#3: can u get pregante
An ode to my cruel mistresses, Yahoo! Answers and r/HealthAnxiety
Whoops, I wrote another post that requires some content warnings! This edition of Body Lore has brief mentions of sexual assault and disordered eating. As always, please take care when reading, I promise I won’t be mad (no one is mad at you!) if you sit this one out.
And yes, this Body Lore is a bit late (much like your period may be if u r gregnan). We’ll be back on our normal every-other-Sunday schedule when life is less absorbed by the (wonderful!) chaos of my lovely partner moving in with me.
You know the YouTube video.
If you were online in the 2010s, surely you feel something stirring deep in your soul when you read the words:
“Am I pregegnant or am I okay?”
“How do I know if I’M prengan?”
“Can u get pregante…?”
And if you were a well-adjusted offline person… here you go:
The loss of Yahoo! Answers still hurts.
And not just because we won’t get any more of these brilliant video compilations displaying just how well people using the crowdsourced Q&A platform could spell.
For a good chunk of my life, I fried my eyeballs scrolling through Yahoo! Answers threads related to every possible question I could ask.
Which college do I pick?
The classic: Are all my friends mad at me?
Am I going to throw up?
Those of you with anxiety disorders are nodding along.
Lying wide awake in the dark, ignoring the fact that I was wasting precious sleeping hours, I’d let my fingertips drag me to the underbelly of internet self-help.
Yahoo! Answers, my teen obsession
For years, my favorite entries to devour revolved around one theme: sex and relationships. Yes, even as a teen, I did know better.
I grew up in an immigrant household where my parents balked at some American cultural norms, but they still gifted me an American graphic novel-style book about how babies and bodies work when I was eight. I also attended a high school with surprisingly thorough sex ed. Our health teacher was an older woman who would grin at her newest batch of tenth graders year after year and slowly explain how important the clitoris is to female sexual pleasure.
“Remember boys! It’s not enough just to go in and out!” Bless you, Peggy.
Yet, I didn’t turn to any of these resources with my questions. I only trusted Yahoo! Answers. Occasionally, WikiHow.
When I had my first big crushes on boys in middle school, Yahoo! Answers clued me in to watch the direction in which their feet were pointed in class. [Redacted Baby Republican] and I spoke a total of three times in the seventh grade. Yet, thanks to Yahoo! Answers, I knew he liked me back because, in English class, his New Balance sneakers pointed my way more than 50% of the time.
(Note: I just looked up whether this advice is recreated nowadays on somewhere like Quora, and was very heartened to see this wisdom: “It means you are seated in a direction of his feet.”)
When one of my best friends fooled around with her boyfriend in high school, she asked me if I thought she should get a pregnancy test even though they hadn’t had sex. I consulted my wisest teacher. Yahoo! Answers said it’s possible, by the way (especially in a hot tub)!
As I grew up, the nature of my queries before the Yahoo! Answers forum grew more serious. The platform figured out long before I did that I didn’t just like boys. When I fell in love and out of it, Yahoo! Answers was there to confirm if I truly knew what my feelings were. Y!A often suggested I shouldn’t have to count calories to feel like a desirable human being—though I did for a while anyway. And when one of my best friends turned out to be a rapist, Yahoo! Answers was the confidante that walked me through my rage.
(Pause for a hug and light pat on the head for teen Kasia)
Yes, I was a dumb teenager. I was also smart enough to realize that strangers on the internet were infrequently experts and more often just as lost as I was. But I wanted to belong.
At the very least, I needed anyone out there to tell me it was okay that I was confused and my questions were worthy of answers. Though God forbid any such person know my actual name.
I was waist-deep in guilt about having befriended someone capable of sexual assault—I should have been able to tell, to sense the evil in between the memes and music we bonded over. And I resented the brain that told me I needed to both love myself and starve myself more effectively if I wanted someone to want me.
I didn’t want to process. Someone else could surely do that better for me, I thought, given my track record.
I didn’t trust my gut—couldn’t—when it had led me so dangerously astray. Compound that with the whack-a-mole of trying to exist in society with life-threatening food allergies, and I’m out here like Lit.
(As in, My Own Worst Enemy)
(Get it?)
(pls lmk why my car is in the front yard, etc.)
Humiliated by my possibly broken brain, I took comfort in cloaking myself with confidence bestowed upon me by my anonymous internet advisors.
Gut check on my gut
My therapist is so glad I don’t do this anymore as an adult. Sort of.
I’ve been around the inner-child-work block. Some things I now know:
people can do terrible things and I can’t always predict it
diet culture has convinced us we’re not perfectly cool and great and healthy while also coming in many different shapes and sizes
sometimes I can check 20,000 times and a speck of peanut might still end up in my mac n cheese
Hell, I’ve done the crash course of trusting my gut that is self-employment.
And I listen to the Post-it on my monitor which reminds me:
And yet.
These days, I’m a (not so) proud member of the subreddit r/HealthAnxiety, a both very helpful and unhelpful echo chamber of health-anxious internet denizens performing (largely) uninformed gut checks about whether their symptoms are actual medical issues or if they just need to chill the f*ck out.
I know, I know.
My recent searches on this and similar forums have included whether I had a DVT (I didn’t), whether a bug I found was a bed bug or a tick (it was neither), and whether my post-run heart palpitations episode was serious or not (I’m going to see a cardiologist).
On one hand, my own propensity for my version of “Asking Dr. Google” gets me excited about the possibilities of health chatbots and other medical AI products.
If designed responsibly and specifically (read: I don’t mean ChatGPT), future public-facing GenAI hopefully can better address health anxiety and an assortment of body questions than Reddit, Quora, and the like.
But then we’ve also got endless risks of inaccuracies and bias with the tools we’ve built so far, which remain largely unregulated. Still shuddering about the NEDA chatbot being caught giving out dieting advice.
Of course, these tools are coming whether we’re ready for them or not.
Because people are really turning to the internet and ChatGPT for medical questions in this Year of our Lord 2024. I swear it’s not just me. And I’ve worked in the healthcare space for years! Time to spiral about access to medical care and health literacy!
But we’ve also got great online resources—like Luna—with a wealth of information accessible to teens (and the rest of us) about the most stigmatized body topics you can think of. (Literally, look at the preview question on Luna’s LinkedIn post.)
And I’m still grateful to the NP who referred me to Bedsider when I was considering getting my first IUD in college (Psst: Body Lore on the history of the IUD coming up!!!!)
So what’s the point of me, as a relatively health literate and well-informed adult, searching through Reddit?
I’m still trying to answer that un-Yahoo!-able question myself.
On my worst days (like yesterday, when the aforementioned bout of heart palpitations had me thinking I was going to die with the sweat on my run shorts making me look like I peed myself), it’s maybe a bit of a guilty itch scratch. I know I shouldn’t do it, so it’s a bit of a rush.
Other days, it’s because the reliable, evidence-based information coming from trusted websites and doctor/med student friends is mostly devoid of personal experience. Relating to other people, while it can stoke misinformation (hello, TikTok), can also be really affirming when you’re feeling scared and alone in your miraculous mystery of a body. If SwoleChad6969 felt that exact same pain in his calf as I’m having and also got paranoid about it, then I’m not nuts, right?!
All in all, better access to approachable, empathetic, body neutral (God, am I asking for too much??), and patient healthcare providers would probably ameliorate many of these issues. We can all dream of a healthcare utopia.
For now, I’m grateful the insurance I pay ~$600 monthly for (Haha! Love self-employment in America!) is making it possible for me to see a doctor tomorrow.
Okay, off to contemplate (once again) whether to delete Reddit from my phone. At least I’m not gregegnant.
Before you go, PLEASE SHARE WITH THE CLASS (if you’d like): What’s an embarrassing body-related thing you searched for online (either recently or as a wee babe)?
If you’ve never done an embarrassing body-related internet search, BOOO GET OUT OF HERE (but also please drop the mental wellness tips n tricks, queen).
As a wee babe (teenager), I was convinced I had contracted an STD despite never having been sexually active. Turns out I was just blessed with a cute lil' mole on my labia. Terrifying.