#been trying to come to terms lately that i am mentally disabled and i may mot be able to perform as good as everyone else but i still can

[blissfali]

Anybody whos in college wanna tell me thats it gonna be ok ahaha.

#been trying to come to terms lately that i am mentally disabled and i may mot be able to perform as good as everyone else but i still can #i am. stressed #i just feel like im suffocating a bit and this is supposed to be the easy part😭😭 #i thibk im just overwhelmed with the idea of whats up ajead #im scared but im excited #vent #They call me mr autism the way that its actually a disability and not silly goofy special interests #Im gona be ok im just very overhwelmed ahahah #Greg house like take my hand. we xan go to college rogether… #Youre so right greg house even if i crash and burn theres no success without failure

[official-locke-writing]

Hey guys, I know I've been serious-posting quite a bit more than usual lately, I just wanted to talk a bit more about how (and why) I write my characters the way I do in terms of realistic portrayal and my take on mental health issues in fiction, mainly Creepypasta and Slenderverse.

It seems like some people take me for an able-bodied, mentally stable human being "looking in" on mental health who assumes that I know everything because I Googled some stuff. I can see where this view can arise, as I have never truly spoken about my disabilities or personal life much at all. It occurred to me that you don't know much about me, or why I am so passionate about things like this.

So, let me be transparent.

Yes, I have studied abnormal psychology as a focus in college, but that is not the source of my interest in exploring mental health in the fashion that I do. I have a literal shopping list of physical and mental health obstacles that I deal with daily, and being able to understand it better and connect with characters who share a more accurate depiction of the struggle feels more personal to me than a more standard "fanon" depiction of Creepypasta characters. It's how I like to write things.

I have Marfanoid Habitus Syndrome, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, childhood-onset Rheumatoid Arthritis that is in later stages now that I'm an adult, along with heart conditions like Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), heart valve abnormalities, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I deal with Borderline Personality Disorder and autism which can cause episodic confusion, emotional distress and panic attacks. I am not asking for sympathy by saying this. I just have these things, and it's a part of my life.

Needless to say, I know what it's like. I really do, which is why I have such passionate interest in rewriting Creepypasta characters to be the way that they are. I just thought you guys would like to know that my differing views on how I would like the characters to be should not, in any way, feel like an affront to your depictions. I may not agree with them, but whatever, y'know? It's the internet. Differing depictions should not equate to waging war about who is right.

I will address this specifically to the people who want to "call me out" on being ableist because I changed some mental health depictions regarding my Toby rewrite to be less noticeable: Mental health issues are not always the forefront of someone's personality nor behavior. I can promise you that people think I'm normal on first look because all of my medical conditions are "invisible." It comes with the package, and I think anyone with an invisible disability can agree with me that the original stories in the fandom are... incredibly strange and even a little offensive. I'm not a fan.

And I will state, I know this character is outdated and I am not bashing the creator, and I am well aware of their need to be detached from this character due to the poor writing, but Ticci Toby does truly belong to the fandom now, and the fandom has held up these pretty wild design choices. I'm looking to change that in my personal depictions and hopefully foster a healthier way of using these characters to cope.

I love you guys; I hope I'm making sense here and am trying to touch base with you all in hopes of clearing up some misunderstandings. I'm not participating in the erasure of disabilities; I'm participating in realistic writing.

#creepypasta #slenderverse #character design #blessed be the wicked

[orchidyoonkook]

I wasn't ignoring you! I've been depressed lately... So I haven't actually been sociable with many people at the moment, or with anyone if you want me to be honest. I would try to be in a healthier mindset before I get back into conversations with people if I am actually able to do so.

But, then I woke up to the news that the guitarist (from a band I listen to) is leaving the band. Because of the timing of the announcement.. I thought, along with many other fans, believed it was just an elaborate April Fool's prank. But it doesn't seem that way. So! Now that brought my depression back hearing that news. My mental health is changing everyday. So I have conflicting feelings about hearing that new today.

So there's that.

I know, I know.. I'm just overreacting about news that I'm not apart of in any way so it shouldn't effect me but it also does at the same time.

I've noticed some emojis don't seem to appear on certain devices so I will have to figure out an emoji that actually appears everywhere, or if it would be easiest to know who is who (while I'm being anonymous).

Yeah.. I'm a private person. I would only reveal things about myself if I am actually comfortable around any other person. I'm always like this all the time. Doesn't matter if you're family, friends, even strangers.

Oh! Yeah. Maybe I should've elaborated those specific relationships in fictional stories. I can see and read dark content, but never content in that way; those ships are limitations that I'm never comfortable with.

I wasn't going to say specific words in you - or anyone else who might have - read my messages. Since I know certain terms may actually be upsetting for some people. Maybe my explanation was just too vague though, so I should've elaborated more with being explicit about that.

Based on labels. My style was between "emo", "goth", "punk", "grunge" and every style in between that you could think of. Ripped jeans have always been my preference in pants.. Usually black shirts, sometimes I'd wear band shirts on occasion or shirts with graphic designs (skulls is an obvious example). Dyed hair, piercings. This is still my own style.

So it doesn't was not a phase for me like most people believed.. There was only a few people who knew that my style wasn't any phase at all either. Anyway! I'm getting too off topic again. Or at least I think I am.

Yes! Guys and girls could be friends. Not every relationship between a guy and girl have romantic or sexual either, there are also the platonic ships and even kinships too. Depending on how close their bonds are.

I rarely had female friends. Not because "I'm just like one of the guys." was the reason. Well.. Maybe I felt that way when I was a preteen that time. But I usually have better connections to guys. Nothing against a lot of women, since I know not every female is the same person when it comes to actions and reactions. I knew many girls who were always horrible to me. Other than people who treated me differently once it's been known that I'm disabled, since people have treated me different once they've found out about my disabilities (like autism for example) - but this is towards people in general though. When it comes to girls; so many female friends were jealous of me for whatever reasons they had. I'm not being conceited. They were actually jealous of me for any reasons I don't know. Any time I had other friends besides her, dating boyfriends or even had a crush on guys, she'd always steal them from me. Which is why I have trust issues with people. The girls I knew end up abusive towards me. Physically, mentally and emotionally. And the few friends, including female friends, worth having in my life were the people who abandoned me. So I've gotten used to being alone now.

And don't get me started on being friends who guys who actually did stop hanging out with me because of jealous girlfriends.. So I was not sure if they hated, distrusted, me. Or they distrusted their boyfriends.

That happened frequently too.. So having every trust issue that I have been through. I tend to push people away, before they push me away.

Yeah. Regardless of sexuality, I just can't see the BTS boys in any ship that isn't a familial ship. Kinships? Something like that. Like.. I am fine with side ships but not main ships. Nothing against people who enjoy those ships though. People should read and write their own stories.

I haven't officially came up with a nickname yet... But you might know by now that I'm the verbose anon who never even knows how to keep messages shorter than what I respond with. That may be a give away.

I finally FINALLY have the time and proper mental space to reply to this!!! Lemme dig in!!

I never thought you were ignoring me dear!! don't worry I know we all have out social limits and sometimes you just need to not be a person for a while in order to recharge. I think it's incredibly kind that you are aware of your mindset when interacting with folks and chose not to interact when you know it isn't in the best place. But please know that I'm here if you ever need to vent or need a little sprinkle of colour or kindness in life. Depression is so hard and I would never treat you differently because of it <3

I'm so so sorry the guitarist from your fav band is leaving 😔. I hope it's so that they can better their health or for the best at least. And if not, i personally find a comfort in knowing that you had them in the band for as long as you did, and you can always go back to old videos and music to reminisce. But again that's a personal coping mechanism of mine.

You're not overreacting. If this is your favourite band I'm going to assume they play rather large role in your life. So it's completely understandable to have big feelings about it. If the guitarist from my favourite band was leaving I would have enormous feelings about it as he's been with the band since 2003. Like. It's something that's a big deal. Your reaction is super valid.

Emoji's are dumb like that sometimes unfortunately. I'm happy to use whichever emoji you'd like. Or a psued if you want. Both work for me. But I usually know it's you , you're memorable!

And I can respect that. I would never push you to not be like that, I just want you to know that I'm here if you need it. The anon part of tumblr is a beautiful feature that way. Talking to strangers who are also friends without the pressure of them actually knowing. It's a very amazing type of human connection. And I find it easier to tell filks things when it can't fall back on me. Like a living diary almost. I find it super cool at least. An annonymous form of community you can't really replicate anywhere else. Beautfiul when you think about it.

Ahhh gotcha!! RE: side ships and pairings. Totally makes sense!!

I'm not someone who can be triggered easily, I semi-regularly consume darker content/ dead dove type (mainly out of loving jealously for the folks who write it so well. my ass could never) so as long as the terms you chose are talked about with respect or in proper terminolog I dont see myself being upset.

Your style sounds like what I would dress as if i had a bit more courage. I'd love to dye my hair again and get so many pericings and tats but i haven't quite gotten myself there yet. Hell, my mum has more tats than me. Just go ther sleeve done a year or two ago and is working on her next one soon! It's just something about that particular style that's comfortable to me, but my neurodivergence (AuADHD) makes permanent alterations to my body freak me out a bit, hence the need for courage. It's more of a mental block than anything,

Also it is 100% me who always goes off topic so fear not! you fit right in if you slip once of twice too!

Half of my closest decade(s) long friendships are with guys so I absolutely agree with you. I never dated any of them and neither did the other girls in the friend group. We've all known one another (as in all of us in the group knowing everyone in the group) since 9th grade and we're turning 25 this year. So it's absolutely possible. People just like to think it's not.

I was similar. When I think of my childhood and my childhood frienships, all of my girl friends were neighbours, whereas all of my school friends were primarily guys, and for the same and similar reasons you've mentioned. I was primarily raised by my dad and I only have brothers so it makes sense to me why I hung out with guys more. And I had a similar experience where girls were just mean to me for no reason and I couldnt at the time figure it out. I know why now that I'm older. But still, that hurts when you're young so you're more likely to go and be with those who feel safer to be with.

I knew i felt a certain type of similarity between out experiences and the shared diagnosis' makes so much sense. Folks treat me very different once I mention that ASD is the reason I dont undertsand things they way they tell me too or whatever the situation is. It's actually why I left my last job. They wouldn't accomodate me and my performance suffered to much as did my mental health.

"many female friends were jealous of me for whatever reasons they had. I'm not being conceited. They were actually jealous of me for any reasons I don't know." My mum saw this when i was younger too. She said i was (and am) "intimidating" and so people would try their best to knock me down a peg. hence the jealousy when their couldnt or when the realised that they wanted what i had. I've accepted it now, and silently acknowledge it. But once again, it still hurt the little girl who couldn't figure out why she was treated so differently.

'The girls I knew end up abusive towards me. Physically, mentally and emotionally. And the few friends, including female friends, worth having in my life were the people who abandoned me. So I've gotten used to being alone now." I'm truly sorry you had to/ have to deal with this. Not in a pitying way, but in a 'human to human I see and acknowledge the things you've gone through in your life' way. I hope you are able to one day build and find for yourself a lovely group of humans who love and respect you for you. Who don't tear you down like the horrible people before them, and instead lift you up. I will happily be a part of that, should you like to have me, just so you know. I may be words on a screen, but there is a person behind them who sees you.

The girlfriend situation of guy friends is something I have very fortunately not had to deal with as I usually end up being their friend too. I have a habit of wanting everyone to feel accepted and included in spaces I exist in, and it commonly plays to my favour. But I have had and heard second hand experiences with this, and it's just awful. And we can reiterate to earlier where guys and girls can be friends without anything going on. I have never understood girls who cut their guys off from perfectly normal and healthy female frienships.

Pushing folks away before they push you is absolutely a coping mechanism I understand. Breaking through that was one of the more difficult things I've been trying to learn as an adult. That some rare folks actually want to be there for me, and truly have no ill intentions. I hope you are able to one day have this as well, to which, once again, I will happily be one, should you want.

Perfectly respectable opinion on the boys and relationships. I have nothing to add other than I agreee completey.

And yes XD I am usually able to tell it's you by the length!! I just know some folks like having a tag to make searching for thir asks easier! I know I did before i had tumblr. It just made tracking what I'd sent in way easier! No rush tho!

Hope you are well, darling <3. Always lovely chatting with you.

#im sorry this took so long but i finally had the proper mental energy and BOOM here she is #asks #anon #ms.mailbox📬

[burning-jealousy]

Hi! My name is Noelle or Sanguinary, depending on where you know me from. Please don't call me "Sang" or "San", if you must shorten my name, please call me S. I am a lesbian who's gender identity is best described as trans lesbian. I am twenty-three years old, my pronouns are she/her, they/them. I also use moon neopronouns, but these are optional. Please respect grammar though and do not change pronouns in the middle of sentences (she went to the park and they brought her frisbee, at least I think it was moons) as this makes it incredibly hard to read and understand.

I am currently in a long-term relationship (08-28-21) with my joyous little beast, @incubian. While it is my little beast, I am it's little freak.

(P.S., you don't need to read more. Knowing this is plenty about me.)

I am physically disabled. I might talk about this sometimes, because it sucks balls. The exact specifications in regards to my disability are private and poking and prodding in regards to what exactly disables me is inappropriate. If I feel the need to disclose my disability, I will, but I am under no obligation to be your personal Bible in regards to answering questions about disabilities unprovoked. Please use Google instead.

Past my physical disabilities, I am neurodivergent, I have several "scary" mental illnesses that I am not obliged to share, but what I am willing to share is the fact that I have autism. I may type with a flat tone, miss social cues or misread your tone. However, do not use tone indicators with me. They do not help me and I spend more time Googling what they mean- I do not appreciate time wasted.

I spend most of my free time creating, reading and playing games. I have been writing since 2010 - 2011, a fact that startles me. I have writing commissions open- Check my other blog, @sanguinaryrose for those. When I am not doing that, I often spend my time badgering my long-distance significant other like a cat realizing you are mere moments late to it's regular feeding schedule. It loves me, though, so I'm allowed to be a little cat running in front of it to play insurance fraud every once in a while. Past those activities, I spend a lot of my time resting on account of my chronic conditions.

Some of my special interests are dragons, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! (TCG & Anime), Warrior Cats, World of Warcraft, Monster Hunter, Baldur's Gate (I - III), Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Axolotls, Dinosaurs and Spyro. If you want to make friends really fast, ask me about these. However, I ask that you err on the side of caution when it comes to critique of any medias mentioned in my presence unless I initiate it; I can take it very personally, like you're attacking me, and it will, 100%, make me act like the big companies need defense from some random online.

I am a non-practicing, baptized Wiccan. I respect all religions, even if I do not personally practice them or have bad experiences with them. So long as you respect my religion, I will respect yours, or your lack thereof. Please do not try fighting with me or debating me in regards to my religion, it has taken me over 15 years to even want to consider my religion properly past a "God hurt me!" level of comprehension. I am not going to try and debate you in or out of any religion or world view, as above all else, unless bigotry (racism, trans/homophobia) is involved, I believe in mutual respect. However, in having said that, I reserve my right to sharply cut contact should you prove yourself to be a threat to me, my partner, or my mental health in any way, shape or form.

I have a blacklist of media or things that I avoid at all costs, it's either triggering or I loathe it to such a deep degree that I just cannot discuss it civilly without making an ass of myself.

Additionally I have a whitelist of a few special interests of mine. Note that these links do not work on mobile.

If all of this [written while motioning to the whole post] doesn't bother you, or sounds cool or whatever, you're more than welcome to reach out and start chatting; I'd quite appreciate having more mutuals to talk to. I hope you have a peaceful rest of your day; thank you kindly for reading this all.

Divider template by @/cafekitsune / @/kithsune.

[bondsmagii]

New anon. The most terrifyingly thing about the Chris Chan debacle was how much it it close to home for me. The doc did have a kindness to it that was pretty professional and even I couldn’t finish because what she went through. Like I see something of myself in her if i’d fallen in with the wrong people. I was very easily manipulated when I was younger and not mentally sound at all. I was even and can still be quite disturbed. I have people though. I got better with care and support.

I look at her and am like. I could have been someone like you.

And when I see that damn lack of empathy in people and the support for the people who tortured her and helped make her like that for their own pleasure…they delighted in every horrible thing she did so they could justify making themselves worse. I can understand people like that too because it’s easy to dehumanize people into acceptable targets for cruelty. All of it just makes me sad.

I really appreciate you sharing this. I don't think a lot of people realise how... easy, I suppose, it is to be targeted in this way. Chris has undeniably acted both inappropriately and cruelly in the past, and she may have even committed a horrific crime. this makes it very easy to see her as a one-dimensional villain who deserved it -- because this is what many people think. they think that because she's an undesirable person who may have committed a terrible crime, and who has been confirmed to act badly before, she deserves the cruel treatment she receives. it's easy for these people to write her off, deny her her humanity, and even revel in the torment she's suffered. they do not realise that it could have been literally anyone, and that before all of this started, Chris was just... doing her thing. yeah, she made mistakes, she acted badly, she had trouble expressing her emotions in acceptable ways -- but none of these things happened because she simply wanted to be awful. she was a severely autistic young woman with absolutely zero support systems in place, and the one support system she almost had -- a good school that was working with her in terms of social and educational plans -- was denied to her by her parents. isolated, alone, and completely unable to function normally in society due to her disabilities, Chris was doomed.

the fact is, she was targeted for being "cringe", and she was "cringe" because she was overly enthusiastic about her OC and because she acted in accordance with her severe autism. there are countless thousands of people just like her, and this could have happened (and could still happen) to any one of them. we don't know how we would act. nobody can say for certain what they would do if they were tortured and harrassed and put on some fucked up Truman Show for over a decade. even if we try, we can only come at it from a place of rational thought -- something that Chris did not have, and hadn't had for a long time, and that we can't guarantee that we would have at that late stage. the whole case is profoundly tragic, and it illustrates just how many people have surface-level humanity. they can preach acceptance, mental health support, LGBT support, whatever -- but if they do not extend this support and acknowledgment to absolutely everyone, no matter how badly they act or what they've done, then it means shit. you cannot preach human rights if you refuse to assign them to somebody because they're not a good example. Chris didn't deserve this, and if not for this torture, she would not have done half of what she did. considering that at some points of her life, when she actually managed to seperate herself from the internet for a few months, she made vast social improvements and sincerely worked on herself? she could have made it. instead she had hundreds of people watching her every move, hoping for her to fail, and orchestrating failures if she didn't mess up naturally. absolutely nobody deserves that. the treatment is inhumane and it is torture. the people who did this to her should be in prison, and I will stand by that.

I cannot express how glad I am that your life took a different route. had Chris had access to the same care and support that you did, I doubt she would be in the position she is now. people do not understand how easily things can change and how our lives can divert, even when we're just minding our business. I think in all the voyeuristic gawking and the misplaced sense of justice, people forget that there but for the grace of god go we. all it would take is for one single person to see you do something cringe and slap you on some deranged website, and then what? I doubt any of these people would say that they would deserve it themselves. is it so hard to believe that Chris didn't, either?

#anon #asks

[magnoliabloomfield]

I need a minute to feel a feeling here.

I did not win anything in that art contest I entered, while I can be reasonable and logical and know that it’s her contest and her prizes she can give to whoever she wants and I don’t deserve to win just because I have some sob story life, that doesn’t stop the irrational feelings that just happen and I want to unload those like washing a dirty cup before I put clean water in it, if you pour clean water in a dirty cup then technically you did “put clean water in it” but that doesn’t make it drinkable. If you try and stuff positive emotions and thoughts into yourself without getting the negative ones out first it’s all gonna be tainted.

So the contest was a prompt a day for the 31 days of October. I found it on the 16th and started working to catch up and get them all done so I’d qualify. Since I am disabled but haven’t gotten disability yet, work is not only scarce but getting harder to do, I wanted to open a digital download/printables shop so I could do something I actually liked and be able to make passive income for those times my health bottoms out for a while. I entered the contest even tho I was late because 1) free is the only thing in my budget at the moment and 2) if I learned to be better at art I could make better products which would make better sales which would help me have like maybe a normal persons income.

Now I’m left thinking I just wasted so much time for nothing. In that time I could have made novel planning sheets for NANOWRIMO and sold them, I could have made a lot of things I could be selling right now. Now I’ve gone over a month where my only income was from a week of pet sitting. What kind of future could I have had if I’d been able to get some more education? What kind of difference could those lessons made in my future? Why were all the winners people who were already so good at it who didn’t need lessons, whose lives may not have been changed by gaining that prize?

I already have to come to terms with and accept that my health took away every aspect of the future I imagined for myself, that I can never live alone, that it’s hard to find a partner when you’re disabled, that working is so much harder and I can’t do as much socially. I’m very very tired of imagining what could have been, and having to settle for what is. I’m tired of risks where I never win, I’m sticking to things that I have more control over, that if they go wrong it will be for a specific reason that I can fix or learn from, that will have everything to do with my own actions and not the whims of fate or other people. My mental, emotional, and physical resources are finite and precious, I can’t be wasting them anymore.

#venting #coping with disappointment

[prinxlyart]

First, your headcanons give me life. Second, oh man, that whole graveleaf thing with Willow. We saw the Blight parents' reactions, but I can't help but wonder how her girlfriends took that news (Amity especially...)

Oh man you know how to hit where it hurts most huh?

TW: depression and thoughts of suicide

***If you are struggling with depression and/or thoughts of suicide, please see a medical professional right away.***

I think Willow may have revealed this to her girlfriends years before she’s admitted it to the Blight parents. I think during one of her worse days when they’re all about 15 or 16 she ends up staying home from school one day and not answering Luz or Amity’s texts which scares them shitless, but like, it’s Willow. Whatever she’s up to she can probably handle, she’s one of the most powerful witches they’ve ever known. She just usually answers them and it scares them to know she’s not answering.

It’s not until after school lets out that they go to visit her and one of her dads answers the door only to give them a sort of tired, resigned look and explain that she’s probably asleep, but they can go check on her if they want.

They find Willow in her bed with the lights off and the covers pulled over her head and Amity seems a little confused but Luz knows exactly what’s going on because she’s been in this exact situation before. Luz just whispers a hello to Willow and sits down on the floor next to the head of Willow’s bed and leans up against it and pats the floor next to her for Amity to join her. I think they all sit in silence for a while before Luz tries to see if Willow is actually awake.

Willow’s been awake the whole time, just silently crying. Her pillow is wet with tears but she struggles with answering Luz or even making any noise. Depression can really suck all the energy out of you. When Luz tries to peel back the covers from her face, she doesn’t even have the energy to keep the covers there and just lets Luz unveil Willow’s depression to two of the most important people in her life. Luz let’s out a small sigh and climbs into Willow’s bed with her, just sorta draping herself over Willow and whispering in Spanish (something Willow doesn’t understand but recognizes later on as something Camila does when Luz is having a breakdown of her own). Amity is frozen, just staring at her girls in confusion and fear because she doesn’t know what brought this on.

After a while I think Luz is able to maneuver herself and Willow into a position where Luz can sit down properly with Willow’s head in her lap so she can just pet her hair gently and hum quietly. Amity doesn’t really know how to help beyond holding Willow’s hand and interlacing their fingers. It takes roughly an hour before Willow is able to make any sound at all.

(Willow’s dads check in on them to make sure they aren’t up to any funny business with their daughter and just relieved to see Luz and Amity gently taking care of Willow.) One of them brings the girls some water and Luz manages to convince Willow (with Amity’s help) to drink some water before trying to talk.

Willow eventually asks Amity to turn on the lights and begins explaining everything to them. She’s so scared that somehow this will make them not want to be with her even though rationally she knows that wouldn’t happen. She’s mostly scared of how Amity would react; her depression stemmed from their original friendship breaking off the way it did after all.

She can’t really look either of them in the eye. She’s grateful in that moment that Amity already has her own issues with eye contact but is able to communicate with their linked hands. She’s grateful that Luz understands what sort of mental space she’s in and sits behind her to cradle her. For the first time in a long time, despite how horrible she feels, she also feels safe and loved.

She knows she’s hurting Amity with what she’s saying about how her depression came about. And Willow’s trying hard to make sure it doesn’t sound like she’s pointing fingers. But she can feel Amity’s fingers tensing in between her own and tremble and she can feel Luz’s tears on the back of her shoulder where her face was resting as she listened to Willow speak. She knows she’s hurting them by telling the truth, but Luz encourages her to keep going. Her steady presence at Willow’s back is like a security blanket for Willow. She feels safe in Luz’s arms no matter how terrified she is in the moment.

It’s dark outside by the time Willow finishes explaining. The whole time Luz was either playing with Willow’s shirt or her hair or putting gentle kisses to the back of Willow’s head (that made her feel much better, oddly enough). Amity however, looked like she was going to throw up. She was pale and shaking and had tears streaming down her face but refused to move or speak until Willow was done. When she was done, Amity couldn’t really speak. Any time either Luz or Willow asked her anything she would simply shake her head, her tears still flowing freely.

Emira ended up getting a scroll text from Luz asking if she could bring an overnight bag for Amity to Willow’s place. When Emira tried to tease her about it, Luz replied so somberly that Emira knew immediately something was up. She didn’t tease and let Luz know that she and Edric would cover for Amity (also reaching out to Skara asking to cover for Amity too in case their parents thought to try to reach out to her). Emira arrived at the same time Eda had on her staff and they just shared a look of concern as they waited for one of the Park’s to answer the door.

It was a really scary night for all three girls in Willow’s room. The Park parents made sure to check on them every so often and made sure they had food and plenty of water, but ultimately let them be. They fretted the whole night of course, pacing either in the living room or in their bedroom once it was time for bed, but eventually fell into restless sleep. Both knew that if the girls needed them they’d need to be alert and awake.

Fortunately, the girls didn’t end up needing them that night. Granted, they were up until nearly 3 AM talking everything out (once Amity was able to speak again), but it never got to the point where anyone felt like they needed an adult to intervene. Luz remained quiet for the most part, oscillating between her girlfriends as she comforted them when they needed her to most. She would throw her two cents in every so often whenever the topic of mental health was addressed; she couldn’t speak to their shared history but she could speak to depression and mental disabilities.

By the time they finished talking (or were too tired to keep going) it was late enough that if they stayed up any longer, they’d see the sun rise. Luz and Amity took turns getting changed for bed in the bathroom and they all snuggled up in Willow’s bed (kind of a tight squeeze in a queen-size bed but they made do) and slept until nearly noon. They woke up to the smell of Willow’s dads cooking something that smelled intoxicating (Willow’s favorite breakfast) and all three enjoyed a good breakfast together in relative silence. Once their stomachs were full and they were properly awake again, they went back to Willow’s room to finish talking.

Willow and Amity felt lighter than air after the spine-chilling talk they had the night before. Luz was thrilled that her girls had managed to so thoroughly clear the air between them, but her heart felt extremely heavy afterwards. She knew you couldn’t just “fix” depression with one Good Talk and a romantic relationship and it hurt her to know that Willow had been silently suffering the entire time she’d known her. She made sure Willow knew that if she ever started to feel like she was getting back to such a low place to just call her. Luz would always make time for her, no matter how late and no matter how busy she may be. Amity assured Willow the same was true of her with some caveats. As much as she wanted to be able to just drop everything to be able to comfort her girlfriend if needed, their relationship was still a secret from Amity’s parents. She didn’t want to risk them finding out and somehow making good on the threat they’d made nearly a decade ago.

From that point on, it took a lot of work and a lot of talking for all three of them to come up with good systems for when one of them was feeling low, but they eventually figured it out. Once Amity was living with her siblings, she sought out her own therapist to start working through, well, everything, but she was able to come to terms with the concept of forgiveness and accepting your faults and mistakes and how they don’t actually make you a bad person.

It takes a long time, but they figure it out. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they need space. But they figure out a flow that works for them and their relationship becomes that much stronger as a result.

#prinxly inquiries #anonymous #the owl house #luz noceda #amity blight #willow park #willumity #toh headcanons #tw: depression #tw: mentions of suicide #sort of? #not directly addressed just sort of implied #keeping it as vague as possible #Hey anon! thanks! for hurting me so deeply! with this question! I’m gonna go cry forever now!

[saltymcsaltything]

But I'm not disabled enough...

As my health has been deteriorating lately, I've been reflecting on how I have undermined myself from internalized ableism and willful ignorance.

In particular, I'm dealing with a weird sense of guilt for applying for a 6 month ADA parking placard. I've been using a work issued medical permit for the last 5 months to lessen the amount of walking I have to do each day because it is very clear now that any walk over a few hundred feet completely exhausts me and leaves me aching. I'm sort of okay with the medical permit because it's restricted to my workplace and I can't use it just anywhere, and somehow that feels better than "stealing" a state-mandated handicapped spot from someone who really needs it.

I have noticed all of the restricted parking (both ADA and medical) are filling up faster and faster with our parking problems at work and I keep going through this weird anger/shame/acceptance spiral. When I can't get a spot and have to park in overflow and ride the shuttle, I first get angry at all the "new" disabled folks and thinking of them as fakers, and that makes me feel guilty for being selfish and I then think that I’m a hypocrite because I'm not really disabled enough to take those spots anyway. Eventually I realize that the parking problems are probably forcing people who never considered themselves "disabled enough" to reevaluate because their limited mobility is now no longer something they can just push through with the ridiculous distances to open parking.  That was me back in May.

I hesitated to get a mobility aid (cane) because I wasn't "disabled enough", and when I finally did I avoided using it and only allowed myself to get a folding cane so it would be "just for emergencies. " I got it in March, and I've been using it nearly full time since May and it's starting to show the wear and tear. I need to get a solid cane before it breaks but again I feel like I'm "not disabled enough" to get a cane for longer term use.  It feels too much like accepting that this “temporary” disability might not be so temporary after all.

This has been a pattern throughout my life. Any struggle I had, I always minimized because someone else had it worse. If I was being bullied I wouldn't speak up because my friends had it worse and they didn't speak up, so obviously it couldn't be that bad and I'd just look like a whiner. If I was depressed or grieving, I swallowed my pain because my best friend had it worse because he lost his Dad at a young age and to express my feelings was to whine about something that paled in comparison to his pain.  If I was in physical pain, I’d push through it and never say a word to my friends or parents because a classmate had had multiple surgeries trying to correct a congenital condition that had left his legs twisted around backwards and was in constant pain.  My pain was nothing compared to that, so it didn’t count.

And when I felt like something might be wrong with me mentally, which was pretty often, I didn’t want to know.  If I stayed ignorant of my condition and did my best to appear normal, then I wouldn’t be othered, right?  I had literal nightmares of being sent to a psychiatric hospital or medicated into a stupor because of how wrong my brain was, or being locked up in some sort of reeducation camp (I was a cold war kid, that stuff stuck in my brain).  But if I ignored every opportunity to learn about psychology, I wouldn’t have to know what was wrong with me and that would help me continue to hide “it” whatever “it” was.  I had anxiety and panic attacks as a kid and didn’t know what they were, and I never told anyone about them.  If they knew, they would use it to hurt me.  And clearly I was okay, right?  Someone would notice if I wasn’t, even though I was actively hiding and masking those struggles.  I guess I figured if it was really so bad, I wouldn’t be able to hide it, and everyone would just immediately see that I needed help.  But I think by now we’ve all seen cases where people in crisis are not seen and recognized until it is too late.

Every time I have been injured, ill, or struggling mentally and emotionally, I have minimized it.  I have participated in the “Oppression Olympics” of disability without even knowing it by considering myself undeserving to even compete.  Rather than acknowledging my struggles as I experience them, I have used comparisons to those less fortunate to argue myself out of seeking accommodations because I felt like doing so would hurt those who needed them more, even when the accommodations in question are not a limited resource. 

Me using a cane to reduce my pain and increase my mobility doesn’t lessen someone else’s access to mobility aids.  I’m not “faking it” if using the cane helps alleviate pain and increase my ability to move efficiently.  I’m at the point now where walking without it is *always* painful and slow.  And this is the 4th time in my life I have had reduced mobility like this, where a mobility aid would have helped.  I let myself suffer needlessly through 3 major injuries and probably slowed my healing by doing so.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I wonder if I had allowed myself to use a cane or wheelchair back then, maybe I wouldn’t be in the shape I am now -- maybe it would have slowed my deterioration and given me a few more years of walking without pain.

For limited resources (like parking), I am still hesitant to let myself use them when others might need them more, and if my condition wasn’t currently deteriorating, I might not allow myself to do so.  But I also need to recognize that the lack of sufficient accessible parking is an issue that my employer needs to solve; the increased need has been caused by their failure to plan around their construction projects.  By forcing people to park further away, they’ve caused those with less severe mobility issues to need accommodations that they didn’t before, and my employer clearly didn’t consider that reducing available parking was going to increase the use of ADA placards and medical passes.

But when it comes to these limited resources, I’m slowly accepting that I do really need them.  I’m noticing my mobility decreasing.  How long should I wait before I let myself accept that very soon, using ADA parking might not be optional?

#ableism #internalized ableism #spoonie #actually disabled #actually autistic #actuallyautistic

[whentherewerebicycles]

hi! i wanted to say i love reading your reflections on teaching, and in general i really look up to/am inspired by your thoughts regarding education and academia. if it's not too much to ask (completely understandable if it is, in that case please disregard!) i would love to get your advice on college related things?

i had pretty significant academic struggles throughout grade school, and ended up dropping out of college after a year. i would've graduated this may, so lately i've been considering going back and finishing my bachelor's. but i've been waffling on this decision because of 1) anxiety about having to drop out again, and 2) some confusion about what i actually want to study. i guess i'm wondering, is it worth it to start from scratch? my struggles were mostly about mental health stuff & difficulty keeping up with coursework—i loved being in the classroom, working with professors, learning from other students. i like being challenged intellectually, but if i have issues with followthrough, is there a way to work on that??? i know these are Big Questions, lol--whether they are answerable or not, cheers and thank you and i hope you are doing well these days. <3

hey! happy to give my thoughts, for what they're worth. you know your situation better than i do so the specifics may or may not be relevant, but i can give some advice just based on seeing lots of students pass through four-year programs!

i've worked with a number of students who took time away from college and came back to finish later. i took a year off myself in the middle of college for mental health reasons, though my school allowed you to take a two-semester leave of absence for any reason (so i always had the safety net of knowing i could come back without having to reapply or start over). in my experience, time away is almost always a good thing. sometimes people just really need that break from the stressors of the college environment! but more importantly, i think people benefit from having a few years' experience living and working in the world.

even though it can be intimidating to come back to college as an older student, i think older students or nontraditional students who took time off and came back tend to underestimate how much more confident and assured in themselves they'll be once they're back in the classroom. working out in the world for a while, even if it's not a job that you especially love or feel is relevant to your long-term goals, tends to help you build more trust in your own ability to get stuff done, manage responsibilities, and be an adult person in the world. in your time away, you've probably grown more than you think, and you may find that some of the things you struggled with at 18 just don't feel as daunting anymore. or they might feel daunting, but you also have more experience talking and working with other people, and you may feel more confident in seeking out & using your college's various academic success resources.

have you considered a two-year college as a possible next step? one of my advisees this year was an adult student who went to college for a year, dropped out, served in the military for four years, came back to do an associate's degree, and decided he liked school enough that he wanted to transfer to our university and finish his degree. (now he's going on to do a phd next fall!!!!) he's one of the most passionate advocates for community colleges i've ever met, and he's stayed actively involved in our local CC community & now mentors recent transfer students at our university. he's talked at length about how CCs are this amazing way for students to explore their interests without having to take on the huge price tag of a four-year degree, within a learning community that's much warmer, more responsive to student needs, and more accepting of the diverse paths that lead people to & through higher education. i wonder if you might consider taking a semester or a year of courses at your local CC, to dip your toes back in and see if you're still feeling energized by the experience.

you might find that some of the courses aren't intellectually challenging enough, but this might also be a wonderful opportunity to create the kind of learning experience you want to have. i was a full-time community college student for a year during my year away from yale, and while i'm sure i was just INSUFFERABLE in many ways, i had a prof in my Western Civ course who was really generous with his time/energy and met with me outside of class to help me figure out how to make the papers into something that i found really exciting and challenging to write. so the class kind of became what i made of it, and i got to read some stuff (dostoevsky!!!) that sent me down all kinds of interesting unexpected rabbitholes. the former CC grad i mentioned above was an extraordinarily bright student who would always go to office hours and ask his profs for more recommended readings, and he ended up becoming a TA for one of his courses and helped them redesign basically their entire intro humanities curriculum as a student advisor. so your CC experience can absolutely be what you make of it. and even if your profs can't give you that kind of support, you could practice doing it for yourself, setting little challenges for yourself either focused on the intellectual aspects ('I'm going to read and cite two scholarly sources in this paper, even though it's not required') or on developing strategies for effectively managing the workload ('I'm going to schedule a writing center appointment on Thurs, so I have to finish this paper two days before the deadline—and then I can devote my weekend study time to practicing for my Spanish test').

CC would be a slightly lower stakes environment for you to try out college again— lower-stakes both in the sense that it's cheaper (so if you decide you don't want to continue, you're not out as much money / don't feel compelled to go on to justify the debt you've taken on) and in the sense that the workload might be more manageable for you as you readjust to academic life and build systems & structures that work for you. as you probably have gathered from this blog, i am a HUGE believer in doing lower-stakes things many times over to build your own confidence and your trust in yourself, and then gradually scaling up the difficulty. by the time you reach the hard thing, you've already built up this strong image of yourself as a person who can handle challenges (and you've also had the chance to identify areas where you struggle & experiment with developing workable solutions).

if a two-year college isn't something you're especially interested in, i think it's definitely possible to start a four-year degree again. if that's the path you choose, i would strongly recommend reaching out to students in some of the degree programs you're tentatively interested in. people are almost always happy to share their ~wisdom~ (see: this ask response, lol) and most people love being asked for their thoughts on the pros and cons of something they know well. so you could get an honest sense from students of what the program is like, what the workload is like, and how useful or engaging people find the required courses for the degree. but also know that it's pretty normal to take courses all over in your first year or two (you have the advantage of having done a freshman year before, so you probably know this!), so you might just want to plan to try out a bunch of different things, with the goal of narrowing your focus by the end of your first year, or midway through your second.

i would also HIGHLY recommend spending lots of time familiarizing yourself with the resources your university has to offer. learn everything you can about the kind of mental health counseling and support they offer to students, and see if there are things you can set up in advance for yourself before you even step foot on campus. for instance, our university offers individual counseling, but they also have free groups that meet every week or two around different topics (coping with stress, students in recovery, etc) that are led by a counselor. check out your university's writing center or peer tutoring centers, too, and set up a standing appointment once a month or once a week or whatever, to bring in something you're working on—so that you know that every week, you're going to talk with someone about what's going well and what you're struggling with in your assignments.

you might also want to look into your university's services for students with disabilities office, as they can help you figure out if you are eligible for various kinds of accommodations or additional support (extra time on exams, notetaking services, recorded lectures, etc). i know you mentioned that you've dealt with academic struggles in grade school, too. if you think it's possible that there may be underlying learning differences that are affecting your academic work, it might be worth seeing if they can help you find lower-cost testing, so you can get a diagnosis that qualifies you for additional accommodations and university support.

many schools, esp large public universities, also have resource centers and mentoring programs for students from specific demographics who may benefit from additional structure and support in their early years of college. my university has a variety of resource centers and programs for students from low-income backgrounds, first-gen students, students who transferred from community college, etc. you don't have to take advantage of ALL of these resources, but proactively establishing a support network long before you need it is a really good way to set yourself up for success. and even just doing the research will probably help you feel more confident in your capacity to 'follow through', since you'll know that you're going into this with your eyes wide open AND with a detailed plan for what to do if you run into some of the same obstacles you encountered the first time around.

speaking of detailed plans: i find it helpful sometimes to do IF-THEN exercises with students when they're stressed about something on the horizon or unsure about whether they can handle some new challenge. IF-THEN is just what it sounds like: 'IF this thing I'm nervous about happens, THEN I'm going to do X, Y, or Z.' what i like about this exercise (i use it with myself too aha) is that it acknowledges that sometimes the thing you're dreading DOES happen. sometimes the professor you emailed for an extension says no. sometimes the TA doesn't understand why you're confused about the assignment. sometimes you don't have time to finish the reading before class. sometimes you overschedule yourself and you have to pull an all-nighter to finish two papers on the same night. scary things, confidence-shaking things, happen all the time, but they are rarely fatal! and there can be something really powerful about acknowledging and naming the thing you're concerned about, and then generating a few next steps you could take, should the thing you're dreading come to pass. i could see you doing something like this as you start thinking about the things that tripped you up last time, or made it difficult for you to balance the workload. if X happens, then what could you try next? giving yourself a few options means that you already have backup plans, too, which can make the whole situation less terrifying. if this happens, i might have to try this, or this, or this, and those things might not be the most fun or the easiest to do or the 'best' thing academically, but they'll get me through this difficult moment mostly in one piece, and once i'm through it i can look back on it and learn from it, or adjust the structures i've built for myself moving forward, to reduce the chance that X happens again.

PHEW!!! sorry this got so long but that is just the RISK YOU TAKE when sending me anons 😅 i hope that some of this is helpful to you, or at least sparks some useful thinking for you, even if it's not all directly applicable to your situation. i would say that if you love learning and find being in the classroom exhilarating, then you should absolutely go back to college! but that doesn't mean you have to go back right away, or that you have to go back and do it exactly the same way you did the first time. there are lots of possible paths to higher ed, and there's no particular rush—college will always be there, if it's something you decide you want now or at some future point in your life. i would also just reiterate again one of the core Themes of This Blog, which is that the brain is NEUROPLASTIC, and that humans have a truly astounding amazing capacity to change, grow, and learn new things (including new ways of getting around old obstacles or working through old challenges). just because you struggled the first time doesn't mean you are doomed to repeat that pattern. if you can spend some time thoughtfully reflecting on what you found most difficult to manage the first time through, you are better equipped to make plans, design new structures for yourself, and build the support networks that will help you thrive in college.

#long post #mw #teaching #(kind of)

[backbracebruin]

I have been sitting on a photography project idea for quite some time, and have been a bit more motivated to pursue it based on encouragement I had been receiving lately from a professor of mine. Since the inception of this project sprang forth from my usually addled brain, a lot more projects like it have cropped up in the art world and on social media. Not just professional photographers, but everyday folks sharing pictures of themselves going about their days and doing the things they normally do. They just happen to be using their disabled bodies.

As my mental and physical disabilities have fluctuated over the years - from rendering me completely non-functional to me having the ability to participate in the world in my own capacity - I've thought about the way the world perceives my abilities. I think a lot about how others are perceived, as well. I have friends and family who have mental disabilities, some with physical; others with both. I notice that there is a grace afforded to those with visible physical disabilities, but that it often comes accompanied by pity and condescension. When you're struggling with a mental disability - or any other "invisible" disability - you're more often met with invalidation or outright denial that you are disabled, because obviously all disabled folks use wheelchairs and walking canes and other clearly apparent assistance devices.

Long before I received my diagnoses and started collecting my SSDI and living off my Medicare, I grew up being very close to family members who have/had apparent visible disabilities. The individual who had the biggest impact on my life, especially in terms of how I grew up knowing to have compassion for people who have different abilities than myself, is my aunt, who is featured in the photo above. The photo depicts her rolling down a pathway in Glacier National Park - one of the hundreds of stops on our four month long cross-country trip back in 2008 - arms outstretched and showing not a care in the world. She is the nexus for not only this project, but for my ongoing learning process of how to treat and think of others and myself.

I'd notice that people would feel entitled to grabbing her wheelchair if she was pushing herself while we traveled and a particularly stubborn curb appeared. I remember the incredulity in one person's voice when I rolled her chair to the driver's side of her car and as she slid in on a special board for transferring, they said, "You can do that? You can drive like that?"

I know many people are either under or ill-informed, and they perhaps do not understand the implications of their words or actions. I'm sure many think that they are being helpful by grabbing someone's chair (for clarity: No, you are not, unless explicitly asked to do so. Otherwise you are grabbing what that person considers an extension of their body). I know that when people have marvel in their tone at a disabled person's ability to do things that they themselves as an able-bodied person can do, it is again, just their woeful ignorance of the lives that we as disabled people lead. I think it’s a safe generalization that, because we are human after all, we have our “good” days and our “bad” days. 

A disable individual's "good" days and "bad" days may look radically different from what we consider the norm. But despite how we may categorize a given day, we still must find ways, however minute, to function in our own microcosm and the world at large.

I have had this post in my drafts for weeks now, unsure of how to summarize this concept and what I might intend to do with it. With the very recent personal news that my own disabilities are going to put me on a different path than even I had accounted for, I'm thinking that I will very seriously try to undertake this endeavor. It will be an outlet for me to continue to explore my passion for photography and my all-consuming desire to meet new people and listen to their stories and understand us all better. Covid is still a large-looming presence, and the state of affairs here in the U.S. and abroad never seems to be getting better. Even so, I think I am going to try to find safe ways to venture out and engage with others and capture how people live their lives and adapt despite whatever "limitations" they have been presented with.

I need to ruminate on this more, obviously. That includes whether I would start a separate blog or Instagram or something for photos. Also how comfortable I feel sharing photos of myself. It kind of feels like I have to? I don't know.

But if anyone has read this far and would like to offer feedback on the idea or even go so far as to discuss potentially participating in this if it comes to fruition, it would be greatly appreciated. Honestly, any input is welcome, and from anyone. I certainly would like to hear from people with disabilities who want to see themselves represented in ways we're not always used to; but also from able-bodied, healthy, and/or non-neurodivergent folks who maybe want to understand experiences outsides their own.

#actually disabled #disability #mental illness #neurodivergence #physical disability #mental disability #not sure how else to tag this...? #long post #photography #maybe using some of my own diagnoses? #schizoaffective #tardive dyskinesia #gastroparesis #spoonies unite! #parkinsonism #chronic illness

[queenofallwitches]

Venus trine MC, my MC lies in Saturn and Saturn is in 9th house Aquarius.

Saturn Return, and my Soul Journey into 12th house Sun conjunct Mercury (in Aries) bound by the 12th house Shadow Secrets. Jupiter is Leo and Mars is softened by my conjunct cancer moon, both in my 3rd house. The kicker is Chiron simultaneously sitting over in my wounded goddess divine feminine Luna moon compelling me to build a home, a base and a clan of like minded souls. cancer and Chiron sit together and Chiron is akin to the wounded healer. I have a complex but alchemical natal make up and its been 6 years of accepting the square and oppositions in difficult places to come to terms to work with my natal astrology in a way I can become creatively involved in.

23/3/20 initiated the formal induction of my Saturn return as saturn transited to Aquarius for the first time since 92/93.

It’s a taste of the full saturnine swing coming up after the December 21st astrology grand conjunction. Saturn will be in Aquarius up to July. before moving briefly back before that grand Conjunction with Pluto/Jupiter later in 21/12/2020. (activity period from 14 April 2020 until mid-July 2020) Venus trine MC

Yeah on a tangent but one day I will be thankful this was forged. I am will using my moonchild manifesto to track the astrology and transits for my own wounded healer journey. I don’t have the consistency of a computer to hoard things as I did before the big brother fascism came full formed this year and cannot freely trust anything can be stored. I will be putting things online purely to keep a record of what may soon be lost, unable to be accessed.

Plus I’m burning my journals after I take the photos of them and upload them for a ritualistic purpose.

It’s part of this creative alchemy and trauma soul retrival quest I’ve found myself on. I note this as my Saturn is returning home for my FIRST Saturn return. I have been formally initiated for the infamous, enigmatic Saturn return that marks the passage from “adolescence into adulthood”. (Funnily last time I heard a university lecture on neuroscience, the latest research noted recent findings that the brain of a fully, functional prefrontal cortex in adult brains don’t become fully formed until age 28-30. This first sparked excitement and also uncertainty about the privilege cast to the “teenage myth”. As kids brains are still developing when things like getting a driving cars, choosing a life career, alcohol privilege and making other major life changes at those critical developmental stages are still as risky when a 12-16 year old does it. So now psychology and neuroscience knows that the adult higher order thinking that marks the turn of a mature and civil adult come in the late 20s. Not the teens. So until after 25 a brain cannot be fully assessing its choices due to underdeveloped prefrontal higher order thought processes This was fascinating in the social science side of things where we look into social constructs of society and how teenager was a made up archetype for a post war period. I remember being in my early 20s at the time and my life was no longer a race as it had been made to be prior.the schools of the latest brain neuroscience confirm my impulsive nature could change before age 30. I was hopeful. Maybe I wasn’t a gifted genius who was highly sensitive and afflicted with the contrasting “ADHD or Attention Deficit Primaily Inattentive” which could only be “treated” (as far as I had experienced), via heavy duty schedule 8 drugs. The kind of medication that calmed me down but other people wound beg me to have. Meaning in the past people in my life around me were constantly trying to turn into their party high by taking advantage of my disdain for psychostimulants. But my love and need for money back in that time. Fuck fake friends I say. Taking advantage or dysregulated prefrontal cortex with or without all my labels was still, after all, a risky business, when it comes to juggling psychopharmacology and a myriad of labels that resulted in other medicines given to me that may or may not be accurate. No brain scan or confirmation has been given that my brain is anything aside from ADHD. So my academic quest in childhood was confounded due to this.I learnt a lot about my childhood and growing up with a long list of multiple mental illness diagnosis, and the medical pharmacology given to me for those things; was beyond measurable.

But my neurochemistry was tweaked ineffably by both psychiatric pills pushed on me from age 9 and for things I may not even need. The end result of what my social science teacher termed “social constructs akin to mental illness medical model DSM labels”. My self pursuit of understanding my own brain was a hard thing to understand in the sense that prior to hearing about this from the side of academic and professional training, I had spend 12 years in expensive and possibly more damaging than beneficial treatment for “mental illnesses”. My life was a focal point for the goal I set to help women with the “borderline stigma” after I had fixed my own borderline.

Clinical psychologist was my end game until I found the trauma truth sweeping me into a existential soul contusion merged with trauma after trauma therapy went into flooding memory. Academic research and the psychology and counseling journals I spent my spare time fine combing. For answers. For my why and how. By the time I found any sense of this it became a painful limbo of dancing with my demons, coping destructively and limbo between the underworld and the reality I found my body and mind entwined in.

Now it’s even more synonymous to my own Saturn return journey and how the Saturn return is the mark of adulthood. This can be a speculative musing I make now on celestial astrology and how it aligns to our inner psychological makeup. (The Jupiter return is age 12, puberty ; and the other inner planets all mark significant development milestones in growing up. I’ll go into that more in later blogs).

Astrology is a map of the soul, psychology makeup, can be so deep too. How does it measure up to statistics? Sun sign horoscope is nothing versus the natal chart and how it corresponds to planetary magick and Kabbalah. I have been seperate in my magick and academic work but it was always my will to merge these at one stage I could research it. But now the sands of time are shifting, and Aquarius Saturn is calling for novel innovation I never could convey due to academic being seperate as spiritual, magickal practice is something I was careful to keep silence on when working with clients, peers and mentors, forget telling my psychologists or doctors who wound dismiss any test as “bipolar mania”. I remember once I read “the difference between the mystic and the mad man is the mystic knows who NOT TO TELL.

Now it’s my time to informally but officially start logging my journey into my own healing, soul mapping, I call it cognitive alchemy, gnostic psychology, soul psychology, metagnosis.. I’ve had many a name for the potential inspiration from my true will calling. But I can now forget about the archaic bonds from the academic world I was schooled to excel in by confirming. I am also a high iq gifted kid and having been labelled gifted but “adhd” simultaneously while having traumatic events left right and center is a mix of confusion for me. Teachers classed adhd as a learning disability, my in attention confused with inability to listen to simple tasks. This meant my mind never adapted to that school conditioning but my education was still installed due to the private school system somehow making my alters succeed without effort. Most of my spare time as a kid that wasn’t dissociative was reading books. By me processing my own literature in my spare time, I knew so much random stuff but hid it in order to seem dumb bc that was accepted. But in private in encyclopaedias and non fictional library quests I’d devour books. for my 10 maximum haul of borrowing books. This was a routine my mum and I went to do each week but my reading speed was beyond anything known, as I read and synthesised up to 10 books mostly in one day, from age 6 onwards.

I also stole books and hid my reading habits at school due to a deep shame of not being liked due to reading being for losers without friends, as girls bullied me over my gifted weird quirks. I was pretty but saw my self as ugly for trauma will deprive the mind of seeing it’s own true perception. I was never understood how my looks became a thing used against me by girls who were jealous until I learnt about this myself. I recently accepted and remembered this all after 3 years of integrated healing. I was doing this all on my own. the spiritual and metaphysical work is my primary tool that was keeping me here. Actually saving my suicide program from self destruct after the March 2017 incident I shall not talk about now. But I’m here now, alive, kicking, Saturn here to shove my shadow to consciousness without prompt and this change can bring me into a 30 year blueprint of setting things right.

Now in order to build a solid and functional framework and foundational life. I have a litany of secrets I need to get off my chest. I think to share my growth, my thoughts and my experiences for my own liberation of my deep dark secrets finally free to be released into the public domain.

I have no choice but to share this.

I do this co consciously as a part of my integrative process.

Maybe One day it might be a guide for someone who was as alone as I feel doing all of this self work without support. Maybe it will fade into the cyber void forever. Maybe I’ll use this as a tool to help clients in the future. Whatever this is means nothing but what the process of alchemy can do to forge my liberation from soul loss and traumatic dissociative trauma.

As a therapist I always wanted to avoid what I went through growing up. Now more so. I never want another lost dissociative mental health client who was also stuck between professional and academic pursuits being my “purpose” and having to sacrifice career and my study and research to sit in my shadow to see the shit.

In order to break the shit therapist mould I list journey through my own shit first. This meant I needed to be away from all therapy both as a client and practitioner and student for awhile. I’ve been off since the end of 2017 and now it’s clear it was neeed, how do I heal without healing my own shit first? Am I not the finest example of how bad therapists can get away with their bullshit and be paid for it but never really know who they are. I’m never doing that. I never was about that. So due to therapeutic negligence. I am finding my gift was the lesson. Those a shitty therapist who are a dime a dozen were the anti mentors I saw too often: but my purpose was to be a therapist. But a therapist who did things the way I never had.

Never did I want another to go into the heavy weight of shame from the secrets of sexual wounds, childhood schemas, mixed up and messed up conditioning made to seem functional to outsiders. But that was all alters. Now it was a spiritual journey as magick and my mystical path entwines to save my soul. The self awakening, trauma revelations, merging with the dark night of soul, and the shadow work. Plus everything else coming out is not a journey I can say is or was at all easy, I suffer more now as a co conscious intergrating my trauma. I feel it all without the dissociative switch to save me from witnessing all the shit. Now I see my entire life and it’s fucked up raw and grim reality and I have to do something because I survived it this far? Again I never suicided or stopped into self destruction when I knew my own inner child’s wounds were no longer blacked out but burning bright longing for love. Symptoms for survival and the survival was part of the dissociative switching making my outside self seem so functional, but never seen. It’s not something they needed to drug me for, but it’s another thing I have to address now. My symptoms they drugged with medications that were mind altering and powerful for anyone let alone a developing child’s brain, were suppressed by many meds. Who knows where that ends and the damage via trauma and other things begin? It’s a mess of some thing I was never aware of but always trying to silence due to the need for people to accept me. But that was many mes all living a life that appeased many people, but not for me. Here we are.

#saturn return #soul astrology #soul psychology #depth psychology #transpersonal psychology #psyche #self knowledge #cognitive alchemy #neuroalchemy #self understanding #creative healing #creativity #planetary magick #soul healing #wounded healer #moonchild #therapy #journey #alchemy #soul retrival #complex ptsd #journal #writing #metagnosis #esoteric #magick #mysticism #celestial astrology #trauma journal

[thesickpanda]

Where is My Mind?

Stress can make you feel like you're going crazy.

I cannot emphasize this enough. Long-term, persistent and intense stress well above your baseline levels can make you feel like you're losing your mind.

Life is stressful and when I think back to when the intense periods of stress started in mine it gets a bit ridiculous because I grew up in a domestically violent household with severely mentally ill parents in a country on the brink of civil war with one of the highest crime rates in the world. So I have been kinda stressed for a very long time. However, in more recent months, the level of acute stress I've been experiencing has made me feel disconnected from reality. I've experienced derealisation a number of times due to Lyrica withdrawal and accidental cannabis highs. But this one is different. The depersonalisation I’ve been experiencing is from pure, unrelenting stress. I really did question my sanity more than once.

 In July, I saw my psychologist to describe this feeling to her. She very helpfully drew a diagram which explained the neuroscience of why we feel this way when we've experienced high levels of stress for a long time. It was really helpful to see that because it reassured me that what I was feeling was, as much as this can be said, "normal", given the amount of strain I was under. But the stress hasn’t let up since then and I have been well above my baseline for much too long.

 Long story short, I haven't really recovered since my family visited me last year. 2018 was a year from hell. 2019 hasn’t been much better but for different reasons. Basically, the hardships I’ve endured being the leader of a non-profit all these years reached critical mass and finally, at long last, broke me. After 8 years of pouring all my heart, soul and every last spoon I had into it, I quit last month…and to very little fanfare at that. 3 people turned up for our final meeting, and only because we needed to hand them the organization’s physical assets. We had a little unplanned dinner out and that was that.

I'm grateful to the handful of people who have reassured me they will continue its legacy beyond my departure, genuinely I am, but overall I think I stayed in that position at least a year longer than I should have. I feel incredibly jaded and cynical about the whole thing.

 And I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but screw Sydney’s activists. The vast majority of them can barely call themselves that. I have never been in such an apathetic, vain, self-centered and lazy city when it comes to political activism. This migrant has had enough of trying to get Australians to care about their own issues. (And yeah, the people I handed the non-profit over to? Also migrants).

It is telling that the final meeting was also the night before we moved house (because we always had to wrap our own lives around the goings on of that organisation, not the other way around, which is another major reason we quit). So after an hour and a half’s drive into the city, we had to get home late to get up early the next day to start that fun process.

 But I am getting ahead of myself. Before we ever got to moving day, we first had to find a house. If you haven’t done it before, let me tell you, the process of house hunting on a tight budget in a hostile market is disgustingly stressful.

We were looking from June. The property market in Sydney is unbelievably expensive and even though it experienced a so-called "correction" for a year, (meaning that house prices stabilized instead of continuing to rise), that ended just as we entered into the property hunt. I am extremely grateful that we got the house we did at the price we did, but my God, getting to that point nearly killed me. I keep explaining to people that it felt as if my partner and I ran full blast over broken glass to the edge of a dock, leapt several metres and grabbed onto the barnacles of a departing ship by our fingernails. I really do think we may have been among the last millennials that got on that “property” ship, and it was only because, at long last, we had help from my partner's extremely wealthy parents. After shaming us for a decade for not being able to afford impossible house prices (“ok boomer…”), he finally relented and helped us out. Again, I'm grateful, but also disgusted that this is the world we live in. Housing should be a human right and we shouldn't have this intergenerational greed and infighting over something so basic. Forgive my inner socialist. 

Finding the house was only the first part of the equation; moving into it was the next step.

 The moving process was incredibly arduous. At the time we should have been packing up the house, my partner's work decided to send him interstate for business on multiple occasions. By the time moving day came round, we were not ready and we couldn't afford to pay removalists. We enlisted the help of two amazing friends and Joe's brother-in-law. Again, super grateful that I had their help, but my God, was it intense. It took the better part of four days to move everything. We had to pay off the mortgage and the rent for the previous place for a two-week period, putting considerable strain on our savings. At the same time, we needed to get some work done in the new house so that was being done while we were trying to sort out the old house. The rental laws in this country are a joke and are widely considered to be abusive to renters, including by many of my American friends who now live here. I doubt we will ever see our bond returned, even though we were treated like crap living there for three years in a house that was not sealed, had no insulation or air conditioning, leaked and was draughty, didn't have proper doors et cetera et cetera. I mean, we had maggots falling from the ceiling… twice. The place was rotting and rotten but because my partner couldn't completely colour match the paint when he tried to cover up what was absolutely reasonable wear and tear on one of the walls, I'm sure we will lose all that. As usual, the landlord will claim it costs our entire $1800 bond to get a $50 an hour painter in to patch up one wall.  They always do this. In your contract it says reasonable wear and tear are a few knocks and dings on the wall and that the tenant is not expected to pay for that. In reality, in every rental we have ever lived in,  the landlord has refused to refund the bond when there’s been even the slightest bit of damage, even if we had a record of being model tenants. It was almost comical how hard my partner was trying in the middle of the move to cover up a few scrapes on the walls from moving furniture in and out. It all came to nothing because for love nor money he couldn't find the correct match of paint. And then of course he had to mow the entire grounds of the last rental when he really wanted to be using his weekends to sort out and unpack the new house. Good God, it was awful.

 My partner and I barely spent any quality time together during this period and he was extremely stressed out and distant from me. I totally understand why but the whole thing flared every single one of my conditions and I needed him as my carer. But he couldn’t really do that, as he was trying to do literally everything else. Moving house is hard on a healthy body, never mind one with two chronic pain disorders, irritable bowel and generalised anxiety disorder. And then (because of course), a family member of mine (one of the abusers) picked that moment in time to start harassing me, thereby triggering my PTSD which led to a nervous breakdown which led to intense depersonalisation, insomnia and nausea. Everyone and everything seemed unfamiliar to me, even my partner. I started to doubt whether or not I loved myself or anyone else anymore. I just felt so completely and utterly disconnected from the world. I began to lie awake at night terrified that I was fading away, that I could no longer feel anything other than fear. All the time, people kept saying, “congratulations on the new house! You must be so excited!” But all I could feel was sickness and dread.

 Two weeks after moving in, I had to drop my Lyrica one more time. This drop has been very difficult. All of the stress has led to some dark thoughts in the back of my mind which of course Lyrica then co-opts and exaggerates. I have had a more than a few moments of suicidal ideation. Everything in my life on paper has improved. We are now homeowners, we live in a beautiful part of the world, we've made some new friends lately, things are settling down et cetera et cetera. But I feel like I'm in shell shock after this year and last year. I haven't even had time to process that I am no longer the president of the not-for-profit I founded and formulated an identity around. I just haven't had the time to process literally anything. I've been more exhausted that I have ever felt. Oh, I'm sure everyone will say, “this too shall pass”. But I do not believe that bullshit. Yes, this individual stressor will pass but more horror will come and I know that makes me sound super negative but I just cannot remember a period of time when things were calm for… I can't remember. I just feel like I've been in a hurricane forever.

 So yeah, I'm writing this post while experiencing Lyrica withdrawal which makes me depressed and anxious. It's probably colouring my vision on everything. Fine. But I have been going through Lyrica withdrawal for two years, so it’s kinda become my normal. My final drop is on 26 December after which I will experience two more months of withdrawal and hopefully, after that, some semblance of sanity again. In the midst of all this I have to study for my citizenship test which is at the end of this month. I don't get any government support for my disability until I have been a citizen of this country for eight years, and as I’d like to survive my 40s, I need to get citizenship now. But yeah… studying an eighty-page textbook with an addled brain is just so much fun.

 Of course, during this time we haven’t have Internet because we had to disconnect the old place and it takes an age for it to get reconnected at the new place. We only recently acquired it at the new house. So there are piles of emails waiting for me. Many of them are from friends and I'm glad for that. But there is also a lot of life admin I now need to do. I have to change my address on every account I hold, which is really tedious. We have also had to organise time with family. Because my partner's family helped us get this house, we feel especially obliged to go to every single one of the family events, of which there are many. He comes from a big Catholic family so every relative who comes to visit, every party that's being held, every birthday, wedding, funeral and religious holiday, we’re now expect to attend. We have several in the next few weekends, taking up most of the time we *needed* to be unpacking the house. We’re obligated now.

 In all this negativity, though, I want to say that I am genuinely grateful to be one of the lucky ones to have a house. I know it sounds like I am whining about a good thing. It's not that I'm not glad for this (I know how ridiculously privileged we are). I just haven't been able to really feel it yet. I think that regardless of what happened this year, I’d be feeling this way. Something broke in me last year and just hasn't really come back. I feel shattered.

 And all my chronic pain conditions have been wearing me down too. I found out this year that the operation that cost me and my friends so much money (to remove that nerve in my foot) had failed. Or rather, the surgeon had completely botched it up. I have PTSD from that surgery. Just the thought of going back to have it done again fills me with heart racing terror and cold sweats. I’ve had numerous surgeries before that one and been fine, but the reaction I had from the anesthetic last time was so severe, and the recovery so long, that I genuinely fear it more than almost anything else. And yet I need to go in for that nightmare all over again in 2020. I'm going to be asked to trust a different surgeon to do the same so-called “simple operation” to restore some functionality to my left foot. My right knee is probably also going to need surgery since it has been resistant to any physiotherapy rehabilitation. And on top of all this, my poor partner's health has also taken a hit this year from the stress which is worrying me. Because I can always do with some more worry…

 But hey! This too shall pass! You should be happy! Life is great now! Yay yay yay!

Fuck, sometimes it just want to be allowed to feel shit and to have other people say “okay you can feel shit now. Yes, some good things have happened but right now you need to process the bad and that's okay too”. My lord, if people could just do that for me. If they could just let me feel what the fuck I need to feel.

 What I feel is exhausted, scared, freaked out, traumatized, weird, sick, angry, overwhelmed and fed up. And I need to feel those things before I can feel anything else.

#rant #Fibromylagia #chronic illness #chronic pain #chronic stress #stress #overwhelmed #personal catharsis

[bettsfic]

sleep!anon: (1) god it feels so good to have someone understand. i only realised at about 17 that i must have spent half of my life being tired and not knowing it. after that, i started sleeping more, and after some self tests, i realised about 10.5 hours seems to be the sweet spot (9.5-10 i can get by, but over time, it gets worse), which was perfectly feasible at school/uni, but 9-5 is more troublesome. i sleep about 9.5-10 hours, nap on the train over (about 20 mins)

(2) and even then, still have to catch usually at least one (sometimes more) discreet 10 minute nap at some point during work. like you, i usually REALLY need it around 3-4PM. and i hate feeling tired at work because then every mistake i make, i'm like is this me? or is this just bc i'm so f*cking tired? like, sometimes when i'm trying to nap at work, i can feel how tired i am and knowing i'm not alseep makes me want to cry. i genuinely feel like i'm halfway to having a breakdown sometimes

(3) i'm not surprised that feeling anxious/stressed means you need more sleep - it's really taxing mentally and physically to be stressed. now you've said that, i wonder if mine has been getting worse recently because of the stress/anxiety i have over mistakes and how tired i am etc... GOD don't get me started on people who call you lazy. i think some folks think it's a joke, haha ur so lazy lol, but i would give ANYTHING to be able to live like them. to feel rested after 7-9 hours.

(4, final) i can't even comprehend what life like that would be like. imagine not having to regiment my bedtime so strictly, actually waking up in the morning and not wanting to d*e. like, my life revolves around controlling my sleep, and then people turn around and call me lazy? do not like. anyway, sorry to go off, just feels so good to talk to someone who understands! in any case, how did you go about doing a sleep study? i've thought about it but not sure if it's worth it?

i’m not sure if you’ve considered it, but you might have sleep apnea. it’s the most common sleep disorder and it sounds like you have a lot of the symptoms. like if you’re asphyxiating in your sleep, you’re not hitting REM, so you need to sleep longer. if you do a sleep study, the apnea tests come first. for me, they gave me a take-home test which is cheapest and easiest, and i tested negative for that, but the home test has a lot of false negatives (but not false positives), so they had me come in for an overnight stay. i tested negative for that, and the narcolepsy test is during the day.

that’s it, that’s all they can test for. narcolepsy, delayed phase sleep, and hypersomnia all use the same test and all have virtually the same treatment. if you have apnea, you sleep with this machine thing on your face. a friend of mine uses it and it completely changed his life. for narcolepsy et al, the medicine is called nuvigil, which i’ve never taken because it was way too expensive, so my doctor put me on adderall instead. which, let me tell you, adderall was awful for me. i was operating at 200% and convincing myself it was my “true” 100% and basically my entire life had been a lie. but that wasn’t real at all. 

i’m going to caveat here that my sleep doctor was absolute garbage, totally incompetent, and i nearly sued him, so i’m hoping you’ll have a better experience. you usually need a referral from your GP, so i’d start there. hopefully you’ll get a newer tech test so you don’t have to go through what i went through. apparently you can do most of it from home now. the sleep study will be totally worth it if you test positive for apnea, and even more worth it to find treatment for narcolepsy et al, and most worth it to take it to your HR people and ask for disability accommodations. 

another thing to check for is carbon monoxide. i had a dude inspect my chimney at home and he said i’ve been slowly carbon monoxide poisoned for years now and i think that’s maybe part of my fatigue issue, because the *day* i moved to my grandma’s house, my sleep reverted to something sustainable. like i got tired at 10pm, fell asleep by 11, and woke up naturally at 8am. and it’s been like that now for a month (exception being EDS [excessive daytime sleepiness] due to aforementioned stress). chronic fatigue syndrome may also be a thing. so a good sleep doctor will take you through all of this and hopefully find you an effective treatment. oh! and idk how old you are, but if you’re under 25, there is a chance you will grow out of it, which sounds ridiculous, but developmentally your brain doesn’t get steady sleep-wise until then. THAT SAID, even if you are under 25, you’re unable to adapt to the environment you’re in, so you still need accommodations.

also keep in mind -- disordered sleep is extremely normalized, which is why the term “lazy” is tossed around so much. nearly all young people have disordered sleep because they’re forced into adult schedules. and most millennials have disordered sleep because of growing up with disordered sleep, and now because of a constant invasion of blue light late at night. i think i only know one person my age who doesn’t have disordered sleep, and she’s a middle school teacher. everyone else i know is delayed phasic, polyphasic, or chronically fatigued. it’s a serious, horrible issue that causes so much anxiety and depression, like you know how it feels to lay in bed at night, freaking out about the following day or all the stupid shit you said? that’s fatigue!brain. i’ve basically learned not to listen to any of my own thoughts between the hours of midnight and 8am. they’re all lies.

okay this is getting long. i do hope you find help and good treatment. i’ve heard good things about nuvigil if your insurance will cover it, and if not, i hope your workplace will allow you accommodations so you can nap in your car in the afternoon, have a flexible schedule/delayed start time, and/or work from home.

#narcolepsy #Anonymous

[mrsh0rr0rxoxo-blog]

Depression

Depression –

 Let’s talk about the different types of Depression that are out there. Once I’m finished, if you are someone who suffers from Depression talk to me. Tell me what you Suffer from. And if you’re so inclined to do so, tell me about what made you this way. Because we didn’t get this way from birth, TRUMA happened to make us this way.

Clinical Depression –

Being sad most of the time, so much that it effects your daily life, you may or may not have this.

Treatment – Talking to your doctor, talking to a Therapist and medication. You may also want to consider making changes in your lifestyle. I know it’s hard, but even the smallest change, might make your Clinical Depression, less noticeable to you.

Major Depression –

Major Depression or as often called by doctors “Major Depressive Disorder” (It’s technically the same thing). To know if this is something that you suffer from, you’re going to feel or should be feeling depressed most of the days during the week, and nothing that you can do will bring you out during those days.

Symptoms –

-         Loss of interest or pleasure you once felt in activities.

-         Weight gain is most common for us Stress eaters & depressed eaters, but don’t be alarmed if you lose weight. It is more common than you think.

-         Not able to sleep at night or able to fall asleep, resulting in you feeling sleepy all day.

-         Feeling Worthless. (Which means in your mind, nothing you can do makes anyone happy) It’s not true, but in your mind it really is.

-         Restless, Sluggish and Agitated (ALL. THE. TIME.)

-         Slowed down physically and or mentally. (But typically if you’re slow physically, your mental state will be slow also.)

-         Always tired with lack of energy.

-         THOUGHTS of Suicide (BUT no action).

-         Can’t concentrate or make decisions.

If you go to your doctor with FIVE or more of these symptoms, and they last more then 2 to 3 weeks, you have a chance of being diagnosed with Major Depression.

Treatment –

Antidepressants, Talk Therapy (Which never worked for me.) Mental Health Specialists that you will be asked to see, they will help you find a way to manage it. (I highly recommend it.)

If medication barely helps – then you can also try ECT & rTMS (Electroconvulsive Therapy & Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation)

Consult your Doctor before considering the above treatments in Bold.

 Persistent Depressive Disorder –

Depression lasting more then TWO years. The Term “Persistent Depressive Disorder” is used to describe two conditions, previously known as Dysthymia (low-grade persistent) & Chronic Major Depression.

Symptoms –

-         Change in appetite (Over eating or not at all.)

-         Sleeping too much or too little.

-         Fatigue or lack of energy.

-         Low Self-Esteem.

-         Trouble Concentrating/Making Decisions

-         Always feeling Hopeless.

Treatment –

Psychotherapy, Medication or Both.

Bipolar Disorder –

Someone who is Bipolar – or often called “Manic Depression” Has a mood episode. It can range from Extremes of high energy with an “Up” mood to low “depressive” periods.

When in low Phase, you will have symptoms of Major Depression.

Meds will help bring your moods under control. Whether you’re in a high or low Period. You might also need a mood stabilizer. (Talking with your doctor is the best way to figure that out.)

Bipolar is something Serious and needs to be treated right away.

Traditional  antidepressants are not always going to be recommended as first-line treatments for bipolar depression, since there is no proof from studies that these drugs are more helpful than a placebo(sugar pill) in treating depression in people with bipolar disorder.

Not to mention that for some people with bipolar disorder (like me), some of the traditional antidepressants may increase the risk of causing a “High” phase of illness, or speeding up how often you have these episodes over time.

Psychotherapy can also help you and your family with support.

I can honestly tell you, that my Bipolar Disorder, puts a lot of stress on my husband and child. It’s really bad. When I’m having a “High” day, it’s a bad day for everyone. I don’t even want to work on those days. I can’t focus. But employers don’t understand someone with mental disabilities, so unfortunately in this world, you can’t not go to work because of it.

 Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD or Seasonal Depression as most often heard) –

It is a period of Major Depression that most often happens during the winter months, when the days grow shorter and you get less and less sunlight. It typically will go away in the spring and summer.

If you do have SAD, antidepressants will help. You can also do light therapy. You will need to sit in front of a special bright light box for about 15-30 minutes each day.

Get it treated. Don’t let it go because you know with spring your mental state will clear, if you get too far down the rabbit hole, there’s no coming back out of it with the change of the season.

 Psychotic Depression –

People who have psychotic depression have the symptoms of Major depression along with “Psychotic” symptoms, such as:

-         Hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that are not there)

-         Delusions (false beliefs)

-         Paranoia (wrongly believing that others are trying to harm you.)

Treatment –

A combination of antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs can treat psychotic depression. ECT may also be an option for you.

 Peripartum (PostPartum) Depression –

Women who have major depression in the weeks and months after childbirth may have peripartum depression. Antidepressant drugs can help similarly to treating major depression that is unrelated to childbirth.

Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) –

Women with PMDD have depression and other symptoms at the start of their period.

Besides feeling depressed, you may also have:

-         Mood Swings

-         Irritability

-         Anxiety

-         Trouble concentrating

-         Fatigue

-         Change in appetite or sleep habits

-         Feelings of being overwhelmed

Treatment –

Antidepressant medication or sometimes oral contraceptives can treat PMDD.

 ‘Situational’ Depression –

Situational – is not a technical term in psychiatry. But you can have a depressed mood based on what is going on in your life, a stressful event that you’re having trouble managing. A death in the family, a divorce, losing your job. Your doctor might call this “stress response syndrome.”

Treatment –

Psychotherapy can often help you get through a period of depression that’s related to a stressful situation.

Atypical Depression –

This is different then the persistent sadness of typical depression. It’s considered to be a “Specifier” that describes a pattern of depressive symptoms. If you have “atypical depression,” a positive event can temporarily improve your mood.

Other symptoms of atypical depression include:

-         Increased appetite

-         Sleeping more than usual

-         Feeling of heaviness in your arms and legs

-         Oversensitive to criticism

Treatments –

Antidepressants can help. Your doctor might suggest a type called SSRI – Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, as the first line of treatment.

They might also sometimes recommend an older type of antidepressant called MAOI – Monoamine oxidase inhibitor – which is a call of antidepressants that studies state work well with atypical depression.

 Some of you are reading this & thinking, “I’ve been depressed my entire life” that very well maybe true. No doubts about it. It is highly unlikely for you to have every single type of depression, but it is not unlikely for you to have had, experienced each one in your life.

I myself am Bipolar. I suffer from Major Depression & I very often do get Seasonal Depression.

I suffered from Postpartum after I had a miscarriage. I didn’t know that, that was possible, all I knew was my depression was worse. So I seen my doctor he treated me and it finally went away, it went back to my normal Highs & Lows.

My depression started when I was in High School and it has not gone away.

Somedays my depression doesn’t get the best of me, and somedays it does. I can feel myself slipping into depression now, when the bad days are coming. Lately they are more often then not, because I lost a friend that I loved very dearly.

That is her own fault, and I am partly to blame, but I’m not the one that wants everyone to feel bad for me. I think it’s because she suffered a great, great horrible loss in her life and hasn’t found the right way to overcome that, resulting in pushing everyone else away from her. Then making someone else the victim.

I’ve done it before. It’s how I can figure it out.

So, I did what I had to do for me. I stopped talking to her, and ever since there’s been stuff said about me that isn’t true, and it’s making my depression even worse. So, I’m cautious.

I watch what I say and do, I watch what I eat, because I need to eat healthy to keep me in a positive mood. I focus on the things that keep me happy. My husband, child and close, close friends. I read trashy romance novellas because they make me happy, I binge watch Grey’s Anatomy (because who doesn’t love a good cry) and I try to get the best sleep possible.

I’ve recently had an increase in medication, and I do think that is helping. I can’t say that I will ever be okay, and I can’t explain how I’m feeling to people that don’t understand because they will never understand.

  Credits -

Thank you to WebMD, for helping me fact check and make sure that I provided the correct information, treatment and diagnosis.

#depression #stress #overeatting #noteattingenough #mentalhealth

[volelpmas-blog]

change is coming - on my terms

this is the first post on my online journal!

while I am busy, I have a personal goal to dedicate myself to journaling more often to help me with self-reflection, goal setting, and the archival of thoughts and memories. 

with that, here we go.

I have been prioritizing myself lately, and for that I am proud. I have had the habit of sacrificing myself for others. I have made a lot of personal progress in the last couple of years, but though I have my good days, my bad days can feel very low. It seems like a roller coaster every-other week. The theme of my sadness the past couple of months in particular is work.

I’ve been telling myself that I will put in my notice at both of my jobs for a while now, but it wasn’t until very recently that I actually started pursuing another job. I’ve been holding on the both of my jobs because of my fear of disappointing others. 

Currently, I work as a caregiver for a disabled man. I have been working with him for a little over a year, but I learned not long after I started this line of work that I would not be doing this labor for many years. While I enjoy the bond we have, I feel it may be time for a change. I find myself feeling more unmotivated to take initiative, and I used to work much harder than was expected of me. I may be just feeling burnt out, or maybe it’s my body’s way of letting me know it’s time for something else. I’m still figuring it out. I am struggling with letting go of working with him. Having a friendship with him has made me better in many ways. I’m forever grateful for that sentiment.

I also work at an auto glass repair shop with my sister, A. Though I’m grateful for this opportunity, and decent pay, I learned fast that this isn’t the job for me. I am not present there nearly enough to thrive in that job, because the information I need to know to preform well on a daily basis is monstrous. My sister excels in this job, and it is cool to see her be such a boss, I don’t enjoy having her as my boss. My sister and I have a weird relationship, and I enjoy spending time with her, but I often feel uncomfortable working with her. I feel sensitive to her moods, and I don’t like how she talks to me. She talks to me like I’m stupid and makes me look stupid in front of customers. I don’t think she has much awareness around this, but she is my older half-sister, and I don’t expect a whole lot else from her. Many times, I feel stupid, because I am not a car person, I don’t know much of anything about cars, and there’s so much information I have to know that I am really overwhelmed by it. It’s complicated to say the least.

I’ve been applying to several different jobs, and I’m only getting interviews for the gigs that I don’t want -- but maybe I should be going for whatever I get. I am grateful that any company/organization is getting back to me at all. I am privileged to have such a luxury. 

I am realizing that I have always been a very idealistic person. Since I was young, I’ve always had high expectations for events, relationships, plans, anything that I wanted to go well so badly. I found myself constantly disappointed. With this realization, I’m trying to become more aware of my expectations. My idealism could be a large reason why it’s difficult for me to stay motivated in a job, or why I’m not satisfied with where I’m getting interviews. 

I also see this in my romantic life. As my psych professor says, Loving someone means loving them just the way they are, not needing them to change in order for us to love them. I have always been very idealistic about my relationships. Before, I had expectations about how my partner should be, or how I wanted them to be, rather. With my partner, S, I have learned to not expect him to be everything I want him to be, I have loved him most when he is being himself. I realized it is best for my mental health to give my partner the space he needs to grow and become the person he wants to be, while prioritizing my personal growth and self-actualization. He is such a lovely person in every way, and I decided that trying to change him is not what I want. He does not try to change me, he does not criticize me, he allows me to be me. This is very different from what I experienced before him. I am so happy to be doing life with him. 

That’s all for now, but before I hit post, I want to put some manifestations at the end of every post to help remind myself of what I’m capable of. . .

I will quit both of my jobs for one job that works well for me.

I will focus on my wellness emotionally and physically while I work on finishing school.

I will not impose unfair expectations on myself or others.

[dammitadolfnomorecake]

COTW 21 - start

Of all the days to be running late, Levi was running late on the day that Doctor Reed was finally going to be meeting with Eren over their pup's tumour. Viren had been in a bad mood all morning, the pup having come down with some kind of children's fever, that left them spending the night on the sofa. His son had fallen asleep in his arms after hours of crying, and Levi hadn't dared move on the off chance he woke him. Eren was still in hospital, still being watched for potential clots, while the pups were still being monitored. He knew Eren wasn't happy about it, but Reed had flown in a day early, and with the hospital trying to get him to gain weight, it was better Eren be there. Rushing down the hall to Eren's room, Viren was crying against him. He'd tried to calm the boy down, but he wasn't having any of it. Their son hated hospitals just as much as Eren did, when there was no cookie in it for him. Letting himself into Eren's room, he wasn't surprised that his omega and the doctor were talking. When he'd heard Eren was talking again, he could barely contain his happiness over it. If Eren was speaking, it meant his mental blocks had been lifted and he was allowing himself to use his own words "Sorry we're late. Viren wasn't feeling well. Doctor Reed, thank you for seeing us again" Rounding Eren's bed to the free side, he placed Viren on the bed as he leaned in to kiss Eren on the forehead "Hey, beautiful. I'm sorry I'm late" "It's alright. We were discussing the surgery" "Surgery?" Doctor Reed cleared her throat "Yes. Looking at the growth of the tumour and the effects on the pup, I've reassessed the situation. Eren as I were just discussing the finer details of how I'll be detaching the tumour, and the potential complications from it" "Complications...?" His mind was more than a little slow. He'd been so busy with Viren that he'd skipped his morning cup of tea, leaving him with too much blood in his teastream, and lacking in the mental process department "Yes. For instance, this is complicated surgery that may cause death, or a life of disabilities, and it just for the pups. There's a real risk to Eren's lift too. It's not my job to scare you, but I do want you to be well educated about this before going ahead. Also, Eren will be on bed rest for the rest of his pregnancy. No heavy lifting. No strenuous activities. No operation heavy machinery, etc. There is also a chance that the pup, or both may pass after the surgery. We are still able to abort, that is an option. But Eren has opted for surgery, knowing the risks" What now? Without talking to him?! He could die or even worse. This was something they needed to be talking about... "Now, don't worry. Eren may have opted for the surgery, and I was explaining the procedure to him. But he did say you two needed to discuss it" Then she should have as much in the beginning instead of giving him a miniature heart attack over it "I want the surgery" "Eren..." Climbing onto Eren's chest, Viren gripped Eren's hospital gown. Kissing the top of his son's head, Eren sighed softly "I want the surgery, Levi" "So many things could go wrong..." "And? These are our children" "They haven't even been birthed. You heard what Mike said, this pregnancy is essentially killing you" "And they've been monitoring me. The only reason things have been going so badly is because of the tumour. Our pups deserve a chance at a real life" "And what if you die? What happens then? You're too weak to be having surgery" "I'm not too weak. The amount of food and medication they'd been shovelling into me... I want this" "Maybe I should give you two some space?" "No. Can you please explain everything to Levi so he can see that the surgery is the best thing?" "I didn't say it wasn't. I'm saying... I'm saying that I need to think" "About what?! You agreed to this. You agreed to the surgery!" "That was before you had a fall and scared the shit out of me. You were in labour, Eren. Do you have any idea how bad that fall scared me?! You were out of it for a week! I thought the pups were dead. I thought you were bleeding to death! What if it happens again? What if you trip again? What if you actually lose the pups because of it?" "I didn't fall! I was pushed, so don't make me feel like shit for it! I didn't ask to be pushed. I didn't ask to go into labour. You were scared?! I was scared!" Levi felt himself pale "You... were pushed?" Running the fingers of his right hand through his hair, Eren sighed heavily "Eren. What do you mean you were pushed?" "Fuck... fork" "Eren, answer me" His tone was harsher than he meant it to be. When Mike had suggested it, he'd thought it... he didn't think Nick'd actually sink that low "I was pushed... someone whispered in my ear, the I was pushed" "Why didn't you say anything?!" "Because it's so fu-forking easy to say anything when everyone is hovering over you. It's so easy when the guards are making fun of you for your dynamic, and everyone finds you weak. It was so easy to speak up without a voice" The guards too? Had Nick paid then off? Or were they naturally arseholes? "Eren..." "This is my body Levi. I want to have the surgery because I want the pups to survive. I am so sick and tired of how people treat me. I'm sick of being in and out of hospital. I'm sick of feeling shit all the time. I want this" "It could cost you your life" "And it could cost them their's" "If you two may, can I just jump in here" Both he and Eren looked to Doctor Reed "The aim of the surgery is for all three of you to come through alive. This isn't the first time I've performed this surgery before. And yes, the size of the pup will make things harder, but the tumour is growing, and if left, it will grow to be bigger than your pup. In the end you both need to be on the same page" "Can you promise he won't die?" "No. But I can promise you I will do everything in my power to keep Eren and your pups alive" Taking Eren's hand, Levi looked down at the rings on Eren's finger. Taking a deep breath, he released it slowly "Eren. Is this truly what you want, for yourself" "It's not just for me. I want these pups, and I know you do too" "I won't have you undergoing such a dangerous procedure, unless it is something you truly want for yourself" "I do" "And you understand things will be different when you come out of hospital? You won't be able to dance, or go walking. You'll be on bed rest. We both know how bored you get" "If it's for them, then it's ok" "You won't be able to lift Anna or play with the kids" "Levi. I don't want our baby to keep suffering. I don't want that tumour to keep sucking the life out of them. I could never forgive myself if something else happened to them because I didn't take this opportunity" Levi still wasn't sure about this. He knew the hospital all too well, and wasn't sure they had the right resources for such a dangerous procedure "Doctor Reed. When will the procedure take place?" "As I was explaining to Eren, I would like to operate in 8 days time. I would also like to have him transferred to Mitras, where my team is based" "Mitras..." The fucking capital city... He'd wanted to show Eren the city, but he didn't think this would be how it'd happen "And you're not going to change your mind when we get there?" Eren shook his head "Ok... ok. I guess we're doing this... you better give me all the details now... I can't believe I'm agreeing to this" Moving his hand in his hold, Eren pulled it to his belly "It's for them. It's for the pups... and for all of us" "Excellent. Now, Levi..." Even after having the procedure explained to him, Levi was filled with apprehension over the surgery. They'd open Eren up, like they would for c-section, then essentially remove the pup from the amniotic sack to remove the tumour, before closing the wound with dissolvable stitches, as returning the pup back inside Eren like nothing had happened. If something did go wrong, they'd also be removing the stitch Mike's team had placed in, so if things did go wrong, Eren's body would pass the pups naturally, which was supposedly better for his omega's health and long term recovery. It was... a lot. Reed seemed confident, yet he knew better than to trust an overly confident doctor... all of this was so heavy, he could barely look Eren or Reed in the eye. If they were headed to Mitras, there was so much to organise. Accomodation for himself and Viren, as well as their flights. And then there was the trial... Floch... Fuck... He had to talk to the wanker.