I lived for three months in Mazatlán. I get it.

I don’t know if anyone else has this problem but I have a really pacific issue.

The word you want here is “specific”. 👍

I would like to add this: I’m pretty articulate in English, and even though I speak French quite well, I sometimes feel like I small child when I try to speak it with my francophone friends, which is why I shy away from that. I feel like I barely know how to express myself and, since I find that so easy in English, it frightens me to struggle so much with it.

I say all this to let you know that you’re not alone and that practice is, indeed, a path to success. It might not be what you need, but it’s worth trying.

Where can you practise speaking that you feel safe? Where you can expect not to be judged nor ridiculed?

“Infamous” exaggerates, but I find this amusing: we had a delightful chant for our sports teams.

COCKSUCKER! MOTHERFUCKER! EAT A BAG OF SHIT! CENTRAL, CENTRAL, HIT! HIT! HIT!

I’ve tried to forget that and I can’t. I wonder where they got it from.

Alternatively, use fc 371 to open the command in an editor and take your time figuring out how you might want to change it.

What kind of “better” do you have in mind to aim for here? Why do you want that?

“The only person who won’t fire you is you.”

Pink noise sounds soothing.

“You first.” 🤷‍♂️

“I’m not looking for a family here. I never was. Thank you for the invitation, but no.”

It could be that simple.

It seems to me that by speaking up when you’re still calm, you can avoid erupting at an inopportune moment and causing the huge scene that might worry you.

I used to feel terrified about how people judged me–for good reason, based on how people treated me when I was young. Eventually, I grew utterly exhausted from trying to please everyone, after which it became much easier to speak up for myself.

Now I find it easy to offer a cheery “No, thanks” while acting like it’s perfectly normal and leaving the other person to be confused and to deal with it.

I wish you peace as you work towards finding your voice.

“I’m not interested. Please leave me alone.”

I have a big chosen family, including people who feel like children, and even grandchildren. I don’t believe that a blood relation would make that any richer an experience for me.

I wish you continued good luck in this regard.

I don’t live in a shithole, so nothing.

St. Thomas and particularly Gladys Cafe, especially if you like hot sauce.

You don’t need to study axioms in order to accept them, but once you accept them, then you must accept any soundly derived conclusion from them. Belief doesn’t need to be logically consistent, but knowledge does.

As for investing significant time and energy, I would say that that depends on things such as the length of the chain of reasoning or the difficulty/cost of testing a hypothesis or how closely observations match your intuition. Some knowledge is cheap to acquire, such as “the sun rises in the east”, because we can observe it directly and we can clearly identify the direction of east and the sun’s path in the sky is very stable from day to day.

Belief regards opinions, in which people have a free choice to accept or reject the idea. There is no notion of rightness or wrongness.

Knowledge regards conclusions from a set of axioms, in which people who accept the axioms are honor-bound to accept the conclusions. To reject the conclusion while accepting the axioms would be wrong.

In my life, this governs when I can freely choose and when I am obliged to accept a claim based on whether I’ve accepted previous claims.

I have worked this schedule at a job I disliked. Never more than about 32 hours from time off felt amazing.

Of the ones I tried to read, Atlas Shrugged, and it’s not even close.