I’m not giving up, but I’ve also been making peace with death in the process.
All of my symptoms seem to be traceable back to one hypothesis: the brainstem, where the majority of nerve signals from the body converge, has been compromised. Progressive damage is causing it to send incorrect signals, resulting in random pain and symptoms over nearly every surface and system in my entire body, as well as the gradual breakdown of my autonomic systems, such as unconscious breathing and regulating bloodflow when standing. Unfortunately, every new symptom that happens only reinforces this theory, with many of the explanations for them being brainstem or cranial nerve damage. Sufficient damage to the brainstem is known to result in death, and brain damage itself isn’t directly fixable. All of this has led me to believe that this has a fairly high chance of being terminal with no medical recourse. Not 100%, but high enough that I cannot ignore it. The writing is on the wall.
Instead of pretending everything is going to be okay, I have chosen to accept this possibility and enjoy the time I have remaining. I can’t control when I die, but I can control how I react to it, and I want my final days to be peaceful and nostalgic, rather than horrifying and distressing. And hey, if I survive for longer than expected, I’ll take it.
Society has already failed me. Capitalism made me push through the pain that led to my injury, and the medical system gave me the middle finger. I was one of the few young people who slipped through the cracks. It’s very sad, but it happens. I hope that after I’m gone, people continue to push for a better world and develop the technology to finally diagnose and rectify damage to individual neurons, so nobody will ever have to experience what I went through, and go on to live happy and healthy lives.
Ohio, not too far from Columbus.
Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately no, I don’t have local friends. My POTS makes it hard for me to be out and about for long periods of time (I get lightheadedness and brain fog after just a few minutes of standing).
I try to be the best friend I can be to myself and live life in the moment. I tell myself that how proud I am of myself and that it’s okay to be scared or sad. When nobody else will tell me these things and when I feel so dehumanized and isolated, I try to treat myself with warmth and compassion where none exists.
I feel grateful that I had the chance to experience life at all. I got to experience so many amazing things - incredible video games, a fulfilling programming hobby, and the cutest of cat pictures. I always wanted to live my life building cool and interesting projects, and I’ve already built a website that well over 100,000 people used, solved problems that nobody else had before, and got my work featured in several videos on YouTube by people I considered celebrities. I shouldn’t be ashamed if a health problem I can’t control cuts my life short, because I did the best I could and kicked major ass while doing so.
I think of the YouTube creators I really enjoyed whose lives were tragically cut short in their 20s. Talented, entertaining, and charismatic individuals who continued their passions and shined brightly until the very end. I think the most humane existence I can give myself, for however much time I have left, is to keep doing what I love too, for as long as I still can.
I’m a man, though I suspect my young age and anxiety led to people labeling me as “just another teenager with health anxiety,” which undermined my position, despite how impossibly difficult it was to remain stoic.
As for my parents, that’s generally because I have toxic relationships with them and they are extremely hesitant to consider anything I think and believe. For example, despite my vehement disagreement, they told me that if I got vaccinated for COVID, they would kick me out onto the streets even though I had no financial footing and was struggling with my condition. Having no car or daily routine that would make it feasible for me to get vaccinated behind their backs, I eventually contracted the Delta variant and was forced to endure the full infection. I now have chronic cough.
You basically have to get lucky. The model is able to get shorter strings of text correct more consistently, but it still took several tries to get something that looked good.
I’m using Bing Image Creator, which integrated DALL-E 3 on the backend recently. From what I’ve seen so far, it looks like you get 100 free generations every 24 hours.
Me when my brain waits until family dinner to tell me the funniest joke I’ve ever heard, but only I understand it
Yeah, that happened to me several times too. I think a lot of people quickly jumped on it and whatever they have going on in the backend is scaling poorly and returning blank generations. It worked well for 20 minutes right after launch, so a lot of my results were from that.
EDIT: I just got 100 more boosts after about 24 hours, so it seems that they periodically replenish after you run out.
I used Bing Image Creator, which integrated Dall-E 3 on the backend yesterday. It gives you 100 fast generations before it becomes unusably slow, so make them count!
Yep! It’s been really fun to mess around with… well until my preview credits ran out, anyway :P
Nice to meet you, fellow explorers of cyberspace!
Reddit now:
What’s your all-time favorite video game?
u/totallynormaluser: “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I don’t have personal preferences or emotions, so I don’t have the ability to have a favorite video game.”
Thank you, it makes me happy to hear that.