You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.
Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.
And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.
Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.
“If you have time to watch Netflix you have time for a side hustle” my side hustle is relaxing so that my body and brain can heal from by this nose-to-the-grindstone bullshit. I refuse to feel guilty for being a human with the need to relax sometimes. my side hustle is no.
Let us suppose that the "average" horse would have equal proportions of all these parts. The degree to which each part in this poll deviates from the "average" size (20% of total) will determine how large or small that part of our horse will be (i.e a horse with only 10% in Legs will have legs half the size of the average horse).
15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.
i don't think we talk enough about how childhood bullying really just. fucks up your ability to make friends long-term.
I'm not talking about self-image or even like attachment styles, although peer emotional abuse affects that too. I'm talking about how it legitimately stunts your understanding of how positive platonic relationships even work.
Like, a few years back (pre pandemic) a classmate point-blank told me, "hey, you're pretty cool, do you wanna come out for drinks and trivia with us Thursday night?" and my first internal reaction wasn't "oh cool, a friend!" or even "I'm not really interested" but: "where is the trap?" My kneejerk response to an earnest overture of friendship from this guy was trying to figure out how he was trying to back me into a corner, trick me into something, or make fun of me. We were in goddamm GRADUATE SCHOOL.
Of course I did end up going to drinks and it was a lovely time, but sometimes I think about the sheer number of potential friendships I've missed out on because I read their intentions as potentially hostile, *even when their intent is clearly not hostile*. Getting asked out for drinks is SUPER NORMAL. Being invited to parties is normal. Meeting for coffee is normal. in fact it's a primary way of forging adult friendships. But i am immediately wary of it, because the years in which I was developing most of my crucial social skills were spent dodging cruel pranks, getting invited to fake parties or uninvited from real ones, getting asked out "as a joke", being given compliments that were actually somehow insults, and so forth.
I don't have problems making friends-- I talk to people for a living, I am overall extremely charismatic and get invited out a lot, but I struggle to forge new connections because my trained response is to be immediately suspicious of people who appear friendly, welcoming and well-intentioned -- even fifteen years later. This is why I don't get the "you should have been bullied more" crowd. Like somehow bullying makes you more "normal". It definitely doesn't, even if "normal" was a real thing. I am definitely a more antisocial weirdo as a result of prolonged peer-to-peer emotional abuse than I would have been otherwise.