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painted-crow · 3 years

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Secondary Toast Revolving Door, Part 2

On what it’s like when I burn Bird secondary

Usually, when I burn either Bird secondary or Badger secondary model, they’re down for weeks or months at a time. I know they’ll come back, which isn’t always true of burned Houses in general but that’s just how mine work. Right now Bird is having a minor upset and it’s been out for a few weeks; it was about to come back when life stress happened and smacked it down again. This time I can predict that it’ll be back in maybe two weeks when everything’s settled down, but usually it’s not that tidy—I don’t always know why it’s having problems or what to do to get it to recover. Usually I just wait it out.

The burned state looks different for Bird vs Badger, of course. I’m probably going to struggle with writing the Badger side, either because I’ve forgotten the details of what it looks/feels like or because it’s actually simpler. I lean towards the “I’ve forgotten” angle. My memory is very bad during depressive periods. (You’d think this would leave my brain goblins fewer cringey memories with which to taunt me at 4am, but no.)

But that doesn’t matter right now because today we’re talking about Bird.

Tipoffs I’ve burned Bird

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’ve burned one of your Houses. It doesn’t always have a clear start or end, and you might not notice the gradual slipping into exhaustion and lack of confidence in your House. Here are some things I catch myself doing or thinking when my Bird peaces out on me.

I start thinking I’m not good at things I’ve spent years studying.

I get a panicky feeling of resistance when I think about working on projects that wouldn’t normally give me problems.

I struggle with self-doubt about my ability to learn new skills.

This one’s complicated: the society I live in holds Bird up as the way it thinks intelligence should look. So, in burned-Bird!Paint’s mind, that makes it arrogant to assume that you're better at using Bird than others, because it suggests you think you're smarter (and thus better, because society says that too) than them. Therefore, if I’ve learned how to do something, my impulse is to assume that anyone could. Anything I’ve already learned is obviously easy, because I learned it, and so it isn’t rare or valuable.

Weird analysis paralysis cocktail: I feel perpetually unprepared to do stuff and too afraid to move forward, but I’ve also internalized the “you’re never going to feel ready so just start now” advice—which is supposed to spur you into action and probably works if you’re a Lion, but it just gives me something else to beat myself up about.

Sometimes Bird secondary starts feeling more like a toy than a tool that can actually be effective. If that's happening, using it feels kind of self-indulgent and not terribly useful--it seems good for entertainment, but not for anything else.

That last one is really fricking weird and it took me months to figure out what it was and put it into words. It’s obviously flawed—it’s circular logic sitting on top of societal prejudice—but when you’re depressed, the kind of clarity you need to verbalize and pick apart something that complicated is often nowhere to be found, especially when your perception in general is skewed due self-hatred.

I can’t do that “just start now” thing Lions do—it terrifies me. But that’s fine. Other people don’t casually pick up new skills or binge-read nonfiction or hoard resources like I do—maybe that’s intimidating to them—and that’s fine. Both approaches are useful and powerful, objectively, and philosophically I “should” be okay with owning my abilities. That’s harder than it looks on paper, though.

There’s one more.

The value of skills is subjective, circumstantial, and easy to underestimate.

I’m a jack-of-all-trades style Bird. Lots of things interest me. But every time you decide to invest in a new skill rather than continuing with an old one, you sort of start over. Not completely; some skills transfer and there’s a lot of value in having a range of knowledge, especially in terms of creativity.

Still, though: you enter each new field as a total noob, you stay long enough to become a kinda competent noob, and then when you’ve learned what you want and maybe built the thing you wanted to build, you leave. Rinse and repeat. Usually you don’t stay long enough to become super-skilled, and people in your community don’t specifically ask you for help.

…Until they need something other than the thing they specialize in, and you happen to know it. Suddenly you’re the expert in the room. You know how to get the project started. You know where to research, who to ask about advanced topics, what all the search keywords are, and where to find the supplies. Suddenly you're valuable, and maybe you're not used to feeling valuable. It can be kind of a jarring experience.

It's especially jarring when someone you know needs something and you're like, "oh I can take care of that, I spent six months studying how to do it and I have the resources already" and the other person gives you a look of deep skepticism and you try to convince them that no, really, it's not a big deal, you can have that done in a weekend or two if they give you the right information and... they don't believe you can do it, you guess. It's easy to misinterpret a "this sounds too good to be true" reaction for "I don't believe YOU can do it.”

My old draft had a note about how I should build myself a portfolio site to demonstrate stuff like this (except that my tastes develop faster than my actual skills in most fields, so I tend to dislike my own work and don't want to display it). But actually I’m wondering now if Badger secondary isn’t part of the problem. Sometimes I just volunteer to do stuff for people I only kinda know, without naming a motive or a price tag, and seen through that lens it’s hard to blame them for feeling awkward or skeptical about accepting. It’s not a big deal to you, but it is to them—too big to be just a favor. And then the people who do accept freely given help tend to take advantage of you… I guess I need to cultivate more Courtier Badger if I want to give my Bookkeeper Badger model stuff to do.

(Bonus bullet point: “I don’t know if I can really say my House is burned... it’s just not totally there right now? The stuff I’m dealing with isn’t THAT bad” is another tell that you’re burned. I’ve had to stop myself from writing that sort of thing several times over the course of this post. I’ll let myself bring it up for the opposite reason, though: if you’re thinking this, you may be underestimating the damage because you’ve forgotten what you’re like healthy. This goes for mental illness in general too. Don’t undermine your own experience.)

What I do instead

I’ve learned to be flexible and work around times when my Bird isn’t at 100%.

For example, this is why I have three novel projects running at once, with varying levels of complexity. The least complex of the three is new—I started it back in February, and working on that one instead of the others has let me stay productive and continue using Bird without pushing it past its limits. Plus it lets me keep making art, which as I’ve mentioned, is important to my general wellbeing.

If I’m able to section off my work like this and focus on the things I can do, and selectively procrastinate the ones I can’t (that aren’t super urgent), I’m usually fine—as long as I stay on top of my mental health enough for things to swing back around so I can catch up. It’s very, very difficult to recover if your needs aren’t being met.

I can be kind of a productive powerhouse when I can get my brain to actually process dopamine correctly (thanks, medication!) so if I can manage to work on something useful, I don’t always have to be too picky about what it is. That also means that if I can’t work on the things I’d normally use Bird to do (whether it’s burned or I’m just worn out), it’s a good excuse to catch up on more menial things like paperwork and laundry and whatnot. If I’ve let those pile up, dealing with them will improve my environment and my mental health and get Bird to recover faster.

What I shouldn’t do is continue to press on with my normal work, if I can avoid it. There have been times when people needed me to deliver the creative or technological thing I was using Bird to work on before it burned, and I had to push through and get it to them anyway, and it’s not a good situation for me.

*cue flashbacks to the three or four times that’s happened for months on end, dissociates for 10 minutes*

ugh okay brain can you not do that right now? trying to write a post here

Where was I? Oh, right. I was making a point.

Take the pressure off your burned House if you can.

I think when you burn one of your Houses, it's injured and you're actually worse at using it than people who just don't have it as one of their Houses. Say you're a bowling champion but your dominant wrist is broken. You can choose not to play at all until you recover, or you can try to play with your other hand but you're probably going to be worse at it than a lot of casual players, and that feels really bad because being good at this matters to you.

^ copied from the old draft of this post. I was going to write a smooth transition into that point, but it didn’t work and I’m not going to try to rewrite it and get “ERROR 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR” from my brain again.

In any case, this post has been sitting around for a week already and I should probably just publish it now. ^^;

#sortinghatchats #secondary toast revolving door #burned ravenclaw secondary #paint speaks

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prorevenge · 5 years

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High School Bully Fired and Arrested 6 Years Later

[TL;DR at the bottom]

[Backstory] I went to school in a predominantly white area and being white myself I had it pretty easy, parents who cared for me and my activities, friends who respected each other, and all around a 'normal' HS experience. (not really important, just want to paint the picture) Like all High Schools, I was bullied, not a big surprise, I'm your generic nerdy white boy with glasses. I had a small friend group and generally never caused problems.

Now, you know I wouldn't be posting here if we never met again... little did I know it would be 6 YEARS later!

[The Encounter] Time went on, years went by, I secured a job with a Security company after my Associate's Degree, and make decent money. I mainly deal with truck drivers 95% of the time and have only written 3 major incident reports in the 4 years I've worked there. Day was normal, no problems, until "Enter Chad." I didn't know at the moment he came in, but it was him, 100%. I found out after he handed me his license, I knew because he had this one for 3 years (obviously expired) and I remembered his putrid, disgusting, bile face. The memories came back, I hadn't thought about Chad in YEARS, tbh I forgot he even existed, until that day. He came in, didn't recognize me and I took care of him like anyone else, except he has to come back to me when he leaves with his outbound trailer, so I planned, I thought of what I could do to make him remember me, to make him hurt like I did... Now I graduated with a degree for Criminal Justice, so I have a pretty good understanding about laws and regulations in my state, and since his license is expired I thought I could use that to my advantage. So I basically told Chad what trailer to pick up and where it was, he went and grabbed it and brought it back to me, I said "Heyyy, sorry... but I gave you the wrong trailer, we are using that one later to fill a load and the Site Manager just called me about it." He gave me one of those, 'really? God you are wasting my time' looks that I get all the time but said this, "Look man, I'm almost out hours and I need to get out of here, can't they just reassign it?" Me: "No, unfortunately once a trailer is assigned... blah blah security talk" I told him he needed to go get a different one instead. {This was true and not part of my plan, but I rolled with it} He kept nagging about how it will get him fired if he doesn't take his break on time and that he is already on his dispatcher's "watch list"... I loved when he told me this, I was going to do whatever I could to make him waste as much time as possible, so, I called our 'yard dog'(YD) (a driver on site who moves trailers in and out of dock doors) and told him a driver was refusing to drop their trailer and that he needs to be escorted off the property. The YD came and stopped in front of his tractor so he couldn't move forward and told him to unhook immediately. For a second he waited outside of his truck yelling obscenities and stuff, eventually the YD and myself went into the guard shack in case he got violent. He said. "F\*k this!" *Big mistake** Chad jumped back in his truck, drove around the YD's when he was in my guard shack, and left as fast as he could, I was already on the phone with my supervisor and he told me to call the police. (Trailer theft is a felony in my state) So I did, told them the Tractor number, his name, and a description, along with the trailer he had and his general direction of travel. About an hour went by before I had a police cruiser show up and asking for me. He questioned me on the whole who, what, when, where, and how. He told me that he was caught up to eventually and was arrested! They needed me as a witness and to make a statement for their report, so I made sure to mention myself noticing his expired license and everything else. To the best of my knowledge Chad will be getting at least a year of prison time (as felonies are a 1 year minimum) and fired from his trucking company.

Granted, I technically just did my job, but I made sure to be as detailed as possible and make sure he pays for what he did to me all those years ago.

[TL;DR] Bully from school beat me up, I see him at my job 6 years later, he breaks the law, and is now in prison.

Thank you for everyone who read this, hope some of you got a kick out of my experience, and remember: If someone's job is to tell you what to do, just do it.

I hope to have updates when the trial comes around (if it ever happens) but the Officer told me for the most part my statements should be enough for them and I might not even have to go to court. But I sincerely hope I get to, I'd love to see his face when the judge slaps a sentence and remind him of the past and what he did to me.

PS: Who's the cumstain now Chad?

(source) story by (/u/What_I_Wonder)

#prorevenge #by /u/What_I_Wonder #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #last10

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