Tag: self

obviouslynotawalrus:

myxpsychoticxmind:

slugprinc3ss:

valenshawke:

princegumbutt:

I’ve got a friend and they mean a lot to me.

For anyone that has and is fighting depression and that feels alone.
Remember: You have everyone that has fought and is fighting depression on your side, even if you don’t hear them.

I normally don’t reblog stuff like this
not that I don’t appreciate it, it’s just not something I do

but this is just for someone specific and I hope they see it

this is for you, you know who you are, you are everything to me and more

without you I don’t know what I’d do, I probably wouldn’t be here

i hope you see and understand this

whenever you have a bad day ❤ just know that I love you!!

officialleoneabbacchio:

writerlyn:

The most important writing lesson I ever learned was not in a screenwriting class, but a fiction class.

This was senior year of college.  Most of us had already been accepted into grad school of some sort. We felt powerful, we felt talented, and most of all, we felt artistic.

It was the advanced fiction workshop, and we did an entire round of workshops with everyone’s best stories, their most advanced work, their most polished pieces. It was very technical and, most of all, very artistic.

IE: They were boring pieces of pretentious crap.

Now the teacher was either a genius OR was tired of our shit, and decided to give us a challenge.  Flash fiction, he said. Write something as quickly as possible.  Make it stupid.  Make it not mean a thing, just be a quick little blast of words. 

And, of course, we all got stupid.  Little one and two pages of prose without the barriers that it must be good. Little flashes of characters, little bits of scenarios.

And they were electric.  All of them. So interesting, so vivid, not held back by the need to write important things or artistic things. 

One sticks in my mind even today.  The guys original piece was a thinky, thoughtful piece relating the breaking up of threesomes to volcanoes and uncontrolled eruptions that was just annoying to read. But his flash fiction was this three page bit about a homeless man who stole a truck full of coca cola and had to bribe people to drink the soda so he could return the cans to recycling so he could afford one night with the prostitute he loved.

It was funny, it was heartfelt, and it was so, so, so well written.

And just that one little bit of advice, the write something short and stupid, changed a ton of people’s writing styles for the better.

It was amazing. So go.  Go write something small.  Go write something that’s not artistic.  Go write something stupid. Go have fun.

@cohensdisciples

intersex-ionality:

“healthy” is whatever you can actually do that causes you the least harm.

Getting McDonald’s is healthy of “real food” isn’t actually an option and the alternative is to hurt yourself getting it, or starve.

Staying in bed is healthy if the alternative is ruining yourself for the next week just so you can get your living room vacuumed.

Avoiding the doctor is healthy if the doctor is as like as not to make you worse or get you dead.

Healthy is the best course within your abilities, and it looks different from person to person.

Don’t let people convince you that health means hurting yourself: they are wrong.

shacklefunk:

yknow theres a lot of pressure to be successful, particularly on artsy kids whose professions are seen as useless unless theyre famous, but life is fucking hard and sometimes things dont turn out

but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53

but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone

there are a million ways to be happy and a million ways to be a successful artist. we create what we do to enhance the human experience and relate to each other and improve ourselves. theres something to be said for just doing that,,,for the sake of doing it, yknow

Most writers were the kids who easily, almost automatically, got A’s in English class. (There are exceptions, but they often also seem to be exceptions to the general writerly habit of putting off writing as long as possible.) At an early age, when grammar school teachers were struggling to inculcate the lesson that effort was the main key to success in school, these future scribblers gave the obvious lie to this assertion. Where others read haltingly, they were plowing two grades ahead in the reading workbooks. These are the kids who turned in a completed YA novel for their fifth-grade project. It isn’t that they never failed, but at a very early age, they didn’t have to fail much; their natural talents kept them at the head of the class.
This teaches a very bad, very false lesson: that success in work mostly depends on natural talent. Unfortunately, when you are a professional writer, you are competing with all the other kids who were at the top of their English classes. Your stuff may not—indeed, probably won’t—be the best anymore.
If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package. By the time you’re finished, you’re more like one of those 1940’s pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end.

Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators – Megan McArdle – The Atlantic

The Why Writing Is So Hard field of psychology is very interesting to me.

(via abbrasions)

Oh my god. I understand so much. I was not the top of my class cos I had executive function issues. But yes. I used to just spit out the “you can’t do this all in one night” project in one night and I would get a good grade. And yes I stall on writing because I don’t want it to suck.

(via deducecanoe)

Salt in the wound: when I actually listened to the instructions to do a little bit at a time over several weeks, I’d get Cs. When I’d leave the work to the last minute and do the whole project in one night I’d get As.

(via lemonsharks)

Oh god yes. 

Here in my spheres of the Internet, it’s funny how everyone shares this idea that WRITING = fantasy and science fiction, that WRITERS are people who get loads of money to publish their space elf stories. I think we all found each other here and now because we share these roots of being The Bookish Children, who aspired to be Tolkien or Adams when we grew up, and I think that’s great, and I’m so glad we share all this.

It’s weird, though, how our Writing About Writing then tends to be about fiction. And fiction is such a strange market, a really weird beast. I think that a lot of this post applies to fiction writers in a particularly toxic and demoralizing way but it’s also very true in nonfiction writing. 

As a kid you have all of these… IDEAS about nonfiction writing. That your textbooks and news stories and magazines and adventures and dictionaries and everything are prepared lovingly and truthfully by experts. Edited and approved by some great authority. It isn’t Authors or Writers who create this stuff; you don’t want to grow up to be them; they are oracles, not celebrities. There is still this perception that nonfiction is handed down benevolently, like stone tablets from God.

And the truth of it is that nonfiction is handed down by whoever met the deadline first. These were generally not The Bookish Children whose Daydreams Finally Took Fruitful Wing. These were the ones who believed Terry Pratchett when he said “If you trust in yourself…and believe in your dreams…and follow your star…you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”

The truth is, natural talent attracts a certain magician’s-flair attention, but that the Content Machine is starving, and it gobbles up sparkly cupcakes just as fast as it gobbles up plain bread. The news cycle turns over. Nobody’s reading it carefully, thinking of the children, setting words to flake and texture against each other just so. They’re thinking of Wednesday. They’re afraid they’re about to be found out as Mediocre, and if they miss another deadline they will get the Raised Eyebrow.

Talent is a pony you can ride for 3000 words, but when your job is 10,000 words a week then you need a fuckin trained warhorse that puts its head down and carries you stolidly through a battlefield of distractions and doesn’t listen when you try to steer it otherwise. 

So you get this dichotomy in Writing about Writing, where in Fiction Writing you’re encouraged to build an elaborate fairy grotto and arrange the correct pencils in pretty Mason jars to attract the attentions of a Muse, and then do a bit of performance art where you try to market yourself while also being very humble and modest – it’s not very evidence-based, is it? And in Nonfiction it’s just THROW WORDS AT THE PAGE UNTIL THEY STICK! THROW WORDS AT THE WALL – THROW WORDS AT YOUR MOTHER. THROW YOUR MOTHER AT THE WALL. FUCK FUCK BALLS THEY’RE SLIDING OFF!! FUCK HAND ME THAT CONCLUSION WE’LL NAIL IT INTO PLACE AND PAINT OVER IT AND IT’LL KIND OF… CRUST OVER. THIS IS CRAP, IT’S THE WORST THING I’VE EVER MADE, SEND THE FUCKER OUT THERE YES GOOD DONE.

And the Nonfiction gets written, every damn day, thousands of words, filling up the Internet, bringing the news, coming through the radio, teaching the children, adorning the museums, educating the people, telling the truth, selling the product – it gets out there.

But don’t think it isn’t creative, powerful, coming from some essential source – its pedigree is just as potent as fiction’s. This post may be terrible, but it has warhorses and cupcakes and all sorts of strange and alarming imagery.

And most of nonfiction writing isn’t good. Most of it is workhorse, mediocre, bringing the truth to your mouth – some of it’s terrible. This certainly is. 

And you didn’t notice. You noticed it was there. 

Maybe try writing fiction like you’re writing nonfiction. Maybe it will help.

(via elodieunderglass)

Myths about emotions (DBT)

hopeforbpd:

jesusbpdandme:

  • I should feel differently about this. The fact is, you feel the way you feel and there’s no right way to feel about anything. Invalidating your emotions is a dangerous trap! Notice any judgements and challenge them. You feel the way you feel. No one will react the same way to things because we are all individuals.
  • My emotions are bad. No emotion is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The emotion you feel doesn’t make you ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Emotions aren’t sin! Emotions are human!
  • I’m overreacting to this. Challenge, challenge, challenge! If you’re unsure about your emotional response then check the facts. But your emotion is not an overreaction.
  • There’s a right way to feel about everything. Nope. The way you feel is the way you feel. 
  • Being emotional means I’m out of control. Being emotional makes you human. As a society, we’re not good about talking about emotions. Some people believe that you should not show emotion in church because it’s shameful and sinful! But the truth is, feeling emotions doesn’t mean you’re out of control.
  • My emotions are who I am. Actually, emotions are a part of us. They are not our identity.
  • Emotions should always be trusted. Emotions can sometimes be trusted, but not always. Check the facts before you decide that you can trust your emotion.
  • All painful emotions are the result of a bad attitude. Painful emotions tend to be the result of struggles, triggers and illness. Feeling low or angry or anxious isn’t the result of a bad attitude!

Don’t believe everything you think.