Good evening @Zoe7,

It is absolutely totally a bazillion percent fine for you to move into the underwater cave for the foreseeable future. I have to admit though, I am feeling a bit bemused. You do know that I'm the one who wrote the disrespectful and offensive post, right? I'm the one that the moderator was concerned was going to cause you harm via the post I wrote. I am the one who neither loves you nor worries about you. What the heck would that moderator think if she knew you had decided to bunker down in an underwater cave with me all the way at the bottom of the ocean? Are you sure this is safe hanging out with a turtle who is known to have tendencies towards being disrespectful and offensive? I'm thinking of getting a warning label made for my shell: Warning, contains hazardous material, engage with at own risk.

I have never thought about the idea that people mistake validation for attention, but I can see how that could happen. I was very much labelled as "attention seeking" when I started super struggling in my late teens and thus I guess for me, being ignored and being invalidated have kind-of gone hand-in-hand for my entire adult life. But reflecting on it now, I definitely agree that giving someone attention and validating their emotions, experiences etc. are two different things.

I super love that you are reading along with the adventure Zoe7. You do realise that hanging out here in the underwater cave, you are going to get sneak peaks of what's coming up in the adventure don't you.

I have a post ready to go, but will hold off until Wednesday to post it. Then I want to get the final bit of the introduction done, ready to post on Friday. This is what I was aiming to write yesterday...and then the day fell apart. I have another marking gig starting on Saturday, and before then I need to actually figure out the answers to the questions I am marking. I am hoping this gig won't be as all consuming as the last one because the lecturer has now made it such that I can access the papers myself, whereas last time I lost a few days waiting for her to send them to me. Also, last time my big change-the-world adventure (and recovering from the change-the-world adventure) meant I lost days. So...I'm not planning to totally drop off the planet, but I will be busy for a while from Saturday onwards. Hopefully this is going to synchronize nicely with where @CheerBear is at with the adventure.

It was interesting reading you and @Faith-and-Hope converse about teaching. I feel the weight of responsibility with marking. I super know how stressful uni can be and I hate giving bad marks. At the same time, the quality of most students' work is amazingly poor. Thus I tend to give the marks that I feel the work deserves, along with mountains of feedback. This upcoming gig is for the same subject as the one I did the other week so I'll be curious to see whether they took on board the feedback.