annierecovers

[annierecovers]

Heating pad/ Chronic pain PSA

Heating pads can burn you.

They can burn you quite badly.

I saw a post the here other day that asked how to “get rid of heating pad marks.”

Folks. If you have “heating pad marks” those are burns. And they can become much, much worse if you continue to use a heating pad on the same area of your body.

I know most folks with chronic pain scoff when we read the warnings on a heating pad. “Don’t lie on this pad.” Yeah. Sure. Lying on it is exactly the main thing you’ll be doing.

But please. Please always have a layer of protective fabric between the pad and your skin. Never, ever use a pad directly on your bare skin.

Never fall asleep on a heating pad. I know it’s easy to do, but you’re much more at risk for getting a bad burn when you’re asleep.

And never combine use of a heating pad with a topical analgesic (like Icy Hot, A535, Tiger Balm, Voltaren, Lakota creams or roll ons, essential oils or any other topical pain reliever) the oils and plant compounds in these products will accelerate burns. Do not apply anything to your skin and then use a heating pad.

And if you burn your skin, take a break from using the heating pad. I know that’s hard because many of us rely so heavily on them for pain management.

But you can permanently damage your skin by repeatedly burning it and dramatically increase your risk of cancer by doing so.

Be careful.

Please reblog this for the chronically ill folks in your life/ who follow you who use a heating pad

[annierecovers]

[annierecovers]

There she is. The Duchess.

Please consider subscribing to Crow Time!

Check out my Patreon, it's rad.

[annierecovers]

They’re married your honor

[annierecovers]

characters in their 30's and older exploring their sexuality and discovering themselves beyond their teens and twenties is so important and beautiful and worth telling

[annierecovers]

[annierecovers]

"They have never interacted in canon" TO YOU I've seen them kiss though

[annierecovers]

Brief Encounter 1945 | dir. David Lean

[annierecovers]

like as a feminist and an asexual if you ever imply that not having sex / not having "enough" of it is a conservative or reactionary trait I will be running you over with a bus pronto

#I really needed to read that

[annierecovers]

mutuals do this

take care of yourself

[annierecovers]

Rafael the racist Immigrant, hater of progress.

[annierecovers]

[annierecovers]

i know a lot ot us have that “what if i’m actually annoying” fear, and while i COULD self-soothe with affirmations like “i’m not annoying, it’s okay” i prefer “it is my human right to be annoying and cringe”

[annierecovers]

Please pass this along 🩷

[annierecovers]

I see a lot of people joking about the adhd thing of "I have a appointment/phone call at 3pm, guess I won't do anything all day!"

But no one seems to make the connection that it's a time blindness thing. One of the symptoms of ADHD is not having a good and accurate sense of time. And not doing stuff prior to an event with a hard deadline is an obvious coping mechanism for that.

Can I go to the store? It's 10am and the appointment is at 3pm. How long does going to the store take? An hour? Three hours? Five hours? I DON'T KNOW!

I get anxious trying to do things before appointments because I'm aware that I don't know how long those things take, and that if I think I do, I may be very wrong. Too often I've been like "hey I can walk to the corner store and grab a drink, that'll take like 15 minutes!" and then an hour later I get back and whoops my rice has burnt.

Plus there's also the fact that ADHD people know that motivation and focus is a two-edged sword.

Like, let's say you decide to play a video game. You've got time, you can pause/save whenever, so this should be a perfect fit to make good use of your waiting-time. So you start playing and WHOOPS you get really focused for some reason today (because people with ADHD do not get to pick when their brain decides to focus) and the next time you look at the clock it's 2:49 and you haven't showered or dressed and the appointment is 30 minutes away. Fuck. (you could have set an alarm, but now you're asking people with the forgetting-things-and-time-ignoring condition to remember it set alarms)

And with motivation, it can be almost worse. Instead of playing a game, you so something useful or creative. You clean your room or fix your plumbing or write a story or draw a picture. And suddenly it's great. Your brain is firing on all cylinders. You've got all the motivation you can ask for, and you are FLYING. the ideas are brilliant, your hands are nimble, you're getting stuff done you've been putting off for weeks or months. And then the alarm goes off. Time to go to your appointment. Fuck.

You drive there, your brain still full of ideas and plans. But by the time you get back, the motivation is gone. You may still have the ideas but you don't have the drive to write them down. You can't force yourself to do it. Your sink is still in pieces. Your room is half-cleaned, and you have to shove all the sorted clothes into one big bin just so you have somewhere to sleep. You've left things half finished again, in a cycle that has been repeating your whole fucking life. It seems sometimes that nothing ever gets finished.

So next time you don't even start. There's not time. You've been burnt too many times. Why add another half-completed project to your pile of shame?

My point is that people seem to be going "lol I can't do anything all day if I have an appointment at 3pm" like this is a quirky "oh I'm so scatterbrained!" weirdness they alone have, and not a major complication of a disabling mental illness.

(and that's not even getting into the secondary effects. If you know that having an appointment ruins your whole damn day, you're going to avoid them. Even when it's things like "going to that party" or "meeting your friends for a drink/game" or "going to a movie with that cute girl from your math class". Things you should enjoy. Things that'd help you be social. Things that make you feel human.)

[annierecovers]

sometimes you just have to let yourself be a bit neurodivergent.

i hate going out, it gives me a lot of anxiety and sensory input that i dont like, and i am often forced to talk to people.

so i do this thing on more difficult days, or sometimes just for fun, where i "bring a fictional character with me". i walk and imagine Fictional Character walking next to me. they talk to me, reassure me, hype me up, whatever i need them to do.

today dean winchester came christmas shopping with me. he went over the list with me of stuff i needed to get, told me i was doing a good job every time i finished in a certain shop, reminded me to take a deep breath when i got a little overwhelmed.

and yea. its kinda silly. and i know its just me talking to myself in a different voice, but it Works! especially since all of my special interests/hyperfixations tend to be tv/movie related.

so do what you gotta do to Get Shit Done. stop holding yourself to neurotypical standards. if you need Fictional Character to tell you you're doing a good job, do it! if you need Favourite Singer to walk you to school, do it! yea it might feel silly but you're literally fighting against your own brain to get stuff done every single day. you can have a little self indulgent daydream, as a treat.

[annierecovers]

this is your gentle reminder to stop fighting against your adhd and instead structure your life around it

buy a pack of chapsticks and put one in the pocket of all of your coats and jackets because you always forget to bring one and chapped lips is sensory hell

leave important things where you can see them. if they go in a box or a drawer you will forget they exist

put any appointments or deadlines in your phone calendar As Soon As you get them. set a reminder for a week before, a day before, an hour before, as many as you need as often as you need them.

when that little voice in your head says "i dont need to write that down, ill remember it" that is the devil talking!!! write it down anyway!!

plan for down time. have a few hours at the end of every day to just do fun stuff like engage in your hyperfixations. even if you didnt get all of your work done that day, have the rest anyway. you probably spent the whole day beating yourself up for not doing what you Should be doing, so you still need the break.

if you never eat vegetables because its too much effort to chop and cook them, get the frozen or canned shit. it doesnt go off for ages and you just have to microwave it. theres no point buying fresh vegetables if they just keep going off and being left to rot in the bottom of your fridge

if you struggle to decide what to have for dinner every day, take the decision out of it. choose a set of meals and eat those on rotation until you get sick of them, then choose some new ones and do it again.

its not stupid if it works! our brains literally have a chemical deficiency. you are allowed to accommodate yourself. go forth and stop making your life more difficult than it has to be because "this shouldn't be this hard". it is hard, so make it easier.