Doreen Michele

I have a serious medical condition and as is the norm for my condition, I was a bag of bones as a child. At the same time, I've always been big for a girl, starting with being nine pounds at birth and my mother told me that when I was five, doctors wanted to put me on drugs to slow my growth because they felt I was too big. She told them "No, she's not THAT big." I ultimately ended up 5'9" tall and was still a bag of bones when I hit that height at age seventeen, at which point I started taking hormonal birth control pills and gained about fifty pounds in one year. I met the future ex at age sixteen, so he knew me when I was still rail thin, but I married him at age nineteen after gaining a bunch of weight. He and my mom were always critical of my weight but a lot of men made it clear that I looked just fine, honey, and if he didn't like it, I could always call them if I wanted some positive strokes, which I mostly declined. I finally got a proper diagnos...

I want to design a better culture. A better way to feed people than what we currently have that adequately nourishes people without chaining women to the stove and a second class citizen status. I want to make clothes and change housing . I don't need all jobs and housing and food everywhere to change. I just want planet Earth to ALLOW a new option to exist for those who want it.

320 points Generally speaking, toxic substances are only "cheap" due to externalizing many of the costs involved... 202 points   It's important for a sub for disabled individuals to have mods with that disability. Footnote   I previously published a list of Fourteen Comments on HN with more than 100 karma and added a fifteenth comment in a footnote. The fifteenth comment and the one above with 320 points are actually related to my career aspirations.

I grew up in the Deep South which defacto uses honorifics that are peculiar to the local culture. It's well known that Southern culture is shaped by The South being historically more strongly Christian than most of the nation and Southern manners are typically attributed to Christian influence. My understanding is that a lesser known factor is European nobility historically established an expectation of court-like respect and diplomacy. So Southern Manners and Southern Hospitality is also a political  heritage, not just a religious heritage, and is shaped by the culture of European nobility who weren't simply wealthy upper classes , they were the ruling class politically and their children were expected to be officers in war, married off as defacto ambassadors to other countries, etc. So with that background, unsurprisingly, my political views and ideas on what makes sense politically boil down to looking to treat ALL people with a certain baseline respect for bodily autonom...

1. I'm socially observant and interested in figuring out how social stuff works. 2. I'm an ordinary person, not one of the upper crust, who knows how it works if you are a big fat nobody. 3. I'm interested in parsing how someone can get their own needs met without stepping on anyone else's toes. AKA "ethics" or good boundaries. 4. I'm not interested in controlling anyone. I just want to TALK about what I know so other people can look at that and go "Oh, x and y are useful to me, z is irrelevant to my life. I can make some adjustments here and be less miserable/have less friction with other people."