Have you eaten in the past three hours? If not, get some food — something with protein, not just simple carbs. Perhaps some nuts or hummus?
Have you showered in the past day? If not, take a shower right now.
If daytime: are you dressed? If not, put on clean clothes that aren’t pajamas. Give yourself permission to wear something special, whether it’s a funny t-shirt or a pretty dress.
If nighttime: are you sleepy and fatigued but resisting going to sleep? Put on pajamas, make yourself cozy in bed with a teddy bear and the sound of falling rain, and close your eyes for fifteen minutes — no electronic screens allowed. If you’re still awake after that, you can get up again; no pressure.
Have you stretched your legs in the past day? If not, do so right now. If you don’t have the spoons for a run or trip to the gym, just walk around the block, then keep walking as long as you please. If the weather’s crap, drive to a big box store (e.g. Target) and go on a brisk walk through the aisles you normally skip.
Have you said something nice to someone in the past day? Do so, whether online or in person. Make it genuine; wait until you see something really wonderful about someone, and tell them about it.
Have you moved your body to music in the past day? If not, do so — jog for the length of an EDM song at your favorite BPM, or just dance around the room for the length of an upbeat song.
Have you cuddled a living being in the past two days? If not, do so. Don’t be afraid to ask for hugs from friends or friends’ pets. Most of them will enjoy the cuddles too; you’re not imposing on them.
Do you feel ineffective? Pause right now and get something small completed, whether it’s responding to an e-mail, loading up the dishwasher, or packing your gym bag for your next trip. Good job!
Do you feel unattractive? Take a goddamn selfie. Your friends will remind you how great you look, and you’ll fight society’s restrictions on what beauty can look like.
Do you feel paralyzed by indecision? Give yourself ten minutes to sit back and figure out a game plan for the day. If a particular decision or problem is still being a roadblock, simply set it aside for now, and pick something else that seems doable. Right now, the important part is to break through that stasis, even if it means doing something trivial.
Have you seen a therapist in the past few days? If not, hang on until your next therapy visit and talk through things then.
Have you been over-exerting yourself lately — physically, emotionally, socially, or intellectually? That can take a toll that lingers for days. Give yourself a break in that area, whether it’s physical rest, taking time alone, or relaxing with some silly entertainment.
Have you changed any of your medications in the past couple of weeks, including skipped doses or a change in generic prescription brand? That may be screwing with your head. Give things a few days, then talk to your doctor if it doesn’t settle down.
Have you waited a week? Sometimes our perception of life is skewed, and we can’t even tell that we’re not thinking clearly, and there’s no obvious external cause. It happens. Keep yourself going for a full week, whatever it takes, and see if you still feel the same way then.
You’ve made it this far, and you will make it through. You are stronger than you think.
Some people have asked about making this into a poster or redistributing it. This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License: alteration and redistribution are welcome as long as you attribute my tumblr. For some background and FAQ about the post, see my follow-up post.
there is something really nasty the body does that I have to tell you about. sleep deprivation causes the body to feel stronger signals. it can make light and sound and pain worse, just from not sleeping. and then, get this - - that can be the kind of shit that keeps someone up at night. less sleep makes more pain happen, more pain can make less sleep happen, and this feedback loop keeps spinning. and then that feedback loop fucks with your body and can make you have worse illnesses, worse infections, worse physical health, worse mental health, and feel like shit overall. and then THAT can make it even harder to sleep.
quality of sleep is quality of life. no matter what else you have going on, you have to prioritize sleep. if your sleep is not restful, you might have something like sleep apnea that can make you weaker until you get treated. whatever is stopping you from sleeping needs to be a priority because it will wreck you until you can sleep. your body cannot function properly without enough sleep, and it might not even tell you that sleep is the problen.
your body might just tell you that everything sucks forever until you can figure it out and get it addressed. there are ways to break the pain and sleep deprivation feedback loop, like medication. and if sleep still sucks, really consider getting a sleep study. even if it is a pain in the ass, your health might depend on it.
no matter what else you try, no matter how else you try to prioritize your health, and no matter how you have to accomplish this, you might not be able to feel better until you can actually get enough quality sleep.
big shoutout to disabled people who smell bad. disabled people who cannot shower regularly. disabled people who sweat a lot and it causes them to smell bad. disabled people who cannot apply deodorant due to mobility restrictions. disabled people who cannot do laundry regularly or at all, and end up wearing dirty clothes for a long time. disabled people who cannot clean their living space, and thus end up smelling bad themselves. disabled people who have any condition or disability that causes body odor. and any other disabled people who smell bad for reasons i didn’t mention. i see you and i love you.
(this post is for all disabled people, including mental and physical disabilities)
“I am going to get a good grade in ___________, a thing that is both normal to want and possible to achieve” drifts through my brain with positively alarming regularity.
I am begging you. Please learn about stress/discomfort tolerance. Practice raising it. You need this to survive. If someone online can ruin your day with a throwaway comment, you desperately need to understand discomfort tolerance and consciously, systematically build that shit.
Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!
Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don’t treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.
No, you don’t have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.
It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.
Letting your discomfort dictate your actions and beliefs about things is a great way to become a terrible person. Learn. Discomfort. Tolerance.
As a preschool teacher, this is a skill you need for parenting. I cannot tell you how many kids I work with who are having an incredibly hard time because their parents don’t have the distress tolerance skills to cope with being a parent. I have so many kiddos who parents never let them be distressed (swooping in as soon as they’re crying, fixing natural consequences, flexing boundaries) because they themselves do not have the skills to cope with a crying child. This also sets their kid up to not have any distress tolerance skills of their own because they don’t see them practiced by adults and have no opportunities practice it themselves.
not to sound like a dick but while I was spiraling someone left a comment on my art saying I fetishize my one character’s disability because he was receiving leg stretches (something that can be intimate) and I checked the users bio and they are 17 so that checks out.
NGL it slightly snapped me out of my bipolar spiral over how stupid and concern troll-y it sounded.
17 year olds are ignorant and lack to see the nuance in the spectrum of marginalized people but for the people who think the same but aren’t in high school:
i think disabled characters deserve to feel loved and have intimate moments with their partners. and based on the notes it seems like other chronic pain individuals shared similar experiences.
i just think it’s seriously weird, unfair, and low-key ableist to assume that say, chronic pain disabled people and cane users can’t be seen as sexy or desirable or loved because it’s “fetishizing disability”
i think at some point with this disability advocacy it becomes infantilizing and dehumanizing to assume that marginalized people cannot be loved like able bodied, neurotypical, cis, white people. but with that teen I expect them to have a more open worldview when they get older. i know was ignorant at that age.
A well informed autism self diagnosis is just as valid as a psychiatric diagnosis. Additionally, under the given circumstances it is safer, most probably less expensive and you don’t need to wait for any appointment.
I hear from many trans & nonbinary people who are actively seeking an Autism diagnosis. My advice is RETHINK THIS. Restricting Autistic people’s access to gender affirming care is a major TERF talking point. As legal attacks on trans healthcare mounts, a psychiatric dx is a risk
The high overlap between Autism & transness was one of the main “concerns” JK Rowling rose in her “TERF Wars” blog post. Numerous fearmongering anti-trans articles influenced by TERFs have raised the issue since. if youre trans now is not a good time to seek a formal Autism dx.
An Autism dx does not unlock access to any beneficial therapeutic treatment, bc there is no “treating” Autism. Formal diagnosis makes us vulnerable to legal & psychiatric control and gets our competence challenged – you dont need to subject yourself to this. diagnose yourself
I am close with dozens and dozens of Autistic people, and I have no idea who has a diagnosis and who does not. It does not matter. There is no reason to ask, no reason for others to care how someone identifies and how they arrived there – all that matters is community support.
also if you cannot afford to pursue a lengthy & expensive lawsuit, it’s unlikely a formal diagnosis will actually protect you from discrimination at work, in school or in housing. if you have the means great, but most don’t. disclosing disability can be more risk than its worth.
if you need a dx to access resources such as disability benefits or extra test time, by all means go for it, but be cognizant of the potential costs. you could be denied for surgery, lose control of your assets, be found legally incompetent, lose custody of your kids…
Tweet replies to this thread:
By Greysquirrel @/treerat93
My autism dx was forced on me at age 2 and kept me out of the military in my 20s. It’s been nothing but destructive. I was beat up in sped and believed myself to be stupid my entire life because of it. I can’t even buy life insurance.
By Emily Johnson @/emily_rj
In some states, people with autism face being denied organ transplants, are at higher risk for forced sterilization and/or denied contraceptive and reproductive care, and have a higher risk of police brutality I considered this and decided informal diagnosis was best for me
By AK Faulkner is sweet and…
In the UK, an autism diagnosis is already a significant barrier to gender-affirming care. The GICs automatically try to discount dysphoria as autism during your initial assessments with them. If you arrive pre-diagnosed with autism they write your dysphoria off as that.
I’ve frequently encountered people who are like “well I want an autism diagnosis because I’ll be more comfortable calling myself autistic if I have it confirmed officially” and while I’m not going to tell other people how to live their lives (I strongly believe in letting people make their own risk/reward decisions even if they choose what I think of as the foolish option) I do want to caution anyone who thinks that way to please check to make sure these feelings aren’t bleeding into the way you treat other self-diagnosed autistic people
This is something to keep in mind with diagnoses in general. Having official recognition is important in cases you are seeking accomodations, disability, or certain treatments. But a lot of cases are like this where there aren’t treatments, or the treatments are over the counter/diy friendly.
Sometimes if you have a good doctor they’ll even let you try medication without it! My PCP was actually willing to let me try meds for ADHD without an official diagnosis! I am really grateful for that, especially since they ended up not working out, so if I had gotten the diagnosis just for the sake if trying them, I’d be subjected to additional ableism with no positive trade off! Not everyone will be that lucky, but it’s worth a try before resorting to painting a target on your back.
I’ve seen a fair amount of fat liberation activists explain that they have always been fat, they’re not about to stop, and that’s natural and beautiful and fine. That’s an incredibly important message.
What I’ve seen less - and what I want to remind people of - is this: if you’ve become fat, that’s also natural and beautiful and fine.
When you’re a fat person who has been thin in the past, that comes with its own brand of shaming. People take your history of thinness as proof that you don’t have to be fat. You often fear the look of disappointed surprise in the eyes of someone you haven’t met since you were thin. People try to determine “what happened”. They don’t see your fat body as just you, but as a sort of symptom that isn’t part of you.
Becoming fat is not a tragedy, it’s not a sign of failure, it’s not a bad or shameful thing. The thin you is not the Real you. You are always real and always worthy of freedom, respect and peace. You are allowed to be fat no matter how or when you became fat.
Me: Well, I think it’s wrong to say that children are disgusting and repulsive. They are human beings who deserve respect.
Someone: But have you considered that they [something that applies to many disabled adults]
Me: … :) So. I think human beings with those traits still deserve equal love and respect. Actually.
“But they go to the bathroom in their pants.” “But they make annoying noises.” “But they smell.”
And so did you, once. And it’s very possible if not likely that someday you will do so again. And you were worthy of love and respect back then and you will continue to be worthy of love and respect if it happens again.
a lot of you really need to internalize that acting avoidant isn’t cute at all and that it will cost you experiences and life outcomes if you don’t change course
