something that has usually worked for me in the Bad Times is just. Giving myself an hour. no i don’t want to wake up. but i tell myself. get up. and if in an hour we feel worse, we’ll go back to bed. i say to myself: you don’t have to like it. you just have to do it. sometimes i get to the end of the hour and go back to bed. but a lot of times after a shower and water and maybe doing some jumping jacks or stretching i feel better. there’s a lot to do in an hour that makes it a little less oppressive to breathe. picking out good clothes, putting on good music, doing your makeup so tight it forms a blade, texting a friend, making tea, trying a new hairstyle, making an omelette. it’s gotta be up though, nothing in bed, nothing still, nothing just sitting and staring into the void. it’s got to be moving. creating things helps. journalling helps. but not in bed.
i think we who are mentally ill kind of got. a double dose of inertia. and sometimes the push it takes to overcome that inertia keeps us in bed. but i have found a lot that just. starting to move. helps. even a little. because if you’re up you might as well make the bed. and you might as well go to one class – you can skip the second if the tired gets worse. and once you’re at that one class, you make it to the second because why not.
it doesn’t always work. but give yourself an hour. sixty minutes. say: okay. it’s gonna suck and that first push might take all of our effort and we might sit on the floor for an hour and if that happens, fine, we’ll go back to bed. but then you tried. you got up and tried. and something about that makes the guilt a little less harsh and makes you feel a little bit more powerful and the next time you wake up and your body wants to sit on the floor, you say: no, thanks, we did that yesterday and my hips still hurt. let’s see if i can shower. and maybe you sit in the shower instead but you did take a shower so it probably counts. there’s a lot of power in baby steps. i believe in you. and i think you can do a lot with those sixty minutes.
Tag: but we are in this together
The most valuable thing I learned doing a Masters degree with depression, anxiety and ADHD was to change my “things I’m bad at” list to “things I can’t do on my own.” Stop thinking of them as things I could do if I tried hard enough, and accept that I can’t accomplish them by effort and willpower alone; they’re genuine neurocognitive deficits, and if I need to do the thing, then just like a blind person reading or a mobility impaired person going up a storey in a building, I need to find a different method.
I’m “bad at” working on long-term projects without an imminent deadline or someone breathing down my neck? Okay, let’s change that: I can’t work on long-term projects without an imminent deadline and someone breathing down my neck. So let’s create an imminent deadline and recruit neck-breathers. Find a sympathetic prof who will agree that 3 weeks before the due date they expect me to show them my preliminary notes and bibliography. Get a friend I trust to block off an hour to sit with me and keep asking, “Are you working on your project?” Write a blog post about my progress. Arrange to trade papers and proofread them with another student.
Accept your limitations and learn to leverage them, instead of buying the neurotypical fairytale that they’ll go away if you just try hard enough.
I’m sorry. Just like the disabled people you speak about finds a different method to help them, you should too, try a physical calendar, or even the calendar on your phone to set your own deadlines. If you need help reminding certain things use a notebook. Sitting there pushing the responsibility off onto someone else is wrong. Forcing someone to be a nag and enforcer is wrong. There are steps you can take, gadgets to help. That’s just my $0.02.
Take em back, I don’t want your shitty pennies.
For the record, given our relative physical sizes and temperaments, @star-anise‘s ability to force me (as one of the friends who has done this) to do anything is about nil.
I mean I’m literally not sure she could force me off a couch. I am just saying.
This week I tried to emotionally terrorize a squirrel who kept coming and stealing food off our picnic table. It was not much of a success.
More seriously, for anyone reading who might need some clarity: none of us MIND. The only thing that would be wrong is if @star-anise actually did push “responsibility” off on us – that is to say, blamed us if that day the strategy didn’t work, or she didn’t get things done, or we didn’t spontaneously read her mind and know she needed nagging, or even if she pitched a fit or made it our fault if on that day we have something else important to do.
That is what “pushing off responsibility” would actually be. “@violent-darts couldn’t nag me on Tuesday so it’s her fault that I didn’t get my project done!” See how that works? Mmmkay?
Otherwise, frankly, given the personalities at play, she’s just giving useful boundaries within which we can do something we’ve almost all had to break ourselves of the habit of doing unsolicited anyway. Remembering to go “oi you, work on the thing” every hour or so is hardly onerous.
Also seriously I’m pretty sure we’re all bigger and meaner than she is.
AND THIS HAS BEEN TONIGHT’S EPISODE OF FEATHER-OVERCLARIFIES-A-THING. THANK YOU AND GOOD EVENING.
Another instance of a busybody attempting to police behaviors of someone else that do not and will not affect them. Cause trust me, if you’re this vocal about Do It Yourself And Don’t Ask Anyone To Help You Because That’s Cheating, you’re already on the list of people not to ask under any circumstances.
a professor that accommodates ptsd? what is this??
Today I was talking to my professor about my ptsd and how it may affect class performance, because it’s a very participation-heavy class. The system that my professor came up with is kind of beautiful, so I want to share it with you guys.
She gave me some neon pink post-its, the kind that can be seen for miles because of how bright they are. If I’m having a flashback, dissociating, panic attack, etc., I can just put one of the post-its on my notebook, or somewhere in front of me on the desk. She’ll take that as a cue to not call on me and not expect me to participate. When I’m ready to engage in class again, I’ll just move the post-it out of sight.
I definitely appreciate having this accommodation, and I plan to use it with my future students someday. It’s simple, works when I’m non-verbal, and it doesn’t look like anything weird or attention-grabbing to classmates.
me: hello can you please tag [insert ‘obscure’ trigger] it causes me to have flashbacks
gross person: actually no. its not listed under the Official Neurotypical Approved List Of Triggers™. please try going outside !!
@all of my followers please feel free to hmu if you have an “obscure” trigger and you need me to tag something on my blog. I’ll do it straight away and I promise I won’t be upset
Dr. Gorin pauses. “You don’t. March to
a different beat. Or whatever cute phrase someone uses. What you are is
this: deeply strange. You’re extremely smart and very very weird. If
you wanted, you could go back to school. You could pay very close
attention to what everyone around you is doing and you could try to
emulate them. Eventually, you will probably succeed. You could be like
everyone else. Perhaps shaded just enough to the left to be thought a
class clown.”“Oh,” Jillian licks her lips. “Um.”
“I think that would be a goddamn shame.”
Before anyone says it, yes, I have a therapist.
In any case, this is, as you might imagine, very important to me. I say “i had nightmares when i was a kid” like i dont still get night terrors as a 22 year old adult. The first panel of this is actually based on a photo my mom took of me in a sleep study when I was fifteen. It was one of the harder times in my life, honestly, but things have been steadily getting better since then. all the dreams here are based on ones i actually had, and theres a ton of old comics and drawings of them on my old deviantart from when i was a teenager.
that’s all really, theres no end goal here, nothing im looking to accomplish other than sharing.
Can you link resources on trauma repression guardian personalities?
I… Think something clicked just now.
Would either of you happen to have resources on this or know someone who might? (tagging House of Chimeras since this seems related to system stuff.)
Unfortunately I can’t really think of any resources for guardian personalities specifically that aren’t drenched in “everyone with personalities/headpeople/etc has DID and everyone’s DID works according to this specific model”, because the idea of people with specific roles in a headspace really got bound up with that in the literature.
But I know some folks who might: @solipsistful?
(Also, I just really like this comic in general? Like, I don’t know, just the way it’s presented just feels very normalising. Just like “yeah this happens to people sometimes”.)
@star-anise, you have any potentially useful stuff on this?
One of the most frustrating things is that nobody teaches you how to be disabled.
Everybody teaches you how to try to get better, how to blend in, how to be as normal as possible and “lead a fulfilling life.”
But nobody says the important shit.
There is no
“Hey, fuck, you’re in a wheelchair and that just sucks balls, but you know what? You gotta fucking do it so here’s some things to make life easier.”
Or “Here’s your new cane! Congrats! Here’s how you use it. Stairs might fuck you up at first but let me show you how to make it easier.”
Or “Hey, you’re autistic, that’s cool. Let me know how I can help as your friend/family. I care.”
No one teaches you, actually teaches you about how to deal with daily life moving forward.
Once you’re disabled, once people know or once you’re injured or sick or diagnosed or whatever,
it’s all about pushing to get out of the chair, to stop using the cane, to blend in.
There is no help to accept your disability and move on with life working with it.
It’s always a push to work against it in every way possible and that makes it even more exhausting.
God, this! It’s always about trying to ignoring and deny our disability or giving up on us completely.
It’s like disability is the ultimate failure, even if they won’t say it.
No one tells you how to make accommodations or what accessibility problems you’ll face.
Disabled people can have quality lives.
But our lives are going to be different from abled people’s.
Our health is going to be different. And so should our healthcare.
But instead we are given the same treatment tailored to abled people, and that means it is going to fail us in so many ways.
This is also why “cure” culture bothers me.
Because if there’s no cure, doctors give up. It’s like no cure = no available treatment, because why try if we can’t get you back to abled standards?
[caps removed and spaces added for accessibility]
So. Much. This.
fuck this is so relatable right now
I want to make a blog about these things, like finding accessible places, using canes, talking to doctors, ease of dressing, even the emotional stuff and how to deal with that. There’s so little for us spoonies out there in relation to what the hell to do, how to just live with our disability or illness. Would anyone read it?
This post hurts because it’s so true.
This is why the online spoonie/disability community is so important. I was particularly lucky, because by the time I got sick, my older sister had already been sick for some years (EDS, both us), and so she was able to talk me thru a lot of stuff that she had had to learn by trial and error. How to talk to doctors when my meds weren’t doing enough. How to buy a cane. How to enquire about getting a parking placard. How to get a hip back in socket. Etc etc etc.
I’ve also found tons of good advice here on tumblr, or been able to go to blogs like @spooniestrong to ask others for help. It would be amazing to have a blog dedicated just to tricks of the trade, but that might also be a lot of work for a single person/few people. Maybe there’s a tag to talk about this stuff specifically? (Or we could make one if there isn’t already)
So a new blog has started called “Is There Rape In It”. Basically, it’s a blog dedicated to listing movies, TV shows, and videos game that have rape in them, so that victims and survivors can avoid triggers.
Since they have just started up, they don’t have full lists yet. So if you are aware of rape in any of those forms of media, please reblog their lists and let them know!
Boost.
there is also one for suicide and self harm!
(their lists arent that long yet either so if you have anything to submit to either, please do)
Kimchi and Justice 