Hearing your online friends’ music taste and feeling like a total normie in comparison and then hearing your co-workers’ music taste and feeling like a throat-singing/death-metal/electropolka fusion enthusiast in comparison.
I think it’s so helpful to tell friends you’re about to do something scary, and then to come back and tell them you did it, because your anxiety thinks you are going to die, but how can you die if you know the instant you’re done you’re going to pop back into the group chat and go “I survived ✌️😭”
disabled people who do not directly “contribute” to society and need large amounts of care and resources to survive deserve not only to survive but to have comfort, stability, and fun within their lives while they do. no compromises.
“exercise will give you more energy” gets said a lot as a common piece of health advice but I think it needs to be expanded into “exercising will make you tired while you do it, and you will continue to be tired immediately afterwards, sometimes even the next day too, but over months of consistent exercise, your muscles will get stronger and therefore get less tired out by everyday activities, making you feel like day-to-day life takes less physical energy than it used to”
I have no strong feelings about Hamilton the musical one way or another, but the sentence “I wasn’t aware that was something a person could do” is such a perfect way to precisely express the kind of “not judging, just baffled” response people sometimes inspire in me with their antics and activities.
Can I offer a reframe of the common “write the shitty first draft” advice? I like that advice a lot but I think the way it’s often presented bounces off a lot of people and activates shit that does not help writing happen.
I think of the first draft as an armature.
If I was making a beautiful bronze statue, I would need to make a clay model first. And, depending on the shape, before I even got out my clay I would need to get some good thick wire and create a basic shape for the clay to adhere to, so it doesn’t all fall down. Once I have this essential 3D wire frame, I can start building and subtracting and refining.
But if I try to refine on just clay, it won’t have enough of a core to hold it up. I’ll sculpt a beautiful hand only to have the whole arm fall off and go smush.
The armature isn’t the sculpture. It is the frame you build the sculpture around.
The first draft isn’t the novel, it’s a sort-of-novel-shaped thing that will hold up everything you build and beautify later.
Write the armature draft. Try to make it a good armature, instead of trying to make it a good novel before it’s ready.
I know this might make people mad, but absolutely refusing to even attempt to treat your mental illness, and instead just endlessly inflicting your unmitigated episodes on the people around you, is abusive. Your loved ones are not stress toys that you can just squeeze every time you feel bad. It is bad if someone says your repeated behavior is hurting them, and you take no steps to change. I know damn well that you can’t always help how your brain acts, but I’ve also spent a lot of years trying to stop my spiraling brain in its tracks, work on strategies to calm down, and consider the impact I’m having on others, because I grew up in a household with people who have the attitude of, “I have the right to consume all the attention in the house and drain your energy every single day because I feel miserable, and you’re the bad guy if you say that I’m making you feel bad and that I need to get help. I can treat you however I want because of my anxiety.”
Your mental health is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you for saying this
This will be worded so messily and unorganized but asexuality is so weird like, you often end up questioning yourself because you don’t even know what sexual attraction is supposed to be like.
So many people don’t realize their asexuality cause they assume whatever attraction they do have must be the oh so fabled sexual attraction they hear so often about, see the common ace experience of confusing aesthetic or romantic attraction for sexual attraction.
Just the uncertainty of having thoughts like “I found this person pretty, is that sexual attraction? I kinda get nervous when I talk with this one classmate, is that getting ‘butterflies in my stomach’?”
Or there’s the alternative experience of assuming sex and sexual attraction is actually this one huge inside joke everyone’s into but of course nobody actually feels these things, right?
And the proceeding realization of “wait, you’re not joking? None of you are?”
I myself know so little about sexual attraction, it feels so foreign to me, and I’m just left with so many questions, Recently I just learned myself that apparently finding someone attractive and being attracted to them are two different things? What?? How do allo people keep up with all this stuff???
