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all that anxiety WASTED 🗻😤

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OCD is the pathological intolerance of risk, however minute, and the surrender to protective ritual, however unbearable.

Obsession comes from a simple glitch in cognition. Ordinarily, you have a built-in time clock in your mind. After turning over a certain problem for a while…your brain decides, “okay, that’s probably the best solution we can come up with for now – enough.” When you obsess, however, your mind refuses to admit defeat, to accept that you just can’t come up with a better answer… OCD demands safety and certainty, and the fact that nothing can ever be totally certain is regrettable but irrelevant to its purposes. Sometimes this leads to the physical compulsions so many identify with the disorder. If we’re obsessed with catching a disease, we may wash our hands over and over again. Eventually the behavior of the sufferer is entirely divorced from reality.

But these physical compulsions which so many assume are the greatest burden of OCD, may be only modest indicators of a terrible internal struggle.

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Friendly reminder that this manifesting/law of attraction/law of assumption thing might be really harmful and triggering for person suffering from OCD or other mental illness that has symptoms like intrusive thoughts and paranoia

Some affirmations

Your thoughts are just thoughts

Thinking about something doesnt make it any more or less likely to happen

Its not your fault that your mental illness is making you have negative thoughts

Thinking about a bad thing doesnt make you a bad person

Universe is a vast space with planets and stars and comets and stuff, its doing nothing to you and has no connection to your thoughts

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well a lot of things just made a lot more sense

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Maybe controversial, but normalise people being able to talk about their mental illnesses without it being treated like they're asking for an in depth conversation or therapy session about it.

I have OCD. Sometimes it acts up more than usual. Sometimes talking about my intrusive thoughts to other people is beneficial, sometimes it isn't.

Sometimes I just want to be able to mention that "my OCD is bugging me" in the same way I'd say "I have a headache" or "I think I'm getting a cold" and just have the person I tell be like "aw, that sucks" without having to make a big deal out of it. Sometimes I want to be able to mention that I used to be in therapy in casual conversation and have it be treated no differently than if I'd mentioned having once gone to the doctor.

This is something that I have dealt with in one way or another all my life (at least since I was a small child) and may well have to deal with forever. Sometimes it's basically just background noise, occasionally it's completely incapacitating and a lot of the time it's somewhere between the two, but it's something that I have to put up with.

I feel like a lot of the people who do this are just trying to be accepting and understanding, which is admirable, but by ensuring that the topic of mental illness is always going to be approached as a Big Important Conversation, you're basically ensuring that your mentally ill friends can only be open about their mental state when they feel like/have the spoons for Big Important Conversations, which is likely to discourage them from actually bringing it up.

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an under-discussed feature of chronic illness + pain is how fucking boring it is. Like I know that I will get better and stop hurting if I lie down with my eyes closed in a quiet dark room but holy fucking shit if I do that for five more minutes today I’m going to totally lose my marbles.

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my brain is deteriiooioutaing i can hear it

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one thing that is so interesting to me about the baby is that reinterpreting things through the lens of his interests really makes a difference for him, even if they're actually the exact same things. for example even though he likes vegetable soup, sometimes when he's in the middle of playing if you say "you want to come eat soup?" he's like "no" because he doesn't want to stop playing. but one of his favorite interests is the "construction site" series of books (good night good night construction site, mighty mighty construction site, construction site on christmas night) and his little toy diggers and bulldozers and cranes and so on. so my sister started saying "do you want to eat some cement? (potatoes) and drainage pipes? (green beans) and wrecking balls? (green peas) and orange bricks? (carrots)" and the baby is always like DZYEAH because he really does like the soup but also this makes it part of the game and not something you have to stop playing to do. and earlier when my sister went to put a bib on him he was like "no bib!!!" but my sister was like "no, this is the cement truck blanket!" and he got this look like "hmm. well ok then" and let her put it on him.

it's like how recontextualizing cleaning and organizing as something I get to do to rediscover and further appreciate my nice things, instead of a horrible boring chore I have to do or else I'm bad and lazy and shameful, has made such a huge difference for me. even though it's the same exact chore. but now I can do it

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lots of times if I tell my boyfriend that I am proud of him for dealing with a situation, or that I'm sorry he's having to deal with a situation, he will say "no it's my own fault." meaning that he feels like he doesn't deserve praise or comfort for dealing with a situation that is his fault. (for example a financial problem caused or exacerbated by him having been too anxious or absentminded to deal with the situation sooner.) and I tell him this and I will tell y'all this, that I don't believe that. I think you are even braver and stronger for taking steps to deal with a mess that is of or partly of your own creation, because you have to cope with guilt and shame on top of the thing itself, and because you're fighting against the same ingrained dysfunction in yourself that caused the mess. that's like the bravest and most constructive thing you can do and you should be proud and I am proud of you.

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have been helping a bit to look after a little girl who is almost three, about six months older than my nephew, but who unfortunately hasn't been looked after as well as my nephew has.

had her in the kind of baby swing that you buckle a baby into, and she was being very very quiet and meditative. not smiling or engaging with me at all as I chatted away at her, or even looking at me. which is fine of course

but after awhile I said "are you all done swinging?" and she didn't answer or look at me. I said "are you still having fun in the swing?" and she didn't answer. I said, "do you want to keep swinging?" and she didn't answer. I said "are you hungry? ready for a snack?" and she didn't answer

I knelt down in front of her and said "let's unbuckle you and we can go get a snack, ok?" and she just stared at me. but when I reached for the buckles she whimpered and sobbed and tried to push my hands away from them

so of course I was like "oh! you do want to keep swinging!" and she didn't answer, but when I pulled the swing back to get her swinging again she smiled really widely

and it got me thinking about how sometimes, especially if it doesn't seem like anybody ever listens to you, or cares what you think or feel, it's hard to think of language-- including the language of gesture-- as a tool to communicate. because even when she started to cry and pushed at my hands it wasn't really like she was trying to tell me something, or even ask for something. she can talk, I've heard her say a three word sentence, and her speech and articulation are probably better on a purely technical level than my nephew's. but why should she? grown-ups do whatever they want. she didn't communicate her wishes to me, not because she wasn't able, because why bother? she cried because she was sad and frustrated, not because she thought I wanted to know what she wanted. she smiled because she was happy, not because she wanted me to know she was happy.

and I get it, you know? sometimes you have a breakdown because it's easier to get to the point when things are so bad or upsetting that you just have to cry out in protest, in organic despair that just overcomes you, because it's too hard / it seems too hopeless to choose to ask for something before it gets to that point. even if people are actively asking how they can help. because how do you know they mean it? what if you choose the wrong answer? better not to imagine you get to choose.

wish she'd yell "no snack!!!! more swing!!!" like my nephew. who knows I'm listening

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One of the most life-changing things I ever learned came from Mythbusters, where they tested and proved (with cognitive testing puzzles and reaction time tests) that lying down and resting with the intention to sleep STILL provided significant mental benefits over just staying awake, even if a person couldn’t fall asleep in the amount of time they had. 

It helps me to actually sleep to know that just lying down with my eyes closed is still doing me some good, and helps me to not freak out/beat myself up when I stay up later than intended. Any amount of rest is better than no rest!

So if you didn’t know that…now you do

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every morning i wake up and make the worst possible time management decisions anyone has ever made

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I am very serious if a game both negatively impact your mental health and is the source of all your joy, it means you have an addiction problem and you need to delete your account and uninstall it and cry for however many hours you need to get it out of your system.

Your lifeline CANNOT depend on a mobile game they're predatory as fuck.

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executive dysfunction is telling yourself for two and a half hours that you need to shower bc you smell like your workplace and you absolutely Cannot do Anything Else until you shower, doing Any Other Thing before showering is illegal!!! but you still haven’t for some reason??? you’ve just been sitting on your bed in a towel scrolling tumblr for 2+ hours thinking “I need to shower right now immediately” and growing increasingly frustrated that you are still not clean and you haven’t eaten or done your laundry either

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I think people need to tell more kids that they're proud of them for graduating high school. I'm absolutely dead serious, especially now. I can see the graduating high schoolers surrounding me right now are burned out and traumatized and depressed, and they've undoubtedly had a much, much harder time in high school than I ever had, and I had some pretty shitty high school experiences.

I graduated high school with no more acknowledgement than the standard "congrats on surviving another year of school!" And immediately followed by "have you finished all your scholarship applications?" That was fine for me. I knew i wanted to go to college, I was set and ready for it, eager to get out of high school into more challenging courses.

But if I just finished high school after two years of fighting through online courses and no one acknowledged the battles I went through? If I was as burnt out and traumatized as these kids are right now? I'd have never have gone to college.

So for everyone graduating high school, even if you barely scraped by passing: I see you. I'm proud of you. You did such a good job. I wish you success in what you try to do, fortune enough to keep you safe and happy, and health always.