Two job-hunting resources that changed my life:

This cover letter post on askamanger.com. A job interview guide written by Alison Green, who runs askamanager.

useful

Alison Green’s advice works. 

Alison Green got me all my interviews from 2012 onward, I am reasonably sure.

Alison Green is basically my life guide.

Mine too - she was my most visited website for the first few years of my working career, and I cannot emphasise enough how much her advice helped me navigate how to behave in a work environment. You name it, she has an answer for it. Definitely a life hack.

How do you (“how does one”) shop for a therapist?

Can you call up a therapist and be like “hi, I’m therapist shopping”? Can you schedule an appointment with a therapist and then be like “actually I have some questions and I want to spend part of this appointment talking about your practice and whether or not it is garbage?”? Are you expected to phone interview/screen your therapists if you are shopping around for a therapist?

If you’re seeing one therapist are you supposed to/not supposed to tell them if you start seeing another therapist? Is it possible to cheat on your therapist?

I know this one! Or, at least, I know a way to do it, because I’ve done it.

1) When you call them up (or email them, which I prefer, because PHONE, EW), you ask if they’re taking new patients.

2) If they say yes, say something along the lines of “Great! I’m looking for a new therapist. Would it be possible for me to schedule an appointment so we can see whether we’d be a good fit for one another?”

3) Assuming everything is a go, head over to the appointment. Bring your notebook, pen, and questions. Also, if possible, have a very brief rundown prepared of what you’d like to accomplish with your therapy (or even what you think your biggest issues are).

4) Introduce yourself. Reiterate that you want to see if the two of you would be a good fit, so [a nice little social laugh or smile here, while holding up your notebook] you brought questions.

5) Give the rundown of what you want, what your issues are, whatever. See how they react.

6) Ask your questions — about their therapeutic approach, why they entered the field, whether they feel comfortable working with *your* needs (I, for instance, specifically told my awesome therapist that I needed her to tell me absolutely nothing about her personal life or experiences — as much as possible, I needed a blank wall to bounce things off of. It’s been years now, and I THINK she’s seen at least a couple of episodes of Doctor Who. I THINK. That’s all I’ve got. It’s amazing).

7) By this point, you’ve probably hit the 45 minute mark, and you’ll know if you want to see this person again.

Regarding current therapists: If they’re toxic, get rid of ‘em before you even start interviewing others. Nobody needs that kind of garbage. Otherwise, you could keep seeing them while you interview others, and then the second you find one you like (and you schedule your next appointment), get rid of your current one. You don’t have to say why — just say that you’d like to cancel future appointments. Do it over email, if you want. If you like them, you can tell them that you just need something different now, but that you “really appreciate all the work we’ve done together” or something. If you don’t like them, just cancel. They don’t need to know jack.

So that’s my philosophy/style with regard to therapist shopping — I may be completely wrong, but it’s worked for me so far. Good luck!

This is really good advice

Yes, very good advice!

A Little Advice for Life from Sir Terry Pratchett

“Use your gifts and your talents to greatest possible effect while you can. Spread joy wherever possible. Laugh at jokes. Tell jokes. Make puns and bugger the embuggerances. Read books. Read my books. You might like them. You might find something else you like even more than them. Look for these things in life.

Question authority. Champion good causes. Speak out against injustice. Do not tolerate bullies or bigots or racists or anti-intellectuals or the narrow-minded. Use your education to challenge them. Broaden their perspectives. Make the world you interface with a happier place.

These are your choices. Choices you have been fortunate to have been given, so don’t waste them while you have them. Don’t look back in years to come and wish you had grasped a fleeting opportunity. Grasp it now with both hands, Live. Strive. Love.

~Terry Pratchett

April 28, 1948 - March 12, 2015

— Rav Binny Freedman (via yidquotes)

sometimes the issue isn’t that people are toxic + need to be cut out of your life. sometimes you’re just giving too much of your time/energy/resources to the wrong people + need to learn how to set healthier boundaries for yourself.

if you’re someone w/ a big heart who takes care of others by willingly giving them your time + support whenever they come to you, it’s really easy to feel drained if they’re not reciprocating that support. when you’re constantly giving but the people you’re giving to aren’t giving back a similar or equal amount, you end up feeling exhausted, upset, and uncared for. (this also can lead into codependency imo b/c you start to think you can “earn” someone’s reciprocation by giving more and more, but it doesn’t work that way + you’ll only end up feeling more drained and desperate.)

some people have things going on in their lives that don’t have anything to do with you. some people genuinely do have good intentions but for whatever personal or circumstantial reasons, they can’t or won’t match the energy you’re giving them right now – doesn’t necessarily make them a bad person or someone you need to cut out of yr life altogether – but you do need to learn how to set boundaries + give less to those people in order to keep yourself happy + healthy. it’s easy to tell who’s willing to meet you halfway + who isn’t if you pay attention to how you feel after being around them. 

Want to hear a hot take?

Despite what modern core nihilism will tell you, the accidental nature and inherent meaninglessness of life as a biological phenomenon does not mean that our efforts are pointless but instead allows us all to determine what we personally desire out of life. It means we are free to pursue what our hearts desire, and so enables each of us to find our own unique meaning.

Also love is real.

And the majority of people in the world are inherently good-natured.

“Hi Tom Hardy! My name’s Jimmy and I’m six and a half. I love goldfish because I think that they’re golden. Do you like goldfish more than humans?”

Kids Ask Tom Hardy Difficult Questions

Everything I Have To Tell You About Love by Neil Gaiman

Don’t assume malice. Assume ignorance. Life is easier, the world is kinder, and you can educate. Actual malice is pretty rare, I find. 

Always remember Hanlon’s Razor–”Never assume malice when incompetence will suffice as an explanation.”

That’s said, never forget Fred Clark’s Law, either: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” There’s a certain point at which ignorance becomes malice–at which there is simply no way to become that ignorant except deliberately and maliciously.

Time to cross-stitch!

Do whatever you must. Surround yourself with people you enjoy. Steer your thoughts and efforts in the directions that most appeal to you. Find reasons to be eager getting up in the morning, even if your reasons aren’t important to anyone else. Seek out the ordinary beauty and magic in everyday things, even the sad things. Give your life whatever meaning you desire, and change your mind as often as you like.

Do whatever you must, to make life feel livable.

I have been working on this comic “Undergrowth” for the past month and I’m so happy to finally be able to share it with you!! This is the reason I haven’t been posting as much art on tumblr. I was very inspired by people who depict personal growth as a potted plant, and I wanted to do my own take on that idea: I think of it more as an entire forest or ecosystem within a person.

I hope reading this will inspire you to keep improving as a person even though it’s a process that is so difficult and convoluted.

[commission] [ko-fi] [Please do not repost my work!]

oh this is EVERYTHING

obeyed

i feel like the most important piece of wisdom i can impart on teenagers is that no one–no one–knows what the fuck they’re doing

my brother is 26 years old, makes $200k a year, and just bought a house with his fiance. he’s the success story you hear about but never actually meet in person, but it all happened by accident. he wanted to go to college for clarinet performance, but he got rejected from all the top schools. so he decided to major in physics instead, and then went on to get a doctorate to put off being an adult for a few more years. but then he ended up dropping out halfway through the program and accepting a job with google as a software engineer. so to reiterate: my brother majored in something he was not interested in, and then he got a job that had nothing to do with his degree. 

he isn’t successful because he had some master plan he followed, he just stumbled around blindly until something worked out. and that’s what we’re all doing–i majored in political science and now i do customer service for a company that makes industrial-sized gas detection monitors. the marketing director at my company has a degree in biology, and my mom has an MBA and works at a middle school.  no one knows what they’re doing, we’re all just trying different things until something works out.

so if you don’t have a plan, that’s fine. most of us don’t. and even those of us who do, don’t usually end up doing the thing they thought they would. it’s okay to relax and let life carry you wherever it’s gonna carry you. because even though a lot of us don’t end up doing the thing we wanted, most of us end up happy anyway.

I’ve been thinking about this post since I made it a few hours ago, and I realized that I literally don’t know anyone who’s doing what they thought they’d be doing at this point in their life. I know a girl that has a degree in neuroscience and works in a restaurant (and makes quite a bit more money than I do, might I add), and a guy who wanted to be a parole officer but is now a security guard. I know people who wanted to be lawyers but ended up not having the grades for law school. I have a friend who’s 24 and just finished her bachelor’s, and two friends who decided to go to grad school because the idea of joining the adult world terrified them.

When I was seventeen, I was 100% sure that I was going to get a job as a bureaucrat and save the world. When I was a 21-year-old recent college grad, I found out that it’s impossible to get a government job unless you know someone. So I gave up and found something else. I know my teenage self would be disappointed if she could see where I’m at, but you know what? I don’t care. Because teenage me was an idiot. She didn’t know anything about the world or how it worked, and she couldn’t have possibly predicted the curveballs that life would throw at her. And because I don’t know a single person who’s doing the thing they wanted to do when they were teenagers.

I know a thousand people who aren’t where they thought they’d be, and zero people who are following the path they set out for themselves. All of us are confused and all of us are scared, and it’s okay if you are too.

Honestly thank u, i needed to hear this again

More Beautiful After Being Broken

What this trite imagery misses out on is the fact that kintsukuroi requires a lot of work to repair a piece like that.  It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a great deal of investment.  Sometimes parts of the original are damaged beyond repair, and you have to instead painstakingly create entirely new ones.   It’s still not the same.  Maybe it’s something more beautiful. But it’s not the fact that it broke that makes it beautiful. It’s the work put into it.  It’s the fact that people made the effort to salvage it, because it was worth salvaging, because it was important enough to salvage.      It’s the care that makes the beauty.   An apology can’t always fix what has been broken.  That doesn’t mean it’s not irreparable, sometimes you can go on to rebuild and repair.  But it won’t ever be the same as it was again.   

I really appreciate this addition because I’ve always hated the “more beautiful for having been broken” thing. Being broken sucks and I hate all those tragic romantic sensitivities that try to make it what it’s not. These pieces are beautiful because they’re repaired with effort put in to making them shine.

if you’re ever scared you’re not a good person, remember that bad people don’t care about being better 

This is actually very important, so I’m gonna hit that reblog button again