bass-fucker:

disabled people are not metrics for each other, we are individuals. This person may push through more, that person may be doing less, but they’re not a metric to grade your life by. Your way of handling pain and difficulty isn’t less valid just because a different disabled person handles it differently.

animate-mush:

amatara:

I’m pretending all the time to be, kinder, stronger, funnier, more sociable than I am. I guess we’re all like that but it just feels so inadequate.

What’s the difference?

I know it sounds flippant but… certain things are fundamentally performative. And other things are so close as makes no difference.

Kindness is performative. Actions are kind, and people are kind by performing those actions. You can’t “pretend” to be kinder than you are, you can only perform kindness or not perform kindness, and choosing to perform kindness is always worthwhile, no matter how much you may second-guess your motivations.

Strength is so many things. It takes strength to pretend a strength you don’t feel. And the way to achieve strength is to exercise it, so long as you do it in enough moderation to not strain or break anything. Being able to affect strength when necessary while being able to put it down again when that in turn is necessary is healthy. Everyone starts weight training with the littlest weights. It’s not fake or pretending to do what you gotta do in any given situation.

Funniness lives in the interlocutor, not in the speaker. It doesn’t matter how funny you think you are (or think you are pretending to be) – that’s not how it’s measured. At what point are you “pretending” to be a musician if the music still gets made? And often what it’s tempting to describe in first person as “pretending” is more accurately described in the third person as “practicing” – which is of course the way you cause things to Be.

Sociability is also performative. Pretending to be sociable is just…being sociable, despite a disinclination towards it. It’s making an effort towards something you value. So long as the effort is not so great that it backfires into resentment, there’s no practical difference.

Qualities or activities or whatever are no less worthy because you have to actively choose to perform them. If anything, the worthiness lies in the act of choosing. It’s not “pretending” – it’s agency.

tl;dr: ain’t nothing wrong with “fake it till you make it.” A plastic spoon* holds just as much soup as a “real” one

* I keep wanting to talk about semantic domains! Artifacts are defined by their utility, whereas living things are defined by their identity. So plastic forks are still forks, but plastic flowers aren’t flowers. So there’s two pep-talk messages to take away from this: (1) for certain things, the distinction between “fake” and “real” isn’t a relevant one so long as they still get the job done, and (2) the purpose of a living thing is to be the thing that it is. The idea of a “useless person” is as semantically nonsensical as the idea of “pretend kindness” (or fake cutlery).

heavyweightheart:

kids who’ve been abused and had unwarranted, unpredictable anger frequently directed at them can get really preoccupied with how they draw boundaries as they get older. the persistent hope from childhood is that if they say it just right, and all their logic is perfectly sound, and their behavior is above reproach in every way, the other person might not get angry.

but 1) no one can be that perfect and shouldn’t have to be, and 2) entitled and abusive people are gonna get angry no matter what.

be reasonably polite when you draw a boundary, but most importantly, draw the boundary. accept that some people will be angry and use your energy to process your discomfort and self-soothe around that instead of futilely trying to avoid that outcome. also remember that healthy people will hear and honor your assertions.

people who manipulate with anger are rarely making an effort to be respectful of you, so why should you walk on eggshells with them? and people who do respect others’ boundaries won’t need a perfectly cogent treatise on why you want or don’t want this or that; your assertion will be enough.

theunitofcaring:

I think there are a lot of people who have a mental concept of, and can be accommodating of, disability-related “I cannot do this” but don’t have a concept of, and are terrible at accommodating, disability-related “the cost of doing that is much higher for me than for most people”.

That’s probably for a lot of reasons. The cost of doing something is mostly invisible to other people, while not being able to do something at all is really visible. Disabled people often themselves don’t have the concept “doing this is much harder for me than for other people” and think “other people work harder than me” or “I suck” or “I hate doing that but don’t know why”. It’s much easier to evaluate and verify ‘impossible’ than ‘really costly and awful’.

And if something is easy for you, it can be really hard to imagine what it being costly would be like. I bet most people who can drive have an easier time imagining “you can’t drive”, which they can imagine like “you don’t have access to a car”, than “you can drive, but drives of more than ten minutes will usually (but not always) give you a headache and a buzzing sensation that lasts on-and-off for the next few hours, and drives of more than half an hour are so exhausting you had better be able to nap for hours when you reach your destination, and turning the radio on keeps you awake but makes you spatial awareness worse”.

This is terrible because far more disability things manifest as “the cost of doing that is much higher” than as “doing that is impossible”.

Unlearning harmful behaviors you once needed as survival tactics takes time. Be patient with yourself.

urie:

urie:

urie:

urie:

my hot take as someone who has experienced the lowest of lows in terms of severe depression and anxiety and executive dysfunction: the whole “not everyone is neurotypical karen” mindset is legitimately damaging and destructive and ultimately will make you feel worse and more isolated

eating well and exercising and etc absolutely helps with mental illness. obviously it’s irritating to hear that when those things feel like impossible tasks, i get that, and i’ve been there. but forcing yourself to eat better, to walk more, to get up out of bed and shower even when you don’t want to, those things help. they clear your head. they make you feel better. they absolutely do. getting there is hard, but once you do it, it does help

rejecting any kind of help, even the most benign suggestion, from someone who is trying their best to think positively for you and shoulder the emotional burden with you, is going to make you feel worse. it’s going to make you feel that much more cut off and lonely and frustrated. i have isolated myself and ruined friendships with people because i chose to close myself off from people who were just trying to help and i convinced myself that they didn’t understand me and no one would ever understand me. what did that get me in the end? genuinely nothing. it made me feel even more alone.

in 2018 i encourage people who suffer like i have to see where people are coming from with cheesy self-care advice. they’re coming from the heart. and sometimes, doing a face mask or taking a hot bath or eating a nutritious meal or getting up to watch the sunrise or even just one yoga class can make you feel that much closer to the person you want to be. a lot of recovery from mental illness is “fake it till you make it” type shit. so don’t reject even the corniest advice because you are convinced it won’t help you. sometimes it really does. and you shouldn’t keep denying yourself even the smallest of victories because you feel like it’s easier to wallow in how bad you feel. it is so difficult to do good things for yourself and your body, but it is so rewarding

shesgotwhatittakes:

shesgotwhatittakes:

While cleaning out my room I found a paper that my therapist gave me some time ago to deal with obsessive and intrusive thoughts. Sorry the paper is a little crinkled and stained, but I figured I’d post it in hopes that it will help someone like it helped me.

Here it is again with text for anyone who can’t see the picture

That thought isn’t helpful right now.

Now is not the time to think about it. I can think about it later.

This is irrational. I’m going to let it go.

I won’t argue with an irrational thought.

This is not an emergency. I can slow down and think clearly about what I need.

This feels threatening and urgent, but it really isn’t.

I don’t have to be perfect to be OK.

I don’t have to figure out this question. The best thing to do is just drop it.

It’s OK to make mistakes.

I already know from my past experiences that these fears are irrational.

I have to take risks in order to be free. I’m willing to take this risk.

It’s OK that I just had that thought/image, and it doesn’t mean anything. I don’t have to pay attention to it.

I’m ready to move on now.

I can handle being wrong.

I don’t have to suffer like this. I deserve to feel comfortable.

That’s not my responsibility.

That’s not my problem.

I’ve done the best I can.

It’s good practice to let go of this worry. I want to practice.

heavyweightheart:

heavyweightheart:

the idea that we shouldn’t “make excuses” for our behavior or mistakes is so unhelpful, like it precludes any insight, self-compassion, or positive change. if you messed up, please examine what events, thoughts, and feelings caused you to do it. explore and explain it. some kind of blind determination never to do it again because there are “no excuses” is only gonna make things worse. take responsibility for your actions by getting wiser and kinder about them, not by pretending you act in a vacuum and your willpower is in total control

typically the people who tell you not to make excuses are authority figures of some kind in a power structure that would be implicated if you actually did explore all the factors contributing to your behavior

downtroddendeity:

thequantumqueer:

orochimemelord:

severus-snape-is-a-butt-trumpet:

is there a word for “i was instantly good at a lot of things as a quote-unquote gifted child, and, as a result, i was able to skate by without ever being taught how to actually learn a new skill, and now that i’m an adult trying to learn new things that i can’t be good at instantaneously, i don’t have the patience or knowledge to improve on them, because skills that don’t come naturally to me just make me angry because i lived off instant gratification my whole childhood due to not ever being challenged intellectually or taught basic learning skills?” asking for a friend

people like this piss me the fuck off

why does everyone refuse to consider the possibility that maybe an education system designed from the ground up to turn intelligent and creative children into mindlessly efficient factory drones might have a negative effect on the people it deems (correctly or not; usually not) to be more intelligent and creative than average?

we were punished for “learning too fast” by having the lessons about how to learn taken away from us, and by couching it all in positive language so that our peers would resent and isolate us. literally all of us know we’re not better than anyone else, but that doesn’t seem to matter in the face of “i was jealous in elementary school and have held on to that for 15+ years.”

when we say things like “i don’t know how to learn things that i don’t immediately understand” you hear “i was that kid you hated because i never studied but i always got a 100% on the test anyway,” but what we mean is:

i have a vague understanding of what a flash card is, but no idea how to make them or what to do with them

i have literally no idea how to take notes because:

i don’t know what i’ll forget if i don’t write it down

i don’t know how to pay attention to what’s being said while i write

i wouldn’t know what to do with the notes anyway

if i don’t understand something, i don’t know how to formulate a question

i don’t know how to recognize when i don’t know something until it goes wrong, at which point i don’t know how to identify what i did wrong

i can’t tell the difference between a mistake that’s part of the learning process and a mistake where i should know better

but yeah, if we ever acknowledge any of this, we’re definitely just being ungrateful whiners who don’t realize how good we had it when we were 7

Don’t forget that:

Gifted children sometimes get explicitly punished for being smart, either because the teacher resents the kid (especially if the kid is getting some sort of special advancement), the teacher thinks the kid is cheating (I once got a zero on an assignment in middle school for finishing it too fast), or they act out because they’re bored out of their minds (incorrect ADHD diagnoses aren’t uncommon, especially among underprivileged kids).

And when I say “bored out of their minds,” I mean “there were times when I got physically ill before school because the thought of another day of that was soul-crushing.” Anything in school that was so boring you felt like your brain was turning into porridge? The easier the work is for you, the more of that feeling you get.

Gifted children often end up with perfectionism complexes, because they’re constantly taught that high grades are the most important and valuable things about them, and anything less than a 100% is a failure. This can easily lead to crushing, crippling anxiety and self-sabotage when they hit something that’s genuinely hard for them, because you’re supposed to be good at this, and if you’re not, there’s nothing left.

Gifted children with mental illnesses or learning disabilities are in for a special hell, because nobody wants to admit they exist. Good grades are used as evidence that you’re not trying hard enough, and disabilities are even more likely to be treated as moral failings than they are in non-gifted kids. Just off the top of my head, I personally know:

Someone whose daily, violent panic attacks were written off by the school as “acting out for attention” because when they didn’t have a panic attack, they had no problems with the work

Someone whose previous teachers would warn the next teacher to have her each year not to seat her next to the window or anything that made noise because if you did she’d get distracted and never listen in class, but when the possibility of ADHD was raised by her parents, all the teachers insisted that couldn’t be true, because she got good grades

Someone who, while at a gifted school, asked for accommodations for their mental illness, and was refused because “you shouldn’t be handicapping yourself like that”

Someone who went to a school counselor for suicidal ideations and was blown off because their grades were good

And that’s not even getting into the interaction with, say, dyslexia or dyscalculia.

A very, very high proportion of the gifted ex-kids I know (and I know quite a few) are dealing with a cocktail of depression, anxiety, and often at least one other mental illness that wasn’t diagnosed until they were out of school. Many of them crashed catastrophically in college, either because they were never taught basic learning skills or because they burned out under impossibly high expectations. Hell, I know a guy who started college at 13, graduated it at 17, got a bunch of achievement awards from gifted organizations, and was homeless at 20.

The school system sucks for everyone. Just because someone got higher numbers written on their papers doesn’t mean it sucked any less for them. It just might suck in a slightly different way.

Why I’m not giving up on a rotten future.

queeranarchism:

Something a little personal that I just wrote for a comrade who expressed despair at the massive gloomy future ahead of us. I thought it might be worth sharing even if it is a little personal and emotional.

I’m not giving up on a rotten future because below all the large scale despair is always a diverse small-scale reality.

As someone who has been depressed, I know there were moments of laughter and joy even within my depressed life. As an anarchist, I know we can create moments and places and communities of freedom even within a capitalist state and they can never stop us completely. As a historian, I know people wrote songs and cried with laughter and fell in love inside nazi concentration camps.

We live in a world that prioritized large scale and long term events because it prioritized power, but small things matter. Every moment of joy and beauty in our small scale lives is precious. Every moment we can create matters.

When we stop trying to save lives, stop trying to create quality of life, and stop trying to give life joy and laughter, we waste those precious potential moments of beauty. That’s a terrible thing to waste.

So basically I keep on going because the people and the moments in my life and the ways I can help others are all incredibly valuable regardless of how long they last and how bad things get. I want to fight for them as long as I can.