STDs and Mouth Diseases

In this article, I will discuss an experience that illustrates how poorly society handles STDs and Mouth Diseases.

In July 2014, after several years of chronic stress as a tech startup CEO, I triggered an autoimmune disorder. It was the first serious health issue of my life and it took a long time to get a diagnosis.

Very quickly the news spread in my friends’ circle that something was going on with my health, but no one really knew what.

While I was confronting the shortcomings of our medical system, trying to get a diagnosis, I was posting more frequently on FB to get some emotional support. People could tell that something was wrong.

Some in my surrounding began making assumptions based on my posts and ironically their assumptions were based on their own health issues.

Two of the most common issues that people seem to deal with are STDs and Mouth Diseases. Interestingly, at that point I didn’t even know that Mouth Diseases existed, because no one talks about them and people refer to them as mental health.

I also didn’t know the amount of signaling people do on FB to broadcast their STDs and Mouth Diseases, since I never had any STDs or Mouth Diseases to think about signaling.

Eventually I found out that one way people signal their STDs and Mouth Diseases are by colors and color combinations in their posts. Ironically, because there are so many STDs and so many Mouth Diseases, pretty much every color and every color combination is taken.

So anything one posts that has any colors in it will automatically signal something to someone.

Therefore, without realizing what was going on, people were reaching out to me, because they had seen a color combination in my posts that was representative of their STDs or Mouth Diseases.

Being completely unaware of this, I was leading conversations with them while the other party would try to signal something to me, either by spelling, using different emojis or other symbols.

Interestingly, I later realized that some people were even concluding that I was understanding and reciprocating their signals. This is another shortcoming of limited communication channels, like texting.

If you are expecting something, you can read anything you want into someone’s message. I guess this is similar to availability bias.

As my battle with the autoimmune disorder was continuing, my mood was gradually degrading. It was the first time I had to deal with any serious health issues and had no idea how challenging something like that can be.

And people around me just continued their signaling, without ever asking me what is going on.

With time the amount of signaling increased, the amount of assumptions based on my posts increased and the amount of false rumors circulating also increased.

So people’s communication with me became more and more cryptic.

Everyone was signaling something without asking what is going on.

And ironically if you have never dealt with a particular STD or Mouth Disease, it is difficult for you to know what the color or other signals for that disease are. But people will still signal to you without thinking that far or considering that there are so many other health issues out there.

Because there is very little discussion on STDs and Mouth Diseases, the amount of signaling has proliferated. There are so many redundancies and duplicities in signals, that all it does is just confuse people even more.

It is also interesting that this signaling varies by country and even social circle. There are so many signals that no one can keep track of them.

An important conclusion from this experience was that lack of real communication is the source of most problems in the world!

When it comes to Mouth Diseases this communication is even more confusing.

With Mouth Diseases, in addition to colors, people also use mouth and hand gestures, like big smile, closed lips, showing some teeth, different hand positions, different color sunglasses, reading glasses and so on.

Because I didn’t know that Mouth Diseases existed, I never paid attention to how someone smiled in their pictures or what color sunglasses someone wore.

This made my experience even more confusing. Because of the intensity of the autoimmune disorder my mood was degrading and naturally I was smiling less and less in my pictures.

This would trigger those with Mouth Diseases to read something erroneous into my posts. So over time people with Mouth Diseases would reach out to me more and more.

They would talk to me based on their own experiences of their Mouth Diseases, without realizing that I was dealing with something completely different.

With time, considering the lack of actual communication, the amount of confusion in my social circle was only increasing.

Those with specific STDs were thinking I was dealing with their STDs and those with specific Mouth Diseases were thinking I was dealing with their Mouth Diseases.

Everyone was projecting their own experiences onto mine. And I was just trying my best not to give up during my health battle. Most autoimmune disorders don’t have any treatments and only time can improve one’s symptoms.

Then another interesting phenomenon occurred. As time went on and many people could tell that I was struggling with my health, many attempted to play power games in their communication, which ironically went completely unnoticed by me.

Because I was always somewhat exceptional at most things I have tried, I had never felt the need to incorporate power games into my communication. So the concept was fairly strange to me. Therefore other’s attempts in the past had never registered with me.

Only much later did I realize how primitive most people’s behavior is, when attempting to take advantage of someone’s struggle. This is mainly because most people don’t have exceptional abilities and therefore have to use other means to gain an advantage.

Then after about 4 years, by the summer of 2018, my health had slowly recovered and I was able to be more active and more social again. After all these years, people following my FB posts had read whatever they wanted, as signals to them, and spread all kinds of rumors about STDs and Mouth Diseases. Ironically, having mostly recovered from the auto-immune disorder, my health was absolutely perfect. I had no STDs and I still didn’t know that Mouth Diseases existed.

But the absurdity was that once I started socializing again, at this point every rumor was out there. And people started exposing me to stuff without any warning and without feeling the need to say anything. And some people even colluded and attempted to intentionally infect me.

Luckily, I could avoid STDs because one can use condoms but mouth diseases are much harder to avoid.

Obviously, this disease signaling mechanism with colors, gestures and mouth signals is broken and society needs to discuss this issue openly.

To be continued…