Brought to you by late night reflections over the engagement of my littlest cousin, who is now a man w facial hair & a dog & an apartment & a fiancée but also “my baby” who I changed & fed in the middle of the night during school holidays & snuggled w the way I now snuggle my own little boy bc life.

Have we considered that maybe OP is a Dodger actually

Therapists should NOT be enabling people to be Dodgers fans

Excellent thing to say to someone who is currently seeking support of their mental health lol

So far the pain reduction alone has been worth it but in general I feel a benefit once that sleepiness wears off. I feel more like myself for a few hours a day than I have in a couple of years. Now I just need to pray for funding bc my insurance doesn’t cover it & it’s thousands $ / month

Oh yeah it’s a JAK-inhibitor called Rinvoq (for my arthritis)

Getting good mileage out of this one this year

At the time I remember having little sympathy & being highly critical. But now with the wisdom of age & a career spent working with teens, I have compassion for the ideals they had as children & the truths they did not know at the time. Speaking for the boys I knew & men I know, not anyone else.

Even tho Canadians didn’t fight in Iraq some of us have American family members who did. Some were also sent to Iraq not as combatants but as peace-keepers, & came back traumatized. I say boys & men bc I personally don’t know anyone who identifies as female who served.

P.S. My Nonno would have been conscripted right at the end of the war. We never got many details from him as he only spoke about it at the very end of his life, and almost exclusively to me. One detail I know is that after surrender, Allies & Axis alike would still kill an Italian soldier on sight.

*the relatively young (unified) nation of Italy had mandatory conscription at age 18 & my Nonno’s only choice would have been to serve or be killed

Maybe you or I would make a different choice. All I know is that if he had, I would not be here today as his witness to the atrocities of that time.

What I do know is that my family came here after being devastated & traumatized by the facts of living thru fascism & war, leaving behind the ancestral homeland of the three tribes, bc of those experiences. Fascism is a beast we must work to keep at bay, every day, no matter what. 2/2