niom

Masking behaviors are strongly correlated with worse well-being and increased mental health issues (generally depression, suicidial ideation and attempts).

Mental health. Haven't seen it mentioned yet.

Never think of yourself as wrong, invalid, defective or unworthy. That's wrong. Don't do it.

For about 90 % of my life I've thought about myself as defective in many ways.

- In puberty I thought I was defective because other boys were talking about their crushes, how they'd like to f--- this girl or that girl or how they got a boner just looking at them. Later almost everyone got a girlfriend or two. None of that happened for me, so I felt defective. Turns out I'm gay.

- Also in puberty I'd get random boners when sitting down in the bus. It made me feel ashamed and like a pervert, so I stopped sitting down in public transit. Turns out many boys experience this in puberty because, well... the vibrations. They're called "bus boners".

- I always struggled a lot remembering faces and names. I felt bad about it because I thought it meant I didn't care or try enough. I've always had issues forming relationships and again I felt bad and thought I just had to try harder and make a better effort, which didn't work. And various other issues, and for each of them I thought it was a defect of myself. Turns out I'm on the spectrum and my parents didn't bother telling me about being diagnosed as a child. I only found out when bored me stumbled over online autism tests and literally all of them came out strongly autistic-neurodivergent.

Figuring I can be a bit more open since it's a throwaway account (edit - this kinda escalated)

I lost eighty pounds in a year with that body image "trick", but that's only half the story at best. That's what I desired, but it wouldn't have been enough motivation. And if you have a severe mismatch between your body image and your body that's not going to cause good vibes, will it?

So I don't know how depression manifests for others. For me it has usually taken the shape of a particular mean intonation in my inner monologue (I don't have or hear separate voices let alone characters, I'm not a schizo). When my depression gets worse, that part of my inner monologue gets more frequent and nasty, like incredibly nasty in ways I haven't ever even thought about being to anyone in my entire life, ever, not even close. I've literally never told anyone about this and tearing up a bit now. I'm kinda at a loss how to describe it. Calling it "mean spirited" would be the most British understatement in the last few ten-thousand years. When I had really bad days it felt like "it" just wanted to destroy me, like total annihilation until nothing was left and then discard (suicide) the empty husk. Thinking about this makes me wonder how I survived those days. I'd guess without binge-watching some series and binging some video games I might actually be dead now. Not such a waste of time after all, I suppose...

So uh I don't know how exactly I've done it. And even if I knew, I wouldn't tell because it's just such an obviously bad idea. I don't think it was a conscious choice, because even to a very depressed person it would've been obvious how insane doing that would be. But what I did was I weaponized that part of me, the depression, into helping me loose weight.

When I went hungry during a day or wanted to eat more, and obviously if you loose that much weight that quickly you're going to pretty often, ... I "let" that mean part speak up and be nasty and ugly and mean to me as much as "it" wanted to. People thought I was "soooo strong-willed" doing this but that's really not true. I just bullied myself into doing it. Every day. Sure... I had a positive idea that I wanted to achieve, but that wasn't how I got there. It's probably an incredibly bad idea to do it like this and a super easy way to end up with an eating disorder or more mental health issues, but at least depression was finally good for something. And it's way better now that I don't loathe and hate what I see in the mirror any more. I can look in a mirror now and say "you look fine today" to myself. And when I put nice clothes on, because I have some of those now, even with colors, I think I look good and I've even got a few compliments and guess how often that happened in the last decade before.

I didn't know that had to get out. But well. There you have it. Does "co-opting depression to rain fire and brimstone on yourself so you stop being fat so you stop being depressed so much" count as "working on your mental health"?

I've struggled with depression and anxiety issues for most of my life. Two things have made a huge difference for me:

Actually identifying with my body and taking care of me (it). That's the diet, sleep, exercise combo driven by a positive body image I identify with. The by far worst years of my life (so far) were when I clung to some kind of cyberpunky mind-body dualism and treated my body as a bag of meat whose only purpose is to supply oxygen to the brain in front of a computer.

Self-acceptance. For some people this is a given, seemingly achieved without any conscious thought at all, and I'm quite envious of those people. For others this takes decades or they repress until the bitter end (suicide in one way or another).

Therapy might be helpful and seems to be the default advice for questions like these. I've been sent to a handful of psychologist appointments due to anger issues in elementary school (don't recall any of that). I tried to get mental health help around a decade ago, only got some pills that made me feel even worse (adverse effects: suicide) and couldn't get a follow-up appointment. Real therapy is hard to access because the health system intentionally keeps capacity low (it's expensive). Basically only for people unable to work any more due to mental health issues, not for people that have quality-of-life issues. The US seems to be on the other end of the spectrum from my country in this regard.

I suppose it's kinda cliché but "start living authentically". Coming out, doing that thing where you meet people not for work, stuff like that. I cheated and started working on this a few months ago though.

Oh and get a better job preferably with more money. This is still Hacker News after all.

Ancient acceptance of MSM generally depended on who did the penetrating, because in a nutshell penetrating was manly and A-OK while being penetrated (orally / anally / vaginally) was womanly and hence bad. MSM was an exercise of social power.

The "trans/gay/lesbian is cool now" explanation doesn't hold a lot of water to me. If I had the choice to not be gay, I wouldn't be. Life would be so much easier, emotionally and otherwise. Sex would be lower risk and it would be much easier to find a romantic partner. I spent a long time - two decades - suppressing it, as hard as I could, and it did not go away. Instead I was anxious and depressed. After I started to accept myself, those things became a lot better. I look forward to the day I come out.

Transitioning is 100x harder. The nonconformity is obvious. The antagonism directed at transitioning people is unavoidable, strong and potentially deadly - violent and lethal attacks on trans people are becoming much more common every year. Compulsory sterilization for people legally transitioning is still mandated in many countries and was only abolished in progressive countries in the last few years.

No, nobody is doing any of this because it's "cool".

Yes. Outright bans and persecution of homosexuality is relatively new. Effeminate gays were practically eradicated, Europe had the Nazis do it, the US had the lavender scare (because gay=communist), the Soviets under Stalin did much like the Nazis. This is why gays reinvented themselves into the hypermasculine leather culture starting in the 50s. It's why older gay men have negative attitudes towards younger effeminate gays and the reason why the same parts of the gay community look down on bottoms who aren't vers.

Why would you need hacking for that? Classic https://xkcd.com/538 nerd imagination.

Simply seize some devices and place the incriminating evidence on them. Or just place a device with incriminating evidence among other seized evidence. Crime shows make you think every item is individually serialized and bagged or whatever but in reality they're just going to make a bag labelled "15 SD cards and 6 USB sticks". Stuff like hard drives is just going to be "hard drive #6" in the log. Just swap the stickers, easy as pie. You think evidence is stored securely? Secure is expensive, and it's all stuff of guilty people anyway (otherwise it wouldn't be seized).

Warrants are not a high a hurdle in practice when they are needed. The US has the third-party doctrine, so all information you've communicated to someone does not need a warrant unless otherwise protected. In the US you need to establish real probable cause (otherwise the fruit may be poisoned), but PC is a low legal standard. Non-US jurisdictions don't use the fruit of the poisoned tree doctrine and so the actual legal standard is more like "arguing probable cause for the warrant shouldn't look like an outright perversion of justice". The world's best limbo performer can't dance under that bar.

The root cause is impressionable subjects accepting priors from questions into the set of priors used to reconstruct memories. Formulating good questions that contain as few priors as possible is difficult, and the reaction of the interrogator to the subject's response will reveal additional priors. Most interrogators are probably not really all that invested into getting as close to the subject's ground truth anyway and are simply looking to by-and-large confirm a pre-established narrative.

Of course nobody with a court order on your doorstep is going to take your word for anything. If the object of the order is to find some data, anything and everything that looks vaguely digital will be taken (consequentially, every physical nook and cranny will be searched for errant micro-SD cards). Stuff is handled on a per-item basis. An item is either returned (after months to years), or not.

If you end up in a situation like that - which does not mean you did anything wrong at all - your best bet at getting your personal data and items back is by 1.) having them physically separate 2.) not encrypting anything or immediately providing passwords / access so items can be cleared.

Effects and results may vary. Consult your local lawyer for more information.