I love seeing those posts where people are like “if you have headmates or whatever you should be on meds because that’s not okay” posts. Like neurotypicals just think that there’s some magical pill out there that will ‘cure’ anything they don’t consider ‘normal.’ Meanwhile, in the land of reality, my shrink thinks it’s pretty healthy that I’m finally getting to know my headmates, and has no intention of putting me on magic pills, because as long as I’m not hurting myself or anyone else, who cares what neurotypicals think is ‘normal?’ Actually, let’s be real: who cares what neurotypicals think at all?
It is not a magic pill, it is called “Therapy” and you can even do it in groups!
i… literally mention my therapist… right there… in the original post…
did you not actually read this… do you honestly believe telling someone who has already admitted to being in therapy… to go to therapy… is a “gotcha” moment???
Okay, so there’s a relevant quote from Slatestar Codex here. (The link is to the source; attribution is a Thing.)
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
I, on the other hand, thought it was the best fricking story I had ever heard and the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back.
It is not a therapist’s job to make you normal. It is a therapist’s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you. And if your therapist can’t do that, you need to find a new therapist.
For some people, having headmates and/or alters is a debilitating condition. They’re losing large amounts of time, having trouble going to work and/or school, or hurting themselves or other people. In that case, they probably do need help, but I think most people who are getting fucked up by their headmates that badly are willing to seek out help on their own anyway.
Other people who have headmates and/or alters find it to be a neutral thing, or even a positive thing.
Have you ever been in a roommate situation where different people do different chores, because, (say) Kate loves to do the dishes, but can’t stand to vaccuum, and Toby’s the exact opposite? If Kate and Toby are headmates, they can wind up doing the same kind of thing. Headmates can also comfort you when you’re sad, remind you that your depressive or intrusive thoughts are not true, or help you deal with difficult people.
So, if you’re in that kind of situation, where your headmates are helping you to be more functional than you’d otherwise be? A good therapist is going to treat it like the hair dryer on the front seat of your car.
Sure, it is a Weird Thing. It makes you look a bit eccentric, and it’s not normal. But if having headmates keeps you from having repeated nervous breakdowns, helps you hold down your job, or makes it so that you can deal with your abusers? Then it’s a win, and a good therapist won’t try to ‘fix’ that.
It is not a therapist’s job to make you normal. It is a therapist’s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you.
Tag: broken brain is broken
You mentioned that in college you were able to get really organized. Would you mind explaining how you managed such a feat?
Well, it was either that or fall apart, like, my back was pretty much up against the wall. I was carrying a full courseload, working part-time, and after my first semester also putting in hours at the theatre for my major. And I was suffering from pretty much constant, ongoing depression, which I was aware of but wasn’t handling super well. So something had to shift, and fortunately for me, it was a positive shift.
That said, I didn’t sit down and say “I’m gonna get organized, I’m gonna do the thing”. At most, I was dimly aware that if I didn’t make a list I would forget half of what was on it, and that EVERYTHING was more of a struggle when things weren’t written down. For example, it’s easy to call the doctor and make an appointment if you have the doctor’s name and phone number in a specific place you can get to easily. Otherwise it’s like fifteen steps and then you have to actually make the call and oh my god I can’t even.
So I started making sure that whenever there was information on my radar I might need, I wrote it down and put it somewhere specific that I could get to easily. It took a lot of training, and it took a lot of trial and error to find out what worked. Like: keeping a notebook where I journal all my doctor’s appointments? Does not work, I kept losing or forgetting the journal. Keeping a spreadsheet on my computer? For some reason that worked despite being no less actual labor. (I also have things like a master spreadsheet of all the sites I have logins on, the email address associated with them, the login name, and the password. Jesus it took forever to build but now it’s easy to just add one in when I make a new one; I even have tabs for different kinds, like “social media” and “medical/insurance” and “travel/entertainment”. It’s a password-protected file that lives on a flash drive that goes everywhere with me.)
The way I started using a calendar is actually hilarious. A friend of mine, for my birthday (at the start of the sophomore school year) gave me a Buffy The Vampire Slayer weekly calendar as a joke. I bonded with that motherfucker, I wrote down EVERYTHING in it; whenever I got a syllabus I immediately copied everything into the calendar and often I copied it in a week ahead of the actual date so that I’d have warning. Over the years this evolved from a “ridiculous weekly calendar” (Buffy, then vintage Spam ads, then vintage pinup girls for senior year) to a Levenger system with a monthly calendar in the front and daily calendar behind it, to my current system of a monthly calendar in google docs (made from an altered spreadsheet). I kept tweaking what worked and improving and improving until I found a functional system, one I’ve used for the last four or five years now.
So here’s the thing: the absolute necessity for all of this to function is to find a records system that functions for you. Not really something I can give you – not something anyone can give you. Full organizational systems rarely work for anyone, and it always feels like failing when you only use part of any given system, which is why most people try to adopt a system and end up reverting. But the vital part of organizing your life is to steal the bits that work, discard those that don’t, and slowly mold it into a whole.
Why do spreadsheets and Google Tasks work for me? Who the fuck knows. They’re not the most efficient, for sure, though they are usually the most accessible. The main reason I use Google Tasks is that if shit is written down, I’m at a point where I check Tasks by muscle memory. So I know I’ll see whatever task it is I need to remember to do. I don’t have to keep it in my mind, and my anxiety drops way down if I know I don’t have to work to remember something important. Why do I have a folder labeled “LIFE SKILLS” that has nested folders for insurance and housing and taxes? Because that’s how my brain works. I use that TAXES folder literally one month out of the year, but when I do, I know right where to go and what to do with it. I now obsessively label files (like PDFs of medical bills) with the date and what they really are, because otherwise I’ll never find them and I’ll give up and fail and cry. Or at the very least turn in my medical insurance paperwork very late.
So the best I can recommend is every time you struggle with something, stop and think, how can I make this easier for me the next time I have to do it? (Sometimes this is even easier than doing the thing, so you can set up for next time and THEN do the thing, like easing into it.) Even if it’s just opening a Word document and detailing what you did this time, that helps. After I leave a meeting at work, I decide if I’ll need the notes I took, and then I type them into a word document helpfully labeled 2016 MEETING NOTES. Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass, but two weeks from now when I need to remember the process we talked about in meeting, it’ll save my bacon. And then I throw out my paper notes, so that they won’t get in the way of me finding paperwork that’s actually important.
It’s a lot of labor initially, but once you get rolling and find what works, it takes very little effort, because you know where to go and what to do. And since it’s automated, like you just go and do it out of habit, things like depression and procrastination don’t interfere as much.
So yeah, that’s the advice I have: find what works for you, rather than searching for what should work for you; take the time now to do that little extra bit of work that will mean less later; and allow yourself to be imperfect. My initial attempts worked maybe 50% of the time. It took me at least eight years to build a system that functions 98% of the time, and I’m at peace with never getting that last two percent. And you may never get to 98% – but that’s okay. 50% is better than nothing.
Organization isn’t a matter of inherent skill or willpower – just a matter of self-examination and experimentation. And it takes time and luck to make it work.
where is the LifeHacks for depressed people tbh
they’re all like “don’t catastrophise!” and “practice mindfulness” and stuff which is fine but where are the genuine “make functioning so much easier” LifeHacks for people who can’t get out of bed
like there is such a market for that
“set several very annoying alarms at different places in your room so you literally have to get up to turn them off! when you get up to turn them off, turn the kettle on so you’ll get up again when that shit starts boiling! oh, what do you know? now there’s fucking coffee!”
“set some more annoying as shit alarms at meal times to remind you to eat food!”
“don’t do that mindfulness Adult Colouring Book bullshit, those tiny meticulous designs are a bitch designed for people who don’t panic attacks about what colour shirt to wear. instead, buy some early childhood colouring books and some thick fucking pencils or textas and focusing like a motherfucker on not going out of the lines like you’re three fucking years old again and watch yourself become immersed so quick you forget to be hyperventilating and crying”
“just buy some fucking paper plates when you can’t do dishes! who’s gonna tell on you?”
#DepressedLifeHacks
Stop telling yourself that the grass is greener on the other side, because it’s not. It is greener where you water it. So take control of your life and start watering your own pastures and grow your own greener grasses.
Stop both envying your neighbor’s green grass AND watering your own. We’re in a fucking drought. You can’t sustain that shit. Think beyond the lawn that society told you to want. Put in some native plants that will thrive and bloom with very little water. They might be a little more spiny than what you first planned, but there is great beauty and variety in these hardy survivors. Your yard will be way more interesting and friendly to wildlife than that of the people who took the easy route and poured on water at the expense of other people and organisms. (This has been a California-themed post hijacking.)
No but like along with being literal good advice (GRASS AND LAWNS ARE A TERRIBLE IDEA WE SHOULD REVERSE THIS CULTURAL EXPECTATION NOW) this is also metaphorically good advice (as I’m sure you knew when you posted it).
There are sometimes things that you take for granted that you are just Expected To Want or Do or Be that you don’t actually have to. You’re so used to it you don’t even think about it, but the moment you do a less resource-heavy alternative appears.
On an environmentally friendly level this is a terrible example, but a couple years ago I was talking with my therapist about problems I was having being a functioning human being, and I went on a rant about the dishes and how they stress me out and I feel like I never get them done and then I hate myself and after listening to this whole rant I expected my therapist to give me the normal pep talks about being kind to yourself and taking it on a little bit at a time but instead he just had the most exasperated look on his face and he said,
“Buy some paper plates.”
He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world and I was completely speechlessly thunderstruck.
He said, “As an environmentalist, I am giving you permission for your own health to buy some paper plates. Problem solved.”
I don’t always use paper plates now. My mental health does allow me to keep up with the dishes better than I was (though these days my physical health has started interfering). But when I feel that slipping? I skip the cultural expectation that I should just be doing the dishes all the time. I conserve my (metaphorical, the opposite of literal in this case, sadly) water, and I buy some paper plates.
There a thing that’s ruining your mental health? Your life? It feels like a simple thing that other people can just DO, but you can’t? Often there’s a simpler solution. If you are tired of taking care of your hair, cut it into a pixie cut to save yourself the hassle. Hell, shave it off. You don’t need hair! Google hangout is a great alternative to going out when you want to talk to a friend but aren’t sure you can get yourself out of your house. If food stresses you out, buy shit you can just grab and eat without even having to microwave (I fucking love cottage cheese and vegetables for this exact reason).
You do not have to cook. You don’t have to date or get married. You don’t have to be monogamous if you do want to date or get married. You don’t have to be straight. You don’t have to be a boy or a girl. You don’t have to look a certain way or talk a certain way or eat certain things. You don’t have to go to college. You don’t have to be in that major. You don’t have to own a house. You don’t have to want or have kids. You don’t have to wait for the perfect partner to have kids if you do want them.
It’s such a normal thing to have a lawn that many people don’t even consider the time, money, and water it would save to just get rid of it and replace it with an alternative that takes into account the native environment of where it’s growing. How much easier their life would be without maintaining something that just went there because it was expected with no regard for whether it naturally fit, and instead put in plants that serve the same function but actually thrive and take root with no real effort.
Instead of fighting to maintain expectations, throw away your lawn and plant natively instead. Both literally and metaphorically.
I once said to my therapist after a particularly hard week, “I wish I could just fix all of my problems and move on to live a normal life”
And he looked at me and said, “There is no finish line”.Those words felt like a stab in my heart, but they were words that I desperately needed to hear. There is no finish line to my problems. It’s not possible to get through a certain point in life and have my problems simply disappear. And it’s unhealthy to think that way. Up to that point in my life, that’s what I though recovery was. I thought it was like working your way forward until it seems like your problems never existed in the first place.
The finish line does not exist. Instead, everyone has a capacity for recovery. You may never completely rid yourself of whatever causes you pain, but you will move miles from where you started. Don’t set your expectations too high and create that theoretical finish line in your life, or you will only end up chasing it. Instead, focus on your own capacity for recovery, and be proud of yourself for every step you take.
(me taking my meds) if your brain can’t produce its own serotonin and norepinephrine, store-bought is fine
You have to cheat. Ask for as many extensions on papers as you possibly can. Pretend your computer is broken. Use your charm if you have any. If you’re going to cry, don’t wait until you’re out of the room—do it where the people in power can see you. Eat the same food every day if you can’t think of anything else to make. Put other things ahead of taking a shower, even if your mom said you have to take a shower every two days. Sometimes people won’t notice you’re cheating but even if they do and are annoyed you might still get by.
My mom goes to workshops for people with ASD and then gives me the really long printouts that go along with them. The printouts tell me to sit down and make a list of everything I have to do. When I am anxious, as I have been this year, it’s hard to think about these things so I hold on to the printouts out of guilt but don’t actually read them. Then my mom finds them and gets upset that I haven’t read them and says that I’m not ready to live on my own.
But I am ready to live on my own. Badly. Just like I can hold down a full-time job. Badly. Just like I am getting my homework done. Badly. And I forget to balance my checkbook, which none of my non-disabled friends do because you can get it online, and my mom says, “Well it’s different for you because they would be able to do it if they needed to, but you wouldn’t, so you have to do it.” Theoretically I understand this is true, but my checkbook remains unbalanced.
Which is bad. And I feel bad. I do! At this rate I’ll never be able to go to college. But I do go to college. At this rate I’ll never be able to have any friends. But I do have friends. I just don’t do everything right with them all the time.
For people whose lives are controlled by executive dysfunction, I firmly believe the difference between getting stuff done and not getting stuff done is not caring about doing things right. You cannot always make a list all the time and be early for everything. You just can’t. Hopefully you’re good-looking or funny or you remind someone of their niece. Exploit all opportunities. Do not do what people who are not disabled tell you to do (unless you want to, of course).
All too often I find myself waiting for the day when I can do shit properly, which more or less amounts to waiting until I’m not disabled anymore. Then I can feel good enough to deserve everything I want. Well my cure is slow in arriving, so I’m just going to do everything I want now, if that’s okay with you.
from I’m Somewhere Else, “Max is a Miracle” (via into-the-weeds)
i needed to punch my paranoia in the face and also practice drawing wolves so I took both of them out in one swing
important message
God Speed Brain Wolf.
Kimchi and Justice 