"Throw everything out of your mind. Read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there'll still be everything left to do."
- James Baldwin
skyvale-s reblogged
the lovely woman who owned kabosu, the shiba known as doge, should get to take a point blank shot at elon musk with the doohickey that killed shinzo abe
If you’ve never been all that disobedient before, you can and should start really, really small. For example, you can wear the slightly revealing or gloriously trashy-looking garment that makes your mom roll her eyes and sigh despondently every time she sees you put it on. You will feel judged and disapproved of when you put it on, but that is fine. Your goal is to sit with the uncomfortable feelings and continue with your desired behavior anyway. Saunter down the steps in that highlighter-yellow Garfield crop top with your chest hair flowing over the neckline, and harness as much courage as you can muster. It’s okay if you feel like a beacon of sin. Just keep it moving. Your emotions are not the target here. Your behavior is. You can feel however you are feeling in the moment so long as you keep acting like you’re free. Do you have a favorite TV show that a partner or roommate vocally hates? Try watching that show around them without apologizing or defensively joining them in mocking the program. At first, you probably won’t be able to enjoy the show while in their presence. You’ll feel self-conscious about everything they find annoying or cringe-inducing about the show, and so focused on their reactions that you can’t relax. That’s okay. Allow those feelings of embarrassment and guilt to exist and pass through you without giving up. In time, you will be able to ignore these reactions more, and enjoy the activity. You want to see the needle of discomfort moving down just a little, like Link’s body temperature meter in Tears of the Kingdom when he puts on a breathable outfit in a hot climate. You’re not gonna go from roiling hot to frosty cold in an instant. But after a certain point, you won’t be actively in pain anymore. Things are just gonna slowly suck less, bit by bit, until they are finally okay. That’s true of most major life adjustments, I find. Probably the best way to develop self-advocacy skills while growing in your distress tolerance is simply by telling other people no. Do this without explanation or hedging. Nitpicky aunt wants to hear all about your dating life? “No, I don’t want to talk about that.” Unreliable ex-friend wants you to do them the tiny favor of moving their entire home gymnasium into a new third story walk-up? “No, I’m not available.” Manipulative shift supervisor wants to cajole you into sticking around for another three hours to close? “No.” As many advice columnists smarter than me have already intoned, “no” is a complete sentence. “No” requires no explanation. “No” is not subject to debate. “No” can be repeated over and over like a broken record if a disrespectful person acts like they can’t hear it. And you can walk away at any time to make your “no” physical and impossible to argue with, when someone has proven they don’t respect your boundaries.
Feeling unsafe is not the same thing as actually being under threat — and if we mask and people-please reflexively, we are likely treating many completely harmless situations of disagreement as if they were mortal threats. It’s important to learn to distinguish between a situation where you have no freedom to speak up, and one where you can live authentically as yourself, and simply get more comfortable with not pleasing everyone. So in any situation where you are free to, try saying “no” and riding out how scary it might feel. When you first say “no” without explanation or apology, you will feel anxiety. That’s okay. In fact, you should pat yourself on the back for reaching the borders of your comfort zone. It is in this area of unfamiliar, slightly scary, yet possible action that we are able to grow. You might panic the first time you tell your spouse you’re not cooking dinner every night anymore, and he’ll have to figure out the meal planning himself, or the first time you let a call from a manager go unanswered while you’re off the clock. Great! You are training your body to recognize that nothing bad happens when somebody is a little peeved at you. You’re detaching your sense of safety from another person’s feelings, and tearing apart that enmeshment hurts the way ripping off a band-aid does.
#this article made me finally understand what distress tolerance is and why it would make sense to train it#but i have absolutely no idea how to apply this to my own life#none of the examples would work for me#i don't even mask well anymore i just go on autopilot when asked questions like ''is an 8 am appointment ok'' and say yes 😭
My recommendation for you would be to slow down the process. If your instinct is to automatically say yes, just don't say anything for a second. It's okay if the moment feels awkward. It's not a weird thing to stop for a moment and think. You can even say "I need a moment to think about that." when someone throws you a question or recommends a course of action that you aren't sure how you feel about.
If those options fail, and you still reflexively say yes, you get to change your mind! You can call back and say "I need to change the time for an appointment." You can text your friend and say "Actually, I decided I don't want to see that slasher movie, sorry." You are allowed to speak up after the fact! That is just as legitimate! If you can't access your feelings in the heat of the moment, give yourself some time and space, and then do what you wanna do.
I agree!
“It’s important to learn to distinguish between a situation where you have no freedom to speak up, and one where you can live authentically as yourself, and simply get more comfortable with not pleasing everyone.”
This can be genuinely difficult, and it’s something I’m still trying to figure out. I ended up making two lists: one with my people-pleasing traits, and one with my authentic traits. Having behaviors written out helped me to decide which of my authentic traits can be considered personality quirks, and which ones I need to hide around family or at work. Turns out I still have some freedom to be myself, even in situations where I have no freedom to speak up.
required reading for autistic folks
skyvale-s reblogged
skyvale-s reblogged
The thing about tumblr is that you could make an entirely reasonable post like "hey in a pinch you can use potato starch as dry shampoo, just sprinkle it on top and comb it in, you can wash it off later and it'll be completely fine", and there's going to be someone reblogging this like
"sure this is safe and ok IN SOME CASES but ONLY if you're 100% sure that the thing you're using is potato starch and not something else, like laundry detergent! DO NOT EVER just sprinkle random powders into your hair before you're sure you've identified it correctly! You could burn your scalp off by following OP's advice without question!"
...Like are you sure that this is a real problem that people might actually have, or did you just feel like it should now be your turn to be talking?
skyvale-s reblogged
it’s cuddle the boyfriend time . are u cuddling ur bf ?
lineart version below for those who also want to colour !
skyvale-s reblogged
"do it scared" ok but I would like to do something some other way occasionally. Like at least once. For a change.
skyvale-s reblogged
also, its sister tweet:
How could you forget:
sometimes im scared ill get on the right stuff or something and my homestuck will dissapear
Things of fiction bring you fun and reprieve until you no longer need them. Sometimes you move on, find something new, and other times you remain. Never fret the changing tides of joy, you will always be able to find it again.
As someone who is on a mood stabilizer(lamotrigine, in fact) what's happening to the people in these screenshots is not what happens to the average person who has hobbies and fandom-adjacent interests. My meds have never stopped me from loving with my whole chest, instead they simply give me the ability to balance my intense love of things with my real life wants and needs in a healthier way. They give me the ability to stop playing Minecraft before I give myself a migraine, or stop thinking about my OTP long enough that I can make a phone call and actually focus during it, that sort of thing. I don't stop having hyperfixations, I just am able to have one and also have a functional life too.
But these people were clearly missing something important in their lives that's place was filled by a truly unhealthy obsession(or like. had mold poisoning. that person is an outlier dw). They use the word hyperfixation but like, I don't think that's really what's going on. This isn't a bog standard hyperfixation on like Hero Academia or WWDITS, these were obsessions with real living celebrities, and fandoms for celebrities tend to take a dive into conspiratorial thinking and vague cult-y behavior REAL fast. Genuinely combing over every single thing Taylor Swift has ever done or said 500 billion times to compile a dissertation on how she's been subliminally telling her fans for years now that's she's gay and attacking everyone who says otherwise because they don't get it and are just homophobes and like, fucking stalking and threatening her ex-boyfriends and spending every spare moment of every day posting about it with other people who are doing the same....that's not healthy. That's not a normal special interest or hyperfixation. That's clearly someone who is missing something crucial in their lives, be it connection with other people or stable brain chemistry or a community, and filling that hole with something similar but extremely dysfunctional shared with a community of people who are also unhealthily obsessed and thus promote and encourage unhealthy fixations and conspiratorial thinking at the expense of every single part of the rest of their lives. This is on the same level as like, someone's grandma who has always kinda been convinced Elvis' death was faked and in 2016 accidentally fell down the Q Anon rabbit hole, not someone who thinks about their blorbos holding hands before they fall asleep at night and is begging for someone to ask them about the tv show they're from so they can info-dump.
And like yeah fandoms can get you like that too, I've gotten too deep before and fallen in with conspiratorial thinking(almost always around ships tbh) and whenever I get out I feel pretty ashamed of letting that free dopamine and validation roller coaster make me act like someone I'm not, and ofc some fans will stalk and harass the people behind their favorite show or movie for ship validation or write up massive conspiracy boards about how "xyz ship is def endgame trust us see we connected the dots and we will destroy the lives of anyone who disagrees including the people who make the damn show" like I was at Phoenix Comic Con the year Andrew Hussie got mobbed(but not in the mob!! thankfully I didn't get caught up in all that!!), I know how fandoms can be, but overall what's happening in these images isn't something the average fan needs to worry about. If you aren't writing conspiracy boards about celebrities sexualities or an OTP and harassing the celebrities/creators about it, sending death threats to real people who disagree with your theory or like other ships, and spending every spare second of every day posting and talking about them to the point that you literally, physically, don't have time or energy for anything else then you don't need to worry about meds making you not like your favorite webcomic as much anymore. What these people are going through is framed through the lens of fandom, but was far closer to going to a Flat Earth Convention in terms of actual behavior and outcomes.
Your meds shouldn't make you stop liking things entirely. When I think about not liking things I genuinely loved as much as I used to I get a little sad because I miss them, when I think about getting riled up because I believed a show runner was specifically trying to spite ME I feel embarrassed, and I'm glad I stopped doing it and moved on to things that actually make me happy and aren't borderline conspiracy theories. That's the difference. These people aren't sad, they are straight up happy to be out, talking about how it's wild to look at the insane things they believed, and putting focus on how their lives are better now. They clearly don't miss these things because they've moved on. Or, in the case of the BTS person and probably the swifties, they still do like the artist or actor or band, they just aren't Obsessed(tm) with them to a truly unhealthy, world-view altering degree anymore. They can still love these artists and actors without that obsessive love taking over their entire lives.
So nah. The average fan does not need to worry about meds doing this to you. These people were outliers in unhealthy situations that improved when they got the things they were missing. That's almost certainly not what's going to happen to you.
(But also yeah even if you do find your interests changing, that's not always a bad thing. Interests change, we find new things to love all the time, it doesn't invalidate the joy we found and friendships we made to recognize that now we want to post about a different show or movie or comic. That's just how life is, we change.)
And if you don't like the way meds make you feel, you can tell your doctor and stop taking them. There are some meds out there that make me into a zombie that no longer cared about anything at all. And so I stopped taking them, told my doctor, and we worked something else out. Don't be afraid of change, but also, if it sucks hit the bricks.
Chiming in as another person whose sanity was saved by lamotrigine: mood stabilisers are the difference between “joyous, enriching hobby” and the genuine corrosive mania of hyper-fixation.
Real hyper-fixation fucks up your life. But it feels a whole lot like happiness… if you have no other baselines outside your own skull to compare it to. But I thought that rush was happiness. It makes me want to scream how fucking sad that is.
I have never enjoyed life as much as I have since I got on mood stabilisers. The hyper-fixation rush that I mistook for happiness turns out to have been like trying to drink water while getting blasted by a firehose. Now? Now it’s like sitting in a meadow somewhere with my feet in a brook while drinking water with a fancy lemon slice in it.
Nothing disappeared. But I appeared.
God, the firehose thing is so true, that's really how it feels 👏👏👏
