@earthmoonlotus / earthmoonlotus.tumblr.com
love is not as transient and conditional as some of you guys think it is. when people tell you they care about you, they don’t change their mind ten minutes later because you said something weird or annoying. the people that love you will still love you when you do things that upset them. love doesn’t instantly disappear like that
there is so much intimacy in creating something together
no I'm so serious. I'm thoroughly convinced this is how I got so close to my online friends. a significant amount of bonding with my s/o came from rping together. tumblr rp introduced me to new mutuals. writing trr brought me so much closer to the person I wrote it with. this applies to irl friends too. my irl I worked on cosplay and fanfic and oc stories with, it brought us closer. sharing your creativity with someone, creating something with someone, creates an inseparable bond between you and them. in this essay I will
The only thing that has ever improved my mental health in any measurable capacity is making more friends. That's literally it
The way isolation plays on your psyche, and the way that a solid support system can improve your life is insane. One of the worst things that we did as a society is removing most avenues to find this kind of thing, and the over reliance on the idea of getting better on your own
!!!
It's like we all collectively forgot as a society that friendship and just connection in general takes effort. Even if you meet someone you immediately click with, it takes hanging out about 20 times (!) to become friends. And guess what, some of those 20 meetings might be awkward or unimpressive.
We all want to reap the benefits (having a friend circle, having a partner, getting married) without doing the work (going to events, interacting with people, learning to handle conflict maturely, dating). Myself included. If I could, I'd never leave the house or go on another mediocre date again... except, that's part of the process.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, the cure to the loneliness epidemic is touching some grass and building tolerance for tedious in-person interactions.
and maintaining a friendship also takes work. You have to keep reaching out and replying and hanging out.
Sometimes, if your friend reaches out and you’re in a bad place you either need to fake it a little bit so that they know you are still their friend, or actually make yourself vulnerable by sharing that you are in a bad place.
and remember that "I'm sorry" also means "i feel sympathy for you" and not "i somehow created the situation plaguing you" or "pity."
the thing with, "if I stopped showing up/posting/participating in chat/going online, would anyone notice?"
is you have to realize that the only way for you to actually know this information is to ask.
if your goal is to see if anyone is going to reach out, which is not the same as someone noticing your disappearance or being worried about you, you have to be prepared for what happens if nobody reaches out. I am very serious about this. not every friend is going to reach out, and maybe nobody will. maybe they are trying to respect your space and privacy. maybe they think you are mad at them. maybe they are super busy. maybe they were too occupied with their own life to notice. you have literally no way of knowing unless you ask.
what do you plan on doing next if nobody reaches out? because it happened to me. I disappeared for weeks. rough stuff was happening. nobody reached out. I was crushed. I felt so alone. and then I moved on and became a stronger person with a better understanding that feeling bad in silence is the absolute worst way to try to get support from people.
if you want to be reassured by your friends, you have to talk to them. if your friends do not communicate with you in the way you want, you have to talk to them. do not play the disappearing game. nobody is telepathic. nobody can read your mind and guess what you want them to do if you disappear. you have to communicate or everyone fucking loses.
this post pretty much says it all BUT! for people not used to doing this - you have to not only talk to your friends, you have to be direct and clear! you have to say something like, "i need to talk about what's going on with me" or "I'm having a hard time right now and really need (xyz)".
it's crushing to reach out to your friends only to accidentally do it so vaguely or stoically that they don't catch on you're asking them for help. avoid doing that to yourself.
recently i tagged a friend to invite him to an exhibition and he declined, saying he was having a horrific mental health patch and that he was currently too mental to go anywhere & some details about mental health services that i won't go into. so, naturally, i said: hey that sucks ass, i've been there, is there anything i can do that will give you some reprieve? would you like distraction or a sympathetic ear or a box of crockery to smash or what? and he really, really helpfully told me what would be useful, which was distracting conversation when he's alone in the house. so, i thanked him for being able to tell me and for letting me help him.
which i think is the other side of stuff like this. it's not just "you gotta be able to communicate that you're doing bad and need help" it's also you need to be able to work out between you what kind of help you need" and you, the person being reached out to, need to reinforce, positively, that letting you know when shit's fucked is a good, non-burdensome thing for them to do. that you appreciate being reached out to and asked directly for help. it's like, it's a process. you have to keep affirming things. none of us is going to internalise anything from a single incident other than "wow, feels bad man".
Adult friendships be like “I miss you bro, let's hang out in November"
the real danger of spending too much time with friends is you stumble out of ten days of happiness and good food like oh my god THAT was real life. my job means NOTHING
yeah it makes life worthwhile. i hope you get to hang out with a bunch of people you really like for several days in a row some time soon!
The best, and possibly only, advice I can give is to tell your friends you love them the moment you realize you do. Do it early, and do it often. That way when something tragic happens, and your gut reaction is to say “I love you, honey” it will actually come out sounding like “I loved you before your world fell apart, I love you now, while it is. And I will love you when the dust settles. I loved you in the before times of your life, the during, and the after. It will be a constant. It isn’t dependent on sadness or trauma. I love you when the most exciting thing we do is laugh about someone accidentally mispronouncing coffee as cawfee. And I will love you when I am listening to you sob over the phone. You can count on this. You can hold this in your head as the one thing that won’t change even as life proves it is ever-changing.”
Basically, it’s important to let people know you don’t love them just when they need love. Your love isn’t conditional on how much it’s needed. It’s always there.
Being around good hearted people is refreshing on so many levels
here's the thing. I don't think that men and women can't be friends. I do think, however, that some men can't be friends with women. bc they are misogynists and don't see women as people. so if you as a man say men and women can't be friends I think you're telling on yourself
wrong! thanks for playing. but it looks like in your attempt to retaliate against an imagined man for their participation in patriarchy, you accidentally reinforced the idea that men are inherently different to women in an extreme and unreconcilable way, which only helps misogyny thrive. try remembering that other people are as real as you. perceiving men as objects is a funny joke but ultimately has no place in a discussion about heteronormative & misogynistic interactions. try again later!
One of the weirdest thing about growing up suicidal is that you assume you have no future, you don’t even try to envision it because you see no point. So eventually, you start assuming everyone else sees nothing in your future either. Recently, my friend and I were talking and she said something about how at her wedding I could wear a suit or a dress as long as it matched her bridesmaid’s dresses because the butler of honor has to make a good impression. This hit me so hard because I had never realized before how other people thought about me. She said it so casually like it wasn’t even a hard decision, just a given fact. She loves me so much she saw me at her wedding, standing with her on one of the most important days of her life. And you know what? There are so many people who think about you that way. If that isn’t proof that you should keep going I don’t know what is.
This is called a sense of foreshortened future and it is also very common in traumatized people, particularly in cases involving long-term abuse or the death of a loved one.
I feel like people just can't read because how do you take "I hardly saw my friends after graduation since our days off don't coincide" as "they abandoned me" and not "adult life makes it difficult to meet with one another."
I love how varied and universally weird the circumstances for making lifelong friendships are. Here's this guy I accidentally messaged once and I could not imagine my life without them now. Here's this girl I was so scared of when I met her, I would kill for her and remind her to rest on the regular. Here's this other guy we have so much in common we used to joke we were the same person in different timelines. It took us years to meet in person and I attended his wedding. There are also people who entered my life in absolutely unremarkable ways but changed it forever for the better. It's wonderful how easy it is to find people to love.
[id: art of sheep frolicking. One of them says “I know love is real because when I’m with my friends it is everywhere!” End id]
AWW IM GONNA CRYYY I LOVE YOOU GUYSSS
watching bridgerton and obviously there were a lot of things wrong with the way socializing has worked in the past, but honestly the idea of a "calling hour" is so appealing. office hours for friendship. you can show up unannounced at my home between 1 and 3pm. you must leave by 3pm. I may give you a pastry. lets bring that back
