eos_nyxia

My first ex who I dated when I was 15 for a handful of years had a lot of narcissistic qualities, but then, I wasn't a "nice girl" at that point either. Why would I have wanted a "nice guy" when I knew deep down that I wasn't "nice" myself either? Also, beyond physical attraction, we need to have other things in common? I put up with a lot, but if he had actually been a consistently kind, genuine, compassionate, and sensitive person (and not a profoundly self-absorbed one), then it would have been much, much harder to inevitably leave him, and I would have had more conscience about the way I treated him the more time went on. (Like if he went into a narcissistic-type of rage-fueled meltdown, if he was a "better" person, I wouldn't have been able to laugh in his face about his behaviour and STILL feel like a decent person.) So probably not quite dynamic OP was originally referring to. My eyes were open. I wasn't exactly fooling myself. Also,the pairing of covert with overt (or classical) narcissists is very much a thing. How common it is exactly, I do not know. But I suspect that women tend to fall more into the covert narcissist category largely because of social conditioning and acceptability -- we really do have a spot in our cultures for overtly narcissistic men, don't we? With women, not so much (especially if you are not considered very attractive and charming as a woman). Secretly, covert narcissists often get to feel superior to the overt narcissist, while the covert narcissist gets to be the kinder, more moral, more responsible one. Or the victim or martyr. They get to look better to others and themselves. I see this dynamic a little bit in myself in retrospect: my ex got to be dumb one and I got to be the smart one. And I felt like I was the more responsible and moral one until I decided that if the relationship originally had something positive to it, it didn't anymore (which it did, again, usually there is a hook which attracts and keeps people in relationships). At that point, I didn't care about how I was seen by others or him at that point anymore, I was going to burn my bridges, and the fastest way to do that is with someone who has narcissistic tendencies to get them to release their death grip on you is to burn their fingers consistently and enough times to make it clear to them that you are NOT a food source anymore, lol. You have to want to look at what's underneath the hood, not just at the superficial dynamics.

No one went into the very obvious trauma and female social indoctrination conditioning growing up? For what it's worth, manipulative people don't usually show all of their hand at first before a person is hooked, unless they are very confident in their ability to pull it off and/or are stupid. Women/ girls often have their guard up the most up at the beginning, because "strangers", and things often fall apart once that guard is down. If you are deeply conditioned since early childhood to accept certain things from males in your life, you will miss a lot of signs that might otherwise be clear as day. It's like a preconditioned blindness or selective seeing. This means in order to not fail at getting duped by a guy who hides his nature, you need to have the foresight to anticipate that a person is no good for you, which is often a combination of gut intuition (which we're often conditioned to ignore as girls) and knowing exactly what tells to look for before the situation escalates and gets out of control (abuse, trafficking, etc.). You need to have a clear enough sense of self, a decent understanding of people's motives, and the strength to trust in yourself even if others tell you there is nothing to worry about. You also need to feel like your well being fundamentally matters. By the way, a woman can appear confident or like she has so much social power and many different options without having any of these traits I just mentioned. Many girls start dating when they are pretty damn young, like even in their early teens. Most people learn by getting burnt first, and then trying to learn from those experiences. From observing from the outside: by the time many women figure it out, there is a lot of bitterness and accumulated baggage. Many are done with men by that point. This is especially true right now with the women who are opting out. And by "foresight", it's often straight up hypervigilance. In my experience, do you know who is the best at predicting who is going to be a user before they get used? People who got used and abused by people growing up, especially by their own parents and caregivers. I'm that way, My husband is that way. Both of us were pretty good at avoiding getting screwed by people when we were young. There's often a terrible cost for that level of clarity and discernment when it comes to sussing. Do you want to live watching your back all the time because people always want something from you and they might be willing to destroy you in the process as long as they get what they want? It's not very fun. You can't desperately want to want to believe in people, for instance, because that is a blindness, which then turns into a liability.

That certainly does not help.

I read that as wilting, lol. Testosterone? I read that somewhere too. I'm wondering why he looks more feminine in the face compared to when he was younger though.

I've juiced fresh cranberries myself, but I don't own a juicer (I have too many appliances and I HATE cleaning juicers) so I blend it up with water and then press it through a fine-mesh strainer and it's good enough for me. Often you can get it super cheap if you buy it right after Thanksgiving and then you can freeze the extra. I usually also juice it in combination with other fruits, roots, and vegetables. My standard thing is usually fresh ginger juice and lemon, which is super easy to strain, and then maybe fresh turmeric and celery or cucumber. For me, ginger is one of my panacea herbs, especially someone who has had lifelong digestive sensitivities.

I mostly go on there (and similar places) to lurk and get a temperature reading of whatever the issues of the day are for a specific community. In this case, mostly I tend to focus on issues relating to female physical health (especially news that I might have missed from other sources), the current state of reproductive rights (mostly in the States), marital issues and issues interacting with the opposite sex (e.g. the uneven distribution of physical and emotional labour in relationships). (Though there is a ton of selection bias that skews toward the negative -- it makes it seem like everyone has a shitty husband and male friends, which I have trouble believing is the result of issues that SUDDENLY APPEARED with no red flags beforehand. People aren't that crafty, even when they try to be, haha.) Maybe there is an occasional post about human rights issues for women worldwide, but most of it is very US-centric and it shows. I mean... any kind of place where people repeatedly go to consolidate their bitterness isn't good for anyone emotionally. After a while, the collective attitude tends to automatically rub off. Even I feel it and I'm not one to automatically identify with the agendas and ideologies of specific communities, even if I'm in the demographic group. This is what happens when people go to a specific place to bond with people over a shared lack or wound though. Bonding through perceived shared trials and hardships. It offers a very strong bonding potential.

He's an almost 50 year old guy with not a lot of melanin. I'm not sure what sort of cosmetic procedures he has had done as well. He also has really low body fat, doesn't he? None of these factors really help with aging. For cosmetic work, the result can be a wildcard even with "good" work, especially with new procedures seemingly being implemented at least every 5-10 years. The long term result isn't always known (e.g. the migration of fillers, undissolvable fillers). Very low body fat makes everyone look older. East Asians tend to have more face fat by default which helps with the appearance of aging even if we also lack the melanin. I think he looks fine enough, though I guess you could ask if that amount of effort is worth the reward (looks wise). IDK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ People really think that diet or controlling external lifestyle factors fixes everything, don't they? The obsession with the visual aspect of aging has gotten completely out of hand.

There is a certain kind of sadness and desperation (like a kind of existential emptiness and not being at peace with that) which tends to follow around the formerly religious like a scent. As if they are trying to fill the void with some new kind of religion, whether it's New Age spirituality, another religion, a food-based "religion" (like veganism, specifically if they're dogmatic and evangelizing in an extremely aggressive way), or turning some other niche into a whole-ass ideology. It could be fitness, it could be intellectualism or anti-intellectualism, techno-utopianism, or something else entirely. Food-based "religions" (particularly as a Western phenomenon) is an obsession with foods as a sort of moral marker of purity, and the obsession with remaining pure or worthy in this way, which in turn calls for demonizing others. There might be a point to reducing the load placed on your body, there is a point to ethical concerns, but I'm simply referring to the emotional and thought processes attached to it and the attachment to specific identity markers. What you demonize in others you reject in yourself, and that always has a cost. He was raised as a hardcore Mormon, wasn't he? If he doesn't believe that he's going to get a Mormon afterlife, then he at least wants to live forever? (Which I get, but I still find sad. Who wants to live entirely like themselves as they know themselves..... forever.... just because they are afraid?)

Why the negative framing by default? What invisible benchmark are you comparing everything to?

This is so goofy, why would you think this is onesided when people are left to their own devices? I was a tween (probably even younger) when I realized that "smart" or "nice" doesn't matter if you're not cute as a girl either, and "weird" is only ok too if it's offset by people thinking your attractive, but that also has its limits.

Personally I think the difference between him and many who would envy being in such a position is that he is truly committed to a service mindset, so it's like a vocational or even sacred calling, Not just the idea of it.

Have you gone out of your way to find people who share similar enough niche interests to commune with? Or can you honestly say that there isn't some part of you that takes pleasure in feeling like you're the best person in every room?

BEING A HEAT FREAK IS A WAY OF LIFE: No problems of any sort exist in this place. No fixations on anyone or anything, and nothing to resolve about the future or past. Literally nothing to concern myself with. And it makes me feel amazing to be existing in a body in a way that few things do. Why would I not love it? In my experience, the dry sauna is just slightly better overall, though it's quite a different experience both emotionally and physically. The steam room is better for your respiratory system, especially your lungs and sinuses, and also your skin. The sauna is better for deep tissue, including the muscles, joints, and fascia (and by extension, general flexibility, thus hot yoga). Personally, I also find that the dry sauna is better for deep emotional release. Along with affecting the deeper tissues of the body, this also might have something to do with preferring to be in there for an hour, sometimes longer, sometimes a bit less. While in the steam room, it feels physically oppressive to be there for more than 15-20 minutes. This might have something to do with the amount of swimming cardio I do these days, and that supposedly the steam room I go to is the hottest one in the city. The steam room is part of my regular 4-6 day a week swimming habit, but the dry sauna is not (sadly). The rec centre I swim at doesn't have a dry sauna, or I'd be in there as much as humanly possible. ONE THING I DON'T GET: People who get super social as they're clearly melting to death, haha. To each their own though!

....because why not?

GOD'S GIFT TO SALADS: SHIRAZI SALAD: Finally, I discovered a salad that has everything that makes the base flavours of a Greek salad amazing (chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, onions + sour citrus vinaigrette), but with a texture that makes it infinitely more delicious: It's that perfectly uniform fine dice! About once a week, I fantasize about eating a very large amount of this salad. (Sometimes I wonder if I'm known as the lady who ALWAYS orders a Shirazi salad at my local Persian food place... often I go there and literally just order that.) TABBOULEH: Now it's competing with my classic favourite salad, which is Lebanese-style Tabbouleh. Usually, when I make it myself, I sub out the cracked wheat with either cooked quinoa or hemp hearts. I love this salad SO much that I googled if it was possible to give myself kidney stones by consuming too much of this stuff. (Parsley, while a super healthy vegetable, has a lot of oxalates, as do many other uncooked dark leafy green vegetables.) Because if it were up to me, I'd eat it all day, every day. ALAS, the other major deterrence with both of these dishes: one either pays the price (buying it premade) or you're chopping your life away. HONOURABLE MENTION -- SEAWEED SALAD: I've always found that the servings that they give you at sushi restaurants are pitifully small. But then again, maybe the serving size is for the best! I love this type of salad so much that I recently googled "...can I get iodine poisoning from eating too much seaweed salad?" The answer is -- Yes. Yes you can. A couple days ago, I was at a Chinese banquet and almost no one at my table wanted to eat the seaweed salad. Haha, their loss! (Wait... is this actually safe?) I'm pretty sure all the East Asian countries have some version of this type of crisp, chewy seaweed salad with a vinegar/ sesame oil-based vinaigrette. HONOURABLE MENTION AND UNDERRATED -- PANAGO PIZZA: For some reason, I've never heard anyone talk about these salads locally ever. But for 8-12 CAD, you can get a fresher, better-quality salad than you can get anywhere else, including ones of a much higher price point for a similar quality. I've had moderately to much worse salads in restaurants, salad bars, supermarkets (including posh ones), etc. (Which either means that the bar for salad quality is in hell or I am super picky haha.) One thing that I really appreciate is that there are a ton of ingredients you can choose from and a lot of them are free to add on. It makes it really easy to order online, check off a bunch of boxes for each ingredient (and uncheck a few), walk there in 10-15 minutes, and everything's already done. If I'm feeling texturally ok with it, I really enjoy these with a ton of extra veggies, as many as I can get, with a protein. (Panago product placement, lol.)

Interesting, thanks for sharing! Are you generally sensitive with sleep or was this routine unusually overstimulating? Also, how close to sleep do you finish your last set? I've been curious about this sort of routine for the last 10ish years, but I didn't have the time, energy levels, or persistence for it back then. I have actually heard of people doing this type of thing for pistol squats or other callisthenics, but also sometimes for kettlebell and other weight lifting exercises, though it's usually more like 3-6 sets spread out throughout the day. I've heard that it's a good way to build strength very quickly because you rarely get fatigued enough to have to take whole days off for muscle recovery and DOMs, though I imagine long-term fatigue must build up anyway, just at a slower rate.

So it's been a month; how did this experiment go?

This is the answer. Although OP is from Lebanon, aren't there a decent number of people with light eyes and even people with natural dark blonde hair? Depending on his colouring, he might very much be white-passing. ...which doesn't mean very much, because I think a lot of very visibly mixed-race people here in metropolitan Canada/the US (including myself in this category) are often considered white-passing.

I mean to be fair, Gal's acting is like: The clips I saw from Snow White weren't much better lol. It's not exactly motivating to pay money to watch even if I didn't care about her politics at all.

This is so, so painfully last decade... Good song though.

...but did they keep the goofy-ass dialogue and camera panning?

@Av2521 What specifically isn't working out about your hometown?

It could be the Christian fundie homeschooling. It doesn't help, haha.

I mean, there is a point to this, even though the speculations about what pre-agricultural life was like tend to be riddled with unchecked utopian fantasy. But you're right. We're not well-equipped emotionally or spiritually to work at unfulfilling labour which arguably serves no higher purpose in a highly regimented and bureaucratic way. Social isolation and disconnection that is built into our modern lifestyles is a serious issue and it seems to only be getting worse. And it's true that by default, we lived more fully and freely. But take a look around, more and more people are finally starting to direct the anger where it is more appropriate, at the parasitically wealthy and greedy who take and do not give back in proportion to what they've claimed for themselves. There is no balance there. More importantly, there is the drive to do something about it, even if it's only changing the way you live your life and the way you speak about it. Great, so now what do you do about the things that deep down you don't feel like you fully deserve? On one hand, there is the obvious entitlement of thinking: I deserve sex; it's a basic need; it should be easily available whenever I want it. On the other hand, deep down, do you really feel like you deserve it? If you don't, then you will probably hate the woman giving it to you freely and also hate yourself as well. Funny how people can feel both ways.

This is good for absolutely no one. You are comparing two unlike things; why not compare a hypothetical "average woman" with an "average man"? Like, do you really think it's easier being a highly intelligent woman? (By whatever normal metrics that intelligence is measured by these days). If you're considered conventionally attractive enough, people will overlook the weirdness and the psychological baggage that often comes with it, but that can only go so far. In a similar way that people will overlook sociopathy as well, but it's not a great thing lol. I mean, getting sex and being loved isn't a reward for just existing and being an intelligent woman either, but it's not about that, is it? Yes, subpar and emotionally unstimulating sex, which in many cases, is worse than none at all. Just a reminder that the female sex bears more risks for having sex, including assault (sexual and otherwise) and pregnancy.