#like it's the Same root cause and just differing / circumstantial manifestations every time | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rebelwith0utacause · 4 years

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re: triggers. I don’t think most people expect to live in a bubble but instead to curate a space on here. If people do tag triggers, they know it’s at least a bit safer for them to follow that blog. For me, it’s really dependent on the day, some days it’s an uncomfortable thing to look at triggers but other days it’s the difference between a panic attack. I’ve always viewed them as a courtesy, regardless of effectivity, the time used to tag is negligible to me but invaluable for someone else

I’m adding everything below the line because I think some people aren’t ready to read this but also don’t want to add tws because there are others who need to have the option to see it.

So I read your ask and decided to take a shower and get my thoughts somewhat together in order to get the best response out. Instead, my mind went a mile a minute in all directions, but that’s nothing new.

Let me preface this by saying I understand that not every trauma is the same, same as how not every person reacts or copes with trauma the same. This isn’t me trying to say that not everyone’s struggle isn’t valid, it’s just my way of reaching out, giving a helping hand and a bit of food for thought for coping.

I keep saying I was raised differently because it’s the truth, might be European but I definitely don’t share the same values as most Europeans (or the image the world has about Europe, which is basically the UK and France). Here things are done differently, tws are almost nonexistent, to an extent you’re considered a lesser human being if you have (so many) triggers, and I’m not saying that this is good. Compassion is rare and understanding even rarer, more often than not, we’re left to our own devices and we can either sink or swim.

But then you have western civilization that comes labeled and prepackaged, where everything is written in fine print, everything is valid, everything is marketed so well that you have no other choice but to believe the seller. I’ve also had the opportunity to experience this, so I know a fair share of how this machinery works too.

I’m always trying to find a balance between the two, because it’s not the Dark Ages, but life also isn’t meant to be so sterile (or portrayed as sterile but I’ll get to that later). And this is where trigger warnings come into play.

We’ve all experienced trauma, either small or big. I won’t bore you with mine, but I can tell you that I’m not immune to triggers. It’s true that I seemingly don’t have them, and if you asked me a couple of hours ago I would’ve said that I don’t have them at all, but upon reflection, mine are just emotional and circumstantial. I don’t get a panic attack from words or images, but I might spiral down from a feeling that a situation might cause (like, say, a sudden right turn in a vehicle or as was the case a few days ago, feeling like my support system is being dismantled, I like my balance, alright?). These are all things I can’t help but fear, but I can learn to cope with them and lessen my reaction to them over time.

But enough about me, the whole reason I started questioning the tws in the first place was because of the overwhelming reaction people on the internet had of the prospect of Ashton’s video/song coming out. I’m talking people literally screaming ‘NO’ but also not wanting to be left out. And this makes me so sad, not because of Ashton or because his work might flop, but because they are missing the whole point of his song. Yes, it’s definitely his way of coping (I don’t buy that bs that it’s only about Harry, like... entering the industry at the fragile age of 18 can cause all sorts of trauma), but it’s also his way of helping other people cope, telling them that their struggle is valid but it can get better if you only allow yourself to get better. By putting a tw on it, it’s not reaching the people it’s supposed to reach, but also, the prospect of knowing that there’s a song about BD but not really hearing it is only leading your brain into thinking about BD, but without the educational guidance the song would provide. I hope I’m making sense here, like you’ll just overthink and reopen old wounds, which will lead you to feel worse about yourself. You can’t unlearn this information, same as how you can’t put a tw on the news that Ashton is releasing a new song.

I made the parallel between the civilizations because my brain went on a different tangent that may or may not be related to coping mechanisms. Whenever I’m made aware of the difference between both worlds I can’t help but think of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Definitely a good read (if you haven’t read it already), but my focus was on the Eloi as a concept. It’s alarming how it translates to modern-day society. For reference, the Eloi were descendants of humans, a species that evolved from (what I gathered as) first-world society, and to fit my narrative, I’m gonna say Western civilization. They had access to everything because of their wealth, from education to food to leisure activities, but they always chose the shorter path or should I say the easier path. They chose to be sheltered from the growingly disproportionate world around them, to the point where they were living under the illusion that everything is alright and they could roam free as long as the sun was shining. They were also scared shitless of the dark because that’s when the Morlocks came out of their tunnels and preyed upon them. Morlocks were another descendant of humans, evolving from the working class and the poor which were pushed to live in the tunnels to cater to the needs of the Eloi.

Now take my short recap as the Eloi being people with trauma and the Morlocks being the trauma itself. Is living in constant fear of the dark really what you want? Or is that something society tells you is okay because there’s nothing you can do about it, so you should stay that way? And what exactly does society get out of telling you that trauma is irreparable?

This is what I meant by the world being portrayed as too sterile. It just can’t be, we’re not the ones who decide what’s gonna happen, so we shouldn’t be disillusioned that it’s up to us. Tws are there to help you in the moment, but they aren’t a coping mechanism. They’re just a veil we put over things to make them look blurry and to give them a less scary filter so that we can forget they exist.

And this is what I meant when I said that not every trauma is the same. It comes in different degrees, but it also comes from different irritants. Not everything is because the world was mean to us, sometimes we were mean to ourselves, and we need to learn to love ourselves in order to cope. This is where, in my opinion, tws are counterproductive. Turning a blind eye on what we do to ourselves and romanticizing trauma and martyrdom is only gonna make it worse.

Before people say I’ve gone crazy in saying this, let me just remind you that I lived through emo szn (I only caught the ends of it, it was mostly the era of ppl born in the late 80s) where self-harm was the norm and trendy and as a person with too many issues with the image of me in my head, I found it appalling that people thought that having scars was helping them. Like... reading fanfics back then, they were FILLED with mentions of self-harm. Say what you will but pop-punk/emo as a genre helped kids feel more understood, but it also popularised physical pain as a way of dealing with trauma, no matter the degree or the outcome.

There’s a prevalent theme in every generation, I think there might be a science behind it all, but it’s almost like there’s depression lurking in the background, but there’s a trend every 5-10 years or so in how we choose to manifest it; self-harm, EDs, drugs, alcohol, adrenaline, violence. Understanding this might help us understand that there’s a root to our trauma, and if we manage to kill it off, we might defeat it. But by adding tws, we’ll never get to this conclusion. We’ll just let society run us over and let us feel like shit.

Did any of this make any sense? Probably not. I’ve been writing this for a few hours now.

My main advice is to get to know ourselves, to learn what really makes us tick. Introspection can help in finding out which trauma we can deal with, and which one needs to be left on the back burner for a bit. The lesser ones we can cope with one step at a time, until we’re out of the prangs of fear, and we can look back and say “I used to be scared of you, but I no longer am. You hurt me, but you no longer do.”

Please think twice before relying on a tw.

As for my blog, I don’t think I’ll tag too many tws, not because I don’t care about your wellbeing, but because I am not an organized person no matter how much I try to be. I also try to steer clear from things that might generally be considered triggering, but you’ll have to believe in my judgment of what’s acceptable or not. If that’s not something you can do, I totally understand if you unfollow me.

Last piece of advice coming from a person that was just another cog in the marketing industry: Don’t fall for everything that’s been sold to you. You don’t have to do anything online. Something you saw on a blog makes you feel bad? Unfollow it. An event you read about in the news is triggering? Shut your computer down. A social media platform is making you feel like shit because the users are shit? Deactivate asap. Remember that information comes to you in binary code, and at the end of the day, that’s how you should treat everything that you consume online, even tho I might be a person on my side of the screen. Life is much more spicier and colorful when you’re out there in the real world, don’t let the overload of information coming from the virtual world stop you from feeling alive.

#sorry this is so long #i just realized that i braindumped a lot on this ask #don't know if it even makes sense now but at least you'll get to know me a bit more lol #have yourself a great day/night wherever you are #user in incognito mode #asks

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xsoldier · 5 years

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Neural Repository: Consciousness Stream on Self Pain

You always see the faves of the depressed people who've killed themselves, and they're smiling and happy. That's likely because tendencies of hyperaltruistic behaviour get exacerbated when there's an extreme lack of dopamine. People become disproportionately more likely to take more harm upon themselves than inflict it upon others. But they're not always that way. Some people are just genuinely cheerful and love putting out happiness into the world.

I know I was.

What most of you don't know is that it's the one year anniversary of the first time in my life that I can remember deeply and wholly wanting with my entire being to not exist. To be done & gone. To will myself into nothingness. To disconnect my conscious self, and just let my body be a stand-in until I could return. To freeze myself in stasis and come back to life later. Or just die since none of those other things are actually options. It wasn't for months still that I'd actually experience the helplessness that lead me to knowing exactly how I'd terminate my life, or experience the emotional roulette rollercoaster of not doing so (about 6 separate times now) purely through the luck of circumstance of brain chemistry in the moment.

Suicide is very much a crime of passion against self. Opting out, and unsubscribing from the flow of the every day that you just can't handle anymore. It's harder when you've very carefully thought through everything and still come to the same answer. I wasn't surprised when Dana killed herself. She was about the only human whose absolute desperation and inability to escape the moments of self were like a reflection of my every day. She dealt with depression and I didn't, and I learned a lot from her. I was so annoyed when she died, because it filled me with an imperative purpose that I had to fill, and it meant that that option wasn't available for me. I talked everyone through it that I could, I spoke about her death, and I never even received a farewell or details about why. The reason that I always spoke so definitively despite that is that just about my only skillset is recognizing patterns of human emotion, and it was like staring in a mirror.

I've probably aged a decade in the last year. You can be around people all the time, but that doesn't overcome the pervasive sense of exclusion and loneliness that becomes all-consuming from where we need it most. We work long hours, because taking time off makes things worse, as the only sense of belonging and purpose is the small refreshing breath of being useful when you're drowning in an ocean of complete despair. Drowning people don't LOOK like they're drowning. They don't yell, or splash, or cry out for help. They just struggle a little differently, and then sink.

I don't remember what happiness is. That's not to say that I haven't BEEN happy and had wonderful experiences over the last year, it's just that every moment sense, instead of experiencing bad moments, life has become a series of the good moments merely being momentary distractions from the deep and inextricable sensation of the endless chasm of the complete and utter abyssal void that is what remains of me. The deepest, most delicate, sensitive, and vulnerable part of myself was utterly disintegrated and my happiest and most confident self is obliterated as being less than worthless. The start of my descent was the limb-shattering drop to rock bottom, followed my months of clawing through bedrock with shattered fingernails splitting to the bone. The only constant sensation of being buried in the scalding frozen blackness, slowly suffocating within the claustrophobic emptiness of being absolutely abandoned.

I know people cared about me. I know people care about me. None of that even scratched the surface of this place. They were a glowing distraction that faded, just making every moment more and more desperate. It's like sleep paralysis, where even as soon as you know what's happening, and every moment just gets worse. It doesn't matter that you understand it, or that you know what it is and how it works. It gets worse. Loneliness is the health equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes A DAY. Our brain experiences the social pain of abandonment the same way that we process the physical pain of being HIT. You want to escape it and what's worse — you don't want help. You don't want pity. That hyperaltruistic trigger means that even causing someone a fraction of the inconvenience that the every day pain causes you actually makes you feel WORSE not better. You are a constant net negative on literally every. single. interaction. for yourself, but it's smaller when you just let it happen. Once you start talking about it, it ends up echoing like a scream that shreds your vocal chords to pieces in seconds and adrenaline and desperation are literally the only things you have in your veins.

Each day, you recognize yourself less. You end up yearning for the worst days you can remember, because it feels like a comforting familiarity. You don't yearn for good times, because you literally can't remember what they feel like. They're a distraction, not root cause analysis. Anything that isn't digging at the core of the issue is extraneous and worthless, and nothing else consumes your thoughts. It latches on to your basic survival instincts for food & shelter, it encompasses the entirety of your need for social inclusion. The idea of self-growth and healthy focus without meeting those other two things first literally doesn't exist, because your brain is CERTAIN that you are moments from death during every agonizingly hour-long second that you experience that state.

As serotonin drops your general harm aversion for others and self drops at the same rate. It doesn't make a dent in the hyperaltruistic behaviour meant to secure you a tribal in-group to help ensure your survival. Eventually you're a net negative on ANY given scenario, and you don't want to try with another group. You enter a state of apathy and learned helplessness. Every response to attempts at improving elicits a dysfunctional response, so there's no telling what actions or behaviours net a known outcome. The momentary improvements are eclipsed by the shattering insecurities and inability to do anything positive. I'd been sleeping with a weighted blanket for months to prevent the crippling anxiety, and my medication hyper expresses my need to take action on things met with an insurmountable apathy as a roadblock to all basic needs. I start to experience panic attacks to positive stimuli because I'm so used to dysfunctional response that I'm ACTUALLY afraid of feeling good, because the drop I experience afterwards is so far down. Every one of the brightest and most positive moments I've felt has been suffocated, and the darkest moments I've felt were the brightest. My friend murdering herself kept me alive, because it gave me a purpose. My friend who I saw 5 days a week for the last 5 years being DEAD was the moment that made me feel the most hopeful about myself in the last year. Knowing that I feel that makes me feel even worse. I've almost murdered myself 6 times this year — I didn't though. That's just circumstantial luck and brain chemistry because I'm existentially horrified of injury, hospitalization, or being in a mental ward. Deep down, I can't do it without a guarantee that I won't be certain that I'm gone and experience as little pain as possible in doing so… and that just hasn't happened yet.

It's part of why I left America and all of the resources I had behind. It's infinitely harder for me to kill myself here. I knew that the moment that suicidal thoughts were replaced with panic about my extant plans for self termination being derailed in my new surroundings. Again — it's a crime of passion against self. It has a lot to override to put you there, but I felt it was necessary to call out that I've spent a year with this as my constant daily "normal" and being very used to overwhelming thoughts of suicide and being well-beyond the most utter insignificance as my day-to-day, and it was necessary to time-stamp those thoughts.

Don't ever feel bad if you did or didn't reach out to a friend you lost to suicide. It's a very weird beast, and there's no telling how it's going to manifest. If we all had an "off" button on our arms, every person would have used it at some point, and the things that hold us back or let us make one vary greatly from person to person. I don't want to be remembered as someone who was happy to combat and offset all this pain and sadness. I just want people to know that I was that kind of person when I WAS actually full of joy and happiness, too. I used to be really great, and I'm still trying my damnedest to make the world a brighter place inspire of myself, and inspire of the fact that you're not in it anymore either. I miss you @acrid Every fuckin' day. Even when I hate myself. I really try to remember the best of both of us, and put it up on display for everyone to see, because maybe somehow I'll find myself again some day, too.

#personal

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