Turning Point Australia is moving into South Australia ahead of next year's state election. It is the Australian affiliate of late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA.

On Monday, Turning Point Australia announced the appointment of conservative social media personality George-Alexander Mamalis as its new state coordinator.

Mr Mamalis is an ex-staffer to former environment minister and opposition leader David Speirs, One Nation MLC-turned-independent Sarah Game, and federal Liberal senator Alex Antic.

The appointment, according to Turning Point Australia, marked "the first time in Australia that TPAUS has formally established a state leadership position".

I had a comment flagged on LinkedIn for "hateful speech" today. Needless to say, I am ashamed of my actions. Elon Musk and Larry Ellison are very rich, very big boys, and I'm sure there are plenty of games that they're good at.

I did a lot of thinking about my love of railways today. I've been drawn to them since I was a child, and although I did have something of a fascination with trains for a while, that's not really what it's about. Even my attraction to the trains themselves was more about the infrastructure surrounding rail travel. The signals, the scheduling, the way it was all remotely monitored and controlled. Even the human elements of train travel felt cold and robotic. People arrived at the platform just before a train was scheduled, and although the driver might wait a little while for a jogging latecomer, they wouldn't wait for long. A chime would sound through the speakers lining the ceilings of each car, the doors would swoosh shut in unison, and that was that. I thought that was scary and cool. But I didn't really care whether I saw a train or not. The things that travel along the railway are incidental. The long parallel beams themselves were the attraction.

As an adult, I still love the aesthetic of railways, and the way I feel when I walk along them. I feel free and uplifted when I deviate from the streets and footpaths, and the drone of the traffic becomes muted behind buildings and tall fences. So I suppose the privacy and sensory isolation is part of it. There are no cars, no pedestrians, no one pulling out of their driveway or unloading goods from a truck. I'm not being advertised to on the railway. There's no point putting up signs and billboards there. The only information written on sheet metal is the kind a train driver would need to see. It's all terse and functional. No one wants me to sign up for sports betting or buy a McDonalds meal deal on the railway. Capitalism ceases to exist.

There's a feeling that you're getting away with something. Going into the back rooms that you're not supposed to see, and in some cases very literally. Train lines often run through blocks of residential properties, exposed back yards visible either over or straight through the dilapidated fences. Perhaps the people who live right against the train lines don't feel their privacy is being invaded such that it's worth raising or repairing these fences. That or they can't afford to. I don't voyeuristically stare into these people's lives, but I catch glimpses. I admire the myriad ways these people make the most of their little patches of land. Humans will find a way to create beauty in the humblest of spaces, and this gives me hope when it feels like very few care about beauty at all.

You can't take a wrong turn on the railway, nor will you be overwhelmed by choice. This way, that way, or stay right here. Those are your choices. There's a feeling of freedom in this too, if you're the sort of person to overthink things. There are plenty of opportunities to exit the train line, so I'm not trapped. I'm free to not make decisions, until I decide that I would like to make decisions again.

Railways are usually lined with overgrown grasses. They're not interfering with anything mechanically, and there's no one to complain about them looking unsightly, so they just grow and grow, wherever they can. On top of that, the lack of shop fronts and foot traffic leaves them litter free for long stretches. No fast food packaging, cigarette butts or plastic bags. Humans have been here. They built things. But they haven't lived here. It's industrial, but clean.

Then there's the darker allure. The knowledge that if I pick the right corner, lie down across the tracks, face down with my neck rested on one of the beams, I could leave this life at any time. Of course I know the statistics of failed attempts, messy, drawn–out successful ones, and the devastating trauma that train drivers have to live with when people choose this way out. It's a comforting fantasy nonetheless. If I put all of those complications aside, this feels like freedom too.

I would say that more people should walk down their local railway some time and see the world this way, but truthfully I hope they don't. So much of the world feels inaccessible, hostile, or overbearing, but the railway is just for me.

This community looks pretty dead, so I'm gonna post in the hope of livening it up a bit. I'd love to hear about the efforts other people are making to remove the burden of OCD from their lives.

TL;DR: I am starting to think Fluoxetine may actually be having a noticeable positive effect, and I would like to encourage anyone with reservations about SSRIs, or who may be thinking of giving up on it, to give it a chance.

Talk therapy and CBT have never really made a significant or lasting impact on the mental blocks OCD creates for me on a daily basis. I put off trying Fluoxetine for a very long time, solely because of an absolutely horrendous experience I had with another SSRI (Venlefaxine) many years ago. The time I was on it was almost as bad as the weeks I spent weaning off it. After reading a lot of posts from other people comparing SSRI experiences, and seeing Venlefaxine consistently ranked the lowest in efficacy and highest in side–effects, I started to feel a bit more confident about starting Fluoxetine. I'd reached a point in my life where a combination of factors had made life a living hell as well, so I was at peak "fuck it, might as well".

I started at 10mg a day. My directions were to continue that for the first week, then step up to 20mg. Like an idiot, I decided to speedrun to 20 on my third day. Also like an idiot, I decided to take it the moment I woke up, and put off eating until a couple of hours later. Two lessons quickly were learned from this.

• Fluoxetine has a long half life, and the reason you start low is because your body is adjusting to an accumulation of the drug over the course of the week. Rapidly increasing your dose will also rapidly increase the onset of the side–effects one feels while adjusting to the drug. This includes an increase of the symptoms the drug is ultimately supposed to suppress. My anxiety was off the charts. I was in fight–or–flight mode from late morning to well into the night, stomach in knots, and sleeping extremely poorly, if at all. It should be the most obvious advice, but for anyone else prone to stupid decisions like the ones I make, please take the drug as directed.

• Your stomach may also need time to adjust to the drug. This probably won't apply to everyone, but I personally regretted taking it on an empty stomach so much that I made that mistake exactly once, and now ensure that I have at least a little bit of something in me before I take my pill. If you do fuck up like I did, I recommend a ginger capsule and an antacid. Seemed to calm my stomach down enough to at least stop writhing around in pain for the rest of the afternoon.

On to the positives now. I'm on day 18, still taking 20mg Fluoxetine XR each morning after breakfast. By all accounts, this is still quite early in the adjustment period for this drug. Most people report an awareness of the intended effect, while still experiencing some of the unpleasantness such as fatigue, nausea, and anxiety. This is consistent with what I'm going through right now. It sounds a bit nonsensical, but while I do feel an unshakeable sense of dread, and I am having bouts of inexplicable irritability, I'm also distinctly aware of my new ability to shake off the anguish of everything being "wrong". Things not happening in the right order, things being in the wrong place, making a minor mistake — in reality these mistakes are just minor deviations from an established, arbitrary process — are easier to move past. I'm able to say "oh well" to stuff that could have completely derailed my day prior to starting this drug.

One thing that really gets me down at the moment is the fatigue. My sleep issues are seemingly calming down. I find it easy enough to get a continuous 6 hours, which for me is pretty huge. I wake up with a spring in my step and get a lot done in the first few hours, but by 6 hours in I'm faced with a choice of either taking a nap or dragging myself through what remains of the day, fantasising about just curling up and switching off. Again, this seems common, with most saying it goes away after 6 weeks, and a minority saying it took them a couple of months. I'm pinning all my hopes on having this same experience. I'm following up with my doctor tomorrow to discuss my dosage, and whether the fatigue could be mitigated in the short term with Bupropion (Wellbutrin), as it commonly is for people in my position.

The key takeaway is that Fluoxetine is a hellish drug to start out on, as all SSRIs seem to be, but it really seems to be making me not only less depressed, but less obsessively compulsive. I encourage others to consider it, even if they've had poor experiences with SSRIs in the past. However, if you're working full time, try to get some time off in your second and third week. If you can't, start out with the lowest possible dose and increase very slowly. I am not employed currently, and can't imagine holding down any job in this state.

HRT day 17.

I always wanted to be more social. I cared about people, wanted to know them more deeply, and wanted them to know me. I just never enjoyed the experience because I felt that the time people spent on me was an arduous act of charity that they endured for my sake, out of politeness and perhaps pity. I therefore kept to myself, unintentionally presented a pretty hard exterior that made me seem abrasive and antisocial, and spent nights wishing I could be closer to people around me. I was ashamed of who I was, and ultimately faded out of the lives of everyone I met sooner or later, once I felt I'd revealed too much of myself to put them through any more. It was lonely, and worst of all, many of these people continued trying to reach out while I sequestered myself and waited for the guilt to subside.

Short of growing breasts and marked shifts in fat distribution that I likely won't see for many months, I can never be sure what's an estrogen thing, what's a placebo thing, and what's just a good mood, but the last few days have been an unprecedented shift in my overall outlook. I talk honestly with people. I opened up to my mother about deeply personal things that I've kept guarded for decades. I message people just to ask if they're doing okay and if they want to catch up over coffee some time, and without even cringing at myself for doing so.

Today I've been thinking a lot about how remarkable it is to simply feel like I'm allowed to exist in the world, and allowed to be part of other people's lives. This isn't me. Except it is, and I hope it stays this way forever.