high functioning depression is so unserious because i constantly feel like choking myself to death with my own hands but. i got laundry to do
(via puppiegracie)
- 1 day ago
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- 3 days ago
- 12353
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Once you start noticing how the incapacity to handle discomfort affects how people live their lives it’s actually pretty shocking how it ruins pretty much every conceivable aspect of existence. Interpersonal relationships, romantic and platonic. Career and education opportunities. Your politics Your willingness to go anywhere. The kind of food you eat. The kind of art you expose yourself to and your ability to read it. It’s never just one thing, it touches everything, and once you notice it it’s like suddenly being able to see germs or something. Just this horrific catastrophe people look at you askance for screaming about. As I grow older and see what became of my friends and peers who could not learn to handle discomfort, the more I’m like. This is a genuine societal issue
When you can’t handle discomfort, eventually discomfort itself starts to feel like you’re under attack. Your body enters flight or fight mode, and your amygdala starts screaming at you that you are In Danger even when the “danger” in question is like, making an unpleasant phone call or like, you’re reading a book about something gross.
Your ability to make frank assessments about your situation becomes compromised, because, well, when you’re under attack who’s going to stay still and go “Let me think this through?” Of course you’re going to panic. The phone call isn’t just unpleasant, it’s potentially life-ruining. Someone is going to think you’re dumb and that’s going to be TRUE and then I guess you die or something except dying would be better. The book isn’t just gross, it’s actively coming for you, tainting your mind with the memory of its contents, it has RUINED you.
Obviously, you want to try avoiding danger whenever possible. So you create a world in which you avoid all dangerous things. Traveling? Well that’s scary, what if you get robbed or lost? Better to avoid it (plus there are so many things to read, rules to remember, forms to fill out… it’s just too much, it makes you uncomfortable, which means YOU’RE IN DANGER, what if you FORGET SOMETHING CRITICAL? Better to avoid). A new job? Well what if it’s worse than your current one? You at least know the rules here. The unknown is so much more uncomfortable, which is DANGEROUS, so better to stay where you are. A dark-skinned foreigner? Do they even speak English? You don’t know how you’d communicate. They don’t know the laws here, surely? Plus what if other people think you’re racist? It’s so uncomfortable which means THEY ARE A DANGER. Best to avoid at all costs, keeping your bag clutched tightly to your chest. Vaccines? You don’t really know what’s in them. The explanations have a lot of words you don’t understand. That makes you feel suspicious and dumb, which is DANGEROUS. You said something that was kind of rude? UNCOMFORTABLE. THIS PERSON IS ATTACKING YOU. FIGHT OR FLIGHT. Someone says you were incorrect about something? DANGER. Someone says you reacted impulsively and seem to have misconstrued someone’s words as a personal attack? YET ANOTHER ATTACK.
Eventually you lose yourself and become this. I don’t even know. This totally reactive thing, unable to think analytically about anything (which is uncomfortable and a danger), unable to assess harms, unable to encounter anything new without having a meltdown. And none of it is a real escape because, well, you’ve created a life defined entirely by aversion to discomfort, which is the most uncomfortable life you can possibly imagine. Of course such people end up falling into fascist ideas about Why Your Life Sucks. When you build a life around trying to maintain as comfortable an equilibrium as possible, you cauterize the parts of you capable of growth, expansion, creativity, learning; at the same time, the knowledge of your own stuntedness is haunting so best not to think about that either. The world becomes this horrifying mirror maze where the only way to survive without offing yourself is by projecting your flaws onto others, bitterly externalizing your self-hatred (who could live like this and NOT hate themselves) just to avoid turning it inward. You end up living like a hollowed-out sea urchin
A lot of people I’ve met seem to think that mental healthiness is characterized by a lack of discomfort whatsoever, and are therefore justified in building a life where all discomforts can be avoided. On the one hand, I completely understand the impulse. Lord knows I have had colossally shitty times and wished I could just retreat into bed and fall asleep for as long as needed for everything to blow over. But like. You also have to understand that that’s a fantasy, not a solution. When you have grown up living a crap life with nothing but discomfort, the ability to avoid it feels like exercising autonomy. But you really do have to be careful about making this your life ethos. I know so many people who have lapsed into total learned helplessness, so consumed by discomfort (mentally catastrophized into dangers) re: looking dumb, looking rude, looking X, looking Y that they just. Idk. Don’t do anything except be bitter. You don’t have to be that way. The solution isn’t “tough it out” because that’s also just a manifestation of your inability to handle discomfort. I also hesitate to say the solution is to focus on how much better your life will be when you do X and Y, because the entire point of the inability to handle discomfort is that it constantly manifests in precluding the possibility of even wanting X and Y in the first place since to want it and not be able to do it IS in itself another source of discomfort.
Idk what the solution is, exactly. I just think it’s important to understand that sometimes things can feel awful and still not necessarily harm you
(via dsudis)
- 3 days ago
- 29
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they spend all of s1 disrespecting kiara and making her say the most wack stuff that a hospital social worker would not and then in s2 replace her with a white person…hbo when i catch you
- 5 days ago
- 349
Fox, never thought he would find anyone who hates and got fucked up by Palpatine as much as he did: …Hi?
Maul, in handcuffs, probably bruised and bloody, just yelled all of Sidious plans in the middle of the senate in a very emotionally dramatic way and very confused about this random trooper talking to him: Hi?
Fox, visibly starstruck even with the helmet: Hi.
- 5 days ago
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- 1 week ago
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i feel like a lot of being disabled is just trying to find things that are stimulating and within your energy levels that dont include staring at a screen for 10 hours straight and only being able to like. read a book. and nothing else.
(via pencildragons)
- 1 week ago
- 50145
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The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.
I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.
Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!
But let me tell you a story:
I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.
One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.
At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.
I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.
Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.
The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.
And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.
So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.
So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.
By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.
(via coinkydirks)