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pathfinderlittleduck · 5 years

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My S/P Hysterectomy: The Legend

CW Long Post - It’s worth it, I promise

Gather round my friends for I’m going to tell you a story. Oh! What a journey it was, what a glorious and befuddling day it was. For it was rightfully filled with exuberant joy and ghastly panic. This is the legend of my Salpingo-Oophorectomy Hysterectomy. Yes. A legend. I’m literally gonna be famous.

Monday, 6am

I get off work. My last day before I take off two and a half glorious weeks. I won’t have to see my shitty coworkers, the shitty employees, nor the horrendous conditions of our office. I’m fucking stoked.

Monday, 7pm

My friend Nikki arrives to my apartment, she gladly has sacrificed her time to drive me to and from the hospital. Not to mention the extra unplanned duties, but heed my dear reader for that tale is soon to come.

Tuesday, 2am

After dinner and my subsequent NPO period, and about 5 hours of working on art, I get my final shower before surgery using that special ass pink soap. IT WAS FUCKING NEON PINK. It smelled nice though, I want more of it to be honest. It got me clean as fuck.

Tuesday, 5am

We arrive at the hospital:

Oh the naivete... I did not expect what so ever the events that were to pursue this happy go lucky picture.

Tuesday, 7am

Nurse: *puts IV in*

Me: *trying not to move as I start screaming*

Nikki: YES SCREAM LIKE IRON BULL!!

Tuesday, 7:15am

They roll me out of the pre-surgery room and into the OR. I see all the doctors I had previously met, I blearily wave hello as I am transferred onto the OR table. I see Dr. Locke preparing all her instruments.

Tuesday, ????

I wake up...

Me: *heart monitor beeping rapidly*

Nikki: Do you want your Hancock pillow?

Me: I can’t feel my arms... I can’t... I can’t move my arms!!

Everyone: Uhhhhhh *starts panicking*

Tuesday, Late Afternoon

After a literal constant stream of neurologists and neurosurgeons and every nurse known to man is streaming in and out of the curtain surrounding me, we finally decide to keep me overnight. I was supposed to go home by now, but apparently waking up from surgery saying “I can’t feel my arms” kinda sends everyone into a panic.

I start crying and screaming, the pain is so bad, a 20 on the pain scale. I’m given Oxycontin and a bunch of other pain meds. FYI Oxy is the devil and I never want it near me ever again. It didn’t help the pain, it just knocked me out and I felt like I had the flu times 50.

Eventually I calm down. Sort of. I am FINALLY transferred to a single room, where I am the only patient and there’s a couch/bed for Nikki to use.

Tuesday, 8pm or something

I FINALLY get into radiology and I’m given an MRI of the cervical part of my spine. This is basically your neck, and also where most of the nerves in your shoulders/arms come from. Turns out I have severe stenosis of these nerves AND a herniated disc AND compression in two of my vertebrae. So there’s like the reason behind half of my chronic pain which my previous doctors never took seriously.

After another constant stream of Neuro doctors, a few diagnosis have come to light. Ranging from just general compression of nerves to an auto immune disorder.

BUT IT DOESN’T STOP THERE!! The best is yet to come.

Tuesday, ????

I’m finally off NPO and I can fucking eat and drink. Silvanus bless this water because shit it was fucking delicious as fuck.

Nikki and I are talking and she says, “So they found a lot of endometriosis and a giant fibroid.”

HOLD ON.

A WHAT.

Wednesday... maybe????

I sleep every 2 hours like clockwork to take my meds when the nurse comes in. I’m still in a 15-20 on the pain scale in my arms. I can barely do anything for myself. I can barely feed myself because I can’t fucking move my arms enough.

Wednesday, 3pm I guess??

Repeat the stream of neurologists again and a bunch of sticking me with things to test my nerves (it hurts you fucker).

I’m doped up enough on pain killers and Nikki drives me home. We go to the grocery to get last minute items I need during my recovery since I won’t be driving anytime soon. I barely make it through the trip because my arms hurt, but luckily enough I was able to use the rascal cart to get around since I was still heavily medicated and didn’t wanna fall in the store and make things worse.

Nikki goes home.

Wednesday - Friday

I spend the next several days in so much pain I can barely move. Medicating every 3 hours was making me sick. It wasn’t helping. I couldn’t sleep. My arms and shoulders hurt so bad I was screaming. I emailed all my doctors asking what we should do next. I’m prescribed a cortical-steroid medication specifically to target nerve pain. But I can’t fucking pick it up from the pharmacy because spoiler alert... I CAN’T FUCKING DRIVE OR MOVE MY ARMS. Luckily I had another local friend who picked it up for me, bless his heart.

This new prescription brought the pain down A LOT. Like it brought me from a 15 down to a 5 on the best of times. But eventually I ran out of this medication and had no refills... But this is where my OBGYN saw me for my 2 week follow up.

Monday, June 10th

I have my 2 week follow up with Dr. Locke. We discuss my recovery re: hysterectomy but also I bring up my arm pain.

Lords bless this woman because even though she has no specialty in pain or neurology, she has been instrumental in getting all my follow up appointments and nerve testing and MRI’s done in an extremely timely manner. She put pressure on other departments to get me seen ASAP because this was such a severe and urgent problem that had arisen so abruptly.

So after she examines my incisions, we discuss the findings. Now. This is where it gets good. If you held on this long... fucking buckle up kids we’re going for another round.

Dr. Locke: So I got your pathology results back...

Me: Hold on... my WHAT.

Pathology = cancer testing etc yada yada

Dr. Locke: Oh so we tested the growth we found. It’s non cancerous.

Me: Yeah the fibroid right.

Dr. Lock: It wasn’t a fibroid...

Me: Wait... WHAT.

Dr. Locke: It was a benign adenomatoid tumor.

Me:

BUT THAT’S NOT EVEN THE BEST PART FRIEND.

You see... an adenomatoid tumor is a special kind of tumor. A very interesting conundrum for someone in my condition. Very interesting indeed...

By definition an adenomatoid tumor is:

Adenomatoid tumors are responsible for 30% of all paratesticular masses. These are usually asymptomatic, slow growing masses. They are benign tumors comprising of cords and tubules of cuboidal to columnar cells with vacuolated cytoplasm and fibrous stroma.

US National Library of Medicine, 2009

Hold on... paraTESTICULAR mass???? So like... THE TESTICLES???? Of which I have none???? LMFAO WHAT THE FUCK!?

Yeah so basically my OBGYN (also my surgeon) found a fucking TUMOR INSIDE MY BODY that is 95% of the time FOUND ONLY IN CIS MALES?!

In Conclusion

So not only did I wake up from surgery with a now potentially diagnosed auto immune disorder I never knew I had... BUT APPARENTLY I HAD A TUMOR INSIDE ME THE WHOLE FUCKING TIME.

Luckily it was benign but HOLY SHIT.

In the end Dr. Locke asked for my consent to publish my de-identified (basically name redacted) story + history into medical journals. Basically I’m gonna be famous now apparently.

She’s discussed with other surgeons in the hospital, talked with other colleagues who deal with trans patients and this has NEVER happened to anyone she can determine.

Monday, Afternoon

I was sent home from the appointment with Gabapentin, another nerve medication. I’ve been taking that in addition to high strength Tylenol, Cyclobenzaprine (muscle relaxer), and Diclofenac (high strength NSAID). These meds have been instrumental in my recovery.

I’m back into my regular working schedule, and depending on how I move my arms, the pain comes back full force. Strength is still minimal and I have to lift even tiny things with both arms. Reaching is difficult still but I’m making progress. My next neuro appointments are in July along with a 6 week follow up with Dr. Locke. We will assess my progress during those days.

But that is my story in how I went from a normal trans dude... to a trans dude with a strange tumor and a potential auto immune disorder!!

#ok to rb #surgery cw #trans guy #ftm #trans rights #trans is beautiful #shut up viktor #viktor: personal #i'm not joking she's really gonna publish this into a medical journal

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scuttleboat · 7 years

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There’s no cursing in The Good Place... (spoilers for season 1)

This post may contain graphic and sexual language. Most of my blog does. Sorry this is way too fucking long.

I had a thought a few weeks ago about how the “no cursing” rule is used on The Good Place, and how a benign act of “appropriateness” is actually an early sign that the characters are living in a dystopian scenario. And how--bear with me here--this reads to me as a clear analogy for dramatic flailing of fandom groups this last two years. Now, I may not make this point in the most thorough or elegant way possible, as I feel vaguely intimidated talking about a show that has such thoughtful philosophical consideration behind it, but I’m going to give it a shot. If I flub, blame the messenger not the essence of the idea.

In season 1, Eleanor and the audience are presented with a world that is supposed heaven, specifically a “neighborhood” of the good place that is specifically curated to fit its residences (in this case, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jianyu, and others). Of course, we learn right away that Eleanor believes she’s there by mistake, and one of the first rules that demonstrates her “wrongness” is that she wants to curse, and can’t.

Eleanor: “Why can't I say ‘fork’?” Chidi: “If you're trying to curse, you can't here. I guess a lot of people in this neighborhood don't like it, so it's prohibited.” Eleanor: “That's bullshirt.”

The show glosses over this pretty quickly, and it’s played for laughs for the rest of the season. It very cleverly supports the show’s season 1 misdirect: any awkward or unsettling aspect of The Good Place is excused away by the audience (and by the characters) as simply being a side-effect of Eleanor’s misplacement. Of course you can’t swear in heaven! Swearing is for bad people, and good people wouldn’t even want to hear it. So, therefore, it doesn’t exist here.

And yet, this is not just a subtle form of personal torture for Eleanor (as she is, of course, really in The Bad Place), it’s actually a pretty grotesque form of censorship on all of the characters. Notice that Chidi doesn’t say he is particularly averse to swearing. He says “I guess a lot of people in this neighborhood don’t like it.” Although not nearly as much as others, Chidi does curse a couple times in the show, himself. So, clearly, it’s not a thing he feels particular discomfort about---so why is it censored when they’re alone? If this were truly a heavenly place customized for each soul, then Eleanor would be able to express herself and Chidi would be able to hear it, but other people who didn’t want to hear it would simply not be subjected to the cursing.

Instead, the neighborhood completely outlaws cursing anywhere, at any time. In the s1 premise, it’s not enough for the other citizens simply to not hear the swearing, it matters if it’s even happening anywhere in their environment, whether they themselves are witness or not. So why am I focusing on that idea, when we know the whole thing is manufactured, and the people who made up this rule did so as a lie, just to be cruel?

Because that line of thinking is so endemic to certain parts of fandom right now. Whether it’s making a story or fanart that contains content someone morally disapproves of, or whether it’s only a simple text post or meme going around, there’s thing now where people feel like content boundaries and warnings aren’t enough. It’s not enough to acknowledge that public platforms like Tumblr are unmoderated and that venturing forth to search or browse is accepting a certain amount of risk that one might run into something that makes one uncomfortable.

[read more below the cut]

When people are campaigning that content they disapprove of--sexually, romantically, politically, morally, paternalistically--shouldn’t exist, they’re doing what the demons of The Bad Place have done to Eleanor and Chidi. They’re saying “This offends me, so it should not exist anywhere that I can know about or ever possibly visit.” Yes, that’s fic about characters who are underage having sex. Yes, that’s fic about characters having sex in a way that doesn’t fit their canon sexuality. Yes, that’s fic about violence and torture being done to characters for brutal and bigoted reasons. Yes, that’s fic about rape, assault, and abuse. Yes, that’s fic about uncomfortable, even disgusting things. Yes, it’s fic about noncon, dubcon, bad bdsm, ABO, slavery, fetishism, power differences, incest, and unrealistic depictions of drugs or sex. It’s fanart and headcanons about those things too.

These ideas, posts, fanworks, and concepts are part of fiction and literature. They’re part of fandom too, and are in fact one of the ways that fandom has pushed the edge of creative development for decades. As they said in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, “We do the weird stuff.” Now most people in fandom don’t want to be a dick and just shove things in the face of someone who isn’t interested in consuming it--the artists and writers usually want their work to be found by people who want to consume it. So various media platforms have tools or informal conventions for negotiating shared spaces: tags and ratings on AO3, for example, serve a primary service of sorting the archive and secondary service of warning people of undesired content. On tumblr, it’s most an honor thing where people typically don’t follow blogs that post stuff they know they don’t like, and if someone is going to post something controversial they usually throw up an “FYI” at the top, or put it behind a read-more tag. Those decisions are voluntary, however, and everyone who uses a site like Tumblr is doing so with the express acknowledgement that they cannot control what others post, and may in fact browse a post with content they don’t like. For emotional, personal, or political reasons. ((Note: I’m not referring to personal targeted bullying and harassment, which may violate the TOS of particular social media sites, and is off-topic for this discussion.))

What happens when you see that post that offends you? Well, you have three primary choices. You can engage with the OP, you can ignore it, or you can hit the “block user” or “report” options. At any given time, those various options may be what you decide to do, and that’s fine. That is, pretty much, the system working. It’s not a perfect system for sure, but it’s a reasonably functioning one on sites like Tumblr that try to accommodate the needs of millions of users. (don’t worry, fandom wont stay on tumblr and twitter forever.) AO3 has similar protections in place, with the difference being that AO3 is a far more opt-in user process: there is no personal “dashboard” or “my feed” on AO3. A person has to seek out content and utilize filters, and doing that only gets the user to the basics like title, summary, and tags. To actually SEE content, the user has to willfully click into the story.

I’m describing these processes (which most of you reading this will already know) because it’s important to keep in mind scope when we’re talking about content exposure and potential resulting damage. When you use these sites (and for the most part, the whole internet), the onus is on the user to curate their experience. On Tumblr that means blocking or blacklisting what you see, and on AO3 that means not clicking the link to a story unless you’ve read and accepted the warnings and description. On Google, it means don’t search “HS History teacher Dean takes teen Castiel in the locker room” if you don’t want to read something fitting that description. Yeah, it may offend you that it exists, but that doesn’t mean that you have to engage with it to prove that it’s harmful to you.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion this last 18 months about what people “can” or “cannot” write, draw, post, or squee about. I’ve seen it in The 100 fandom, I’ve seen it in Teen Wolf fandom, I’ve seen it in Star Wars fandom, I’ve heard about it in anime/cartoon fandom, and I’ve even seen it crop up in, OF ALL THINGS, Game of Thrones fandom. (side note: if you complain about sexual content in fic while also posting gifs of GoT or Sense8 then I personally would like to throw a pie in your stupid face.) For some people, the answer to “I don’t like that this thing exists” seems to be to aggressively rail against it, to the point of targeting the creator, harassing them, or campaigning for websites or forums to change their rules so that XYZ offensive content does not exist. They say “I don’t care if you write it, just don’t post it where I might find it.” The idea here is that the world around us is better without XYZ being part of our creative works or discussions, and that shunning that content and those creators makes the world (the internet) a kinder, softer, more welcoming place.

A good place.

A place where only good things can be. Where no one is made sad, and nothing that happens here can bring discomfort to anyone. And if you want something that’s not allowed in the good place, the righteous place, then it’s you who doesn’t belong.

To circle back, the show The Good Place has gotten more popular this season, and I couldn’t be happier. I think it’s a fascinating examination of the ambiguity of people, as well as how mental stress can be used to torture. It’s a funny show with a lot of heart, but it’s a dark show too. And one of the darkest, subtlest things the show has ever done was reach into Eleanor’s mouth and change the words she is speaking. Not to prevent actual harm, but to make sure that other people could live in a world where things they abstractly disapproved of didn’t exist at all. For that, Eleanor was denied her basic concept of self and expression. The elimination of communication like that is such a profound violation of individuality and self that it’s almost incomprehensible that any world in which that happens could be ever perceived as a “good” place. That’s not a nice neighborhood where everyone gets along and is sheltered. That’s mind control. That’s gaslighting. That’s Hell.

There are a lot of ways to handle the struggle of content filtering, and hopefully we’ll figure out new and better ways in the future to balance the needs of artists with the needs of consumers, but one way that doesn’t work is censorship. AO3 isn’t going to change its rules to prevent content you don’t like. They know where that road ends. Tumblr might someday, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it. And if they do, this whole network of fan culture will migrate to another site without those constraints. It’s already happened twice since I’ve been around. Purity wank is an old problem for fandom, but it used to be an attack from the outside. Now it’s coming from the inside too, probably because the community is so much bigger. So it’s time to really examine the discussions we hear, and sort out if silencing each other is really going to fix anything.

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lionwithouthonour-blog · 7 years

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Meta prompt -- what exactly was going through Jaime's mind during the Loot Train Battle?

Okay, I have to admit I almost had to look up which was the Loot Train Battle because I’ve got so used to everyone just calling it the Field of Fire 2.0...

That aside, this is going to get really long (like really long; I can write an essay on this), and there’s almost definitely gonna be some stuff that could potentially be seen as ‘anti-Dany’ so...I’m just warning you so you can’t get mad and say I didn’t.

I think one thing that’s important to remember about this particular battle (and ironically one thing practically everyone tends to forget) is that it’s one that Jaime never saw coming. As far as he was concerned - hell, as far as any of them were concerned - all the fighting was done once they’d taken Highgarden. Just before the battle seems set to begin, he’s told that the gold has safely entered King’s Landing, which if anyone was going to attack them, surely the gold would be the target and not a few wagons of food. All Jaime’s got to worry about now is getting said wagons of food and the last of the Lannister/Tarly forces back into the city and they’re home and dry. And also it’s probably important to note his attitude towards the soldiers as demonstrated early in the scene: Lord Tarly says that flogging them will make them move into the city faster, Jaime tells him not to. Why is this detail important? Because it shows that on some level, Jaime cares about these men. Lord Tarly demonstrates the attitude of caring about them as a commander to an army, Jaime demonstrates the attitude of caring about them as people. People who have probably already spent a long amount of time marching at a forced pace and who probably haven’t had much time for resting or eating or anything else - again, they want to just get everything back to the city. And that’s another important detail to remember.

Now, when the Dothraki appear, they’re forced to fight a battle that nobody was expecting to come, on a terrain that’s the worst possible kind for facing that particular enemy, and against an enemy that probably none of them have ever faced the likes of before. And that’s even before the dragon shows up. Generally speaking, the tail end of a train of soldiers would not be so heavily armed or defensible - all the best soldiers would have been with the gold up ahead and now safely in King’s Landing. Realistically speaking, at least one of the main four (Jaime, Bronn, Lord Tarly and Dickon), probably two at minimum, would have been somewhere up at the front of the train, but dramatic license blahdeblah moving on. Now, they find themselves essentially cornered on an open field (and just FYI, I’m getting tired of people using Robert’s line of “only a fool would face the Dothraki on an open field” to mock Jaime in this moment; like what the fuck else was he supposed to do..?), and about to do battle when they’re clearly outnumbered and probably quite sapped for strength anyway. Still, Jaime refuses to leave them even when Bronn practically orders him to. His “we can hold them off” is, in my opinion at least, a direct response to what Bronn is saying which basically amounts to “everyone here is gonna die in a sec and if you stay then you’ll die too”. They’re both right by the line of Lannister soldiers when Bronn says that and in battle, that kind of attitude is one of the worst that you can have. It’s like in LotR at Helm’s Deep when Legolas starts going off on one about how hopeless the odds are (though granted he does it in Elvish, at least) - it’s just something you shouldn’t say even if you totally believe it and especially not where others can probably hear you. Even if Drogon wasn’t the master of Ironic Dramatic Timing, the argument would probably have ended there. It was less about the words being said than just trying to get Bronn to shut up.

And then the dragon appears...and this is where the potential anti-Dany stuff is gonna start showing so...heads up. First, I would just like to casually remind everyone that no one on the Lannister side has ever seen a dragon before. Oh sure, Jaime’s seen the skulls and maybe even Bronn has too, but this is something totally different. It would be the same as if you suddenly came face-to-face with a living breathing and intent on killing you T-Rex. And while they’re somewhat prepared for it with the Scorpion, again, huge difference between dead skull and living dragon. And that gets shown in all its logic-bomb glory. Second, this isn’t like when Tyrion first saw them, or Jon first saw them. Jaime is facing Drogon knowing full well that he’s going to be used as a weapon against them. This isn’t just a probability like it was for the other two, this is a certainty. And using a dragon in a swords-and-arrows battle like this would pretty much be the equivalent of using modern-day bombing techniques in a swords-and-arrows battle. While they stood little chance of success against the Dothraki, against Drogon alone they stand no chance and against Drogon and the Dothraki, Jaime knows they are going to be obliterated.

Now, from a technical side of things, I would like to point out that the battle is filmed almost utterly entirely from the Lannister army’s point of view, particularly focusing on Jaime and Bronn. This is the first time we’ve seen a full-scale dragon attack from anyone else’s point of view other than Daenerys’. You know how a lot of people felt more uncomfortable watching this battle in particular than they normally did during dragon attacks? This is the reason why. Instead of the destruction being shown as a wonderful thing and utterly 100% deserved, this showed the destruction as the destruction it really is: men screaming and turning to ash, throwing themselves in the water to drown to try and put out the flames (seriously, the original final shot of the episode was meant to be Jaime seeing his men drowning), sheer and utter terror and chaos everywhere. Also, that scene with the Lannister soldiers and Arya in the woods that everyone just dismissed as a cameo for Ed Sheeren? Well, I’m not gonna argue about that, but I would argue that that scene was a direct prelude to this one. Whether you realised it or not at the time, it humanised the Lannister army, it made it clear that these were not necessarily men who agreed with Cersei or even completely wanted to be there. These were men like any other, who had lives and families and for whom being a soldier was just a job. To everyone who argues that the soldiers were fine to be killed simply by virtue of being a soldier, I repeat: these people had no knowledge on how to fight a fucking dragon! They didn’t sign up to fight a fucking dragon! Most of them probably didn’t even sign up, they were likely conscripted. The logic of that would basically be the same as saying “Oh, you took martial arts courses? You must know how to defuse a bomb!” Also, again I repeat, the best soldiers would have been with the gold up at the front of the train. Jaime, Bronn and (to a lesser extent) Tyrion are the POV characters in this battle and none of them feel good about what’s happening. We as an audience are not meant to be feeling good about what’s happening. Of course, purely choosing a POV won’t control how every single person watching feels because obviously if you like Dany more than you like any of the three POV characters, you’re gonna think this is the best thing since sliced bread no matter how it’s presented. But from a meta side of things, from the set-up, to the acting, to the directing, to just how the thing is filmed, there is a very deliberate attempt to make the audience uncomfortable at the very least with this whole situation.

Going specifically back to Jaime, the next key moment I wanna talk about is the moment he sends Bronn off to the Scorpion rather than going himself. Now, I’ve made jokes about this too, that Jaime is just using his hand as an excuse to get Bronn to do something for him (see pretty much the entire journey to find Myrcella in Dorne). Do I actually think this is his intention in this moment? No. He’s being 100% serious. By this point, chaos has taken over the battle. Drogon is burning stuff left right and centre, the Dothraki have broken through the Lannister lines, their men are being absolutely slaughtered. Jaime’s always demonstrated the desire for ending battles and wars quickly and with minimum damage. Drogon needs to be brought down and fast if they’re going to stand even the slightest chance of getting through this. Jaime is stating an absolute fact that he can’t operate the Scorpion with one hand and certainly not with the degree of skill needed to bring Drogon down. Bronn is literally the only realistic option in that moment.

Finally, because I know this is getting ridiculously long (and I want to congratulate you if you’ve read this far), I’m gonna talk about that last little bit. When Jaime’s looking around at all the men dead and dying and on fire and screaming, I am 100% certain that he’s connecting what he’s seeing in that moment to all the times he had to watch people burning with wildfire in the Mad King’s court. There’s a gifset on here that I’ve reblogged that has this scene with his confession to Brienne (’”Burn them all” he kept saying. “Burn them all”’). I personally have a headcanon (that may or may not be confirmed, honestly I haven’t done enough bts research to know) that Jaime suffers from some sort of repressed trauma from everything he saw and experienced in his time as a Kingsguard to Aerys, and if he does then the sight/sound of people being burned alive would almost certainly be a trigger to it (in the true sense of the term). And it really does look like he’s having some kind of traumatic episode in that moment. Then he sees Dany with the now-downed Drogon, and I honestly think he means what he says to Bronn in the next episode - when he sees her and sees that spear, he thinks he’s found a way to stop the war and more importantly, stop more instances of this. He would have been told the stories of the original Field of Fire, and he has his own experience with the Mad King to draw on. In that moment, Daenerys isn’t the “breaker of chains” or anything good, at least not to Jaime; she’s just exactly what Cersei’s always described her to be - a foreign conqueror who is willing to destroy Westeros if it only means she can rule it (which is one of the reasons pretty much everyone advised her against this action in the first place). And more importantly, she is the Mad King’s daughter, with all the implications of that. He killed Aerys to stop thousands of people burning - and for over 20 years his life has been defined by that act whether for good or not; why would he do anything different here if he has the chance? Jaime literally has nothing else to draw on to decide what kind of person she is besides what he’s seen in this battle, and he sees her at her absolute worst. And it’s a well-established part of his character that he tends to act before he thinks and this is a highly stressful situation where thinking isn’t really much of an option anyway. Of course he’s going to take the chance to try and kill her and, by proxy, stop all the damage that he’s seeing in that moment she’s capable of causing.

So I have a lot of feelings on this scene (and the aftermath in the next episode as well). To everyone/anyone that actually read this whole thing, feel free to agree or disagree as you wish and well done for actually reading the whole thing in the first place (told you I could write an essay on this).

#ooc; out of hands #[ meta talk ]#long post #((So I've been putting off answering this but here you go))#Anonymous #[ headcanon alert ]

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ais-n · 7 years

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Hi there! Wanted to say a HUGE THANK YOU to you and santino for creating ICOS its an amazing series! love the characters, love the plot, even love the pain it comes with. boyd especially is my favorite character :) hope you dont mind, i have a couple of questions (fade related):1. how would boyd have gone about telling everything to danny had carhart not interrupted him? 2. does he have any triggers from the forakis mission that affect his relationship with hsin?

***FADE SPOILERS IN ANSWER - just an FYI for anyone who needs it :)***

Hi :) Thank you! I’m happy you like the series! Thank you for taking the time to read the long ass story and also reach out :) I don’t mind at all – I will just put the answers behind a cut for anyone who hasn’t gotten that far yet :) (Same reason for the bold at the top of this, sorry!) Also, sorry it took me awhile to get back to you.

!!**SPOILERS** FOR FADE BENEATH CUT!! (Also, long post beneath cut)

1) I had the whole thing planned out in my head at one point but I’ve forgotten the nuances since then. But from what I recall, he basically had planned to start the whole thing with a “look, I know you’re going to think I’m insane when I start telling you all this but please hear me out” sort of disclaimer. Then he probably would have gauged Danny’s response and his seeming level of skepticism from that disclaimer alone, and determined his best way forward.

One way would be to just get right into the explanation and try to push Danny’s incredulous questions to the end after he’d gotten through everything. This way led the risk of Danny shutting down on the whole thing and not listening at all.

The other way would be to start out asking pointed and detailed questions designed to poke holes in the understanding Danny has of his situation–the things that don’t really add up, because they aren’t actually real–and then when Danny is starting to get kind of thrown off acknowledging some of those oddities, Boyd was going to give him the full, real explanation of what was going on behind the scenes, tying everything together for Danny to realize how the truth, as bizarre as it probably would seem to him, still makes a lot more sense than the truth he thought he knew. This way led the risk of Danny feeling like Boyd was being condescending or not truthful enough by dragging it out.

Either way, he would have planned to provide him as much evidence as he had available. If he had pictures on his phone, he would show those. Or if he had old drawings or whatever else, he’d do that. Basically, it would be whatever he had that was close enough to the evidence Danny eventually finds, to prove it further. He also was planning to do his best to prove these weren’t the edited doings of a crazed man who photoshopped him into pictures or sat around creepily drawing his pictures and backdating them.

There was a slight possibility that Danny would hear all this and go, “Oh wow, this all makes sense. I believe you.” But Boyd figured that chance was pretty small, all things considered. The conversation was far too life-altering and would seem far too crazy for it to be likely that Danny would accept it without question. He expected Danny to be not just skeptical, but to tell him he was outright insane and to fuck off for a bit. He figured it was best to plan for that as a worse (but not worst) case scenario, so that it would give him the opportunity to plan ahead to try to keep Danny safe in the meantime before Danny accepted everything.

(Boyd saw the worst case scenario as something like Danny getting up mid-story, calling the cops on Boyd for being a stalker or insane, cutting all ties with Boyd and maybe even trying to pursue legal action like an order for protection to keep him away, Janus and the Agency catching wind of all of this, Danny being subjected to experiments and sent by the Agency to somewhere Boyd couldn’t find, the Agency turning on Boyd and his friends in the assumption that they knew about all of this too, his friends being hurt or tortured, Boyd being strapped down somewhere and left to die a torturous death with his mind descending into insanity, Danny dying in the experiments or getting really fucked up or somehow living his life without freedom or happiness, and just generally everything going completely to hell. There were other scenarios like Danny freaking out and accidentally killing Boyd, thereby also fucking up Danny’s future, but Boyd figured that wasn’t worst case scenario because there was a chance Danny could still be found by loved ones as a result of the fallout of that happening, but other ways like his worst case scenario wouldn’t involve that possibility.)

Assuming Danny let him talk to the end, he would have very, very strongly pushed Danny to leave immediately after hearing all of this, as a way to protect him. He would ask Danny to go, even if Danny had to think of it as a sudden impromptu vacation and not a permanent life change, because who would upend their life suddenly for what could be the ravings of a paranoid madman? Boyd would do everything in his power to prove to Danny why that was a very necessary step to take, regardless of how insane he thought Boyd was by that time.

And although he was more than willing to run with Danny, he assumed Danny would think he was crazy and would not want him to go with even if Boyd was able to convince him to leave.

So, honestly, Boyd figured what was most likely to happen would be he would tell Danny everything, Danny would be in denial and would understandably think Boyd was totally off his rocker, but Danny would recognize at least that Janus and others were a concern so maybe he could get Danny to leave even just for that, even if Danny thought it was a temporary thing. Maybe Danny would trust at least that Boyd, due to his job, knew a better way for safe passage for Danny than Danny would easily and quickly be able to scrounge up for himself. Boyd was planning to all but force Danny to take the safe route Boyd would have prepared for him, to try to protect him.

Assuming Danny didn’t want him to go with for whatever reason, Boyd was going to tell Danny he loved him when Danny left, and then Boyd figured he would never see him again. He figured eventually Danny would come to grips with what happened, and would accept the truth on some level whether or not he liked it. But Boyd knew that if he told Danny everything, and if Danny fled Annadale, then the Agency wouldn’t be long behind. And he couldn’t let that happen. Nor could he risk any of his friends back at the Agency getting implicated in anything, if the Agency thought he’d told them everything.

So his plan was to make sure Danny got away safely, make sure Danny was in the hands of someone or some process that wouldn’t let him do something stupid like come right back to Annadale before he realized the truth, and then Boyd would go back to the Agency and either wait for them to realize what he had done (which would give Danny more time to get away), or depending on the circumstances and whether he felt Danny needed more protection, he might find a way to send false positives about Danny sightings to the Agency in an automated way that would continue to protect Danny into the future. He may have also attempted to break into areas of the Agency to further this goal by fucking with their systems or trying to delete information about Danny in the computer system or whatever it was he learned would help and he was capable of doing.

Regardless, he knew that as soon as Danny was gone and if he didn’t go with him, then it was only a matter of time until the Agency realized what Boyd had done.

So, Boyd knew if he didn’t go with Danny, he was dead.

He planned to delay and confuse the Agency as long as possible and automate as much as he could so Danny would continue to have protection going into the future even after Boyd’s death. Boyd figured that ultimately the Agency would go after him to find out where Danny was, and Boyd assumed he would die a slow, torturous death of them trying to get that information from him. His main goal in all of that was to make sure the Agency didn’t get anything from him that could endanger Danny, or endanger any of Boyd’s friends. He wanted to make sure it was clear to the Agency that he hadn’t told the others anything, so they wouldn’t be a target of the Agency’s wrath as well once he was gone.

He did worry about his friends back in the Agency if Danny decided to ask Boyd to go with him, but he still planned to go with in that event because he wanted to be there to protect and support Danny–to make sure the Agency never got him.

From Boyd’s assumptions about how everything would play out, he saw the conversation with Danny as a literally life or death situation, not just for Danny but also for himself. Telling Danny the truth meant endangering Danny, and potentially signing his own death warrant. But he would have done it regardless of the consequences on himself, because he felt at that time that Danny was getting too close to danger without the information, and he didn’t know how else to protect Danny or make sure he could remain safe, happy, and free far into the future. That goal was more important to Boyd than anything else.

I’m not sure if anyone will think any of that sounds a bit dramatic, but Boyd’s mindset was that the Agency would try to kill him and try to recover Danny at all costs, which ended up being accurate to what was seen later. He may or may not have been right about specifics about how it could have gone down, but the stakes of that conversation were quite high in the long run, so he would have tried to prepare for all the variations as best he could, while assuming something would go wrong in the process, because Boyd’s experience was something almost always went wrong when it came to the Agency.

He figured a sacrifice was inevitable at those high of stakes and considering the circumstances and the wrath the Agency was likely to have. When it came down to it, the only sacrifice he felt safe offering for the protection of everyone else was sacrificing himself so everyone else could stay as safe and free as possible. So his plan was built as much around shielding everyone else and giving Danny as much of a safety buffer as possible, with Boyd being the main way of trying to throw the Agency off as long as possible with false information or misleading clues. That was, he figured, the best way for him to try to control as many variables as possible to extend Danny’s safety net as long as Boyd could hold out.

This may all seem a bit tangential to mention but I mention it because Boyd would have been thinking about all of this when he went into his conversation with Danny, so he would have been adjusting the way he said things and how quickly he brought up new information based on how Danny was reacting, because his ultimate goal had to be to get Danny out of there immediately, and to stay gone, and for that he needed Danny to trust him enough to believe at least that the imminent danger to Danny was real and that Boyd’s offered escape was safe, even if Danny didn’t believe everything. All of that would have greatly affected exactly how that conversation went.

2) There probably were, especially in the beginning. I could see there still being some now… it’s a little hard to say because we haven’t written much interaction of their relationship as it is now, and a lot of times with Boyd I don’t always know how he’ll react to something until I’m at that moment in that scene in his mind. There are times I think he’d react one way when thinking about that scene ahead of time but we get there and he reacts a totally different way. I always go with it because it makes sense for him as a person, and it reminds me constantly that I am not him so I can’t always speak for him properly. That may sound like a weird thing to say about a character and it probably sounds cheesy for me to say but I think of characters like real people–I may have an insight into their mindset from knowing them so well, but I don’t always know what they will do or how they will feel until I’m at that moment writing it out.

I know he does have residual issues from that mission and also from everything with Janus later in Fade, because it all fed together.

Things that I know specifically would trigger him or freak him the fuck out include some of the things we already saw referenced or implied in Fade, like:

**Him having a panic attack aversion to the idea of having to perform on screen or have any sort of sexual or intimate interaction with Hsin for the gratification of others. Depending on how thrown off he is, this could transfer to other, more innocuous situations too, like he could potentially freak out even if it’s just him doing something non-intimate and non-sexual with Hsin and others watching/commenting/paying a lot of attention to it. If they’re in a setting where there are a lot of bright lights aimed at them, people watching their every move, maybe cameras going, people commenting on him, basically something that could throw him back into a flashback of filming the videos or being forced to perform for/with groups/etc, then even something like, let’s say, Hsin/Boyd doing a training exercise to show others how to fight against mods using two different skill sets (Hsin’s and Boyd’s) could potentially trigger him into some sort of panicked, dissociated reaction. Or he may not have any problems at all.

**He may similarly have panicked reactions to porn videos, and absolutely would freak out if he thought Hsin ran across one he was in. He’s never told Hsin the extent of any of that and doesn’t want him to know about the movies he was in, let alone have Hsin ever see them. Although he would definitely react negatively to one with him in it, if there were some other porn video playing there’s a possibility he wouldn’t freak out after all. It’s hard to say, but I do think that’s pretty likely to be a stressor for him.

**He’s now freaked the fuck out over the idea of being drugged, which might extend at times to a distrust even of taking lower level medication he would have taken without a thought in the past, like Advil or Tylenol. He doesn’t at all trust people coming at him with a syringe and might react violently if he’s already feeling vulnerable. Although this isn’t likely to come into play for Hsin and Boyd’s sexual relationship, it’s something that potentially could have come up at times if Boyd, say, had a really bad headache or was hurt or something and if Hsin for some reason thought he should take medication and Boyd was really hesitant. He would 100% trust Hsin but he wouldn’t trust who made or provided the medicine to Hsin for Boyd, depending on the situation. It may not be a problem if he feels like Hsin verified everything, because he trusts Hsin to protect him and make sure he won’t take anything unsafe. In some circumstances, absolutely the only way he would allow someone to administer drugs to him is if Hsin is there and will be there the whole time and saw the drugs be put into his IV or whatever it’s in. Even then, he may be really leery because he may be afraid of showing a side of himself to Hsin that he’s ashamed of, if he’s afraid the drug will be some sort of aphrodisiac or similar. But then, as always, there are also other circumstances where he might take the medication without freaking out.

**From an intimate or sexual standpoint, I don’t know. That’s a lot harder because he trusts Hsin not only with his life but also with his sanity, his heart, and his body. His phobias and triggers all tie into the same idea: losing control, and especially having that vulnerability then used against him. That can be said about his fear of being held down, his fear of drowning, and then the fears and triggers he developed after Alexio and after Janus and even after the Agency.

He gets to a point where he almost entirely loses his fear of losing control around Hsin, because he knows Hsin won’t use it against him. But he still has a fear of losing himself. Even if he knows Hsin will love him no matter what, the idea of turning into Cameron around Hsin is absolutely horrifying to Boyd. He feels like being Cameron takes power away from him. He loses control of himself, even if it isn’t due to others taking that control from him, if that makes sense.

So I think that implicit and unshakable trust he has with Hsin is one hugely comforting part of being around Hsin and might do a lot to fight against triggers or extreme reactions he may otherwise have. But at the same time, no matter how much he loves and trusts Hsin, being triggered or having an extreme reaction isn’t a question of love or trust, nor does he always have control over whether it will happen. It’s a question of brain chemistry and memories and human psychology, all of which are things that can work autonomously from logic or his thoughts or feelings on a topic.

So it’s hard to say because I think those are two very powerful forces, and whether it affects his relationship with Hsin depends entirely on what force wins out and what was the impetus for the stress in the first place.

That may seem like a non-answer and if so, sorry! I just don’t know for sure yes/no because there are too many extenuating factors to know for sure.

Hopefully all of this makes sense. I ended up replying to this pretty late at night which means I’m more talkative even than normal but also sometimes I word things super confusingly and go on tangents. If I didn’t answer something properly, let me know :) And I hope you have a great day!

#ask ais #icos #in the company of shadows #fade spoilers #laurelsaveus

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shotbydalonewolf · 7 years

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my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems

My senior manager recently left her husband for another man. This new relationship is very unstable in that they split up on an almost weekly basis. I’ve known my manager for over 20 years, but she has only recently come to work in our team. When she and the new man split up, it is always his decision and she takes it really badly and it severely affects things at work. She will tell everyone about her problems and regularly posts about it on social media. She has called me at home in a state and I’ve spent hours with her trying to console her. But now I’m beginning to feel smothered by her, she won’t leave me alone outside of work, and me and my colleagues are literally carrying her at work and we get no thanks from her for it. I’m at the end of my tether.

Stop answering her calls outside of work. Or if you do answer and she wants to talk about her relationship problems, explain you’re unable to talk (you’re walking into a movie theater / just met a friend for dinner / entertaining guests / running out the door to meet your sister) and will see her the next day at work.

At work, if she tries to lay relationship talk on you, say this: “I know you’re going through a tough time, but since you’re my boss, I don’t feel right being a sounding board for this anymore. I’m sorry I can’t help. I hope you have people outside of work you can talk with.” And then if she continues to try it after that: “Sorry, I’ve got to finish up the X project — I hope things get better for you!” (Accompany that with appropriate body language like turning back to your computer and continuing to work.) And if it still continues: “Jane, I’m so sorry you’re having a tough time, but I’m not comfortable being your sounding board at work. Now that you’re my boss, I feel strongly that we need to have different boundaries in place. I know I didn’t say that earlier, but I’ve realized that I should have. I hope you understand.” And encourage your coworkers to set boundaries with her too.

Regarding carrying her at work — one option is simply to stop. By covering her work for her, you’re enabling her in not doing it herself. Step back from that and see if she steps up (and if she doesn’t, let her deal with the consequences of that).

2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch

I’m coming up to my first Christmas at my current company, and recently found out about their end-of-year tradition: Close early on the final Friday, head into the central business district’s premier restaurant precinct, and enjoy a long (and at 1-2 hours, presumably multi-course) Christmas luncheon.

Here’s the problem: several years ago I was struck down by an unidentified post-viral gastric condition. While the symptoms eventually stopped, six months of near-starvation had a lasting effect: I now eat like the proverbial bird — a SMALL bird. Less than a child, probably. An entirely adequate lunch for me is half a sandwich and two-thirds of a muesli bar … if I’m on my own. I tend to eat even less in company due to self-consciousness nobbling my appetite. A slap-up meal of the type I’m expected to attend is impossible.

I really do NOT want to broadcast my private (and unhelpfully vague) medical history to the entire office, but I’m not sure what else to do. It’s a very small company — no crowd to hide amongst — so if I go, my “abnormal” eating patterns will be blatantly apparent to everyone. I’m afraid that the suspicion of anorexia or another eating disorder will cross at least one person’s mind — a suspicion that’ll be hard to deny without sounding like I’m, well, in denial. (Can’t claim dietary restrictions as I’ve discreetly picked my way though several office bring-a-plates without demur.)

If I can manage not to go, I’ll feel obliged to offer some kind of reason for skipping it … but since I’ve been given ample notice to avoid scheduling clashes, have no family to serve as an excuse, and am known not to have travel plans, I can’t think of one. Either way (go, and nibble at half a salad; or don’t go at all), I’d be concerned about the etiquette implications of seeming to spurn the company’s hospitality. Possibly I’m overthinking this, but I’m new-ish to the workforce and feeling rather lost. What’s the best way out of this dilemma?

You are indeed over-thinking it! Go, eat what you want, and push the rest of your food around on your plate (a time-honored tradition to disguise the fact that you’re not eating it). If anyone questions you about it, say that you ate a late lunch or are on medication that’s giving you a small appetite or “I didn’t have a big appetite tonight but didn’t want to miss this” or even just “I’m not sure! The food is great — just not super hungry right now.” No polite person will scrutinize what you eat after that kind of quick explanation. And definitely don’t worry about seeming to spurn your company’s hospitality — by showing up and being pleasant, you are meeting your obligations there. You aren’t obligated to clean your plate.

That said, assuming you’re going to be working with these people for a while and there will likely be other events, if you’re comfortable with it, it might make your life easier to just say, “I have a medical condition where I can’t eat a lot at one time.” You don’t need to disclose more than that (and if people ask questions, it’s fine to say, “Oh, it’s boring” or “I don’t like to talk about it at work”), but it might help you not have to worry about dealing with this each time.

3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications

I am a senior in college who is looking for a post graduate job, specifically in the museum development field. I am ambitious, go to a top school, and have a high GPA. I have had many prestigious museum internships over the past few years, which have all resulted in glowing recommendations from my supervisors. At the end of my most recent internship, I was told that I was perfectly qualified for a development assistant position.

My father often sends me job listings he finds online.. He recently sent me a bunch, most of which were for associates (the next level up). They all requested somewhere between 1-4 years of experience in various ranges (1-3, 2-4, etc). I have rarely seen assistant positions available. I suspect that in smaller museums, they may not even exist. My experience in development only constitutes a 3-month internship, but it was with one of the best museums in the country, I have extensive museum experience in other internship positions, and all the required tasks on the listing look quite easy for me. I would apply instantly, if not for the requested years of experience. (FYI, they do not request things like “demonstrated experience with ______.” I understand I cannot provide that.)

My father seems to think this is imposter syndrome, and keeps telling me that I’m smart and accomplished (which I do know I am) and should just go for it. But I am afraid I will look silly if I apply for a position for which I do not have requested experience. Additionally, I do not want to call upon my reference from last summer for such a position.

I’d apply for the ones asking for 1-3 years of experience (or 1-X) and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you don’t get interviews for any of them and then you’ll have more data about what’s feasible. But you’re not going to offend anyone or look ridiculous; people apply for jobs all the time that they’re not fully qualified for, and anyone who’s done more than a week of hiring work isn’t going to find that weird. And don’t worry about wasting your reference’s time, since if they call her, it’s because they’re seriously considering you. They’re not going to call a reference for someone who’s not even in the ballpark.

You should also talk to your reference and other people in your network who work in your field and ask them to weigh in on what level of position you should be targeting. You might find out you’re being too cautious (or you might find out that you’re not, which would also be good to know).

4. How do I motivate my employees?

I’m a 24-year-old manager of two employees who are both in their 30s. As you can imagine, my confidence is challenged pretty often on my ability to manage them, but I do know I’ve got the right skillset.

My biggest concern at the moment is motivating the team. I always feel uncomfortable throwing motivational ideas at them because I feel like they can see through my attempts to get them to work harder. How do I go about motivating them to feel ready to take on the day without feeling like an idiot?

Do they need motivating, or do you just think that’s something you’re supposed to be doing? Generally when people need motivating, it’s an indicator that something is wrong with the situation — either you have the wrong people for the job, or something in their environment is de-motivating them (like unreasonable expectations or terrible pay/benefits/management/culture). Generally, if you have the right people on your team and a decent environment, they’ll be motivated if you’re doing your job well — meaning that you’ve given them meaningful roles with real responsibility, ensured that they’re making progress toward meaningful goals, and recognized them for good work (both via feedback and via their compensation).

If there’s nothing in the environment that would de-motivate a reasonable person and you’ve laid out clear and reasonable expectations about how you want them to operate, and you’re having trouble getting them to hit the level of productivity and results you need (and you’ve told them that, to no avail), then I’d look at whether you have (a) reasonable expectations and (b) the right people for the work. But usually a manager shouldn’t need to get people ready to take on the day.

5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?

I am an office and HR coordinator for a small (under 20 employees) consulting firm. I’m the only HR person in the company and had no previous experience in HR when I started here 12 years ago as the first employee in a tiny start-up. Because we don’t have our own HR department, we have an HR consultant who we contact when we don’t know how to best (or legally) handle a situation. The company we use is one of the oldest and most respected HR companies in our town.

After 12 years here, I’m afraid I’m getting burned out. And the ownership is making a lot of decisions that are disappointing to me. So, I’m feeling like it might be time to look for another job. But, I would also like some “career counseling” to get an objective opinion on the employment situation that I’m currently in. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think it is and I’m just too emotionally involved since I’ve been here so long? Maybe I need better coping skills? Or maybe, I really do have a bad boss who isn’t going to change (I think I’ve read all of your posts on that topic).

I would really like to reach out to our HR consultant for career counseling and possibly career placement. But, I don’t know if this would put them in an awkward position or not. Do you think it’s appropriate for me to contact their career placement person, who I know and have worked with, on my own for my own job search?

If I go through with this, I’d like to use this company specifically because 1) they have a great reputation and do great work, and 2) they know my company and I think could give me an honest assessment.

Yeah, you’d be putting them in an awkward situation since they need to have some loyalty to your employer, who could be irked if it came out later that they’d helped you leave. That’s not necessarily reasonable (your employer doesn’t own you and you’re allowed to seek help in leaving), but it’s common enough that your HR company could understandably feel uncomfortable about it. And if nothing else, they might feel uncomfortable keeping a personnel-related secret from your company.

That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.

You may also like:

my boss is smothering me

I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends

I’m sick of being the office therapist

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

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s-kinnyheaven · 7 years

Text

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems

2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch

3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications

4. How do I motivate my employees?

5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?

That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.

You may also like:

my boss is smothering me

I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends

I’m sick of being the office therapist

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

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#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703

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shmow-zows · 7 years

Text

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems

2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch

3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications

4. How do I motivate my employees?

5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?

That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.

You may also like:

my boss is smothering me

I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends

I’m sick of being the office therapist

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703 http://ift.tt/2BtfBQr via IFTTT

#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703

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wanderingfound · 7 years

Text

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems

2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch

3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications

4. How do I motivate my employees?

5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?

That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.

You may also like:

my boss is smothering me

I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends

I’m sick of being the office therapist

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703 http://ift.tt/2BtfBQr via IFTTT

#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703

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trashbagtricks · 7 years

Text

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems

2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch

3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications

4. How do I motivate my employees?

5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?

That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.

You may also like:

my boss is smothering me

I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends

I’m sick of being the office therapist

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703 http://ift.tt/2BtfBQr via IFTTT

#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703

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teamsterekpuppies · 7 years

Text

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems

2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch

3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications

4. How do I motivate my employees?

5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?

That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.

You may also like:

my boss is smothering me

I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends

I’m sick of being the office therapist

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703 http://ift.tt/2BtfBQr via IFTTT

#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703

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willafigg · 7 years

Text

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems

2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch

3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications

4. How do I motivate my employees?

5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?

That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.

You may also like:

my boss is smothering me

I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends

I’m sick of being the office therapist

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

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sinkin2heart · 7 years

Text

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My manager won’t leave me alone about her romantic problems

2. I’m nervous about not eating much at the office Christmas lunch

3. Applying for jobs when you don’t meet all the qualifications

4. How do I motivate my employees?

5. Can I ask our HR consultant for advice on leaving?

That’s not to say that this kind of thing never goes smoothly. It sometimes does. But it depends on the philosophy of the person you’d be contacting, and that can be tough to know ahead of time.

You may also like:

my boss is smothering me

I have an inappropriate coworker and our mothers are friends

I’m sick of being the office therapist

my manager won’t stop talking about her romantic problems, not eating at the office Christmas lunch, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703 http://ift.tt/2BtfBQr via IFTTT

#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265703

0 notes

tortuga-aak · 7 years

Text

I retired at 30 with $1.25 million — here are the 3 key strategies I used to get there

Zak Kaczmarek / Stringer / Getty Images

Grant Sabatier became financially independent at age 30, after saving $1.25 million in five years.

The time it takes to build up $1 million depends on how much money you are making, how much you are saving, and how much your investment grows.

The key is to always keep track of your spending and net worth.

I started my financial independence journey in 2010 and saved $1.25 million in 5 years, reaching financial independence at the age of 30.

I get asked a lot how I did it and how someone else can too, so I decided to outline the variables and scenarios that impact how fast you, depending on your income can save $1 million. As it turns out, my $1 million savings goal wasn't far off from the amount of money I determined I would need to retire early.

While your number will likely be different than mine (a simple calculation is to use 25x your annual expenses to determine how much you will need to retire), I've used $1 million as the example in this post because it's a nice big round number, the goal I picked when I started saving, and who doesn't want to be a millionaire?

How long will it take you to save $1 million?

This all depends on how much money you are making, how much you are saving, and how much your investment grows. Here are the variables that matter most:

1. Income: How much money you are making

2. Expenses: How much money you are spending

3. Savings: How much money you are saving

4. Savings Rate: = Savings divided by #4

5. Investment Growth Rate: How much your investments compound annually. For the purpose of these examples I've set it at 7%, but as you'll see from my specific situation, the higher your compounding rate that faster you will reach $1 million.

MM Note: I tracked all of these variables daily using the Free Personal Finance Tracker Personal Capital. I've used the free version for over 4 years. It's legit and you should definitely check it out. It will help you easily track your progress and identify opportunities to increase your savings rate.

Here's a simple example using these variables. Trevor is making $50,000 per year after taxes and his annual expenses are $40,000, so he saves $10,000 per year and his savings rate is $10,000/$50,000, or 20% of his income. That's a solid savings rate, but given how much money Trevor is making it will still take him 30 years with his investments compounding 7% each year by investing in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund.

Your compounding rate has a huge impact on how fast your money will grow and for these examples, I've chosen 7% because it's a more realistic and likely sustainable investment growth rate based on historical performance than the 12%+ we've seen over the past few years. The higher your savings rate the faster you will be able to retire.

As you can see in the chart below, Trevor's savings rate has a dramatic impact on how quickly he can reach $1 million. Look at the massive difference between saving 10% of his income and reaching $1 million in 39 years compared to saving 50% of his income and doing it in 19 years. Have you ever thought about how much money you should save or how your savings rate impacts the growth of your investments?

Millennial Money

I first did this calculation back in 2011 when I started my savings journey and quickly realized that making $50,000 after taxes was going to be enough to get me to $1 million in 19 years at a 50% savings rate, but I would need to make a lot more money if in order to do it in less than 10 years (which was my goal).

Next, I ran the same numbers at using $100,000 after-tax income to see how long it would take to save $1 million. Here's what I found. If I could make $100,000 after taxes and save 10% of my income it would take me 30 years to reach $1 million, but if I could save 50% then I could reach $1 million in 13 years. That's a huge difference.

Millennial Money

And my goal to save at least $1 million in less than 10 years also made an appearance at the $100,000 after taxes income level, but I would need to have a savings rate of at least 70% in order to make it possible. Could I live on $30,000 or less — while it's definitely possible, my target spending threshold is $50,000 per year (I find I'm able to balance my happiness per dollar ratio at this spending level). So for me living in Chicago on $30,000 would be really tough, not impossible, but tough.

Alright, so $100,000 after taxes clearly wouldn't be enough money to get me there. Let's take a big step up and look at the impact of savings rates on years to $1 million at the $200,000 after-tax income level. If you are making at least $200,000 per year after taxes, then saving $1 million in 5 years starts to be a legitimate possibility — if you can live on $40,000 per year and invest the difference.

Check out how fast you can reach $1 million if you are making $200,000 after taxes.

Millennial Money

While $200,000 in after-tax income is a lot of money, if you make it your primary focus to make as much money as possible over a short period of time and save it, then you can dramatically shorten not only the number of years it will take you to save $1 million, but also retire a lot earlier. If you haven't already, definitely check out my 1% early retirement strategy.

How I saved $1 million in 5 years

Now that we've covered the connection between income, expenses, savings rate, and investment growth to the number of years it will take you to save $1 million, I want to share the investments that helped me get there in 5 years between 2010 — 2015. While I am a huge advocate of index fund investing and recommend that most people invest for the long term using index funds, between 2010-2015 I was also investing in individual companies that I believe in, like Amazon, which happened to increase an insane amount in value of that time period.

I typically only recommend that you invest less than 10% of your portfolio in individual stocks if you are new to investing, I currently have about 50% of my portfolio in individual companies, because the total percentage of stocks as a percentage of my overall portfolio has gradually increased to this level as the stocks I've invested in have risen in value. I also happen to believe in the long-term potential of the individual companies that I've invested in.

FYI, here's the best two books I've ever read on index fund investing that you should definitely check out to get more background on the strategy The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing and The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On with Your Life.

Did I get lucky over this five year period? Definitely — there is no way anyone can predict the stock market returns of the future and I happened to start investing at a period when the market was low and it has gone on to grow considerably over the past 7 years. The US stock market was on a complete tear during this period and still continues to grow until this day. Many people who have kept their cash on the sidelines (outside of the market) in recent years have been asking are stocks too expensive, but have missed out on big gains while doing so? I am still almost entirely invested in stocks for the long haul and I've been happy to see how much more my portfolio I'm about to show has grown even over the past 2 years.

But while you can't know if you will get lucky, you can set certainly set yourself up to take advantage of luck if it happens, or if it doesn't, your investments will continue to grow consistently over the long-term. Alright, let's check out my investments and portfolio growth from back in the day when I was able to go from $2.26 to over $1 million saved in 5 years.

November 2010 to November 2015

During this period I saved and then invested an average of $144,500 per year — which is a lot but was the primary reason I was side hustling so hard. Note that I didn't just save the money in a savings account (where returns are often really low and you are likely to lose money to inflation), I invested as much money as I could into the stock market. Some of my investments during this period were pre-tax (in a 401k and SEP IRA) and other was post-tax (Roth IRA with a traditional conversion) and after-tax investment accounts.

My average income during that period was approximately $257,000, so while my savings rate fluctuated throughout this period, sometimes going as high as 80%, my total average before-tax savings rate across that 5 year period was closer to 56%. I always calculate my savings rate as a percentage before-tax, but you can also do it after-tax as well. If I did it after taxes, then my savings rate during this period would be closer to 80%.

Millennial Money

A few notes. The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund returns (with dividends reinvested) was 13.53% — so considerably higher than the 7% average used in the calculation examples earlier in the post. An average return of 13.53% is insanely strong performance and well above the average annual stock market returns over the past 100 years.

But investing in the Vanguard Total International Stock Index didn't yield any gains. I was, and still, invest in this fund to add more diversification to my portfolio. Although, the current share price as of writing it is $29.92, so it has gone up in value over the past two years.

Also, both Amazon and Facebook stocks went on a tear during this period. Amazon ended 2010 at $180 and by the end of 2015 had increased $675.89, a 275% increase in value. With Facebook stock, it started 2013 at $26.62 and ended 2015 at $104.66, a 293% increase. Also note that during this 5 year period, I was continuing to contribute to most of these investments.

Amazon ended 2010 at $180 and by the end of 2015 had increased $675.89, a 275% increase in value. With Facebook stock, it started 2013 at $26.62 and ended 2015 at $104.66, a 293% increase. Also note that during this 5 year period, I was continuing to contribute to most of these investments. Combining all of the investments the $743,125 that I invested during this period grew by 68.07% to a final portfolio value of $1,248,973 in November 2015.

So I was able to make $505,848 in investment gains over a 5 year period or $101,169 per year! While this portfolio growth is pretty likely unsustainable long term, the past 2 years have also been strong so my investments continue to grow and are the foundation for my early retirement — where I project that I will be able to live off of 4% of the portfolio each year for the rest of my life. Even during the years when my investments have grown by 15%+, I still plan to be able to live off the 4%+(2-3%) inflation, so I can keep some of my investment gains in my portfolio compounding well into the future.

I use the free retirement planner in the Personal Capital app to track my investment portfolio progress and make adjustments. Here's the projected glide path of my investments over the next 60+ years. See what your glide path looks like for free here.

Millennial Money

5 quick tips on how to save $1 million

1. Track everything: Sign up for the Free Net-Worth Tracker Personal Capital and start tracking your income, expenses, savings rate, and investing performance regularly. I do it every morning, but you can do it as frequently as you like. Once you sign up they will even send you a weekly email to give you updates on your progress.

2. Make more money: Try to make more as much money as you can invest early as you can, so you can take advantage of the fuel of compounding, which is time. $1 invested at 25 is worth at least 2-3x than $1 invested at 35. The more money you can invest now the more it will grow. If you haven't asked your boss for a raise, then use this strategy to get a raise or get a new job. Start developing the best skills that lead to more money and make you more marketable. If you already have really valuable skills launch a consulting company or start side hustling.

3. Invest more money: Increase your savings rate 1% every 30 days, so you are saving at least 12% more each year. While that may seem like a ton, by escalating your savings rate 1% every 30 days you aren't likely going to feel it in your everyday finances. If you are starting at a 10% savings rate, and you increase your savings rate 1% every 30 days you will be saving 46% in 3 years! This will make a massive difference in how quickly you will save $1 million and how quickly you can retire. Check out this calculator I built to see how quickly you can retire.

4. Keep at it: Don't day trade stocks or look for the quick immediate return. The market will go up and down unexpectedly, but stick with it and keep investing as much as you can. The growth will continue to compound and accelerate over time.

5. Don't lose sight of the big picture: Money is not the goal, time is. One of my biggest money mistakes I've made it valuing money above all else. While I am all about trying to make as much money as possible, just remember why you are doing it in the first place. Life > Money.

NOW WATCH: This is what separates the Excel masters from the wannabes

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tortuga-aak · 7 years

Text

I built my net worth to $1.25 million with 3 key strategies anyone can use

Charley Gallay/Getty

Grant Sabatier became financially independent at age 30, after saving $1.25 million in five years.

The time it takes to build up $1 million depends on how much money you are making, how much you are saving, and how much your investment grows.

The key is to always keep track of your spending and net worth.

I started my financial independence journey in 2010 and saved $1.25 million in 5 years, reaching financial independence at the age of 30.

How long will it take you to save $1 million?

This all depends on how much money you are making, how much you are saving, and how much your investment grows. Here are the variables that matter most:

1. Income: How much money you are making

2. Expenses: How much money you are spending

3. Savings: How much money you are saving

4. Savings Rate: = Savings divided by #4

Millennial Money

Check out how fast you can reach $1 million if you are making $200,000 after taxes.

Millennial Money

How I saved $1 million in 5 years

November 2010 to November 2015

Millennial Money

5 quick tips on how to save $1 million

NOW WATCH: The 5 most annoying changes in the new iPhone update — and how to fix them

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