokes in English than the other two languages.
    • Some words I only learned in one language because of timing and circumstance. There are technical terms I know only in English because of my work. There are motorcycle parts I only know the name of in French because I bought my first bike here. I birdwatch, and for some birds’ names I default to English, while others I use their French name.
    • Because of moving around I was exposed to a lot of different cultures, which is awesome, but that means I have cultural weak ties to my countries of origin (I’m also mixed race). If anything the one cultural constant in my life has been anglophone media (especially American) which had a mot of influence. I identify more with Anglo-Saxon culture but also feel vaguely European. I even sound generically American, which throws some people off when they learn I never lived in the US nor Canada.
    • Knowing multiple languages fluently can obviously make it easier in some ways and make things more accessible. It also made me very adaptable. When I arrived in France I narely knew the language. Once I gained fluency, everything became much easier (well, as easy as this country can be).
    • One disadvantage is that in some ways I am always the “other” (though not just because of language). Everywhere I go I feel like a foreigner, hence the username. I speak English to my kids, and that makes me stand out and people treat me as if I’m some sort of exotic being. It’s gotten better now they’re in a more international school.
    • It’s harder to find people who “get it” because they lived through the same experiences.
    • At work I sometimes have meetings with Portuguese speaking people but I’m uncomfortable speaking Portuguese in a work setting because I miss many of the terms. So I often default to English which confuses people because I’m from a lusophone country and I speak fluently.

    There are some messier issues around identity that I won’t get into because those aren’t limited just to language, but the above are things that have stood out to me over the years.