I've never enjoyed having the gate to my baby incubator scrapped, but I've never found it agonising either.
A biopsy is a bit beyond a pap. Not necessarily agonizing but more than the ick or cramp of a swab. They might call it a "pinch" but it's more like a hole-punch (I think it may literally be some kind of punch, idr). Hit during sex? Can be anything from an "ow!" to breathtaking, in the bad way. I know there's a view/ fantasy/ belief/ rare situation where that pain is pleasure, but - being as expansive about people's mindsets as I can - I think it's very rarely "pleasure" accidentally/ without having decided that you intend for it to be so or having some adjacent supporting kink about pain in general.
Imagine being her fucking neighbors.
Christ, her poor parents.
this is hitting middle age
But isn't she like 35? That's an age for some prime beauty as a woman (and a man, tbh). It's a robust age, and an age many people really come into their own (physically and otherwise).
You're not supposed to look like death.
as a sedentary 'tard who's escaped her minders and knows how to buy and prepare food.
But I agree: she looks absolutely bonkers, like some broken, homeless person lost in an imaginary world who, once the show is over, will be signing autographs out back in the dumpster while she digs for the next meal.
When I recall that one pic of her standing at the end of a row of people (out in the world!, some convention, maybe?), short hair, smiling (even if, iirc, wearing some kind of pin-covered jacket),
this person is unrecognizable. And not in the way she thinks.
Weirdly, with the wet hair it would seems she's just out of a shower. But she looks like she smells, if not overtly BO bad, then just...unpleasant enough to make you move away. (...and maybe BO too.)
I guess the goal is to be as sensorially offensive as possible bc
you can't handle her edge. Maybe some inverted insecurity/ rejection fear/ wound turned into a weapon.
Or could have been that simple if not for the fact that:
This is mental illness.
...Maybe her therapist is merely trying a containment/risk mitigation approach with her and is not actually incapable. Bc Steph needs to be in an institution, which we don't really have now, and she's too deluded and obstinate to accept full-time wrangling.
Once again, the internet is a pox. She's found the occasional imagined or deluded kindred spirit + glommed on to the trans & kink & disability fads/ escapism. Funnily enough, unlike most who get sucked in, she's so intentionally or unintentionally nuts/ unlikeable/ oppositional, she can't really find community even there, except in the most tenuous, self-asserted ways.
