#worst experience on this site is trying to reblog an old post with like 20 useless additions | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gurubuckaroo · 6 years

Text

A Tumblr looks at 50

Tomorrow, the 21st of February, I turn 50 years old.

#what are you going on this hell site #delete your account #go pay taxes or something #hes literally twice the ops age

Go ahead, get it out of your system. Those are all things I’ve had replies to me tagged with. A lot of people think a lot of things about people my age being on Tumblr, and they’re not shy about saying it. If there’s one -ism I’ve learned that’s perfectly acceptable to most Tumblr users, it’s ageism. That doesn’t bother me. The last time I got anonymous hate, I donated to the ACLU on their behalf.

There are a lot of things being old (ugh) means. There are a lot of things it doesn’t mean. I don’t deserve your respect because of my age. It doesn’t make me better, or wiser, or smarter or more educated. It doesn’t make me more interesting.

The only thing I’ve got on you is that I’ve had a lot more time to make mistakes than you have. And boy have I taken advantage of those opportunities.

They say people can’t learn from the mistakes of others - they have to make their own, and only then do they learn the lesson. Well, that may be. Maybe it’s true for my generation but not yours. Maybe if I can prevent just one person from making some of the mistakes I’ve made in my life, this will be worth it.

Stop hating yourself. There are plenty of people out there willing to do it for you. Don’t be like them.

Stop berating your talent. You think your art is bad. Your music is bad. Your cosplay is bad. You know what? Everyone who has ever expressed a talent feels the same way about theirs. If there’s one constant about artists, it’s that they always feel like their own stuff is trash. Stop being your worst critic. Again, plenty of other people out there willing to do that job. You don’t want to be like them, so don’t agree with them.

Drink. Do drugs. Or not. But always in moderation. Moderation in all things - including moderation. Be moderate in your moderation. Although stay away from crack, cocaine, heroin, and anything prescribed - unless it’s your prescription (more on that later). I’ve seen those first three kill far too many friends. Worse, some of those killed are still walking around, pretending to be alive.

If you’re going to do LSD or other hallucinogens, do it with someone you trust who’s done it before. Bad trips happen - but almost always because of something you or your tripmates bring in with them. An experienced tripguide can walk you back out of a bad trip. Never do it alone. It’s almost impossible to have a bad experience on shrooms, but they might give you stomach cramps - if so, make tea out of them instead of eating them.

Take your Brain Pills. If you’ve been prescribed antidepressants or some other psychoactive meds, take them. My first psychologist appointment was when I was 5. I’ve literally fought clinical depression my entire life, to the extent that I was hospitalized for 45 days just before my 18th birthday. It’s not something to be ashamed about any more than having Diabetes or Sickle Cell or Grave’s Disease or Autism. Depression, Schizophrenia, Bipolar, these are all brain diseases, not failings, and taking medication for them is how you treat them. If you’re terrible about remembering whether or not you’ve taken your meds, they sell pill bottles now with caps that show how long it’s been since you opened it last. They’re great for my chronic pain meds. If you can’t afford them, you’ve got a Tumblr - make a draft post and update it every time you take a pill.

Don’t over-rely on safe spaces and trigger warnings. I can hear you now - “Oh here he comes, about to call us all snowflakes or something.” On the contrary. Safe spaces are wonderful. My wife is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and teenage sexual assault. I worked for most of our (so far) 27 year marriage helping her to heal, only to see so much work thrown out because of a well-placed trigger from someone who proudly considers herself a SJW and doesn’t care who she offends.

The mental immune system we build up in our psyche is every bit as important as the biological immune system we build up in our bodies. Excessive trigger warnings are no less damaging than refusing vaccination, and can in some cases be triggering themselves. In both cases, the individual will be perfectly fine living in a sealed bubble, but will be completely unable to survive in the world at large. Like biological defenses, the young brain is the best at developing coping mechanisms. As individuals age, those systems become more difficult, and more traumatic, to develop. I’m not suggesting that there should be no trigger warnings or safe spaces. I am suggesting that, like in all things, moderation is the best course.

Fact-check. Snopes is your friend. Google Reverse Image Search is your friend. You may really want to believe that new rumor from a .info site. It takes 20 seconds to check before you powerslam “reblog.” It could save your reputation. It could save someone else’s. (Oh, and any website ending in .info is trash. That domain costs the least to register, so it’s essentially disposable). And for god’s sake, don’t believe everything Anonymous says. Bryan P. Willman, a part-time police dispatcher, had his life ruined because Anonymous claimed he was the shooter who killed Mike Brown, and half of Tumblr and Facebook reblogged the accusation without pause.

Be yourself. Shakespeare said it - “This above all else: to thine own self be true.” Of course, knowing him, it was probably an elaborate dick joke that I still don’t get. But it’s still true. Capital-T True. Possibly the biggest Truth I’ve ever learned.

See, we all like to have friends. And we start off thinking that the best way to have friends is to be what our friends what us to be. Doesn’t help that we probably don’t really know what our friends want us to be, but that’s beyond the point. The problem starts when we end up feeling like we’re being drawn and quartered - because we are trying to be all things to all people. God help young people today who have potentially hundreds of friends through Tumblr or such - they’re trying to be perfect in the eyes of too many observers. Throw social forces into this, and we start to try to be perfect to entire movements. It cannot be done.

There’s another perfect truth we have to realize. It’s simple and absolute: People are jerks. Not all the time, and not to everyone! But we are. And here’s why: We’re all individuals. At some time, we’re going to rub someone the wrong way. And if we’re trying to be exactly what everyone else wants us to be, we’ll end up being jerks to everyone. If we’re true to ourselves, we’ll only be jerks to those who just naturally deserve it. Because we aren’t trying to be perfect for the wrong people.

Be yourself. First and foremost. Be the best yourself you can be, but be it because you are it, not because someone else wants you to be it. Let’s face it, other people quite probably don’t have your best interests at heart. If being yourself means that you don’t fit well with a few people, that’s OK - because it means you will fit better with some others.

When you first met the people you call friends, you probably acted like yourself. Because you didn’t know what they wanted yet. Imagine how much more they’ll like you when you go back to being that person they first met, rather than being a mirror.

Regrets are OK. Self-recrimination is not. There are so many decisions I’ve made in my past that I regret. One decision I made I will never be content with, even though I know (then and now) it was the correct action. My regret from that is purely for my own lost chance. Every once in a while I look back through hindsight and say “well maybe it would have been OK to make the other choice”, but I know I’m lying to myself. I just end up wallowing in self-pity over having lost the experience. Don’t be like me. I’m still trying to learn this one. It’s possible I never will.

You will hurt people. Don’t be afraid to apologize. Some of my actions ended up hurting people - some accidentally, some deliberately, some through sheer childishness. I’ve managed to apologize to most of the people I’ve hurt. A few have left this world before I got the chance, or the courage, to face my own failings. And in almost every case, it was my own failing that hurt them. Growth comes when we recognize our own failings, and learn to overcome them. And if we’re going to grow, we’ll need a good ecosystem - and that means friends, who may be hurting because of what we did.

Life is too short to spend with toxic people. There can be a case made that you become an “adult” when you no longer need to tolerate toxic people. This is especially the case regarding parents. I first cut my father out of my life (to my mother’s delight) when I was 11 and refused to come visit him over the holidays. Later we attempted a reconciliation - that experiment lasted 3 terrible years. Since then, I’ve exchanged maybe an hour’s worth of words with him, over three in-person visits and a few phone calls. I doubt I’ll attend his funeral, should he ever get his shit together enough to die.

Unfortunately, there will always be times when you have to tolerate toxicity. Usually at the workplace. The really nasty stuff can often be abated (but not always cured) with a trip to Human Resources - but not always. At least, not yet. Things in the workplace are better now than they’ve ever been, regarding this at least. One can only hope the trend continues.

Life is an experience. Don’t be afraid of it. Imagine yourself on a roller coaster. You’re locked into the car, and slowly it starts climbing the first hill - clack clack clack - and the ground is falling away, and ahead you see the turn. Excitement builds. You crest the hill - and pull quietly into the station. Oh boy, can’t wait to try that again, right? Life exists in the dips, the valleys, the turns and rolls.

Every day you keep pushing through, every day that you groan and pull yourself out of bed anyway, every day you curse while tying your shoes, pulls you kicking and screaming through life. I’m not going to promise you it’ll put you one day closer to your dream job, or one day closer to happiness, or contentment, or whatever. Life isn’t about reaching a goal. It’s an experience. And every day you keep moving, you get to keep having that experience - the highs and the lows. And the highs make the lows so very much worth it.

If you’re still hung up on my age, and think someone my age doesn’t belong on Tumblr, tell me - at what age are you going to give up your fandoms and delete your account?

#happy birthday #life #self care #mistakes

4 notes · View notes

donnerpartyofone · 7 years

Text

Feel free to skip the hell out of this, it's just that Tumblr is blocked at my office and apparently I can't use the "keep reading" thing on the mobile version of the site in a browser and hell "keep reading" wouldn't have protected the app users from this over long shitpost anyway do WHAT THE FUCK AM I EVEN TRYING TO SAY

@ someone nice who attempted to contest my notion that "letting it all out" about one's vexations does nothing: I know that for some people, writing is a form of thinking out loud that helps the person give form to their worries and aids them in understanding and confronting them. Maybe this just isn't as useful for people who are overly habituated to this kind of exploratory writing. I kept diaries obsessively from pretty early in life to the time I was in my mid-20's or so. The vast majority of the content was definitely about depression and anxiety, usually in relation to events and disappointments that I was trying to work through. After twoish decades of this practice, it became clear that the only result was cementing my obsessions with the worst parts of my life. I found myself repeating the same stories and theories over and over again, trying to find novel ways of reiterating them so I could feel as if I were getting somewhere. Some of the writing had to do with things I could actually help: for instance, bad crushes or boyfriends I just needed to burn bridges with, or my unhealthy relationship with corny, cherry picked, wish-driven occultism and the unhealthy friends who encouraged that interest. However, I don't think that the writing helped me sever those ties; one day I just realized that I didn't get anything but pain and embarrassment from that stuff, and I had the ability to just cut it all out. If these revelations ever came up in my writing, it would be after the correct action was taken IRL, and the subject would probably be my obsession with how bitter and stupid I felt about my previous poor decisions, or some endless repetition of things I already know about how I finally did the right thing. It eventually reached the point where the idea of sitting down to write in whatever precious little book I had going just seemed unforgivably stupid, so I stopped. Obviously I sometimes write here, when I'm feeling bad. It scratches a passing itch, but that's pretty idiotic too. However, there's a shred of motivation there that at least SEEMS thoughtful and practical sometimes. It's a flagellatory act. It's usually like this: "Here's a list of all the things you failed at recently, either out of neglect, or preexisting incompetence that would have made it clear to a sensible person that you shouldn't have even tried. Now we're going to do a postmortem on all of it, in the service of like, maybe if we rub your nose in this huge pile of shit you left on the floor, then eventually you'll learn to stop taking a big shit in the middle of the floor." Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to learn that lesson, to spot another bad idea or experience coming, and most of my problems stem from exactly that intellectual deficiency, which is something I have no control over. Also, in spite of public perceptions of me as this terminal mope, I'm actually really susceptible to optimism and self-improvement, so I'm extremely prone to trying new things, or working harder at old things, that are simply out of my range of abilities, so I'm constantly ruining my own day and the day of whoever has to clean up my mess. Too bad none of this awareness can help stop me from feeling absolutely terrible about my endless cycle of fuckups great and small, and there isn't really anything in my life at which I'm satisfactory enough to distract from "the crummy, frustrating part of my life", because is in reality it's just my whole life. The point being, I'll probably stop this form of expiatory/disciplinary/vent-writing too--especially since, in my characteristically epic stupidity, I started putting it on another blog WITH some film writing that a small handful of self-sacrificing loved ones actually reads, and it's too weird for me to keep forcing the personal writing on that "audience". I kept a super secret depression blog for a hot minute, which had no consideration for an audience at all, it was just these really brutalizing non-sequitor descriptions of extremely specific things that were going on in my personal life and the disgusting ways that I felt about them, with no tags or reblogs or anything social, and somehow some weepy teenage girl found it and reblogged one of these posts. I guess I was being naive, but I was astounded that anyone would read this like diary page with zero philosophizing and no romanticism or longing and no platitudes or lessons and really not a gasp of air between descriptions of people and events that only had to do with me personally, but this poor girl totally felt that it belonged on her blog between Evanescence lyrics and black and white gifs of people tragically making out. It's taken me a long time obviously, but that should probably teach me to never write down anything about anything I ever feel ever again. Barforama.

12 notes · View notes